Revisiting Land Nav

I had someone send me a message regarding some of the things I wrote about my land navigation post - I had to go back and read what I wrote, as it had been a while, but his words got me to thinking.

First, about the dead reckoning.  I believe my words were that you should 'never dead reckon at night,' which I would posit are true - for the course.  But I was guilty of not thinking beyond the course itself; after all the purpose of land nav training is not to pass a course, it's to be able to move on the battlefield, and know where you are at any given point.  So, on the land nav course that advice might be well and good, but in the real world, if you have to march through nasty, hellish thicket, then you have to do it.  And if you have to do it, you better know what the hell you're doing.  So yes, you should practice dead reckoning at night, through crappy terrain, and if my advice for the course steered you away from doing that in your future, my apologies.  On that note, there is a book by John Poole called The Last Hundred Yards, which talks extensively about route planning and land navigation, and talk about the perils of dead reckoning, and how to mitigate them.  I would recommend reading up on it, and trying out some of the techniques to see if they work for you.

The other thing mentioned was the, for lack of a better word, cheating.  Which it was - you can mince it any way you choose, I suppose, but at the end of the day, you have to be able to do the course without assistance.  It's an easy endeavor, and I would posit that all the LTs out there are proficient enough that they need no assistance, despite the horror stories you will inevitably hear - so why do people bother at all, then?  I think it stems from a goodhearted, if not flawed, desire to help each other out - nobody wants their fellow man to fail, even if he doesn't really need the help all that much.  The second question that arises is, why mention that it occurs at all?  Well, because it does occur.  And because it does occur, I think it needs mentioning.  After all, what someone reading this journal wants is an accurate, or at least honest, description of what to expect.  I will, however, say that I tried to make light of it, instead of bluntly stating what it was - cheating.  Passive, perhaps, but cheating nonetheless.  So, in closing, I will say that while it occurs, if you feel that you need to rely on it, well-intentioned though it may be, then you should be spending your free time in the woods practicing, and becoming proficient.  After all, there will be no coughing fits and clanging cups in Afghanistan when your GPS dies on you.

Slacker!

Yes, I am one.  Sorry.  We are now ,however, up to date!  Once I return, I'll upload some handouts specific to the OPORD stuff that we did, so you can prepare yourself before hand.

Week 11 - Patrolling

What a week!  Right off the bat, I will tell you that decent cold weather clothing would be a solid investment for you, if you're coming to this course in the winter.

From what I could see, this week was completely different, depending on which platoon you were in.  Some ran more missions that others, others spent quite a bit of time doing rehearsals or classroom instruction.  Regardless, you will be out in the woods for hours on end.  This was basically the first experience for many people with platoon-level operations.  As you would expect, we focused on raids and ambushes for the missions, with instruction being devoted to setting up security halts, ORPs, and MTC/Deliberate Attack.  We operated out of a TTB, which meant warm beds for our four hours of sleep, and porta-johns to download in to.  I would imagine that had the weather been more agreeable, we would have slept in patrol bases.  As it were, only a couple more degrees, and Gore-tex would no longer have been effective.  No joke, my canteen water was slushy, and guys with Camelbaks were SOL - their tubes would freeze up.

I won't spend a lot of time telling you about specifics - you have the field manuals, so you can see for yourself.  I'm going to skip straight to the lessons learned, which were plentiful for this week:

• They are going to take away your compasses after Land Nav.  Go buy one.  You will need it, and they will expect you to be able to do all kinds of things you need a compass for, but won't bother to give you one.  Navigation, setting fields of fire, establishing azimuths for egress, all kinds of things.  You need to have one, and if you don't, find out who in your platoon has one and keep him close by.  We had two guys in our platoon who had personal compasses, and they got requisitioned constantly.
• Prior planning prevents piss poor performance!  Make a copy of the grading sheet the give you in week 8 for your OPORD (or get the one that I will post in a few days) and USE it during your planning.  I would say 90 percent of all the heartache we ran into during missions could have been avoided with a clear and concise OPORD, with appropriate graphics.  Which brings me to my next point:
• If you're going to have a sand table / graphics (and by if, I mean you will unless you're an idiot), make them big enough for everyone to see, and place them where everyone has access to them.  otherwise, you're wasting everyone's time.  If the cadre give you overhead photography of the objective, pass it around so everyone can see it.  How silly is it to do a raid on buildings when the assaulting element doesn't know how many buildings are on the objective, let alone their layout?
• It's important to avoid last-minutes indecisiveness, but that doesn't mean you can't alter the plan, given circumstances on objective. If conditions differ significantly that for what you planned, adapt accordingly.  Don't, for example, place an ORP 600 meters out (especially without those compasses we mentioned) just because on your map recon there was a huge clearing, if the whole place is densely wooded when you show up.
• Sector sketches, sector sketches, sector sketches.  Have templates made up before you go out, it will save you time and energy once you establish patrol bases.
• It should go without saying, but as a leader, please keep a map on you at all times, and make sure your special teams and key personnel have important grid coordinates on hand.

Week 10 - MOUT

I use MOUT loosely for this week - most of it was spent doing the same glasshouse drill over and over until you went blind.  The focus for this week was room-clearing, which would culminate in a live-fire room clearing.  As I said, we started with glass houses, but also incorporated the empty room of the not-yet-renovated BOQ space in the building that BOLC occupies.  Bonus tip - if you're looking for a good place to poop (is poop a doctrinally correct term?) during the duty day, the bathrooms still work.  Just bring your own toilet paper / babywipes.  After a day of that, we spent the next couple of days at MOUT sites.

We started out by conducting a raid on the MOUT site (something we never practiced or rehearsed for, which I found odd) - this took up the majority of the day.  At night, we cleared buildings using our NODs (something else we had not practiced or received instruction in - I'm noticing a trend here), learning how to traverse stairwells, pieing corners, buddy-clearing smaller rooms, and taking corners by force.  Needless to say, when we practiced doing this stuff in the daylight for the first time the next day, it was much easier to grasp the basic concepts.  For those of you who are curious, you can't see a damn thing with those NODs on - it's not that things are out of focus or there's not enough light (which, well, there wasn't, but it was a problem we found workarounds for), but you have no depth perception and your field of vision is so narrow.  You just run in to everyone and everything.  It's not something I would do in real life without extensively practicing first.

During the day it was much better, and quite a bit of fun, actually.  Unfortunately, inclement weather cut things short, and we had to return early to run glasshouse drills until about 2000 or so.  Thursday we went to the kill house proper, did blank certifications ,and then live fire certifications.  A word to the wise - no matter how hot and painful the brass that just went down your neck is, don't lean in front of your buddy's barrel.  Shenanigans will NOT occur.  Friday was the usual - weapons cleaning and lots of standing around.

Lessons learned?  Perhaps:

• Winter tactical gloves would be a wise investment.  All things being equal, fingers were the hardest thing to keep warm, because you're holding on to a chunk of metal that sucks away all of your heat.  It made what would have otherwise been a comfortable get-up absolutely miserable.
• You'll want your terrain model kit ready to go this week - they way they explained it to use, we thought we would just be practicing MOUT, but they through in that mission, which the PSG and PL were graded on.
• MRE heaters make nifty warmers in a pinch, so long as you fold the bag in a way to prevent spilling.  I also use them to heat up my shaving water in the mornings.  No reason to be uncivilized, even if one is, as they say, roughing it.
• If you can wing it, try to volunteer to be a FO, RTO, etc., because it means you're not lying in the prone for hours on end during missions, freezing to death.  It also allows you to actually see what's going on and learn s thing or two before its your turn, as opposed to being a Joe on the line.

Week 9 - More OPORD, Fire Support, and Air Support

As all of last week was learning about OPORDs and then working on the platoon-level OPORD you would present, this week was dedicated to actually presenting said OPORDs, and just to see if I can possibly squeeze in the word OPORD in to this sentence any more than has already been done - OPORD.  I digress.

Basically, if you weren't presenting OPORDs, you were getting classes or running glass house drills for next week.  Classes consisted of learning about different air assets available to us, 5-line CCA, and 9-line CAS, de-conflicting fires and airspace, and graphical control measures associated with said airspace.  After a couple of hours of this, I remember nothing.  One of the days out of this week, we went to the call for fire trainer, where the FA NCOs were able to concisely explain everything you needed to know in about 10-15 minutes.  I've been noticing that, about the FA guys - they cut to the quick, and are very thorough.  Kudos to King of Battle - maybe they could get them to teach all of our courses - we'd be out of this place in half the time, I'd bet.

For those of you who have experience with fire missions, prepare to be underwhelmed.  All the missions were the same, no variations in shell/fuze combos, no danger close, and they made you do successive bracketing.  The civilians running the equipment frown upon you calling Fire For Effect missions right off the bat.  The CCA/CAS was very good, however, and I got a lot out of it.  I feel very confident in that aspect.  Which reminds me - I am not JTAC qualified.

Don't be surprised if you don't get to brief your OPORD this week, it apparently is a time consuming ordeal, and some people have to re-do theirs, which eats up more time.  Best advice I can give you for your presentations is to keep the scoresheet next to you to ensure you hit all the points, and don't overthink things.  People freak out for some reason and make their plans overly-complex, and use thirty words to describe something that can be said in seven (or better yet, with an overlay).   Relax, keep it simple and brief, and you'll be fine.

Week 8 - OPORD

Well gentlemen, I won't make any bones about it -  I've been slacking on this journal.  In the ever present war between keeping current on my updates and letting off steam, letting off steam has won.  Es macht nichts.

Week 8 greeted us with a lovely little mid-course examination, focusing on offensive operations.  Topics for our particular exam included:

• Forms of Maneuver
• Types of Offensive Operations
• Types of Special Attacks
• Types of Movement to Contacts
• Purposes of Offense
• Principles of War
• Civil Considerations during IPB (ASCOPE)
• Military Aspects of Weather
• Military Aspects of Terrain (OCOKA)
• Steps for COA Development
• TLPs
• Operational Terms and Graphics, specifically:
• Unit Symbols
• Equipment Symbols
• Tactical Mission Tasks
• Types of Rehearsals

I am sure I am missing a couple, but rest assured, if you have these down-packed, you'll be fine - they will do a comprehensive review beforehand that will cover everything on the exam.  Just take the time to actually study these things.  All of this stuff can be found in the supplied field manuals.  One of the guys in our class has  something called the Battle Staff Smartbook, which takes all this stuff, from about three different field manuals, and smushes it into a book you can carry in your pocket.  Might be something to look in to.

Nothing much to tell you about the rest of the week, really.  They taught us how to do OPORDs, did a few practice ones, and set up a schedule for presenting them for a grade - they give you the grade sheet beforehand, so you know exactly what you have to hit.  Be forewarned, that the format for these OPORDs is probably not the same way you did them in West Point/OCS/ROTC, but it's not necessarily a bad thing.  The way they taught us how to do them streamlines a lot of the information and makes the whole endeavor less pedantic.  If you can stand to wait a few days until I return from leave, I will upload a scan of the grading sheet, along with an explanation of what all the acronyms mean.  I'll also take the time to walk you through how I presented my OPORD.  If you would like a copy of the company level OPORD that they gave to us, to see what it looks like, I will email it to you, if you provide a .mil address.  The rest of the week you worked on your OPORD, editing as you learned in class, and two brave souls volunteers to go first, so the rest of us could get a taste for what right looks like.  We asked the guys what their grade was, and they told us that it would be on a curb - in other words, we all had to go before we got a grade.  So maybe it's OK to suck, as long as you suck less than everyone else (the answer is no, by the way.  This is your bread and butter, here.).