by Max Velocity
Charlie Fire-Team: Assault Team 1 (2 men) Squad leader plus link-man (2 men)
Delta Fire-Team Assault team 2 (2 Men)
Fire Support/Assault Team 3 (2 Men)
The squad will approach the building and establish Delta team in a fire support position. They will identify a blind-side approach or alternatively an approach that can be successfully suppressed by the fire support. If there are multiple buildings that need suppression, this gets beyond a squad attack into a platoon or company task. We will assume a lone building for purposes of demonstration.
The squad will use some sort of code to identify the four sides of the building for target indication and directional purposes; something like red = left side, green = right side, white is near side and black is far side.
Under cover of fire support, dead ground and possibly smoke, the assault fire team will move up to the building. The squad leader and link man will stay back in cover and provide fire support while the breach team moves to the building. They may be aiming for a window; they may have a ladder, a mouse-hole charge, sledgehammers or maybe a vehicle. For this demonstration, they will make entry by a ground floor window.
Assault Team 1 approaches the window and tosses a grenade in, and then takes cover as the grenade detonates. As soon as they grenade goes off they will be through the window. Note: if you have the numbers, it is better to have a separate breach team to the initial assault team. They can therefore concentrate on the breach, once they have done so they get out the way and the first assault team goes in.
Once they enter the room, one will go left or right and the other following will key off him and go the other way. They will sweep the room with their weapons to identify any targets and engage as necessary, as they move away from the entry point to the corners of the room. They sweep the room with their weapons from the center out to the corners as they move in.
They will engage any enemy in the room and if you are going full out with no possibility of friendlies they will fire rounds into any available cover in the room, such as sofas and wardrobes. Once they are sure the room is secure they will call out to the squad leader: “ROOM CLEAR!”
At this point the squad leader and link man will move into the room, if the squad leader is not in there already, and the second assault team will also be moving to the breach as a domino effect. During the initial breach the squad leader was ready to support the assaulting team as necessary, but did not breach at the same time in case of booby trap and to maintain command and control.
Once the squad leader gets in, the assault team 1 will tell him where the exits are from the room and the squad leader will make a plan as to where to move next. The link man will now be positioned either inside or outside the room by the entry point and his job is to be with the squad leader in the best place to relay messages. He will call in the second assault team and the squad leader will rapidly push them through to clear the next room or corridor.
Assault team 2 will clear their next objective, at which point the assault team 3 (fire support) will have been briefed to either continue in support or to move into the building.
Using the three assault teams at his disposal the squad leader will leapfrog through the house until all the rooms on the floor are clear. By this time, the whole squad should be inside the building. At this point, for a platoon assault the squad would usually call in another squad (via the link man) and they would clear the upstairs.
OBUA is very manpower intensive. For a single squad attack they would have to make a breach to the upstairs and systematically clear that also.
Assaulting buildings in OBUA is a violent and aggressive activity and you should really get away from the idea that you can somehow ‘black ops’ your way through with night vision devices and stealth. You will be kicking doors in and fighting through. If it is nighttime it will be doubly hard and although the use of white light is usually discouraged because the flashlight on your weapon will give away your position, you will need weapon mounted flashlights (white light) and use them selectively for room clearing.
The advantage is to a defender if you are assaulting a room so you really want to have the ability to do something that will put them off balance, onto their back foot, and allow you to regain some of the initiative as you make entry. Explosives, grenades, stun grenades, gas or making entry via a place other than the door are all techniques that can be used. If a house is not strongly built, be aware of rounds coming through walls and you can use that to your advantage if you are assaulting.
Figure 48 - OBUA 1 – BREACH
When entering a room one man will go one direction and the other will key off that movement and go the other, both sweeping their sector of the room with their rifle barrels and moving to the corners, or at least a little ways along the wall and away from the door. If you have a stoppage, then shout out and get down so that your buddy can engage. You may end up in a physical hand to hand fight if you are breaching rooms because it is easy for someone who is in the room already to get close to you so ensure that you are acting aggressively and are prepared to fight.
As you move through the door, you are worrying about your half of the room, knowing that your buddy (or buddies if there are three or four of you entering) is taking care of their sectors. However, don’t pass over a threat in front of you in order to sweep the near corner. Clearly you must
Figure 49 - OBUA 2 - CLEARANCE SCHEMATIC
sweep and check the corner. However, it is a dynamic motion as you come into the room: you will be turning either left or right and you will first sweep from the center then towards the corner. If you see threat in the center or as you continue the sweep, engage and eliminate the threat, then keep moving and sweeping away from the fatal funnel as you turn to check towards the corner. You will then end up running the wall for however far you are going, whether to the near corner or just a little ways into the room, as you turn back from the corner to face and cover your sectors in the room. Your buddy will have come in and done the same with his half of the room. If you have more than two team members entering, they will also engage and take care of threats in the center as you are sweeping/turning towards the corner and eliminating threats as you identify them.
What the explanation in the previous paragraph should show you is that unless you can seize the initiative as you enter there is plenty of opportunity for an enemy in the room to take a shot at you. That is one of the reasons that for a dynamic hostage rescue type entry, the preference is for a team of four to follow rapidly after a flashbang, which will allow all sectors on the room to be rapidly dominated – for example with a four man team the first man can more rapidly sweep towards the near corner while knowing that the center will be thoroughly covered by the third man entering and turning the same way that he did – there are multiple detailed CQB room entry techniques, or variations, so this is used as an example.
In a high intensity urban battle, even more extreme violence can be used to gain the intuitive, such as greater use of explosives and firing into and through buildings/rooms, or even smashing into buildings with vehicles. Remember that if you don’t have to go in, don’t – maybe even do something like set the building on fire, or shoot it to pieces, to burn, kill or drive out the threat. However, if you do use fragmentation grenades remember that their effect is mainly one of initial shock, like a flashbang, and a grenade will by no means clear a room for you. It needs to be rapidly followed up by a dynamic entry: SPEED, AGGRESSION & SURPRISE, in order to seize and clear the room.
For a barricaded enemy, a grenade may not even harm them, beyond ringing their ears. It may give them the opportunity to toss a grenade of their own out as you enter the room, or simply fire at you from behind their barricade. This is similar to clearing bunkers – grenades have a shock effect, and may kill or wound, but don’t overestimate their power.
This is one of the reasons why a method called ‘combat clearing’ has often replaced the classic ‘hostage rescue’ style room clearing where b
arricaded enemy can be expected, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Combat clearing consists of a more considered move through the building. Security will be established in the corridor and rooms will be approached cautiously. Doors will have to be opened if they are closed. The clearance method consists of using the ‘slicing the pie’ method to get viewing angles into the room. Once a visual can be obtained on one half of the room, then a move must be made past the open door, while the corridor is simultaneously covered by the team, in order to continue to slice the pie and check the other half of the room. Slicing the pie is by no means infallible but it beats running into a room in the face of an enemy behind a protected barricade.
A note on doors: check them to see if they are unlocked and will open by the handle. Also, check for any wires or booby traps before you do open them. In general, if the door opens towards you, then the first man will run towards the hinges into the room. If the door opens away from you, then the first man will run away from the hinges. The second man then goes opposite. This will all change if the door is already open or partially so, because you won’t want to go past an open doorway, or if other reasons prevent you going past a closed doorway to follow these guidelines.
When stacking at a doorway, it is best if someone other than the first two men into the room is the one to open the door (i.e. the breacher). This man can be the fourth man from your stack. He opens the door, by the handle or kicking it in, then gets out the way while the stack piles in, following on at the back if it is a four man entry. He must remember to not remain stood there in the fatal funnel as the door opens, getting out of the way to one side or the other but not getting into the way of the entering stack.
One of the uses of a sling is to keep a weapon on you while you are doing some other task. The other reason is to make it harder for an assailant to take the weapon off you. If your weapon is grabbed retain control of it but rather than getting into a ‘to and fro’ over it do one of the following or both: maneuver the assailant so your buddy can shoot him, or go for your backup with one hand and shoot him yourself.
If you are fully geared up in body armor, helmet and equipment, which you will likely be if you are do this sort of thing, you will have formidable momentum when entering a room anyway. Of course, you may also trip over unexpected furniture and fall end over tip! But if you get into a fight, you need to rapidly overcome the opponent. You can hit him with your rifle barrel, your helmet or whatever. Just remember that it is about overwhelming him, not getting into a fight.
If you have the capability to use full auto fire then don’t. Use rapid single shot when clearing rooms. It is more accurate and will not waste ammunition or put excessive rounds through the walls to potentially hit your buddies.
Remember that unless there is a reason to go into a building and clear it, you should avoid doing so. If you expect enemy to be waitng inside for you then you will have to clear by dynamic high intensity methods, such as breaching through alternatives entry points to the doors and or using some kind of shock device, such as a grenade or flashbang, to try to seize the initiative when making entry. Otherwise, the man inside the room will shoot you as you go through the door.
Platoon Level OBUA
At platoon level, we simply build on the blocks we already have for the squad level. The platoon leader will make a plan to organize the mechanics of the break in battle, or breach, and the subsequent sequencing of the assault onto different buildings with fire support as necessary. For a platoon level assault we can imagine perhaps a small cluster of buildings, a farm complex, compound or camp.
It is useful if the buildings are labeled in some way that everyone will understand, preferably on a diagram or schematic that they can carry, so the fire support and assaulting sequence can be coordinated. At platoon level, we have another two squads that can potentially provide fire support to allow the first assaulting squad to breach into their first objective.
Once they are in, link men are used to coordinate the platoon, with the leader situating himself in the place where he can best visualize the battle and coordinate. Squads will clear floors of buildings before calling in other squads to push through and clear other floors. Once buildings are clear, the squads in them will provide fire support while those not engaged will move through and assault/breach into the next building in sequence.
If you are fighting up a street then it may be that you end up taking a complicated route through the buildings, using explosives and mechanical methods to breach walls and blow mouse-holes. You want to stay out of the open street, which will be a kill zone for the defenders. This route needs to be marked and link men will provide communication.
Figure 50 - Platoon Level OBUA
Ammunition re-supply will have to go forwards, and casualties will be evacuated back, though this tenuous cleared route. If you have armored vehicles you can use them to either approach buildings to allow a breach, perhaps from the roof into an upper floor, or depending on the relative strength of the building and vehicle you may actually be able to breach into the building by ramming with the vehicle. You may even be able to knock a big hole through the building or even knock it down, depending.
Company Level OBUA – an Introduction
There are multiple ways that a company commander can sequence an OBUA offensive operation. A simple way to show the sequencing of a company level attack would be to describe a clearance assault along a street towards an objective.
Let’s assume that we have a street of semi-detached or detached houses that leads up to the objective, which is a strongpoint. We can’t go up the street because that is a killing area so we are going to move up through and over the buildings towards the strongpoint.
A company commander will have three platoons, so let’s assume that he has one platoon assault one side of the street and the other assault the other. The third platoon will be in reserve behind Company HQ.
If you refer this to the OBUA defense chapter you will see that a good enemy will make the streets no-go ‘sniper alleys’ and force us to fight through the buildings, where they will fall back to their strongpoint for the final defense (note: if they have several mutually supporting strongpoints then their hand is a lot stronger).
Each platoon will breach into the end building, using fire support as necessary. They will then continue to breach up their respective row of houses clearing as they go. The difference here is that coordination at company level will ensure that although on separate sides of the street the platoons will leapfrog each other: one platoon will provide fire support across the street at allow the other to break in and assault, then the supported platoon will repay the favor.
Once both platoons have fought their way to the end of the row they will get into fire support positions and the reserve platoon will be sent through to assault the strongpoint.
In simple terms that is how a company level operation could mutually support itself in an OBUA environment.
Figure 51 - Company Level OBUA
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WITHDRAWAL
Introduction
A tactical withdrawal, or retreat, is a potentially difficult operation that you will want to plan for and put into effect before you are pushed off by the enemy and it becomes a rout, with the resulting high and potentially catastrophic casualties. In planning for a withdrawal, you should identify, brief and rehearse routes, ERVs and equipment such as ready grab bags of essential gear.
The sooner you do actually withdraw, the more equipment you are likely to be able to take and the better order you are likely to be in. It is feasible to adopt a strategy of ‘stay in place’ in covert and/or defended locations and then draw a line in the metaphorical sand that, once the enemy reaches it, this will trigger a withdrawal. This could simply be levels of mob and looting activity, organized raiding gangs, or even simple discovery of your location if your defense philosophy is based on concealment.
The simple moral is that the sooner you withdraw, the better off you will be,
but realistically this must be balanced against practical ability to withdraw, options of where to go, and the need to defend life-essential assets.
There are two types of withdrawal, that of withdrawal out of contact and withdrawal in contact. The latter is the most dangerous. They involve separate but related techniques.
Withdrawal Out of Contact
For a withdrawal out of contact, it is essential to ensure that the enemy does not know you are leaving. When we say ‘out of contact’ this still assumes an enemy presence, probably keeping your position under observation. If they get wind that you are leaving, this will likely trigger a pursuit response and you will suddenly find yourself in a withdrawal under fire.
The principle for a withdrawal out of contact is for the rear elements to move first, leaving the ‘front line’ in place to conceal the move until these final elements move out. If you can conceal the move until even these elements have left, then you will be successful.
Historically, there are many good examples of this. On the withdrawal from the defended position at Gallipoli in the First World War, the Allied forces left behind deception in the form of rifles attached to water gravity devices that would fire at varied times once the receptacle had filled up. At the withdrawal from Arnhem of the movie ‘A bridge too far’ fame, the paratroopers left behind wounded comrades that they were unable to move to give the impression that the defense was in place; the wounded were subsequently captured and humanely treated by the Germans.
You will need to establish control measures. What should happen is that each element has a check point immediately behind its position. The elements will move through the checkpoint and be accounted for before moving back to an RV at the next higher formation, where they will be accounted for again at a checkpoint and moved back to the next RV in line, until the whole formation is together and moving back to their next location. This could also involve a rally point and pick up by vehicle for the move to the next location.