Ranger U Episode 12: React to Near Ambush

All right, Barrel Chested Freedom Fighters, bring it in. This is Ranger U and class is now in session. Today we are going to continue on with our lessons and talk about reacting to near ambush. This is another battle drill. You will find the references in this battle drill in your Ranger Handbook in both Appendix A on page alpha dash four, as well as chapter eight in pages eight dash 14 and eight dash 15 and eight dash 16. So those three pages, they're actually four pages all the way out to eight to eight dash 17, excuse me. I am also recording this episode from Fort Knox, Kentucky in a spare day room without any editing equipment. So we're one taking this thing. So excuse me, if I have some filler words here, it sounds a little bit jankier than normal. I would hope that you would judge me on the content of this podcast and not so much the sound quality of the podcast, but we're going to make it do what it do and we are going to keep trucking forward. Before we get into today's lesson, I want to remind everybody that if you are enjoying this content, please, please, please share it with your friends and your fellow warfighters and people that would find this content to be useful as we are trying to grow awareness about this show to get this out to as much of the force as possible, to have some shared common understanding about tactics and patrolling and also direct them over to our Instagram platform that is at r.a.n.g.e. dot r.u. We do a lot of work over there every single day on our stories, releasing many classes and pro tips. All right, there's the plug for that. So reacting to near ambush, OK, let's talk about it in general. I want to talk about reacting to near ambush today. I want to talk about reacting to an ambush in sort of in general at different distances and different effects of fire, yes. And then I want to talk about reacting to ambush on a in a mounted setting as well. If we refer to appendix a page alpha dash for, it gives a little bit of a breakdown of reacting to a near ambush, right? So the first thing it has is it has a graphic on the left side. They're in figure alpha dash three, titled react to near ambush. And what you see here is essentially a platoon or a squad rather that is on an asthma, they appear to be in either an advon position. Either they're the lead element traveling overwatch or maybe it's just a squad. They appear to be in a squad column fire team wedge formation. And they take near contact and near ambush within hand grenade range, which is less than 35 meters by doctrine. Soldiers in the kill zone without orders, OK, is what it says. Return fire immediately, number one, OK? So we obviously were getting engaged. We turn in the direction of that engagement, get a sector and fire, return fire immediately. Remember, they swing, we want to swing back immediately. Then it says seek nearest available cover, OK? Remember that cover is something that actually stops bullets. Concealment is something that hides you from the enemy, right? So a hedgerow of bushes is not going to be cover, OK? A brick wall, that's more like cover. A hedgerow of bushes is more like concealment. Now, ideally, we would want both, OK? But seek some sort of cover. And if you don't have cover, we're obviously going to kiss the dirt. And we are getting in the prone while we continue to suppress the enemy. And then it leads on to, say, assume the prone position. Then it says here, to throw concussion, frag, or smoke grenades, OK? Now, this is a little bit contradictory in this section here, because if you reference back to page 8, excuse me, 8-14, it has here to return fire immediately if cover is not available without order or signal, occupy the nearest covered position, OK? And then it does say to throw smoke grenades on there as well, OK? So I guess I was wrong about that. Here's my deal, OK? This is my deal with smoke grenades in general, right? If the enemy has a clear line of sight on you, they have an open observation field of fire on you within close range like that. It is more important to put effective fire on the enemy and begin maneuvering on the enemy rather than worrying about trying to employ grenades and smoke grenades, OK? I am not going to come off of my primary weapon system in a close firefight like that to worry about throwing grenades and smoke grenades. Now, if I'm actually behind a little bit of cover in some defolade, then great. And I think that's kind of the distinction we're trying to make there. But if you are caught in the open and you have a straight line of sight to the enemy and the enemy has that line of sight to you, absolutely do not come off your primary weapon system to start fucking around with trying to throw a grenade. It's not as easy as it looks, especially if you were under duress and enemy fires at that time, OK? But it does say that if you were to throw it, and I'm going to assume that we get frags and smoke out because we're behind some sort of cover position or defolade, and we were able to employ them effectively, all right? Then it says, after explosions of grenades, assault through ambush using fire and maneuver. OK, this is the term that is thrown around quite a bit in cadet command and in the lower ranks, assault through. And a lot of people seem to think that this means that we're all going to stand up, and we're going to essentially bum rush the enemy like a sprinting police call, shoulder to shoulder, rangers on ice, as we run through the subjective area and put fire on the enemy. That is not what that means. Listen to the key distinction here. Assault through, which just means to attack through the ambush or that objective area, all right? That ambush line using fire and maneuver or fire and movement. Fire is your set piece, OK? And the movement is your moving piece. We are still talking about bounding, OK? And this would be extremely aggressive. Three to five second rushes and IMTs, all right, to close that distance with those enemy combatants that are on that ambush line. If you think about it, OK, with an ambush, there are essentially two formations to an ambush. You're going to have a linear ambush or an L-shaped ambush, OK? A linear ambush and an L-shaped ambush have this in common. There are troops in a line formation, right? Which means that they have maximum fire power to the front, but they are able to be flanked or penetrated easily, right? So what you want to do is in this situation, right? If we are already in a close fight, you want to make that close fight closer. You want to fire a maneuver and penetrate that line. One really motivated, well-skilled private with murder on his mind, that penetrates an ambush line will be able to turn down that entire line and put bullets in the necks and backs and heads of those enemy assaulters laying on those assault lines and do massive damage with infallayed fire all up and down that line should he penetrate it. Your best chance at survival at this point in time is to get nasty, create that fight in a phone booth, and get in there, and absolutely put fire on the enemy. And make no mistake about it in a near ambush scenario like this, you're absolutely fighting for your life. So if you go Winchester on your primary weapon system, start beating someone with it. Pick up an enemy weapon and turn it on them. Start stomping people. Start stabbing people. Start hacking people. Pick up rocks, smash people with them. Bite people. You are absolutely trying, you are fighting for your fucking life at this point in time, okay? I can't stress the violence of action enough in reacting near ambush. Soldiers not in the kill zone, okay? Not in the direct kill zone. Or to identify enemy locations and place accurate, suppressive fire on them. They need to shift fires as the assault begins. Soldiers in the kill zone continue to assault to eliminate ambush or until contact is broken. Consolidate and then reorganize what you have left and it's gonna be an absolute mess, okay? More than likely you will have taken some casualties in this scenario and you're gonna have to sort that out, right? But the number one thing you gotta remember here is speed, violence of action, audacity and aggression if you are in that kill zone. And if you are not in that kill zone, moving quickly to set up what is called an intermediate support by fire, okay? So an intermediate support by fire are troops that set up essentially a position that acts as a support by fire without doing a deliberate recon of that position because it needs to be hastily in place. And it's not necessarily going to achieve that full frontal or flanking fire we want. It's more like. go bleak fire, right? There is a good graphic of this in figure A-3. I think it's actually sort of decent. That shows the positions that that Bravo team is going to take up to put fire on the enemy. And then obviously, of course, as the soldiers in the kill zone close with the enemy on those assault lines, they're going to need to shift those fires off and be Johnny on the spot with that. Okay, so that's going to take a team leader being very aware and moving to the closest point of contact between himself and that element that is in the kills without committing to the kill zone, obviously, but between himself and that kill zone element so that he can control his weapon systems to shift off and keep his guys from getting killed, all right? Little story, all right. I'm not big on war stories. Okay, number one, the first reason for that is, they're not just my stories, right? There's plenty of other people that were there with me that did things on multiple rotations and I respect their privacy and all those other things like that, right? And they're autonomy to make decisions about things that we talk about, right? So I don't talk about a bunch of war stories. Number one, number two, not really that, not really that interesting, all right? I'm not super steeped in, you know, hundreds and hundreds of fire fights and all these other things like this that you hear from guys that were banging out targets back in 030405060708, you know, I kind of missed that wild west section of things. So, you know, but I do have a couple, all right? And I'm going to share one with you now. I'm not going to get into too many of the particulars, but old Sarge himself ended up in a near ambush one night. We were on a bird, 47 Chinook, okay? We were making X-Fill, okay? So X-Fill is one of the most dangerous times. One of the most common enemy TTPs, especially in a counter insurgency fight or, you know, guerrilla war if you want to call it that, right? Is to hit the superior assaulting force during an X-Fill operation, right? And especially when aircraft are involved. So there I am sitting on a 47 in the middle of the night somewhere in Afghanistan. And unfortunately there was a mistake, a very rare mistake made by the air crew and it causes us to sit on the HLZ for longer than we had expected. And so seconds turn to minutes and turn to several minutes and just as I'm sitting there thinking this is absolutely feels wrong. We should not be here, you know, during X-Fill it's supposed to be a very quick operation down on the bird in the air, right? I turn to speak to my buddy, Yel, over the engine, which is, you know, loud as hell on a CH-47. And we're an AH-47 in this case. And I turn and I yell to him, I go, hey, we need to get out of here. He turns to me and he goes, what? And I go, we need to and then pink, pink, smack, pop, pink. There it goes, right? 762 slamming into the side of this bird. I learned two things that evening. Number one, in retrospect, because I really didn't have time to be scared during this, during this whole ordeal, right? It's terrifying to be shot at with 762 ripping into the side of this metal death sausage as you're just sitting there. Pretty much helpless to do anything. The mini gunner in the door next to me absolutely just started ripping. The tail gunner started ripping with a 240, 240 golf with butterfly trigger absolutely putting rounds down range. Guys unsnapped, gotten to any positions that they could get to, to get some fires on the enemy. I pop my head next to the gunner. I got to also witness what a mini gun does to people in a wood line that are roughly about 60 meters away and decide to come out to expose themselves to try to get some accurate shots onto the bird. Absolutely created spaghetti out of those guys. The whole ordeal because the bird took off rather violently after this and actually was falling backwards because I wasn't snapped in anymore. And my only thought as I was falling actually was put selector back on safe. Put it back on safe. Don't shoot yourself in the foot or shoot a round into this fucking bird by accident. But I digress the whole ordeal probably lasted about 12 seconds total from the first round impacting into the side of the bird to the bird then yanking and banking off the HLZ to some ineffectual RPG fire that actually followed us off of this site. But that in and of itself was really in that aircraft was react to near ambush. Like I said it was a very close distance. There was an orchard wood line right next to the HLZ. So was it hand grenade range? No. But with the weapon systems that they were using and the size of the target they were engaging, it might as well have been a near ambush with those different factors there. The bird and the air crew did exactly what they were supposed to do. They laid down overwhelming suppressive fire onto the wood line and just yanked out of there as quickly as humanly possible. I am very lucky to be alive to be telling that story because one well-aimed RPG shot which they couldn't seem to get off that evening would have deadline that entire bird and killed a whole platoon of rangers pretty much. So that all being said, it's not a fun position to be in and I could only imagine being in a position where you are within 35 meters hand grenade range and running into an actual complex ambush. It takes like I said a ton of violence. Let's talk about reacting to an ambush that is from a mounted patrol and again is going to be at the kind of distances that maybe it could be a near ambush, maybe it's perhaps not. So in a near ambush situation on a mounted vehicle patrol, vehicle gunners in the kill zone immediately return fire and deploy vehicle smoke while moving out of the kill zone. So these would be any vehicles that are still capable of movement. Turning those turret gunners, whether that's a 50 cow, whether that's 240s, whether that's mark 19s and putting effective fire on those enemy locations and then Johnny on the spot popping some smoke to try to obscure our position and obscure the movement of our vehicles and personnel. Soldiers in disabled vehicles in the kill zone immediately obscure themselves from the enemy with smoke, dismount if possible and seek covered positions and return fire. Now again, if you are employing effective smoke and it is beginning to billow quite a bit to obscure your position, the chances are it is also obscuring the enemy, right? And we want to obviously ditty mal as soon as humanly possible. So if you have a disabled vehicle that is completely deadline and it is not going to be able to go anywhere, you're in that situation. You have any kind of let's say sensitive equipment or combo equipment you don't want falling into the hands of the enemy, destroy it with a bullet and incendiary grenade, something like that while that smoke is billowing, get your ass onto another vehicle and let's get the remaining vehicles out of there. So instead of sitting there and getting decisively engaged trying to shoot through smoke and engaging enemies that you can't really see very well. Okay, let's use a little bit of common sense. Let's deadline the shit we need to deadline, grab the stuff we need to grab, get on to these other vehicles and get out of this kill zone. Vehicle gunners and soldiers outside of the kill zone identify enemy positions and place well-aimed suppressive fire on the enemy and shift as soldiers assault the objective. Okay, now this is where I have a little bit of a rub. If it is a indeed a near ambush, okay, let's say that you are mounted patrol and you take an ambush within that 35 meter range, I mean like real close, like, you know, and you have a disabled vehicle and you're, it's a narrow road, something like that in the woods or whatever the case may be, right? Like they set up some of these scenarios in the pine forests down in the deep south, right? That might be the right answer. Okay, dismount, maneuver and kill. Okay, it is probably not the right answer if you have enough standoff from the enemy to where you can still maneuver enough trucks and personnel out of there. Even if you have to leave a disabled vehicle, it does not make sense to separate from that vehicle convoy and get decisively engaged and fixed at that spot. You have to realize that if the enemy has set up an ambush on that location and they're sophisticated enough to do that, they probably either A have a reserve that can also maneuver on you and be called up at that time, B have some sort of indirect fire assets they can call on you at that time or C a combination of both. My mind goes back to that unfortunate event with SF in Africa, I believe it was in Nigeria some years ago, where they got decisively engaged when they were being engaged from the 6 o'clock and were almost out of the kill zone anyway. It almost blown through it with their vehicles, but for whatever reason decided to stop, decided to stop. I did a dismount decided to try to maneuver on the enemy in an adjacent wood line and found out that the enemy was far too superior to overcome and they were killed. They were absolutely slaughtered. This is just, it was a bad day at the office, right? If you can get out of that kill zone and get away from that ambush, making a note and being able to, you know, call up a last-known grid of your last-known location and that ambush location and that enemy location, that's the key, okay? Getting out of there and being able to communicate that position back so that you can call for fire on that position, that's the way you need to go with that. So, like I said, you wind up in a fight in a phone booth scenario and it's super close, maybe dismounting and maneuvering and trying to kill that enemy right then and there might be the right call. Anything outside of that do not, at all costs, stop your vehicles, continue to get through that kill zone as you best, as best you can and put distance on yourself. And the enemy, leaving a mental note of where they were, not just a mental, but take down that grid so that you can work a fire mission in retrospect and put it on them, right? The unit leader calls and adjust indirect fire and requests close air support, there we go. According to the mission, enemy terrain and weather, troops and support available, time available and civilian considerations, met TC. Oh, one caveat I wanna bring up, met TC as of 2023 has become met TCI, okay? The last part of that, the eye at the end stands for information, okay? And I know that it seems a little bit redundant considering this is all information, right? But it's an all-encompassing thing. It's any further information out that I guess not only falls into those categories but may fall outside those categories, right? Or intelligence, but it's not intelligence, it's information, right? So I just wanted to make a quick amendment to that because I have made a boo-boo by putting met TC up on the platform, okay, in classes and I just, you know, Sarge is trying to teach you the right thing. I've got some old habits myself. I gotta get up to date on some of the latest and greatest and doctrine and that's one of them, okay? So the 2017 version of the Ranger Handbook is gonna have met TC. Technically it is met TC eye now, okay? Soldiers in the kill zone assault through the ambush and destroy the enemy, okay? This is again for that close fight. So again, kind of reading into this, right? If you're in the middle of a close fight on a near ambush, why would I be calling indirect on that position, right? So again, these are things that the Ranger Handbook says and it goes through it and it lays some of these things out. But some of these things, you have to really use your head and interpret the actual met TC eye of the situation, right? And then the unit leader reports the contact to higher headquarters, okay? So I hope that that unpacked a little bit about reacting to near ambush. This evening again, those references in chapter eight on pages eight dash 14 through eight dash 17 and on appendix A on alpha dash four, okay? I hope that got the juices flowing a little bit thinking about that battle drill and maybe putting yourself into some of those scenarios where it would be an area ambush and the kind of veracity that you would need to fight with as opposed to a little bit of a longer fight, how vehicles change the situation and then ultimately at the end of the day, what is the biggest thing we have to accomplish? The biggest thing we have to accomplish is to get out of the freaking kill zone, okay? With as much speed, audacity, and violence of action as possible, okay? Put distance on yourself in the enemy or go kill the enemy where he stands, you gotta do one or the other, you can't stay where you're at. And that does it for today's episode of Ranger You, class is dismissed.