by Tom Kratman
I’m not a huge fan of electronic targets. They have their place, but they also have certain disadvantages, expense, the need to be dug in from direct fire, unreliability, ease of hitting , and – because they’re so easy to hit, unrealistic zombie-like behavior. They just won’t stay down. They’re also going to be about last priority for shipment to the theater of war.
Remote control electronic targets are also not necessary to conduct live fire training. And, since we do in war what we practice in peace, it is rather important that the troops learn how to build and use their own in peacetime, so they can do it from available materials in war.
For the following you are, or anyone tasked to pull targets is, anywhere from twenty or thirty to thirteen hundred and thirty feet (one four hundred meter roll of commo wire) from the target. The troops about to attack the objective which includes the targets are all around you. The box - which is, say, about 18"L by 30"W x 6"D is, at rest, closed. (The size isn’t key, experiment a little.) The hinges are towards you, as is the base of the target. The head of the target is away from you.
The basic live fire target begins with an e-type silhouette, or any other roughly man-shaped, lightweight but sturdy target. Cut a round hole inside the target, center of mass, four to six inches in diameter. Make sure the sides of the hole are fairly smooth.
Take a wooden ammunition box with a hinged cover. Almost any box will do, though I’ve always preferred mortar ammunition boxes. Nail the silhouette to the box cover, with the bottom of the target nearest the hinges. You may need to put strips of wood over the target before driving the nails, to distribute the stress on the target.
Put a nail in the box’s lid, on the edge away from the hinges, and another in the base of the box, also away from the hinges. Connect with cord to keep the target from being pulled all the way forward, to where it won’t fall back again.
Drive a nail into the lid of the box, between the hinges. The nail is just in the lid, but not interfering with anything else. It provides a point of attachment for the stick, below, such that when you pull on the commo wire, the stick stands up, which then provides that roughly forty-five degree angle to lift the sandbag, hence lift the target, without overstressing the balloon.
Take a fifteen to eighteen inch stick and drill a hole in one end, from side to side. Run string through the hole, and affix to the nail in 3, above. This stick is for leverage. Why? The problem with this kind of target is that, at rest, it's parallel to and quite close to the ground, as is the commo wire. You can tug on the commo wire forever, but all you will do is overstress and break the balloon or glove, or tear the wire from the sandbag, leaving the target flat and useless. What you've got to do it elevate the commo wire in some way, so that it is tugging the sandbag/balloon at about a 45 degree angle, give or take. But you've got to do that in some way that doesn't give away the position of the target. Hence the stick which, at rest, lays flat, but when tugged on, stands up.
Take a sandbag and place in in the hole in the target, open side down.
Stuff a filled balloon or a blown up and tied off surgical latex glove, into the sandbag.
Site the target where you want it, and fill the box at least partway with dirt, to prevent the target being pulled completely over. Run commo wire from the sandbag to the stick, affixing it to the stick, then on as far as needed toward the beginning point of the live fire.
When you pull the commo wire, the stick will rise, giving leverage to allow the target to be pulled up. It can be pulled up and dropped as much as desired, until a friendly troop manages to put a bullet through the balloon or glove, allowing it to collapse and the commo wire to pull the sandbag through the hole. After that, the target will go down and stay down.
It is possible to make the target “shoot,” once at least, by using a practice grenade fuse, with the spoon held down by a loop of wire, it being pulled out of the wire, or vice versa, when the target is raised. Christmas tree lights and batteries can be used at night. A small chemlight hidden by a fold of MRE packet, taped to the front of the target, works too. I am sure there are other methods, as well; use your imagination. Using your imagination is about half the point of this paper.
Note, here, that marksmanship in combat – the probability of a hit – drops to a fairly tiny percentage of the probability on an administrative range. The smallness of the part of the target that must be hit for a kill compensates for that reduction.
There are a number of possible variants to this target system. Instead of a hole being cut, a C of coat hanger wire can be affixed to the target with the balloon-filled sandbag jammed in that C, hanging from a cable or pole. Trenches and fighting positions can be dug and targets with the wire variant can be carried, raised, and lowered by live soldiers under that cover. They can be hung and put on trip wires to swing down in trenched and tires houses. The targets can be connected as a series and hung from an overhead cable to be pulled through the kill zone in an ambush.
It is possible to do with these something that is ordinarily very difficult, a live fire company defense with a reasonable number of the enemy. That said, it takes a lot of work, a lot of ammunition boxes, and a lot of commo wire and rope.
Do not skip the sandbag and go directly from balloon or glove to wire. Even if the balloon can take the stress, it usually won’t. Plus, the heat of the sun will tend to expand the balloons to bursting.
Appendix 3: Chrome
Chrome, a word I’ve borrowed for these purposes from the wargaming community, are things that add realism and spice to an exercise, but are not, strictly speaking, necessary for it. A certain amount of it is worth putting into the preparation for training, as long as it doesn’t become a distractor of limitation on training. It has no useful purpose of its own, but only in the service of other training. It validates that training in the hearts and minds of the soldiers, by making it seem most real, hence making them feel most prepared.
When General Collins wrote, in his Common Sense Training, about excess emphasis on realism as sensory (my phrasing of it, not his) – sight, sound, smell – I am almost positive he was criticizing REALISTIC COMBAT TRAINING and how to conduct it, by a lieutenant colonel named Robert Rigg. Rigg’s book, published in 1955, is replete with ways to put that sensory experience into training. Some of those ways are fantastically clever. Others – borrowing corpses from a morgue or medical school to accustom the troops to the sight of dead bodies – strikes me, frankly, as bizarre. Worse, I’m not sure what it does to the troop to see the dead mishandled, treated disrespectfully, and used as mere props. I doubt it does anything good, given that the troop knows he may himself be among the dead someday in the not too distant future.
That treatment of the dead isn’t the only objection one might have for Rigg’s book. It is so resource intensive that not more than a fraction of what he suggests could be done by a unit below division level. If done at division it would probably suck away every bit of chrome potential for any lower unit. And if restricted to division-run, then the training for the troops would come very infrequently indeed. I suppose this may have made sense in the army of the 50s, an organization mostly lost and looking for a mission amidst a nuclear doctrinal wasteland, and to some extent unserious. I think Rigg’s purpose was mostly conditioning the troops against simply freaking out at the sights and sounds of the battlefield. If that were that much of a threat, it would be more valid.
By the way, if you don’t think Rigg is still having his effects, ask yourself if the training experience at the National Training Centers would really be appreciably less if the OPFOR vehicles were not rigged with those expensive and somewhat fragile VISMODs to look like Russian / Soviet equipment?
Again, though, chrome, if not taken to ridiculous extremes, can have value.
Some suggestions – a not very exhaustive list; rather, a very inexhaustive list – for chrome for particular METL and other tasks:
Deliberate Attack: If it includes a preparatory bombardment, have craters blown
or dug around the objective. They would be there in war. They add confusion and difficulty to movement, but they also provide covered and concealed positions for the troops to rush to and from.
For a night live fire ambush, clothe the targets and hang boots from them. Put items of intelligence value – maps, diaries, and letters to and from home – in their pockets and boots. There is a recipe for making fake blood with food coloring and powdered chalk. Put some of that in the pockets, as well.
For any offense or defense, if there are old armored vehicles in the training area or range, put a mix of waste oil, diesel, gasoline, cut up old tires, and maybe some condemned meat in a half barrel inside and set them off. Doesn’t cost much. Doesn’t take much effort. And the smoke and smell do add a certain something.
Do not issue ammunition in the assembly area. Deliberately withhold it until the troops are marching to the Line of Departure, then pass it to them from the back of a vehicle as they pass. (This one I’ve shamelessly ripped off from General Collins. No, as a matter of fact I don’t feel a bit guilty.)
For MOUT, Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain – city fighting, basically – go through the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office, DRMO, formerly Property Disposal Office, PDO, for scrap furniture, clothing, anything else that might be found and fix up the houses. That’s not just for visual impact, old clothing can hide booby traps. Furniture can conceal mouseholes and, broken apart, provide material to fortify.
The most thorough incidents of chrome in training I know of occurred during a counter-guerrilla ARTEP in Panama in 1978, for 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry. For it, two A teams from 3rd Battalion, Seventh Special Forces, were detailed to provide “special effects.”
For one event, a hill was notionally bombarded by about thirteen mortars and eight 105mm guns, plus some A-7s from the Air Force’s wing down there, for three or four hours. While the notional bombardment was going on the special effects special forces went to work. They first used a fair quantity of demolitions to blow down trees and crater the earth. They took several troops and moulaged them up nicely. Not content with the standard moulage kits, from eyes hanging by threads to guts extruded from bellies, the SF folks put wads of cottage cheese on heads to simulate brains. They also had six gallons of condemned whole blood which was liberally poured over the cottage cheese and moulage sections and pieces. They’d set traps and caught some animals, which they killed and then burned the bodies of to give the air that nasty stench of overdone meat and carbonized hair. Fires were set. The “wounded” troops were further put through a short course in acting, so that their screams and moans would be about as close to real as possible.
I remember that the first man off the helicopter, when a platoon was sent in to do a bomb damage assessment, took one look, one sniff, one earful of heartrending shrieking, then promptly bent over and threw up.
For another event for the same ARTEP, the special effects teams wired several kilometers of jungle with demolitions overhead, in the trees. These they set off as one company, “Mad Dog” A-4/10, if I recall correctly, moved through the jungle, at night, supported by their own mortars firing illumination (risky, and a pain in the ass, frankly, but a nice touch when you can get away with it). The demo would be set off overhead when the company was below it, as if it were enemy artillery or mortars.
Some years later I was reminiscing with a senior NCO who had been in that company, at that time, doing that night movement to contact. He said, “I had two tours in Vietnam, both as a grunt. But I never felt as much like I was in a war, really in a war, as I did that night movement on the counter-guerrilla ARTEP with A-4/10.”