Timurkalay Engagement

A small column of humvees and five-tons set out north from Loy Manara at noon, the sun beating unmercifully down on the soldier's heads. The low for the day was in the hundreds, forcing the men to sacrifice some ammunition space for packs of lukewarm bottled water, but the mission was there regardless of the sweltering sun.

1st Platoon was tasked with capturing Timurkalay from insurgents and turning the now deserted village into a strong point. When their company commander had demanded to be given free reign to secure the heights around it, he'd been ordered to keep quiet and execute the mission.

In the Bowl: August 6th, 2014 with Dog Company

Following a NATO attack on Elektrozavodsk and the securing of the bridgehead, CSAT units fell back to regroup. As the unit conducted patrols to maintain contact with enemy forces, a number of troops were abducted near an old castle to our northeast. HUMINT hinted that they might be in captivity within the castle, which is being held as an operating base by CSAT-backed irregulars. Our mission? Kill every guy who isn't our guys and then bring our guys back to some more of our guys for debrief, candy, and a book deal about their experience.

We estimate the enemy's strength at somewhere between forty and fifty men with technicals (Or as we're calling them, Ground-Grounds) on patrol near the castle. Our plan is to slip through the valley running up to the castle, hit it quick and clear it, hold it to wipe out the enemy as they attempt to retake it, then leg it down to the extraction point.

Hailstorm--Turning an OPORD into a Mission Two Years Later

Two years ago I was a junior leader in a realism unit called Mobile Assault Group (Shoutout to those fellows, if they're still around.) and we were looking for guys to play with. A group stepped up and we began talking over when and how to go about it. Combined our turnout was projected to be around thirty or forty. I was pretty excited. Now being of the mind that cooperative play was the key to starting off good relations between thirty guys who've never met each other and have varying play styles I decided to minimize planning difficulties, show some professionalism (A concept I can laugh at now), and use the piles of reference material I've accumulated like some deranged military science obsessed hoarder.

Creating a CSAT Motorized Battalion

So for an upcoming series of missions I wanted to craft a big and hopefully functioning framework for the enemy force. Normally when we create a scenario or mission we have some random ad-hoc force against us, this time I wanted to have a real TOE for the enemy. I dug up my favorite organizational structure: the old Soviet infantry battalion.

So we dig it and we start with the platoon. She's nice and light but flexible and in functional building blocks of nine-man squads. They're mounted, with no real division between the BTR (Or in this case the MSE-3 Marid) and the infantry squad mounted in it, which I love. The squad leader takes the commander's seat and dismounts according to his whims and the tactical situation. He's got six men led by an assistant leader with a good variety of weaponry.

Those BTR-Ks laugh in the face of danger, better dial it back.

So our section looks like this.

Squad Leader
Driver
Gunner
Assistant Leader
Autorifleman
Ammo Bearer
Grenadier (AT Grenadier, not a UGL)
Rifleman/Marksman (Not a sniper, and not for every section)
Rifleman

We have three sections mounted in MSE-3 Marids and a two-man HQ spread through the vehicles. That's our platoon. Pretty heavy and with plenty of mobility, punch, and flexibility. I can see it now: Marids spraying machine gun and grenade fire as they advance alongside dismounted infantry stopping and firing from the hip to suppress our poor Dog Company grunts or the same Marids deploying smoke to mask friendly forces caught in a crossfire.

So next up there's the Company HQ. I made it a six-man group with some repair capacity. They've got a Marid to drive around in, to keep things uniform. Their group is made up of the following.

Company Commander
Deputy Commander/XO
Repair Specialist (To fix up those trucks when they take a nasty PCML or Titan round and need to get patched up enough to continue)
Engineer (For quick repairs and mine disarming
Driver
Gunner

So now we've got a company almost formed. What company's worth a damn without even more weaponry? The Soviets equipped each company with the usual weapons platoon. They loaded out in BTRs with three machine guns and three ATGM-launchers. So we give them three crew-served 12.7mm machine guns and three Titan AT launchers.

Made in Zeus, each pip is an AI unit or object for the battalion. 

Bam, company. Copy it three times. Almost a battalion. We've got about three-hundred men now. My PC starts to panic. I figure we should flesh out the battalion level assets before we call it a day and prepare to unleash hell upon my poor rifles. What do they need? Air defense, a medical aid group, mortars and another antitank platoon and finally a supply train. I skip out on the repair workshop, signal platoon, and automatic grenade launcher platoon (GMGs are nasty and with Arma's accuracy it'd be a slaughter before we could deal with that threat)

So let's do a tally, eh?

Most of the battalion in a kinda-sorta formation. It's a juggernaut that'll be unleashed on my players in a week or two.

1st Coy Strength - 107 men, 6 MSE-3 Marids, 3 12.7mm Machine Guns, 3 Titan AT Launchers
2nd Coy Strength -  See above.
3rd Coy Strength - See above.
Battalion HQ - 6 Men, 1 MSE-3 Marid
Mortar Battery - 20 men, 1 Tempest Truck, 8 82mm Mortars
Air Defense Platoon - 16 men, 4 Titan AA Launchers, 4 Titan MANPAAD Launchers
Antitank Platoon - 28 men, 8 Titan AT Launchers, 8 Mounted AT Launchers, 8 RPG-42 Alamut Launchers
Medical Attachment - 12 Men

 So why do all this again? Dog Company doesn't have a battalion's worth of players, but we'll be playing a company conducting combat operations against these fellows. The terrain will constrict the number of combat forces that they can bring to bear on us and hopefully our officers and NCOs will be able to form a good defensive plan. They say the best odds an attacking force can hope for is three to one, they might just get it.

I'll be simulating these CSAT dudes, launching company or battalion attacks trying to break through and I don't intend to pull punches. I'll be modeling replacements for assets as well, so a good action for one side will have direct benefits in reducing the threat being thrown against them. Hopefully we'll get some great photo essays, videos, and after-action-reports out of it. If not, I still had a ton of fun crafting this force!

Jackknife: The End of Future Tactical Special Operations

 Running, running. Keep running. Shoot and move, duck and dodge, pop smoke and fall back, kick the door in and scramble away from the rounds. Three days ago they'd been sneaking around and running amok and now they were sprinting and ditching gear left and right to get away. Able team was gone, not even the double key of the radio to let them know they were there but couldn't talk. Their net was most likely compromised anyways. All it was good for was simple orders and whatever weak banter they could summon up.

Alva was upstairs spitting 7.62mm rounds west at a few trucks creeping along the dirt road, the bipod on the machine gun broken forcing him to rest the barrel on the window sill. Hell, the Zafir wasn't even theirs, they'd grabbed it from a patrol they'd wiped when they were escaping the second encirclement. It was the . . . fourth so far? Four and maybe counting, or maybe they'd finally break out and slip away into the countryside.

Jackknife: The Future of Tactical Special Operations

 Jakobs grinned upwards into the vehicle, having popped open the electrical box on the underside to expose the wires inside. They'd disabled two of these mobile AA vehicles today, all without anyone realizing it. Sure, they'd caused a bit of havoc and blacked out a huge segment of the region to cause a diversion, but they figured if they'd never get caught it'd be a simple thing to explain away as collateral damage.

That was assuming the guys catching them would be friendly after the hostilities ended. Jackknife was the first American SF unit to deploy behind enemy lines in ten years, though the instructors and trainers hadn't told them that. After a series of intelligence fuck ups CENTCOM had decided to tone down their operations and play it safe, letting the newly formed CSAT expend manpower and political capital all over Asia and the Middle East. The culture of the elite special operations teams rising out of swamps in fifty-thousand dollars worth of high-tech gear persisted, even if only a few of the guys still around had ever even landed on a hostile shore.

Putnam popped his head up on the other side of the vehicle, leaving a muddy smudge along the digicam print. Still nothing, just the faint sound of Chinese-made attack choppers in the distance shining searchlights on the highway to the south. The last time the Jordanian security team had come by, they'd been smoking with their rifles slung low and safetied, chatting about christ knows what. The two Americans hadn't learned Arabic or Farsi or Persian or whatever the other guys were talking, but years of messing with fuesboxes and wiring on trucks had given them a decent idea on how to disable the delicate systems of just about anything.

Sure, it lacked elegance to just pull at whatever until it pulled from wherever it was supposed to be. It however acquired a new lethality when they rigged the panel with explosives to wound or kill anyone trying to repair it—and hopefully direct some force upwards into where they thought the ammunition was housed to finish the thing off.

“About done?”

“Yep, just gimme another minute, man.”

They heard some muffled laughter, their heads swiveling around to find the sentries on their next pass. They figured it was a bunch of washout conscripts that were tasked with the air defense, it was the only excuse for how easily they'd slipped through and done their work. It would've been a bad time for those guys to climb back into their track to check in with their command for new orders, and the two yankees stared and held their breath waiting for their figures to come out of the trees.

The cherry red of the cheap cigarettes lit up their faces first, then they stepped out of the brush and into the clearing, heading straight towards them. The two operators (That's what they call you when commando sounds too retro) shrank down into the earth and curled against the treads. The footsteps grew closer, their laughter petering out as they neared the vehicle. These were the moments that decided good covert operations, right?

Jakobs shook his head once in the direction of the near treeline and mic-ed his radio twice without saying anything. A few moments passed, obviously tense as anyone would expect. This would normally be the point in the movie where the two sentries passed unawares, but the 6.5mm rounds smacked into the chassis of the vehicle a few inches away from their bodies instead—the silencers barely concealing the pop of them from the rifle.

They glanced around, lowering to their knee as more rounds buried into the dirt. Jakobs and Putnams eyes rolled as their bodies crawled out from under the vehicle. They flashed their tac lights twice before firmly smashing the two sentries in the side of the skull with their rifle butts. It lacked elegance, that tactical operator style-cool they were told they'd have. But it got the job done. They plodded back to the treeline, falling next to the other three guys who'd almost blown their cover.

“Is it so hard to hit a target when they're stock still? Jesus.”

“Hey man, it wasn't like shooting a cardboard cutout. Give us a break.”

“Yeah? And how much did that marksmanship instruction cost the army, man? For special forces you sure can't shoot for shit.”

Gone Mechin'

Here's a quick filler, I've got some Civilization 5 stuff in the works and some Arma 3 Beta stuff as well. MicOneJuliet's been recording missions and turning them into beautiful videos for a while, and this was one of our shining moments. I was the gunner/commander of the AMV Marshall his team was mounted in. Though he doesn't capture the entire mission as our IFVs split into wings, his segment is still awesome to watch.