It got that part right, but the sense of time is the biggest difference IMO. An 8+hour shootout from the AARs would be over in about 20 minutes in the game.
In a related tangent, does anyone have any idea what the possible closure of the US base in Kyrgyzstan might do to our logistics in Afghanistan? It seems land routes through Pakistan are iffy; do we have secure land routes elsewhere? I know we can fly stuff in but that has to get expensive and difficult for lots of bulk needs. If we’re intending on ramping up troop levels, I gather the logistic needs will increase too…
- I suspect that it might be hard to find any place in Afghanistan without some sort of cover
- If the ambushers make it too obvious, the Marines aren’t stupid. So if you do try to pull them into an ambush over an open plain with no cover for 100 years around, well, that’s probably obvious
- If you were pulling them into an ambush, then you are most likely withdrawing from the area they are attacking - which means you had to have cover or you were dead to begin with.
So I think the idea that the Marines were advancing into an open plain isn’t probably what happened.
Two things I can think of:
- The impenetrable walls are everywhere; it’s likely that the squad was able to find some dead zones somewhere in the alley
- There’s not a good sense of unit strength for the Afghanis in that diagram; the null notation makes it look like they may have been facing no more than 5-10 guys. If that’s the case, remember the bit about fire discipline. The marines would’ve certainly been able to return fire to at least keep their heads down even if they couldn’t get any killing shots off. The point of the ambush was that the marines were completely pinned, not slaughtered - even if they weren’t taking casualties, there’s no way they would’ve been able to retreat given the situation.
Air can only supply a fraction of the needed material. The critical route is through the Kyber Pass which is iffy as you point out. NATO has told member states that they can negotiate transit deals with Iran as they see fit. Iran just completed a new road linking Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. Both the Germans and the French could potentially take advantage of that. In theory you could use Georgia as a transit point but then you get into problems going further east. Azerbaijan and Armenia are very mindful of Russia. If you did get shipment rights then its a hop over the Caspian Sea. Not a good solution on the best of days. The Russians will have their price for using their territory and it puts you in the awkward position of relying on their continued good will.
Your absolutely right, supply is going to be a problem with any surge. The MRAP for example is actually six different vehicles and according to regulations you need so many spare wheels per vehicle, so many spare engines… Then oil to keep them running gets supplied by Pakistani refineries.
Runtime about 11:00. It amounts to a day in the life video log for a Marine outpost in the boonies.
Awesome.
- Alan
My random guess is that the Marines managed to find some cover and then returned a hell of a lot of fire, enough to keep the heads down of the ambushers.
There was no mention of an enemy assault, which is probably what it would have taken to really close and inflict casualties on the Marines. Just holding them in place would have caused some hurt, I am sure, but not enough to knock out well armed and trained troops.
That there was CAS I find a little confusing as if the enemy was as close is indicated I can’t imagine that CAS would have been used - too dangerous. Perhaps the untold story is of the unit fighting back up out of the ambush and getting enough distance to call in the air to fix the problem.
Thing is, if NATO starts to lose the air support due to missiles or any other reason, we’re stuffed over there from what I’ve been reading. It saves the day very often.
And lets not get started on how short of air the Brit forces have been. Man, they’ve taken some risks, IMHO, and have also suffered casualties because of it.
Hadn’t heard that before, is there anything online you could link to about it? Kind of alarming, I would’ve figured the one thing the Coalition would’ve have enough of was air support.
They need more helicopters.
What the flammable citrus fruit said. Read “3 Para” a few months ago and they had… what… 4 Chinooks supporting companys spread half way across… Helmand IIRC. Cut a long story short - the soldiers the author spoke to said that had just one chopper been taken down or heavily damaged for some reason then there would have been supply problems across the deployment and no space at all to account for an emergency. Or something.
The main thing to remember about ‘x minutes under fire and only [small number] of casualties’ is that one of the reliable constants of warfare since the arrival of handheld gunpowder weapons is that most men are bloody awful shots when actually in battle. The temptation that virtually everybody seems to succumb to is to frantically fire off their weapon as quickly as possible in the vague direction of the enemy… The interesting advantage of a WW1-era machine gun is not so much that it multiplied the number of bullets in the air at any one time (at early war issues of two per battalion, they weren’t that significant in terms of the proportionate firepower of the unit), but that it reduced the task facing its users from ‘firing at that man over there’ to ‘servicing a temperamental bit of industrial machinery’.
(The War Nerd on the Exile once linked to Youtube footage of the front lines in the Iran-Iraq war. An Iraqi tank was knocked out about fifty yards from the Iranian front line, and the crew, understandably legged it post-haste. Despite being fired at from effectively point-blank range, all three of them made it unscathed over the dune to safety.)
Yep. Firing modern weaponry isn’t exactly as easy as games make it seem. I was machine gun carrier in the army, and our old MG-3s worked on a spray-and-pray principle: Point it in the general direction of the target, fire a burst, see if the target is still there, re-aim and fire another burst, rinse and repeat.
Firing an assault rifle while standing up is tough, firing an assault rifle while crouched is hardly any better. The only really reliable way to hit something at range is to aim and fire from a prone position with some manner of support for your rifle. Of course, I was using an aging H&K AG-3 (I think it’s still being marketed in an improved version as A3G3), and that’s probably not the most easily handled assault rifle out there.
It really depends on what training you’ve received. The kneeling position is an exceptionally reliable one at most ranges that exist in urban combat for our assault rifles (50-150m, with a little time allowing for accurate fire at circa 300m at man sized targets), and the addition of high quality 3x scopes with rapid target acquisition training as standard issue has had a significant impact on the lethality of some American troops. Presumably that’s true in other non-conscript militaries and better units within conscript militaries. The key difference there is not in the willingness of the enlisted, of course, but the level of training and equipment they are given as a matter of course. Footage from the Iran-Iraq war would rank particularly low on that scale.
The M249 squad automatic weapon is a disgracefully awkward weapon relative to the progress that simply upgrading the peripherals for the standard M4/m16 variants has allowed, but that is not to say that a skilled operator can’t accomplish amazing things. Once they are properly conditioned to work in short bursts and use bullets for target acquisition (eg, “walking” the gun onto the target, strafing above ground level progressively, etc), they are pretty far beyond “spray and pray”, and that’s only the basic “you’ve been stuck with a machine gun and I need you to be useful” level of training. When they are actually experienced machine gunners, what they can accomplish with a free gun is impressive. Most of them also learn to use their environment and bipods as effectively as possible without hesitation in the face of the short term personal discomfort that moving to such a state quickly can create.
Of course, in the prone you can effectively hit out to absurd ranges (300-500m) with iron sights on an m16, so the difference between that position and the ones I describe is still significant. The bare minimum for the others is not that terrible across the board, though.
I’ve never been in the military, or otherwise fired an automatic, so I’ll defer to the experts above in general, and please correct me if I’m wrong.
But one thing I learned on the Military Channel (yay daytime TV) is that circa WWII at least, machine guns were essentially used as suppressive fire, not really intended to hit anybody. Basically, when you have a gun that fires hundreds of rounds a second, its more like a shotgun than like a Hollywood Rambo machine gun, essentially all the rounds hit at the same time, so you aren’t doing a Tommy-Gun gangster style sweep across an alleyway, you’re just firing towards the enemy so they can’t fire at you.
Obviously a lot has changed in warfare, and this probably isn’t the case any more, but it seemed like an interesting point on how civilians can misunderstand the purpose of weapons that they think they’re familiar with thanks to TV and movies.
That’s not how machine guns work :) Machine guns were and are used for suppresive fire because they’re very good at that job - people hunker down when they’ve got something that’s shooting 750 rounds/minute (cyclic) at them.
The machine guns of WW2 (.30 browning, MG42, etc) were crew served weapons that were hard to maneuver around - it didn’t have anything to do with how accurate they were. Other machine guns of WW2 like the BAR were light and manueverable (compared to a .30 browning at least), and thus were used both for suppressive fire and assault.
Certainly suppressive fire and what is referred to as “area fire” (as opposed to point targets) are the forte of machine guns. But there is still a big difference even between those categories and “spray and pray”.
While there are theoretical rapid and cyclic rates of fire, they would only come close to being realized when it is fired from a fixed emplacement, such as a tripod, and cooling or barrel changes are an option. I was referring specifically to the guns when they are being used detached with the skeletal frame and whatever’s around as the supports (+/- folding bipods). The other key variable is that the rate of ammunition consumption is a big issue when it comes to personnel borne squad automatic weapons (light machine guns) like the ones Erlend and I were describing. Suppression is still a vital role, but it’s a much more specific and carefully managed brand that understands you have to carry all that shit you are about to fire.
Hmm…Sorry about the confusion then. As I mentioned, I’m way out of my depth in this conversation. Alas, television has failed me as an educator once again.