Scouts and Snipers

[Jammersix]

I'd like to talk about scouts and snipers in large scenarios. I cormmand American units exclusively. I have yet to command a Red unit or even a Ukrainian unit. I have my hands full trying to understand American units. So if some of my questions seem strange to all you expert Red commanders, that's probably why.

The following questions all pertain to a battalion level force. For this discussion, that mean any force larger than a company that includes battalion level assets. Usually, I take an Armored Task Force and trim out all but one maneuver company, HHC, the artillery battery and the battalion command unit. Lately, I've even been eliminating the extra trucks in the command unit, to put every penny towards more 155 fire and more TRPs. Always, more TRPs. An American Task Force HHC includes a sniper platoon and a scout platoon, and while I've developed my own mad methods for what I do with them, I'm interested in hearing what conclusions others have reached, and what you do with yours, and why.

1. How do you use your scout platoon?
2. Do you fight your scout platoon as one platoon sized unit or break them up into sections?
3. If you fight them together, what sort of objective do you assign to them in the assault?
4. If you break them up, what type of objective do you assign to each section?
5. If you break them up, what do you do with the HQ and the XO units?
6. How do you measure whether or not your scouts are successful?
7. How do you use your sniper platoon?
8. What caliber to you assign to your sniper platoon?
9. Why do you assign that caliber?
10. What do you hope to accomplish with your snipers?
11. How do you measure whether or not your snipers are successful?

[Sublime]

.50 cal sniper platoons. .50 penetrates some ifvs etc and is also devastating to inf.  Unless theyre very high experience i place them in locations with good LoS and leave em alone let them pick their shots.

Scouts i disperse ahead of infantry. Penny packet em around. I measure my success with them in that they tripwire the enemy first and get the enemy annilated by weight of follow on forces WHILST ALSO not being wiped out.

[TheForwardObserver]

I like to leave Barrett equipped units in overwatch, just outside of effective enemy SAF range co-located with a FIST and at least one small team with a TWS Acog.  Usually bring three of these overwatch units built from the Scout platoon. 

I don't usually need the type of forward reconnaissance that would warrant sending scout formations in front of my advance on their own.

[Jammersix]

Jesus. FISTs. What?

What does SAF and TWS mean? I want interpretive dance, and I can't write SAF with a crayon.

Now, combining scout teams with sniper teams never occurred to me. You might actually be on to something, if we can get your communication skills up.

If you're moving to contact, and you have a ways to go, how do you transport the snipers? The scouts all come with their own rides, but there's no extra room, and the snipers only come with one vehicle for three teams and a HQ. In the past, I've thrown all the posers, clingers and remfs out of their vehicles in battalion HQ and made them all ride in the XO's Bradley, which gives each sniper team their own vehicle. I prefer that private vehicles be assigned to people who shoot at the enemy rather than mess officers. Well, at least until dinner time.

[TheForwardObserver]

My Scout Platoon configured for overwatch looks like this;

If they need to go anywhere they'll be travelling via brown cadillacs.  (saf is small arms fire, tws is thermal weapon sight)

[Jammersix]

Huh.

Is there a way to move the assigned unit or do you eliminate the sniper and buy another one?

Sublime, how do you keep recon from being wiped out?

[TheForwardObserver]

Eliminated the sniper section and added sniper teams to the scout teams.

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

I rarely use snipers.  They're something that in the "real" Army I think we struggled with in CAB type units, the sort of operations tempo mechanized units have is pretty counter to the sort of infiltration snipers seem to enjoy.

One of the great issues with scouts IRL and in game is the sensor systems and target acquisition abilities of a scout isn't much better than their not-scout equivlent (or a M3 isn't able to better find the enemy than a M1 or a M2, a dismounted scout team isn't much better at finding the enemy than an infantry team from my experience).  

I tend to:

1. Use Scouts as an economy of force measure.  They're cheaper than infantry or armor by my recollection, but still have some pretty healthy firepower.  If I'm attacking down one avenue, the scouts are covering the other approach to keep the enemy from being able to safely use it.  If I've identified the most likely enemy approaches on the defense, the scouts are on the less likely but still possible routes.

It doesn't take many Javelins or TOWs to ruin someone's day, and the sort of friction those scout elements induce will allow you to shift forces to address unexpected enemy efforts.

2. Task force "poke."  Sometimes, you just have to check things out.  Putting scouts forward is dangerous because they're fairly weak, but if they make contact first, it keeps your killing arm(s) free to engage on their terms.  It also can lead the enemy to fixate on your small (and hopefully withdrawing under cover of smoke and artillery) scout element and not give your tanks/mech infantry enough attention.  It's basically a lot of "hunt" or "slow" moves though, which often isn't very helpful in games.

3. Disruption.  Similar to the first one, but more tied into the primary battle.  In deeper maps, putting scouts slightly forward with good avenues of retreat allows to bloody the nose of the enemy, and will often steal their momentum (as missiles are missiles, and it might take a minute for them to figure out it's scouts vs regular infantry).  Once the first few missiles are away (and maybe some sabots if you can spare some tanks), then TRP in as much smoke as you can get away with (if you site the scouts correctly, you'll basically know when they're going to see the enemy approaching, so placing a TRP forward of that to call in smoke, or even a HE/PD from one element and smoke from another), and pull back behind the main MLR.  You'll likely have wasted a few turns of the enemy's attack as he tries to artillery your former positions, and will be busy trying to do something about what was actually a very small part of your advanced force.  

Timing is tricky.  Basically you'll want to be calling the artillery as soon as you've got missiles on the way, as that'll get you basically your TOW salvo and a missile from each Javelin team.  And you'll want to "recon" the escape routes to minimize LOS to the enemy.  

[Jammersix]

Huh. Sending scouts where you're not going. Never occurred to me.

When you do that, do you use them as a small platoon or individually?

Edited August 2, 2016 by Jammersix

[Jammersix]

FO, I just noticed that you add First Support to your scout teams, too. 

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

10 minutes ago, Jammersix said:

Huh. Sending scouts where you're not going. Never occurred to me.

When you do that, do you use them as a small platoon or individually?

It's actually a very Cav scout thing!   It's really important to remember that while "scout" is in the title, so is "cavalry" and modern 19Ds inherit a lot of the economy of force, security, and vanguard sort of missions from their house mounted ancestors.  Super quick as I'm bored, the six basic Cav missions are:

Three flavors of recon (zone, area, and route)
Three flavors of security missions (screen, cover, and guard).

We'll ignore the recon missions for now.

Basically think of security missions as a blocking arm in karate.  Your mission isn't to hurt the enemy, it's to keep him away from the soft parts of you while you're hitting with your own hurt inducing appendages.  You'll notice if you look at most of the ABCT scout formations, they've got a lot of firepower for how few guys they have.  This is on purpose.  It gives a lot of strength for the cavalry platoon to hold the enemy at bay, or hurt him bad enough to buy time for the "heavy" part of the formation to mass on the enemy and effect their destruction.

The three security missions are basically this blocking ideal, just in increasing intensity.  Screen is really just somewhere between reporting if the enemy is active, in an AO, and maybe killing his recon assets.  Cover is fighting broadly until withdrawal conditions are met (generally time, or enemy status based, so like hold for the 60 minutes it takes the friendly armor to shift to a different battle position, or destroy the enemy advanced guard etc).  Guard is more or less hold until friendly forces show up, so generally is a much "heavier" mission.

Historically cover and guard are not accomplished without tank augmentation.  But against lighter forces (like a BTR formation) it may be possible to get by with just Brads or something.

When conducting a security mission, it really depends on the terrain, enemy, and what I'm trying to accomplish.  If I've got a lot of depth, I might just two vehicle "sections" arrayed in depth to erode the enemy's lead element.  If I've got less depth I might array the entire platoon firing into the same engagement area (again most CMBS maps are pretty shallow).  Or I might align cav-armor teams (so like, two tanks with two Brads+dismount, although one tank per might be okay) against possible enemy axis of advance while retaining the mass of my forces in the rear, and then only commit the main body once the enemy's primary avenue of attack is identified (the Abrams is great for this simply because it's so good on the move.

[MOS:96B2P]

8 hours ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

It's actually a very Cav scout thing!   It's really important to remember that while "scout" is in the title, so is "cavalry" and modern 19Ds inherit a lot of the economy of force, security, and vanguard sort of missions from their house mounted ancestors.  Super quick as I'm bored, the six basic Cav missions are:

Three flavors of recon (zone, area, and route)
Three flavors of security missions (screen, cover, and guard).

We'll ignore the recon missions for now.  

Interesting stuff.  When you have time it would also be interesting to hear about the three recon types.  The first question that comes to mind: What is the difference between zone and area? 

[Sublime]

Jammer. Keeping the recon from being wiped out is hard. But way easier as blue. First of all any recon team needs to have the follow on forces have some eyes on em. So when if they tripwire an ambush suppressive fire frm their side starts right away. The only exveption is cresting hills or crossing things that aee HARD los barriers. Eg buildings. Then the scouts clear the bldg i run the main body up and as the main body is entering the bldg the scouts should be crossing the st or as the main body is gttn hull down and some mgs or direct fire 60mms in position the scouts are quick moving to cover.

Also its important to move them and every few minutes or whateveer distance you decide to let them sit for a few min literally. Sometimes 3 or 4 min will pass and then theyll start spotting things.

2. The diff between scouts on foot ans in vehicles. On foot very short move orders ubless hunt because theyll goto ground. Ib vehicles i order hunt with either move fast or reverse to what i think would be an egress to safety. Only do this if u know they wont hit the hunt cmmd if they dont have contact. If they do have contact they should reverse right back out of trouble. To be fair im not sure if this works anymore but it used to - being shot at cancelled the move ordr and theyd immediately back up or drive outta the kill sack.

More later

[hattori]

I personally tend to only use the scout platoon out of that headquarters company, and ditch the snipers.  I usually make my scouts crack or elite.  I don't want them doing any fighting, I just want them to find enemy vehicles, or through deduction, reduce the posibilities to where enemy vehicles could be.  I'm pretty careful with them at first, and don't like to expose the vehicles right away.  I will have the headquarters units grab javelins out of the bradleys for spotting purposes, but I give them short target arcs.  If I manage to spot a stationary tank, it's going to receive some precision 155 rounds.  If my scouts see a bmp or two in an area, I'm going to pound any area around them that looks good to hide infantry.  That russian tunguska is cheap and death to drones, so I don't even bother with drones when fighting as the Americans now.  If my scouts are in a good spotting position and see nothing, I might bring up a hummer (opened up so he is using his thermal imaging equipment), to try and get a better look -- they seem to be great at spotting things ... or attracting fire themselves.

Basically, most maps have some decent overwatch positions near where the attackers start.  I get some scouts onto them, see what is or isn't out there, and adjust my plan accordingly.  I will rarely attack with them.

If my scouts do see things I want to take out with my Abrams, I do like to let what the scouts spot to percolate up an down the chain of command to my Abrams before popping them out of cover.  I can be pretty patient scouting in BS.

In perhaps a weakness, I rarely play full city maps, and assume most buildings in villages and farms have a defender in them, and hose them down with fire anyways.

To me, the only thing that really concerns me about Russian forces are other tanks.  ATGMs for the most part ... I usually get a laser warning on my Abrams, they fire off smoke, and I've usually got a good idea where about the ATGM could be hiding -- I'll plaster that location from another angle, maybe arty it, maybe use my limited infantry.  My personal experience is Russian tanks are the biggest killers of my tanks, not ATGMs (I also try not to play with APS for the Americans, that is just ridiculously unfair)

[kraze]

Thanks to this thread I've started using scouts (from all factions) to their fullest (for the first time since game's release). As opposed to using them mostly as a sniper support up till this point. They indeed appear to be more survivable when spotted and probably better at spotting and save me valuable minutes. All of it is kind of obvious in retrospect - but thanks for so many tips.

In fact I was in the middle of a pretty tough mission of Shadow of the Motherland where you have to secure a road through the city - and when I've decided to send scout platoons ahead instead of regular troops - things started moving a lot faster.

[Sublime]

Also sometimes I use a small part of my.scout force to be my tripwire if Im advancing on one axis. The other scouts are a QRF in humvees that will arrive first at emergency spots or opportu ities to flank or whatever. I usually have a qrf platoon in brads too that arrives a minute or two later. If the firefighrs still going it usually ends shortly thereafter if it has ended i have a very mobile group of scouts usuallu loaded with ammo and at 4s and then an inf platoon loaded with ammo and at4s and javs either in a threatened area or better yet in a point i realized an arty strike blew a hole in enwmy defenses or where the enemy is collapsing. Then i can quickly exploit before they can recomposw themselves

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

10 hours ago, MOS:96B2P said:

Interesting stuff.  When you have time it would also be interesting to hear about the three recon types.  The first question that comes to mind: What is the difference between zone and area? 

Zone Recon is effectively trying to get information about a wider place, while area is more targeted.  As a result zone missions tend to be less worried about details, and more on broader strokes.  Area recons will still gather some wider information , but are much more focused on specific "targets."

So as an example, a zone recon might be asking for location of enemy forces, confirm/deny contamination by CBRN type agents, locate civilian settlements, find ways across rivers, etc.  An area recon would be focused in on figuring out how many enemy troops are protecting a certain bridge, if the bridge is wired for demolitions, if the bridge is intact enough to support tanks crossing it, etc.

A route recon will include the bridge, but it's much more focused on establishing what a certain route can support, so it's actually a lot of engineer/math work to establish if the curves can support large trucks, guesstimating how much weight a bridge can take, etc. 

A recon mission might include all three of these too.  You might conduct a route recon to a release point, a zone recon from phase line to phase line, and then an area recon of a suspected enemy artillery position or something.  

Some other odds and ends:

Area Recons are almost always tied to Named Areas of Interest, which are places intelligence folks have selected as containing something interesting, or requiring an additional look.  NAIs may be used within a zone recon to prioritize certain parts of the wider zone too (so while you're checking out from phase line Red to phase line Blue, you also need to check out the villages at NAI 102, 103, and 107).

The recon mission is generally driven by information requirements, which come in many flavors, but they're usually questions that need answering for the commander.  So a Priority Information requirement might be "confirm/deny presence of enemy armor at NAI 101" because that question will drive if he commits his armor to the attack, or simply gives it over to a mech infantry pure formation.  It's a way of refining what the scouts are looking for, but is not exclusive (or it's not like the scouts wouldn't report if they spotted enemy BMPs on the objective instead of tanks).

Recon is also guided by tempo and engagement criteria.  In a nutshell, tempo is either "rapid" (see all things quickly, but details are not the priority) or "deliberate" (take your time, I need to know how many grass blades are in the NAI).  Engagement criteria is how aggressively the scouts deal with enemy forces.  Discrete is basically only if needed, Forceful is pretty much at the discretion of the scout leader, which is to say he'll shoot anything smaller than he is.

[MOS:96B2P]

Thank you @panzersaurkrautwerfer another informative post.  Back in the day (1980s) I worked in a Division G2 shop and remember the NAIs, PIRs etc.  The zone vs area recon I don't remember.  Maybe our officers just sent the request for information to Division Recon and they did the job without us needing to know what type of recon they actually used.  But now I know.  Thanks again.