Basic Tactics

By kilo, Rooney, Soviet Onion, & Loadin

Situational Awareness

1. Know the casualty status of your team at all times. If you suffer more than 1-2 casualties (wounded or dead), alert your leader. If your immediate leader is dead, make sure someone recovers their radio and alerts the next layer of leadership.

   1. If you have taken above 50% casualties and the leader is dead, it may be smart to join with another element, or to break contact.

   2. If you are unable to complete a task due to heavy enemy fire and your team leader is dead, take any immediate actions necessary, then notify the next level in the chain of command.

2. Know the status of your team's ammo and equipment at all times. You should always have a rough idea of the amount of ammo you have. Periodically confirm exactly how much ammo you have left, and notify your leader on any significant changes.

   1. Have a rough idea of what capabilities your team has. Can you take on an enemy vehicle or infantry unit by yourselves? Can you complete your objective?

3. Know your team's task & purpose, in case your leader becomes incapacitated.

4. Continuously scan your surroundings for cover & concealment, obstacles, explosives, enemy forces, friendly forces, vehicles, equipment, civilians, and anything important or unusual.

Communication & Radios

Communication is absolutely critical to survival, effectiveness, and fun. Keep all combat communications Accurate, Brief, and Clear (ABC).

Contact Reports - Alert to all contacts with a quick bearing or directional callout.

1. If contact is immediate (enaging or about to engage friendlies), engage it while alerting friendlies with a quick bearing. If contact is non immediate, wait.

2. Once friendlies are alerted, give a more detailed contact report including what type of contacts, the number of them, and their detailed location/direction of travel.

3. At least one person should call major contact reports on the radio or otherwise ensure FTLs/SLs are aware of contacts.

Assesing Non Immediate Contact - When possible, hold fire and asses contacts.

1. If enemy vehicles or fortified positions are spotted, attempt to mark the location on the map and alert leaders prior to engaging.

2. If a contact appears/engages and requires halting or falling back to eliminate safely, do so with your immediate element.

3. If you become aware of an immediate danger to the platoon or a specific element of the platoon, immediately contact squad lead.

4. If no enemy or possible enemy is sighted, continue moving.

Spacing & Movement

Spacing is the amount of empty space you keep between yourself and others during any type of movement. While you are assigned a battle buddy, do not be on top of your battle buddy. Maintain 5-15m spacing unless crossing open ground, ideally staying within local chat range at all times.

1. During squad movement fire teams will ideally be spread out between 15 and 75 meters apart.

2. Formations are nice, but typically simple line or wedge shaped push forward is enough. Ideally fire team leaders are towards the front middle during movement unless they specificy a pointman.

3. When in heavy cover or urban environments fire team leaders may call for tighter than 5-15m spacing.

4. Try to maintain decent spacing when driving in vehicles, ask your element's leader if not sure how big the gap between vehicles should be.

Fire team leaders will split their fire team into separate color organized buddy teams to assist with spacing and movement.

1. In a four man fire team The automatic rifleman and assistant automatic rifleman will be one buddy team. The other will be the fire team leader and the final member of the team.

2. In a six man (or more) fire team the automatic rifleman, assistant automatic rifleman and fire team leader will compose one buddy team. The other members will compose the other buddy team.

3. The squad’s separate buddy teams should ideally all be different colors in case a buddy team is ordered over the squad 343 net in an emergency situation.

Fire & Manuever

Reaction to Immediate Contact

1. Return Suppressive Fire - You are not trying to be accurate. Stop wasting time. Identify the cardinal direction and open fire to establish immediate fire on the target.

2. Call General Contacts - Each member of the team calls out vocally their contact. Range, bearing, detail. By collecting these reports, it helps team leads/squad build a picture of the battle and relay it up. EVERYONE should be doing this. If you get through ~20 rounds and haven't called contact, you're doing it wrong. It doesn't matter if your range is off by 50m. Or if your angle is off by 3. Just get some sort of report out there.

3. Go to Ground - You are a smaller target prone. Don't worry about cover in the first few seconds unless your entire world is exploding. Your job is to find where they are shooting from and return fire while reporting contacts.

4. Move to Cover - As time permits, move to cover. DO NOT ALL MOVE AT ONCE. Keep the fire up. Move in small bounds. Remember, this is all to be done without orders. Communicate as needed. If there is a rock five feet away grab it. If there is a stone wall twenty feet away, call it out, wait for orders. Your job is to be shooting until told to be moving.

5. Observe - When in a safe(er) position, you can be afforded the chance to step out of the fight, observe the enemy. Keep the fire up though, that is still important. Find the bad guys. Watch your flanks and rear.

6. Aim - Seems simple, right? No. Aim covers more than just you. It means AARs guiding in the ARs. TL's controlling the teams rate, angle and distribution of fire. At this stage in the fight, assistants and TLs can take themselves out of the fight to get others aimed in using their binos.

7. Fire Accurately - General term. Once aimed in, fire, kill the bad guys. Steps 6&7 can be handled for individual targets on a repeating basis until orders come in. Keep observing. Keep aiming. Keep kiling.

Covering Friendles

When contacts or possible are known about before engaing, leaders generally ask one of their fire teams or crews to sit in overwatch or a base of fire.

1. For our purposes a base of fire(BOF) is a dedicated unit or position that will be providing long term fire support to enable another unit to conduct rapid movement towards a known enemy position under the cover of fire support. A base of fire is a static position, similar to a waypoint.

2. For our purposes a unit in overwatch is a small unit or individual vehicle that has taken a position from which it can observe the terrain ahead and provide covering fire. A unit in overwatch may move from place to place, and can be assigned to tail/defend another unit.

3. If one fire team has either two automatic rifle teams or an asset like a medium machine gun in it and the other does not, the team with the asset/more automatic rifles will typically be used as the overwatch or base of fire element.

Assaulting Contacts

1. Leaders typically attempt to have their fire teams utilize fire team bounding when securing or assaulting an area.

   1. Fire team bounding can be done by having one fire team cover another for the time it takes the moving element to get set up in a forward or covered position. Once that time is up and the original movement fire team is set up, they become the new cover fire team. The original supporting cover team then becomes the movement team and the process repeats.

   2. Bounding can also be done within the fire teams by utilizing the colorized buddy teams. Squad leaders might issue the order to do so, but it is the fire team leaders who will control this movement, thus restricting the maximum movement team range to yelling distance.

   3. When bounding across a wide open area leaders may be forced to have a fire team or buddy halt in the open, go prone, and provide covering fire. This is preferable to sending a fire team straight across more than 150-200m of unbroken ground during contact. The movement team should stop around 30-50m ahead of the cover team during this type of action.

   4. Another action which may be utilized in placed of bounding is peeling. Peeling is conducted by having a squad or fire team in a line or column which is holding and providing cover fire. Upon the order to begin peeling the last man in line will move all the way past the first man toward the direction of desired movement. Once that moving individual has called themselves as set, the new last man in line moves and the process repeats. Peeling has a higher percentage of firepower going out at all times, but is slower than bounding.

   5. Bounding and peeling can also be done with two or more entire squads, however the platoon lead would organize that movement.