Quote Originally Posted by ODB View Post
And can anyone answer this one: Why did the Army stopped doing top down building clearing?
I didn't realize it did. Did this occur in 2008, after I ETS'd? We frequently did this in 2005 during cordon and search operations conducted at night whenever we were able to infiltrate the objective before anyone woke up. We would enter adjacent buildings, climb across the roofs, and then go top-down. If you're strictly speaking about clearing buildings in terms of actually killing the dudes inside, I don't recall ever doing that in a top-down fashion, simply because the situation never dictated it. Whenever we cleared a building under fire, it was in a react to contact mode. We usually had the option of hitting the building that we were taking fire from -OR- hitting the building next to it first and then jumping onto the roof of the target building and going top-down. The extra minute needed to do the latter would result in the attackers getting away.

Most recently, I recall watching, via UAV, at least one ODA go top-down on a raid in 2007, though it was a dry hole.