Gear / TTP List

[Ender]

I concede there are absolutely times when speed is essential and a few examples that come to mind are:

• Raids, VCP's, Area Cordons and Cordon & Knocks: These all require a measure of decisiveness and directness in order to effectively catch your quarry in the act, or more likely catch them at all. If coordinated speed is not employed during mission profiles such as these, we miss our targets and they will slip through our net, sometimes never to be caught again. Even with this though I do not know if I would suggest going balls out JUST because the particular mission is more DA oriented. The emphasis I would place is not speed = safety, but that vigilance = safety and speed is only a positive component in so much as it can be controlled. Speed caused more problems for a lot of convoys I saw than they ever solved. If someone shoots at me when I am doing 70mph I am considerably less likely to be able to pinpoint the source of the threat and engage it than if we were cruising at 7 but it is assured, guaranteed, that my desire to return fire is the same IF NOT HIGHER when I am doing 70 miles and hour. This is a dangerous mix... Another problem I saw is what happens to the rear of a column traveling at Ludicrous Speed is very rarely (OK never) communicated to the front in an instant and more often than not this comm gap leads to the patrol becoming temporarily divided at worst or momentarily disoriented at best. I know speed makes us feel safer but I have found as cliché as it sounded to me in Boot and ARS, "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" is truly where its at.
• MSR's: This is the one example where we would pick up our pace and drop the hammer but.... the amount of time we spent on MSR's compared to rural, irregular roads was completely disproportionate. If I had a month to talk about comprehensive vehicle tactics I would spend 3 and a half weeks talking about the rural and urban aspects (Low Rider 101) and only a weekend on MSR procedures (Miami Vice).

I am definitely not saying that speed is a bad thing, it is just that I believe it doesn't matter whether you are in a Daewoo or an Abrams, trained observation and a highly disciplined sense of vigilance goes so much farther to ensure safety in every situation than speed saves in a few. I have to admit that the times we went fast were so few and far between that I can not speak from experience on the pros or cons of doing so and am only offering opinions about what I observed from the outside in, so to speak.

[Ender]

Aside from the speed issue I think the list concept is a good one and agree with everything there and would even add a couple items:

• Shovels. Make sure every truck has one. A good one. I know this is more of a 4 shop request than a rucksack item but its importance can not be overstated. People ask me here in the States how Iraq was and I tell them 99 days out of 100 over there are spent with a shovel and that it is the one day in 100 they hear about here. They think I am highlighting the disparity in number of humanitarian missions compared to "martial machine gunning" missions and while they are mostly correct they too often don't realize I am being literal as well. In Iraq, as many of you know, it is impossible to go 1000 meters without tripping over a cache of some magnitude. Once your patrol has found the mobile AA piece (you weren't looking for) buried in the cemetery (for example) your ass is not leaving until it is recovered and if you were headed for one of AMZ's lieutenants, that is ok... someone else can do the hit... My point is with everything that is buried over there and the conditions of the roads everywhere it is very nice to have the means to dig quickly, comfortably and with some minimal expectation of effectiveness.
• Spray Paint. Lots of it. We stocked up on browns, greys, blacks and greens (of all shades) before we left specifically so we could modify our hides, equipment and weapons... it is very difficult to insert a sniper team and leave them anywhere for any length of time (because of the nature of local foot traffic) unless you have "pre fabbed" the bulk of their "hide" before hand. With the ghillie material, the right vegetation and a conservative amount of paint in the right mixes you can blend your hides without having to pick up a specific soil, building sample from your intended OP before hand to make sure they match. Without these materials expect to have your teams compromised within 8-12 hours of insert(if not much sooner...say like by daylight)... bottom line if you expect to insert anyone covertly and have them stay concealed you are going to have to do a considerable amount of prep work before leaving the LOD. Paint is fast and effective...and in combination with other concealment methods works quite nicely. (As an aside to paint re: hides etc... it is also helpful to be able to put a fresh [or old?] look on something in a hurry... cars, buildings, windows, walls etc...if you play off of what they are USED to seeing it is easier to trick "their" eyes.)
• Ditto on the NOD's... in fact EVERYTHING should go out with you every time. Frago's happen and there is no excuse for we don't have item 'X' because this wasn't supposed to be mission 'Y.'
• Cameras. We sent everyone who had one and wanted to out with their own personal cameras. No two people would have the same perspective on the same patrol and if Private So and So can back up his gut feeling (good bad or indifferent) to his Platoon Commander, about Mahmoud Such and Such and do so with color pictures it carries considerably more weight than trying to get the same 18 year old to articulate his complex (and often correct) instincts verbally. With the SIDS system now this goes a step further where E-2 So and So's snapshot can be relayed back to the FOB and used for immediate decision making. An example of this that I saw came from a Lance in my platoon. This kid took pictures of a group of MAM's earlier in a patrol.... hours later this same kid took pictures of another group of MAMs and noticed that one of the guys was the same in both groups...except for he had dramatically altered his clothing and general appearance. The Lance was able to take his digital camera and show it to our Gunny who then proceeded to look for, find and search the guy's vehicle. That camera enabled us to take a few RPK's and an RPG off the street of Fallujah before Al Fajr and highlighted just how effective good observation skills can be. If this E-3 hadn't had the picture to back up just HOW altered this guy's appearance was it is POSSIBLE that the platoon leadership may have mentally made an excuse for him (maybe he played soccer and showered, or is heading to prayers etc...) and let the guy slide. We had issues initially with the 2 not wanting to take pics from personal cameras but a JPEG is a JPEG and they weren't going to refuse hot photos with the proper format simply because they came from a camera that wasn't serialized. I guess more accurately, we were going to take the photos no matter what and if they wanted to use them they would have to deal with where they came from. On any given (5 hour to 5 day) patrol we would have 15 personal cameras on board in addition to the hot mega jobs we were issued. By the end of our deployments all of our debriefs would have 5 or so separate (fully edited, "azimuthed" and annotated) photo logs that would together provide a VERY comprehensive picture of what went down.