Please leave feedback, I know you have loads. I won’t take offence it’s all lessons learned.
Alpha did really well this op. We took the first mortar position (which was quite well fortified for only 1 squad to take on) in a matter of minutes with only 1 casualty. Then we scouted all of Krasnostav, missing only 1 occupied position. At this point in time Alpha could’ve easily gone in and cleared it, since the enemy positions were all too spread to support each other in contact.
However, PLT (and this is understandable) decided that we should skip Krasnostav and go for the Nuke we located first. Alpha thus regrouped at the airfield and within 5 minutes red team had a vehicle and was ready to step off. Command at some point in this process recalled PLT and told him to take Krasnostav first. Then for some reason the plan (as it was relayed to us) was: Drive into the town as a convoy, dismount when you take contact and clear it. Now to me this sounded like the worst plan I’ve heard in years, especially since 2 fortified buildings were already marked on the map on the main road which we were to take into town. However, this version of the plan seemed also to not be understood by the other elements, as instead of stopping in the kill zone (only redeeming part here) we kept driving aimlessly through town following vic 1 until it blew up. What the real plan was, I don’t know. But it’s clear that a lot of people didn’t understand it.
After that initial clusterfuck in town red team dismounted and did do a very good job, but we could’ve been a lot more effective. We were constantly told to "regroup" and "wait here", which meant we just sat around while we could’ve cleared more sectors. What definitely didn’t help is that no other element (yellow team, PLT, ENG, MAT) marked cleared sectors. There was no communication on what was clear and what wasn’t. Below is the map of the town as we were leaving. Some of the initial enemy pos markers are gone. 5 sectors were cleared and marked by red in the west, sector 5 was marked by Ellpuk and the rest is just unmarked… This is basics for everyone, and especially more important when nobody has BFT.
Once we took off from Krasnostav it all went really well honestly. Vic 1 got unlucky in a crash with AI. The assault on the trainyard went better than I think we could’ve expected given the heavy weaponry from the enemy. Very good performance from all elements there.
I very much agree with this. I made the decision to try and keep elements under my control in position until I could get a decent understanding of the battlespace (there were calls about units coming in from different directions on radio at the time) but in future I’ll definitely consider letting fireteams start clearing (I didn’t expect to be bogged down for so long).
To add to this though, I think this can be solved with a more coherent planning phase. The issue with bringing all element leaders to assist with the planning phase is that it prevents them from managing their elements (I certainly was pretty overwhelmed with comms as planning, considering the capacity of the vehicles and defence of the position were all happening simultaneously - I failed to prioritise so none of these were done well from an Squad Leading standpoint - Alpha as a whole did excellent). This probably contributed to the lack of clarity of what the plan was Koffer so I’d like to apologise for that again. I definitely need to get better at saying no to things and prioritising.
When it comes to introducing a new plan outside of initial briefing, the amount of time actually briefing should be as small as possible so I’d say the takeaway for everyone is, if in a leadership position, only call element leads in when all other logistical steps have been completed and a plan has been made to be communicated. Saves time, leads to less confusion. That’s my opinion anyway.
Either way Dachi it was a really good op. End was a bit of a cluster but couldn’t really be avoided.