Task Force Aegis - Operation Ajax: Heisenberg 17-08-2021

[Bomer]

Mission Name:

Task Force Aegis – Operation Ajax: Heisenberg

Server Details:

IP: 116.202.224.207    

Port: 2302

 

Mods required:

AWE Aegis-456+.html

 

TS address: ts.ahoyworld.net

TEAMSPEAK MISSION BRIEFING FOR ALL PLAYERS WILL BEGIN AT 18:00 UTC

Server opens 30 minutes ahead of time

Expected mission length 120+ minutes (may go over or under expected mission length

 

Player Slots: 23

·         Central // 3 man platoon element

·         Alpha – Delta // 4 man CTRG fire teams

·         Phalanx // 4 man Blackfish-Armed overhead support

Situation

The chemicals found in Malden were brought there via a Russian Spetsnaz team. Fortunately we tracked an Submersible leaving the island and reaching a Russian Sub which then travelled all the way here to the Barents sea. The island is entirely abandoned and seems to have recently be re-activated as a purely military installation.

UK Carrier group Thames has reached a holding position beyond the islands radar while CTRG operatives are preparing to HALO jump over the island to find proof of the chemical production on the island and destroy it.

There is a radio tower and radar installation nearby that will need to be disabled to prevent the enemy from calling in a QRF and giving us space to perform our mission.

Assets:

V-44x Blackfish (armed)

 

Friendly Forces:

Thames // Carrier Group Thames

-available for additional support in the event of overwhelming odds.

 

Enemy Forces:

Russian Garrison

 

Civilians

The island has been abandoned for several years. No civilians are to be expected.

Mission

-cut off communications to this part of the island to prevent QRF

-Disable the radar installation so Phalanx can provide overwatch and fire support without risk of interception

-Assault & secure the potential chemical facilities

-Gather intel through documents, photos, laptops, interrogation and other points of interest.

-Destroy any chemical facility & Depot

 

Execution

Stealth is of utmost importance to the initial start of the mission. Between insertion and assault of the potential chemical facilities stealth should be maintained. Once radar and radio are down you are clear to go loud as the local garrison would then be unable to see you coming or call in QRF.

Movement Plan:

At commander's discretion

Rules of engagement:

There are no limits on ROE. Do consider that opening fire may compromise stealth.

AWE Aegis-456+.html

[Johnson]

This sounds 𝓃 𝓊 𝓉 𝓉 𝓎 count me in to lead a team

[Minipily]

May have to consider going Platoon Command for this one. This sounds right up my street.

[possiblyEOD]

4 hours ago, Minipily said:

May have to consider going Platoon Command for this one. This sounds right up my street.

I'm not around for this one, so it's probably yours.

[Jenkins]

5 hours ago, Minipily said:

May have to consider going Platoon Command for this one. This sounds right up my street.

 

We aren't expecting the Paras to "drop" in and help us again are we?

 

 

Spoiler

 

[Sho_Iwaizumi]

If it's a HALO Jump do we get dropped at 8000m then ?

[Johnson]

Hope you're not scared of heights for this one

[Stanhope]

So for a bit of feedback after sleeping it over.  Also, before I begin, I won't name any names, just roles.  Nothing of what I say here is an attack against any one particular person/ group of people.  I'm fairly certain that if I or other people occupied the roles I'm talking about here the resulting gamenight wouldn't have been drastically different.  Everything said here is also how I perceived them.  I could certainly be wrong in how or why things happened but nevertheless this is how I experienced them.  

 

First off I want to say that I have in the past enjoyed gamenights in which I've done nothing for 2 hours.  However, in those gamenights I knew that I wasn't going to be doing a whole lot or even anything when I took the slot.  Yesterday I took a rifleman slot in bravo, so my expectation was to get to shoot a few csat, assault a place etc etc.

 

Now for  a rundown of events and how I think they could be improved:  (for those unaware I was a rifleman in bravo and this is how I experienced the gamenight)

 

We started with a 10 minute briefing which seems like a reasonable length to me, nothing here that needs improving.  Then it took us 23 minutes before wheels up of the blackfish.  This could probably be reduced to 15 or even 10 minutes.  Often hard to determine what exactly takes so long though.  From what I've seen if the briefing from acting command ends with something along the lines of "mount up in that vehicle once you're read to go" it tends to go a bit quicker.  And than lastly before we get boots on the ground was the flight over, this took 10 minutes.  This could easily be cut in half by spawning the carrier closer to the action.  

 

Then we paradrop out and regroup, combined this takes 2.5 minutes, not bad at all.  After this bravo is send to their first overwatch to scout out the first objective (to my understanding).  We go here together with command.  Going to and sitting at OP 1 combined takes 8 minutes.  After which we're send to our 2nd overwatch, where alpha is located, to commence a combined assault on the first objective (again, to my understanding).  Hiking to OP 2 takes 3 minutes.  

From the information I had and what I could perceive bravo didn't have to go to OP 1 and would've been better of going to the same OP as alpha from the start.  But I understand that this wasn't clear before moving out so I don't mind this.  What could be done in the future though is instead of having both pilots fly us in in the blackfish have one of them fly the blackwasp ahead to scout out everything.  They could still get in to the armed blackfish together after the paradrop had been completed.  But again, having to move between OPs is something that can always happen and I don't mind that it did happen yesterday.

 

Now once we got to OP 2 the plan to move in with alpha changed to alpha moves in and bravo "covers".  I put covers between quotes because we were 500 meters away from the nearest hostile, had a pretty poor line of sight because of trees and it was a foggy night.  So of the 4 of us the only person that could be considered to be within engagement range was the machine gunner in my opinion.  I personally consider the furthest a rifleman with an acog can effectively engage about 400 meters.  In very clear conditions when shooting down from a hill into a valley 500 could be doable, but not at night, through trees, when PID is already difficult.  Again, my opinion.  

After alpha had captured and blown up this first objective though bravo was just told to sit where it was.  In total we sat 41 minutes at this OP.  This is something I cannot understand.  How can a squad sit in one spot for 40 minutes?  Most of which was doing absolutely nothing.  In this time I finished 3 levels of mini metro, I scrolled through reddit a bit and I went AFK for a while.  We once were told to move up but before we walked 200 meters we were told to turn back.  During this entire ordeal I had also absolutely no idea what was going on.  Because no information flowed to me the only assumption I could come to was that we were basically forgotten or simply thought to be not needed.

 

After these 40 minutes we were told to move up to a roadblock a bit up ahead and clear it out, this was the first real contact we had, at this point in time it's been 1 hour and 43 minutes since the briefing started.  I typically operate a rule of thumb that if 1 hour after briefing started I haven't got to fire my rifle yet (which I hadn't up to this point) I leave and go play something else (assuming I'm playing a regular infantry role).  Yesterday I didn't as I had already played the games I typically go play so I'd have left to play mini metro/motorways which I can do while in arma so I might as well stick around.  

Moving up and clearing this roadblock took about 5 minutes, after this we sat at this roadblock for an additional 7 minutes.  In this time I spotted a tractor, walked over to it to play with it to have something to do, only to discover that it was out of fuel and that I didn't even bring incendiary grandes to blow it up.  

 

Next we were told to move to an overwatch position for the final objective hiking over there and setting there took a combined 14 minutes before we got to our 2nd (and final) engagement: we could move up and engage some enemies.  We did this for about 7 minutes, in which time we had reached the outer wall of the compound without taking a single casualty.  I believe we killed about a squad worth of enemies and nobody of us even got hit as far as I could tell.  This engagement ended with our SL saying on our radio that, and I quote: "Okay guys, we've had enough fun according to command so we're gonna pull back".  This assault started 2 hours after briefing began and was only our 2nd engagement.  Now from what I gather "diplomatic avenues" were being used.  If it's known that a team hasn't done basically anything for the entire gamenight and an opportunity presents itself to give said team something to do, why not take it?  Again, this is the conclusion I came to with the information I had at the time.  

 

After this it took another 20 minutes of us doing basically nothing before the op was finally over for a total of 2.5 hours of OP, in which we had about 13 minutes of action.  

 

 

So for things that I think can improve:

 

Have more information flow to the regular infantry who are not on LR.  Not doing anything is only made worse by not knowing what's going on.  It's easier to not do anything because another team is waiting on a resupply than it is to not do anything while you have no idea what's going on.  

 

If a team was told to act as a blocking force send some stuff at them to block.  I understand from debrief that this was attempted but didn't happen for multiple reasons.  The only thing I want to add to that is that if there's too many teams to manage for the zeuses present it might be an idea to reduce the amount of teams (by increasing the size of individual teams) to make it more manageable.  While I certainly don't deny that a lot of fun can be had in small teams, if it's too much work to manage them as a zeus, are they worth it?

 

Reduce idle time as much as possible.  As already mention, try to get people in the heli after brief as soon as possible, have infantry spawn close to the fight so insert times aren't too long, cut down on roleplay as much as possible if an OP has been going on for a long time already, etc

 

This is already a long enough wall of text.  One last thing: I won't be responding here or in any discord channel about what I said in this post.  I've said what I wanted to say, arguing about it won't be beneficial in my opinion.  Obviously anyone is free to respond to what I said here.

[Mikael]

Hello.
I don't want to take anything away from Bravo's experience, but I feel like the debrief went a little lopsided, so I wanted to share charlies version of last nights events.

I 100% agree that getting our stuff together in the start took far too long, not sure what happened, but it happened.
The flight out was also way too long, but I can understand why one would want to have the carrier far out as the AI sometimes freaks out over nothing if it gets too close.

Spoiler

We were in the second group of parajumpers.
The callouts in the aircraft for when to jump was spot on and we all deployed our chutes pretty much at the same time, landing precisely on the DZ marker with our engineer screaming "THAT LOOKED SO F***ING COOL!" on the radio.

We quickly regrouped with delta and sorted out some comms issues, before continuing towards the radar station.
This probably took some time for several squads as there was also some chatter in side chat about radio encryption issues.

Anyways, we got eyes on some patrols and sneakily moved our way up towards the radar dome while Delta with their sniper team moved into a position to cover the area.

With the cover of darkness, we waited at a ridgeline for Delta to get ready and then started moving up to the dome.

After waiting a bit to coordinate with the squad taking the radio tower, we sneakily approached the radar dome with our cover still intact and planted the charges.

When our engineer returned to us, we had to wait for a bit for the radio tower team to get ready.
We started to fall back as there was no reason to sit next to the tower, but still we waited for the call to blow it up.
After a little while we started hearing shots go off to the east(?) towards the radio tower and we had to keep low in order to not be spotted by the guard who was now actively scouting the area with binos.

After some more falling back, we finally got the order to blow up the radar.
Click!
Click!
Click!
TL: WHERE IS THE KABOOM? THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN EARTH SHATTERING KABOOM!
Engineer: Uhm *Runs off towards the radar dome*
I decided to cover him so I go sprinting after him while our teamleader and medic hangs back.

When we finally get close enough to blow the charges, our cover is quickly blown and the engineer and I start taking close engagements from the patrol filtering over the hills.
We cover each other effectively while falling back to our TL and medic who is now being harassed by an angry BTR looking thing.
We have no AT capability (Apart from our engineer chucking demo blocks maybe).

Luckily phalanx is able to take it out fairly quickly without hitting any friendly forces although the BTR is literally on top of our guys.


We then regroup with Delta again and get ready to assault the nearby town.
After some fiddling and planning, we get spotted by the machine gunner at the entrance.
Luckily we manage to get him before he could do too much damage, and we started moving in to the compound.

The fighting is chaotic and we are being engaged from all sides, but we push through to some harder cover and start to clear the nearby buildings.
Both the TL and myself get wounded in the firefight, but its luckily not enough to keep us down for too long, as our medic found our engineer unconscious on the ground at the intersection a few meters back.

Trying to get the engineer back to life, our medic takes heavy fire and my TL and I move in to relieve some pressure.
Still there are enemies filtering in from all sides, but we clear enough of a space to get the engineer up and we resume building clearing.
After a little while, alpha is able to relieve pressure off our backs and we can focus fully on the task at hand.

However, we are starting to run critically low on ammo!

We get told that there might be unarmed scientists that we might need to capture, and that we need to be wearing our CBRN masks.

We don our masks, and keep clearing buildings.
Having forgotten all about the scientists, I breach a room and pop two guys without thinking.
Thankfully they were not the civilians.
After repacking my mags, I realize I am down to half a magazine, that's it.

Unfortunately the two guys wake back up and knock me out before I can really do much.
Luckily my team is quick to return fire and patch me back up again.

After a somewhat prolonged time on the ground being worked on by our medic (Who lost his surgical kit in an unfortunate event before deploying), I am back in action and we re-balance some mags between the team members.

All of us are now down to 1-3 mags and we are starting to worry that we might have to loot AK's off the ground.

Delta (?) secures the scientists and we are tasked with bringing them out to the transport chopper that we hope have our supplies aswell (Spoiler alert, it doesn't).

We get the scientists out of there, but we then wait around for a bit too long as the resupply chopper is having some technical issues and we are told that it will be a few minutes, then a few more etc.

While waiting we steal procure a vehicle so we can get to the last objective quicker.

After a couple more minutes than a few, the supplies magically appear at the entrance (Thanks :))
We rearm and quickly drive out to the last objective where Delta is already on overwatch.

We get tasked with searching the choppers, but find nothing.
All the while, the cease fire seems quite fragile as everyone is aiming at us while we approach.

After searching the third chopper outside town, we are asked to blow up the choppers, but think better of it as blowing up their choppers during a cease fire seems ill advised.
So we are tasked with blowing up their buildings instead...

We go in, but realize we only have two demo charges left for three buildings.
About two seconds after the radio call, phalanx opens fire with us still inside, scaring the crap out of us, but luckily no one got injured.
 

All in all the op was really enjoyable from Charlies side

While the thermal goggles made us quite OP, I enjoyed playing the spec-ops sneaky beaky style for a change. 

 

Anyways, I am sad that Bravo did not get more action.

I've been there myself, sitting on a hill with nothing to do for way too long and I know it sucks.

That being said, I think we all have a responsibility to inform the chain of command, and if that does not work, maybe even ping zeus.

Sometimes there are tactical reasons why one has to sit on a hill doing nothing, while other times, there is simply an oversight or a gap in the plan that could be filled if the right people knew about it.