The Scenario: Dahaneh (Scenario A)
The Mission: An un-supported heliborne insertion to investigate a suspected Taliban compound. Forces available are one US Marines Rifle Platoon plus a US Marines Weapons Platoon (-). No indirect fire support, no close air support available. Forces to be inserted with three CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters armed with .50 cals. Time available for the mission is one hour of simulated time or 12 turns.
What's up? An assault on a single sniper position by a US Marine squad came at the expense of one grunt.
Enough to make nervous even the toughest Marine, this mission has a lot to comment about and learn from. Just to mention two:
- Unsecured, non-prepped by fire helicopter landing zones. During the Russo-Afghan War, the Russians developed a knack for surprise heliborne insertions damn close to suspected enemy held towns. Many times the surprise turned out to be that the Mujahideen were ready and waiting in ambush. In this scenario, given the lack of reasonable fire support and the meager forces available, I had to land just 200 meters outside Dahaneh because landing away from the town and thus approaching through the open ground would be time consuming and the enemy would be on alert by the time we set up a scheme of fire and maneuver.
- The slugfest of advancing through built up areas. How demanding on time, sweat and blood urban combat is. We landed in the southeast corner of our sector and quickly moved west to gain a foothold within the protection of the built-up area. Plan was then to gain our way north, advancing in a left-leaning wedge to provide some sort of support on our west flank.
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| Please click the image for an expanded view. Blue lines and icons were added with MilSketch. The objectives are marked with brown squares containing a number (victory points) within them. The landing has begun. Note the northmost helicopter icon with a white bar in its bottom: the helicopter is in the ground now. |
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| Please click the image for an expanded view. The orange icon near the Marines is a single Taliban sniper. In this screenshot I'm choosing the right ammunition to suppress this guy ... Even after fires from three US Marines squads, the Taliban wouldn't get suppressed and continued to fire. |
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| Please click the image for an expanded view. After pinning down the Taliban sniper, a Marines squad assaults his position (hex highlighted red). Unfortunately one of them fell during the action (numbers in the highlighted hex indicate losses: 1 attacker, one defender). |
We just started the fight, and we have only 30 minutes left for the whole mission!
Cheers,
I'm still working my way through this scenario, but one thing I found is that there _are_ spots in the city where you can drop a helicopter and (as long as it is on the ground) it is safe from enemy fire. It's a risky strategy (and your birds are basically stuck on the ground until you clear away bad guys nearby) but it will let you attack from mulitiple directions at once.
ReplyDeleteOn what OS are you Running Mil Sketch? Iam Running it on W7 64Bit and it doesnt seem to run right.
ReplyDeleteHi peterb,
ReplyDeleteThanks for dropping by the blog.
I really enjoyed your piece about operational war games.
What you mention about this scenario is so true. I really feel that one should isolate the objective first in order to block the Taliban reinforcements pushing towards the compound. But it also true that no rifle platoon should be dispersed for combat in a built-up area.
Cheers,
Hi Seydlitz,
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading this.
I'm running MilSketch in W7 64bit. What problems are you finding? Remember that sometimes MilSketch is wonky in ANY OS.
Cheers,
Thx for the answer JC. When I drag symbols around they suddenly disappear or I cant drag them at all.
ReplyDeleteHi Seydlitz,
ReplyDeleteDragging the symbols is kinda quirky. Make sure that you are clicking on the symbol itself. As for the symbols disappearing, I noticed that when I try to move a symbol and I fail to do so, the program tries to draw a new copy of it and throwing a message about the scale being wrong. :(
Cheers,
After a nap of the earth insertion to the SE sector of the village (in the same area you did), I landed about 80m from 2 of the objectives.
ReplyDeleteI dropped my Lt. and 1 squad 80m from the SE sniper's location. The Capt. and the assault squads were dropped behind the other 2 big objectives next to a wall.
Next turn i moved all squads into structures, suppressed 2 of the objectives and assaulted the sniper nest. This also allowed me to safely lift the helicopters up and remove them to a safe distance to the SW.
I assaulted the least defensible of the 2 main objectives, then pivoted about to assault the harder one (24 or 48 pts of protection).
This is a tough one - by all means do not lose a helicopter!
Ideally i plan to asasult using 2 squads and a leader. I move one squad next to the target the other within 2-4 hexes. 1 suppresses the other conducts the assault.
When next to a hex, your firepower is doubled.
When within half of your weapons max range you do normal damage.
When beyond half of your range, your firepower goes down.
We should play a pbem match
Almost forgot - assault with a leader (there is some kind of bonus for doing so) and hexes that contain a single person target like a sniper or a leader are really hard to kill off or suppress with ranged fire due to a lack of target density in the hex.
ReplyDeleteCheck out the blitz.org - i'm lookin for more pbem matches. :)
~ironwulf
Hey ironwulf!
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading this.
Sound advice there. Thanks for the link! That's great stuff over there.
Cheers,