Battle Drill

[William F. Owen]

Sometimes I sit back and seriously believe we suck, but have just sucked less than our opponents the last few go-arounds.

To paraphrase (no pun intended) an officer from 2 Para said at Goose Green, "We didn't so much win this one as the other side lost it."

[William F. Owen]

Yeah, blank ammo, never mind live ammo, is almost always grudgingly and stingily doled out. In The RCR, we got around that by loading "Militia Bullets" (shouting "Bang! Bang!" - pathetic isn't it?) when our regular ammo ran out.

I have real issues with blank ammunition on field exercises. Blanks, without TESEX kit, or very good umpiring and role players, provide negative reinforcement, - or bad training, - but there doesn't seem to be any other way to get around it. This one really keeps me thinking.

[Ron Humphrey]

I have real issues with blank ammunition on field exercises. Blanks, without TESEX kit, or very good umpiring and role players, provide negative reinforcement, - or bad training, - but there doesn't seem to be any other way to get around it. This one really keeps me thinking.

but I know the groups of soldiers who go paintballing together become very adept at working together, And the sting kinda gets the point across to.

Get guns close enough to familiar feel and you could get great drilling anytime anywhere with just a quick stop at your local wholesaler.

[Penta]

At some point in reading this, I wonder why nobody's ever tried to invent flash suits a la "Ender's Game" for training use - your whole body freezing up when you 'die' would, I think, do much the same as paintball hits, and with less environmental damage.

[Rex Brynen]

but I know the groups of soldiers who go paintballing together become very adept at working together, And the sting kinda gets the point across to.

Get guns close enough to familiar feel and you could get great drilling anytime anywhere with just a quick stop at your local wholesaler.

You do have to be careful with paintball as a form of tactical training--it teaches some lessons well--and others very poorly.

To start with, paintballs are sufficiently inaccurate that rapid movement provides far more protection than it does on a real battlefield against an enemy equipped with automatic weapons. Overwatch is harder because its difficult to hit anything out past 30 meters. Indeed, at ranges much beyond that, the paintball is so slow, and the trajectory so arced, that a good player can often simply dodge the incoming round--assuming that you can put it anywhere near them. Even when they hit, they usually won't break, and you may not even feel them.

That doesn't work with either 5.56 or 7.62

You can compensate for this somewhat with electronic triggers or fully automatic markers, but then you run into another problem: fire discipline and ammunition supply. I can easily go through a couple of thousand rounds of paintballs in a day with a standard unmodified semi-automatic marker. Similar rates of ammunition expenditure in combat conditions could be fatal.

Third, cover works different. With paintball, leaves and small branches are enough to provide semi-hard cover. That's not a lesson you want your soldiers to learn It would better at training for MOUT, where shorter ranges and snap-to-fire times reduce the differences between real weapons and paintball markers a little.

As for the sting, try playing in the winter up here. Paintballs aren't quite so soft then, and its damn hard to run through several feet of snow

[Ron Humphrey]

If you hadn't had to be a realistic about it somebody might have gotten an idea and before it had the opportunity to be intercepted and corrected ;at least some units might have had a little more fun.

Honestly although I understand the limitations with such a thing I gues when I think about what "battle drill" really teaches me as a soldier it would be the teamwork part more so than acurate fires or good concealment practice.

That's why I thought it was worth a try

[Norfolk]

Selected Papers of General William E. DePuy, compiled by Richard M. Swain.

General DePuy was instrumental in the formulation of present-day Battle Drill in the US Army (and the USMC adopted soem elements as well). Being practical-minded, DePuy considered that a Infantryman with perhaps as little as three month's training should neverthless be equipped with simple means to make the most of his potential. One of those simple means was Battle Drill, which DePuy described as being practical techniques that could be automatically applied by any soldier without having to spend time thinking for too long about a given tactical situation.

GEN William E. DePuy (Page 25):

Few squad leaders are Doctors of Philosophy-some are more articulate than others, but prudence suggests that we simplify their tasks as much as possible and this is where the battle drill and the team system relieve the squad leader of at least half of his requirement for battlefield explanation. Those who claim that this deprives him of his prerogatives underestimate the size of the problem which remains to confront him. To decide-under fire-where the enemy is-how to approach him-how to use the terrain-how to control his teams-inspire his men-and how to keep the squad's mental picture alive is challenge enough for any man.

Battle Drill provided the soldier with a simple and effective means to react to given situations now, not after the moment for action had passed; DePuy was a firm subscriber to Patton's dictum on this point.

While I certainly do not agree with Battle Drill, let alone giving an Infantryman only a few months training, DePuy's developments and innovations were genius: "11 Men, 1 Mind" (pp.1-24); "Briefing by LtGen DePuy" (pp.59-66); and "One-Up and Two-Back?" (pp.295-302, not quite about Battle Drill, but gives an idea of the tactical setting it was meant to operate in - one of DePuy's best pieces).

[William F. Owen]

The biggest problem with Battle Drill is the words Battle and Drill.

When you call exactly the same thing an "Immediate Action Drill" or "Contact Drills" no one blinks. - and you can't train infantry without such things.

...and strangely, I note from chatting to my friends in the IDF, that the Israelis intuitively refer to training as "Drills." - which bearing in mind the British Army's part in forming the Palmach and thus the IDF may not be surprising.

[Rifleman]

...and strangely, I note from chatting to my friends in the IDF, that the Israelis intuitively refer to training as "Drills." - which bearing in mind the British Army's part in forming the Palmach and thus the IDF may not be surprising.

Legacy of Orde Wingate? Mad man or mad genius?

[William F. Owen]

Legacy of Orde Wingate? Mad man or mad genius?

Definitely a bit of Orde in there somewhere. Mad as a bicycle, but a dam good soldier.

[Norfolk]

The biggest problem with Battle Drill is the words Battle and Drill.

It does tend to conjur up mental images of Battalions forming Squares as an automatic reaction to enemy action.

[MattC86]

Come to think of it, there was never any exercise of the battalion-to-company-to-platoon logistics flow during the exercise. No ammo planning, and very little "battlefield calculus" where leaders considered what the rates of fire would be and then factored in planned resupply throughout the fight. We always did a great job of pointing out casualty collection points on the terrain model though...

Once the logistics train was complete to battalion level, did they just assume the ammo or supplies would get to each platoon as needed?

Given that since men having been running out of ammo in firefights at the most inopportune moments since gunpowder made its appearance, (and probably archers and other missileers before them), you would have thought they would have realized that ammo expenditure is always going to be higher than predicted, and logistics planning must adjust accordingly. . .

Matt

[Ken White]

... you would have thought they would have realized that ammo expenditure is always going to be higher than predicted, and logistics planning must adjust accordingly. . .
Matt

but that was the time before and all the ammo wasn't used and had to be hauled back and the Ammo guy got chewed out and determined not to make that mistake again.

Now, after another chewing; next time he'll make sure they have too much...

And so it goes. People, ya can't trust 'em

[jcustis]

Once the logistics train was complete to battalion level, did they just assume the ammo or supplies would get to each platoon as needed?

To be frank, yes. There tends to be this presumption that there will be extra ammo back on the track or HMMWV, or that the company gunny will provide it so long as you give him a grid and link-up instructions. Better yet, you'll get your resupply when he stops by to pick up casualties. Too often the fairy dust wand is waived (at least in the Corps) because we either do not actually have the resource on hand (like a full combat load of blanks), or we have to rely on someone else to get it to us. That's why we've had CH-53 5-tons, 7-tons, and white buses for tactical insert for ages.

It isn't terribly realistic, but the wand gets waved A LOT!

On another note, I sat and browsed through a couple of OIF "playbooks", "battlebooks" and what have you, and started to make several observations. A lot of the guidance and issues for consideration that get pushed out to the troops before each rotation aren't typically in response to actual cognitive learning about the enemy. They are also very unlikely to be new TTPs because we have figured out a better way to go about doing something. Too often, it seems as though the volume of stuff we learn is because we do a poor job of conducting situational based training exercises where much of this should be figured out already. If we have figured it out already, as in a CAX or at the JRTC/NTC rotation, we've allowed the CALL and MCCLL publications lie fallow and failed to incorporate those lessons into the subsequent training. The concepts and tools are often already within our doctrine, but we either don't read our own doctrine, or assume that the unit tacsop is good enough.

Some of these weaknesses become terribly apparent when an entire battalion has to move, especially during periods of limited visibility. I know of too many occasions when I would curse a HQ element for moving in or around the coil with lights on, in total ignorance of the light discipline SOP. Truth be told, someone made a "command decision" because they didn't think it was safe to move into the coil blacked out, but in fact many drivers simply didn't have the training or experience to dive with NVGs. Instead of leaving the exercise with a plan of action to rectify the deficiency, it was back to the shop to conduct maintenance, go on a little libo, and then back to the hum-drum of HQ life. Very rarely did someone take action and say, "Well sir, instead of taking the whole battalion out for the next exercise, we'd like to have the equivalent amount of time to run a HMMWV licensing school and complete more than the baseline hours of night driving." Instead the usual game of musical chairs would happen and cohesion would change.


Sorry for the rant, but I just came back again to the realization that we so often suck...just less than the opponent.

[Norfolk]

jcustis wrote:

To be frank, yes. There tends to be this presumption that there will be extra ammo back on the track or HMMWV, or that the company gunny will provide it so long as you give him a grid and link-up instructions. Better yet, you'll get your resupply when he stops by to pick up casualties. Too often the fairy dust wand is waived (at least in the Corps) because we either do not actually have the resource on hand (like a full combat load of blanks), or we have to rely on someone else to get it to us. That's why we've had CH-53 5-tons, 7-tons, and white buses for tactical insert for ages.

It isn't terribly realistic, but the wand gets waved A LOT!

Come to think of it, so little practical attention has been paid to this most basic of all tactical logistical problems that not so much as a single bored staff officer has even published a single Battle Drill for it (AFAIK).

jcustis has raised over the past few posts the matter of one of the most vital of all battlefield functions, the resupply of troops in the midst of battle. I can't remember who wrote or said this, but someone once said that one of the reasons that many battles are lost is that the ammo simply ran out, but that fact very often doesn't get mentioned in the histories.

I wonder if any us here have ever participated a "battlefield" resupply during a "simulated" firefight - and not just during the consolidation/re-org? Ken may be able to fill us in a little on how said was accomplished in Korea and Vietnam. I certainly have not done so, and even in training I have not seen Squads/Sections or even Platoons and Companies perform any meaningful battlefield ammo resupply whilst in "contact", not until the re-org/consolidation anyway.

Yep, that fairy dust wand sure gets a lot of use in peacetime, and it most certainly is not just used by the Corps. Funny how it magically disappears when it's most needed (fickle, perfidious fairies).

[William F. Owen]

This has far more impact than many ever suggest. EG: If your company has one vehicle allocated to carrying the F-Echelon Ammo load, you can't have the company bigger and thus carrying more ammo, than can be stored in the vehicle! Average 8kg of ammo per man, and you quickly get 800kg of ammo needing to be re-supplied, plus batteries, rations and water. - so over 1,000kg easy.

[Fred III]

This is an extremely interesting discussion and I have only just now had some time to try to participate. I am a little confused, however, and I have either missed something (sorry!) or am not fully conversant with a more modern-day military lingo. First of all, I am not sure I understand what you all mean when you use the term “Battle Drill.” When I was in the army (1962-1972), we used a term called “small unit tactics” and I am guessing those two are synonymous. If I am correct, then I am even more confused by what I am interpreting as a general disapproval of either or both disciplines.

I am not sure how I should respond or refute the things I question, but I find it rather startling that anyone would want to eliminate a general concept of tactical operations for very small units. Or have I missed the point here, as well? I don’t know what the army teaches “fire teams” or “squads” or “platoons” today, but when I was in the infantry and learned what later proved to be some of the most asinine folderol imaginable, these tactics were the heart and soul of a battle group/battalion. One of the things I remember the most about the Fort Benning small unit tactical doctrine was probably because it proved to be the most embarrassing—for me, personally. I remember we were required—at some point close to the objective—to all rise up and form a skirmish line, marching toward the objective, firing from the shoulder and the hip. We used to call it, "John Wayne" tactics.

When I pulled that stunt on my first field exercise as a brand-spanking new second lieutenant under Bill DePuy and Oren Henderson, my ass was hauled out of that platoon so fast I thought I had to go back and hunt for my head. DePuy explained to me, “We don’t do that here,” and I was given a mimeographed set of 1st Battle Group, 30th Infantry tactical mores that set me back about a month in training. The skirmish line was never used, having been replaced by the practice of fire-and-maneuver, always, always, always! There were things like “Traveling,” the “Traveling Overwatch,” the “Bounding Overwatch,” “Overwatch Fire and Movement,” “The Assault,” all of which, when applied in practice—and then in combat in Vietnam—made eminently more sense than the garbage Benning was pumping out.

Now, I do not want to mislead anyone. I was no longer in the infantry, per se, when I was in Vietnam; I was the C.O. of Company A, 1st Supply and Transport Battalion, and as such, commanded the only truck company in the 1st Infantry Division (once again, working for Bill DePuy). So, while even though I could not employ DePuy’s “battle drill” as an infantryman, I found two occasions to use it when my convoys were ambushed, and I used his moving formations when I ran patrols—which was quite often, since I seemed to have been designated the unit expert in that area. DePuy's movement formations bordered on the brilliant, with a wide fan, wide spacing, and mutual support, rather than the claptrap “column” movement we so often see. A perfect example of this appeared in a photograph in Tuesday’s New York Times. The caption read, “American and Iraqi soldiers patrolled Monday outside of Baquba. A bombing in the area killed militia members aiding the military.” The first four clowns in the picture appear to be Iraqi’s, followed by an American and then some more Iraqis, all in a column of single file. There are quite a few Americans bringing up the rear. I cannot make out the unit insignia, but the column is simply moving along a well-worn path. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t have run an operation that shoddily if I were just out trolling for Broadway tickets. To my way of thinking, a formation-- or mission-- of the sort in the picture falls under the category of “battle drill,” and unless this were an administrative movement, it appeared about as effective and secure as Calhoun’s skirmish line at the Little Big Horn.

As far as the “fire and maneuver” aspect of “battle drill” or “small unit tactics” is concerned, I would tend to agree with critics, if firing and maneuvering were the only ingredients in the sauce. That was never meant to be the case, however. When you worked for and trained under DePuy, you were told you had assets other than your small group of soldiers. Back in 1962, 1963, and 1964, when I was running hills for DePuy, Henderson, and Turner, if we didn’t call in smoke, mortars, artillery, air, or whatever else was available, we couldn’t sit for a month. In Vietnam, if one life was lost because some lieutenant or captain didn’t call up his available assets, the man’s career was soon over. We were taught to think and to employ our tactics with originality and intelligence. Cover, concealment, smoke, noise—anything we could think of to distract, to panic, to hamper, to bother the enemy. “Fire and Maneuver” was a lot more difficult than firing and maneuvering.

The same thoughtfulness employed in small-unit infantry tactics can also be employed in the convoy operations I ran in Vietnam or that someone should be able to run in Iraq. In 1966, I wrote the division SOP on convoy operations, something I am sure is no longer followed in this “professional” army run by so-called professionals—and contractors. (It is no wonder men like Yingling, McMasters, Nagel, et al, are viewed as such rebels and spend so much time pleading their case!) We had rules on how to run a convoy and how not to run a convoy. All those guys—and women—in the back of that truck a year or two ago, would never have been killed had it been one of my trucks. There would have been no “Jessica Lynch incident” had those trucks belonged to the Big Red One in 1966 and 1967. (But then, there would have been no Jessica Lynch, period, in my command… but that’s a whole ’nother issue.)

So, overall, I see a clear need for an intelligent, effective, and functioning set of “rules” we can term “Battle Drill,” or, euphemistically, something else. I am simply not sure what you would replace the “drill” with were it to be eliminated. What is, however, most important, is that we teach our leaders the necessity to think and to use their heads and to improvise rather than follow blindly. In that regard, I completely agree with the WWII German method of training leaders. It is not a lot different from Erich Ludendorff’s “corporate” management style when he was Chief of the Imperial German General Staff. That style fostered leadership, ideas, and discussion that, in turn, led to a number of clever battlefield innovations and changes, and befuddled the Allies. Those German innovations proved brilliant and probably prolonged the war a considerable amount of time, even giving rise to their contention that they were never militarily defeated.

Best wishes,
Fred.

[Ken White]

Agree with all of it and it points out very well that units generally do what works and the foolishness * of the schools and doctrine writers is ignored far more than it is practiced. That's why the theorists have such a hard time with it; they intuitively discern we are not doing what the books says. Or not...

Particularly enjoyed your comment on the 'patrol' outside Baquba. Generally a couple of other Dinosaurs and I are appreciative of the competence and professionalism shown by the most of the Troops in the pictures we see from Afghanistan and Iraq but occasionally, we grit our teeth at lapses like the one you mentioned. I do not enjoys saying, to myself "...one ping ball will get you all..." or "how many times have you walked that route, that way?"

We still don't do the basics well...

Enjoyable post, thanks.

* Not that the writers or the schools are necessarily foolish; just that hewing to the party line, regurgitating long held shibboleths and avoiding risk are, regrettably, embedded in the processes. Combat entails risk, IMO, the schools go too far in trying to eliminate it....

[Fred III]

Ken--

Thank you. I appreciate your kind words, especially considering your background and after reading so much of what you have posted here.

Best wishes,
Fred.

[Norfolk]

Hi Fred! Good to see you back!

That was a great post, and really, really well put. DePuy's Battle Drill (along with his tactical ideas) at least as I understand it, when properly understood and conscientously applied, could make a dramatic difference. After reading your post and how you laid things out, it appears that the problem then isn't so much (US) Battle Drill per se, but some of the people being tasked to carry it out - some of them just don't have the mental agility to use it right. That's a personnel and training issue as you indicate, not so much a doctrinal one.

DePuy's Battle Drill (as opposed to what changes or modifications may have been made over the intervening years) offers certain improvements over aspects of Commonwealth Battle Drill (and associated tactics), at least in so far as it was often practiced when I was in. DePuy taught to find the enemy with no more than a Fire Team if possible, and even so it was covered by friendly support weapons; in the Commonwealth, you sent a whole Section to do that, and cover was provided by the Platoon Weapons Det - presumably things have changed in recent years. And we still used Skirmish Lines(though the Brits to their credit preferred covered approaches to Skirmish Lines); yep, putting a whole 8-man Section in Arrowhead (Wedge) Formation and just marching straight towards the enemy in full view [Norfolk shakes head, then proceeds to bang it against wall]. I mean, when you saw some of the stuff (okay, a lot of the stuff) that we were doing and the way we were doing it, it just made you feel like an idiot. We were actually intending to fight a war this way? How did we honestly expect to win, then?

jcustis mentioned something on another thread about how he thinks the USMC is bad, just not as bad as our enemies (usually); I can say, most truthfully (and ruefully) that his sentiments are shared in full in other English-speaking Armies - and I can see why my old Section Commander told us we would take 60% casualties in 24 hours of offensive ops.

All that said, there are certainly elements of both US and Commonwealth Battle Drill that could use some fixin'. Like in some of the uses (or abuses) of Battle Drill 6 in the US Army, and Battle Drill 5 in the Commonwealth (even though it's an improvement in its current form from when I was in, it still does not even mention moving from fire position to fire position). But the key to avoiding problems with Battle Drill is to have small unit leaders who have good tactical judgement, not just good memorization skills.

Once again Fred, Great Post!( And good to see you back).