Training Videos: The Purpose Of Them

Max Velocity Tactical

I feel it would be useful to post a comment about the purpose of the training videos that I have put up recently. I want to make it clear that I use them to illustrate specific points or training objectives, and not as the all encompassing answer to tactics. I’ve posted videos from the 1960’s, the OBUA (MOUT) training videos yesterday, and they are all full of useful nuggets but also lessons to be learned and sometimes ways not to do things and to learn from.  

If I ever get the chance, I’ll make some high speed videos to specifically illustrate the tactics that I am teaching, but I’m not there yet.

A good example is the OBUA video from yesterday. The reality is that these guys are doing a decent job but they need a lot more training, which they will go on to do as they progress towards their operational deployments. They are Reservists in work-up training. It’s easy to be a fly on the wall armchair tactician, keyboard commando, and critique what these guys are doing in a dynamic training environment. “Aha! I’ll get them right now with my super-secret hiding position and my perfect information as I watch them on my computer screen. Those spider holes that luckily I had the foresight to dig on that hill earlier would be great to snipe them from, really give them the run-around….” etc.

What you have to remember when you watch this, or live firing, or any video of troops undergoing training is this:

1) They are training certain objectives for specific phases of warfare.

2) They will be at various stages, or levels, of their training.

3) They will be constrained by boundaries and restrictions imposed upon them by the training area, range safety arcs of fire, or the directing staff. That may be why they are where they are on the ground.

If you have served in the military, you will understand this. If you have not, then I would advise you to take what you can that is of use from the videos, rather than thinking up ways to mess up their day if you were suddenly magically among them with your perfect knowledge and your super-secret hiding position.

It was pointed out to me that when attacking the town in the OBUA video, they did not appear to be spending much time looking for booby traps, or Russian second world war bounding mines. “Aha, I’ll get ’em with one of those then, that I magically have and just put over there for him to run into!” Well, that is not part of their training at this stage, they are working on urban maneuver basics and room clearing up to platoon level in an OBUA environment.

When they went on to pre-deployment training specific to theater, for Iraq or Afghanistan, like these guys did back in 2005, they will have moved to focus on booby traps and IEDs, counter-insurgency tactics and the like, because that is a big part of the threat.

Do you think that if you use a super-secret tactic for real against a regular infantry unit, they won’t learn what you are doing and adapt to counter it? It still may work more than once, depending on their level of training and leadership, but don’t think sitting at your keyboard right now you well be able to be as clever, and act with as much impunity, as things continue. They will adapt, you will need to adapt. Or Die.

And while you sit there in front of your computer thinking how clever you are, those young Joe’s from the 2005 video have seen the elephant, come back, and now they look like this:

Or this:

My point is this:

Learn, rather than critique. If you need to critique, remember the setting of the training and make it appropriate. These guys in the videos went through the training, and will have learned where they were going wrong. You too should train, and get better.

Live Hard, Die Free.

MV

http://maxvelocitytactical.blogspot.com/2013/10/training-videos-purpose-of-them.html