COOP: Fortress Cherno

[Clarke]

Leave mission feedback, videos or fun stories below in the thread.

Map: Chernarus (Winter)
Time: 05:40
Weather: Snowy
Host: @Sagu
DLC Required: None / Optional: Marksmen

The temperature rapidly drops in Chechnya, you are preparing to face your toughest challenge yet - “Fortress Cherno”

OPORD

I Situation

After the successful capture of Mogilevka, our unit was tasked with assaulting the infamous Cherno Fortress. Due to difficult weather conditions, we are unable to send the air assets in, however, you were just delivered new artillery pieces which you use to siege the city.

Friendly Forces

• Russian Armed Forces
• Platoon, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, DGR, DMT
• 3rd Mechanized Company holding the line at Balota front

Assets

• 5x GAZ Vodnik - 12 seats: 1x driver, 2x gunner, 10x passenger - no callsign - limited fuel
• 2x 2S1 SPG - 4 seats: 1x driver, 1x gunner, 1x commander, 1x loader - callsign “Dagger”
• 1x Demolishion and Area Denial Crate

Enemy Forces

• Chechen Rebels
• Enemy is an organized armed militia
• Enemy has access to mortars, heavy weaponry, medium armored vehicles, and various small arms
• Enemy utilizes mines and IEDs
• Enemy is expected to hold heavily fortified defensive positions in the city of Cherno
• Enemy reinforcements will arrive from Elektrozavodzk and Balota airfield

Civilians

• Civilians are present in the area > 50
• Civilians are expected to stay inside homes, hospitals and the international hotel
  
  

II Mission

Your unit is tasked with conducting an assault on Chernogorsk. Clear and secure the city piece by piece. Ensure your unit clears the outskirts of the city as well and creates a perimeter. Two objectives of opportunity present themselves, one being enemy ammo caches that need to be disposed of in any manner possible, the second one being an enemy supply convoy heading to Balota.

III Execution

Commander’s Intent

• Capture “Fortress Cherno”
• Destroy enemy ammo caches
• Secure the position
  • The Fortress is considered secure when there are no enemy forces present between Prigorodki and the Cherno power station, including these specified areas

Movement Plan

• Movement is up to Platoon’s discretion
• An easy approach to the town doesn’t exist, every side is well-defended
• It is recommended you move using forests as cover to avoid detection
• It is recommended you move on foot in the city and the outskirts due to high IED probability and long-range ATGM threat

Fire Support

• Dagger serves as the fire support role
• Element leaders and Platoon SGT have access to Dagger net

Optional Tasks

• Ambush enemy supply convoy going from Elektrozavodzk to Balota
  *Convoy leaves at 6:30, it consists of medium armor and light vehicles
  
  

IV Administration / Logistics

• Due to stretched supply lines, fuel is limited
• Ammo for all elements available at the Mogilevka base
• Reinforcements are getting 1x Ural truck

Reinforcements

• Reinsertions will be on the hour every hour and be adhered to strictly, no deviation is allowed.
• Reinsertions are the same for all, including vehicles teams.
• Platoon Commander has a one time reinsertion wild card at his disposal, call this in through HQ.
• At predesignated times, reinforcements will be sent out of the base in the smallest transport vehicle which can hold reinforcements.
• At predesignated times, an air transport will be sent out to pick up reinforcements from the base.
• At predesignated times, an armed escort vehicle will be sent out to escort reinforcements from the base.
• Upon insertion to the AO, reinforcements should stick together until regrouping with the main force in the AO.

[Azrael]

Good Op, killed a lot!

[Clarke]

CNTR: CNTR - Carpe Noctem Tactical Recap

TS3 Stats: Grafana

[Ohdahh]

Fun, challenging op, fun to be on the receiving end of one . As the medic, had a lot of work on my hands in the second half, just got unlucky in the building as far i saw. One thing to help the medics a bit out, if a team that isn’t in immediate danger and another team is in trouble while you’re both spread out, move in a little bit so i can set up a CCP and can get a little more security. If you have any guys down, drag him into the CCP. Also on me to not call out the CCP, situation went south really quick.

[Karl]

Very intense op, especially as I have not lead much and it was too many points of information coming in at once at some points.

Overall I think everyone did okay. I was a bit too heavy and casual on the communications myself. But when we were under time pressure in the city, I feel like communications fell apart with yellow and red a bit which probably caused a few losses or lost time.

Thank you @Sagu for the OP!

[Koffer]

Nice op Sagu.

One thing I forgot to mention during debrief, is that I’m happy to say we did the whole op without resupply Not that this was my intent or a goal, but I think we too often resupply too early and spend a lot of time waiting around just so we can be green (or overburdened) on supplies. In this case the enemy was using the same ammo as us, so obviously that made it a lot easier.

In the end we ran out of blood, but running out and dying to/having losses is not the same. I think it’s good to sometimes add a bit more consequence to getting shot, instead of just relying on medics to get you back to 100% every time. Afaik nobody actually died because we ran of supplies. (We did die due to running out of time and moving too fast at the end, but I’ll chalk that up to spending some time sitting around figuring out how the artillery worked at the start.)

[Volken]

Thanks for hosting Sagu. I agree the OP went very well right up to the city interior. The situation was very challenging in the end as we also tried to rush to the MSR to intercept the convoy, which left us exposed to ambushes and hidden enemies on our flanks/rear. Particularly for red team as we were pushing towards the MSR we got gunned down by a HMG on a rooftop which almost wiped the whole fireteam. We managed to pull through but 1 person was left uncon with no heartrate, leaving us stuck giving him constant CPR to prevent him from dying. It went all downhill from there… which made me wish we had taken a slightly different approach.

Overall though i’m still happy with the result considering the very tough odds and the tools we had available.

[Clarke]

Personally, I really enjoyed the op and had a good time overall. Considering the difficulty of the task, I think we accomplished the mission and performed well in a rather constrained time frame (Tuesday Op). The artillery support was helpful once the elevation got dialled in correctly, and we only had one blue-on-blue arty strike, which was fairly impressive considering we were using proper artillery rounds.

I wanna emphasise that we did a good job even under difficult circumstances; my feedback points are more about how we can improve our performance in future ops in general.

A few notes for improvements

Short-Range Radio Discipline

This op Alpha net was sometimes incredibly busy, and that led to several overlapping messages. Ideally, only element leaders should actively talk on the squad net unless it is a critically urgent message (danger-close enemies, very powerful asset rolling up on us, etc.). Spotting unaware enemies should be relayed via direct voice to the element leaders, so they can filter the information and decide what should be relayed and how. Otherwise, we have instances such as multiple people reporting the same contacts, talking over each other or losing situational awareness among too many radio messages in the thick of the firefight. For whatever reason, most people yesterday (me included) were not on their A-game regarding radio discipline.

Contact Reports

The Contact Report Procedure is something we unfortunately don’t pay enough close attention to in many ops. Most contact reports are limited to “CONTACT, WEST”. In some cases, a “200 meters” is added as well. But rarely does it describe what the actual contact is and what they are doing. It’s important to know if we are dealing with a sentry patrol, a fireteam, several squads, a technical or an angry unicorn. TLDR: we’re really good at ALERT and ORIENT, but we should strive to improve DESCRIBE and EXPOUND.

Squad Cohesion

There were several instances where I felt that the two fireteams were too far apart, which in turn increased the radio comm clutter to coordinate and also created situations where if one fireteam ran into trouble, the other would not be immediately available to help out. When both teams had casualties, things got a bit hectic for our medic and they had to run back and forth. Ideally, both fireteams should remain in visual contact with each other at all times so they can support each other with Find, Fix, Flank and Finish maneuvers.

Glitchy Buildings

In the last 30 minutes before my death, I really struggled with the fortress objective due to its inherent wonkiness. We had so many instances where AI would gain weird line-of-sight advantages through walls, or we would get swallowed by the floors/walls while attempting to scale the two fortresses. This made the last objective much more difficult for us to conquer as our casualties started to daisy-chain. Would have loved to have a transport helo to attempt a rooftop landing or rope-rappel, but I understand that this would have been contrary to the mission design.

In Hateboarder’s video one can observe the glitchyness of these buildings in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KywwrkHKFjM&ab_channel=Hateboarder