exsonic01
Posts: 1131
Joined: 7/26/2016 From: Somewhere deep in appalachian valley in PA Status: offline
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My personal experience of such battlefield friction: Platoon Leader completely lost in the woods. During one field exercise me and my team was working as OPFOR recon element. BLUFOR attacking and OPFOR defending scenario, and we were conducting counter recon/SF infiltration mission. We detected one platoon sized BLUFOR element approaches from very wide flanking route. They were almost following ridge line of outer boundary of exercise AO. But those terrain was notorious for its toughness. We were watching them, but their flanking route was too wide, so we concluded they would not make in time before exercise is over. And that was correct. In addition, after exercise is over, we heard that the platoon was totally lost in the middle of mountains and woods They just marched based on wrong mountains. What I've heard is, the platoon leader of that platoon was new guy just graduated from Academy, so no experience neither knowledge about terrain of AO. And it was zero moonlight condition. Back in late 1990s ~ early 2000s, ROKA doesn't have enough night visions to issue. Flanking route he chose should pass through tough mountains as it is kinda ridge-line route, so he was unable to communicate, and it was middle of the attacking exercise so he couldn't try any comm due to radio silence order. Those conditions forced him to decide to make a wrong turn in the middle of the dark forest in the middle of the mountains. And such things are really easy to happen. His order was flanking the trench line of OPFOR, and CHQ gave him some choice of flanking routes. But he wished to impress his boss and wished to overachieve to get the title of "very good platoon leader" (the attitude sometimes can be seen from new Second Lieutenants fresh Academy graduates) so he chose very wide flanking routes which was not suggested by CHQ. He thought that those suggested flanking routes would be too easy to predicted. Imagine your platoon completely lost the track in the forest, and heading strange wrong direction in the middle of FPC-RS. That would be funny yet will make you angry . Also, in real or in exercise, we all know friendly fire really happens. But in FPC-RS, I never saw friendly fire.
< Message edited by exsonic01 -- 12/28/2019 5:00:35 PM >
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