 Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and welcome back to our third part on Minuteman Tactics. This is where we discuss tactics from the Minuteman perspective, just everyday people like you and me, not necessarily people who are in the full-time military, and what our tactics should or shouldn't look like. As a reminder, we are using max velocity tacticals, small unit tactics as kind of our textbook for this college course. So if you have not read the chapter on battle drills and movement yet, you should read that before you watch this. If you don't care about that, whatever. Here we go. Let's start the party. This part of the series is really what everyone thinks about when they start to think about tactics, right? Where people move here, we're gonna move there, and you're gonna do this, and that's what people, you know, tend to think tactics is, and that's what we think of when we think of tactics typically. Here's how I would like you to think about this portion. These battle drills that we're gonna go through are really like football plays. If you're familiar with football, or if you got to play football when you're younger or whatever, you understand that everybody has a job to do. And as a football team, you have a variety of plays, you know, maybe a dozen or whatever, and everybody understands how those plays work. And then when you get up, you call the play, right? You pick one of your plays that's appropriate that you think of the situation in order to get the results you want. And that's the same thing we're doing here. We're looking at these battle drills as a series of plays. And then when presented with the situation in real life, we decide which play to run. And you should have different variations on the plays. Battle drills are a starting point, not an end point. If you would just go out and say, oh well, we ran the battle drill according to the book, and so, you know, we got that one. We don't really know what we're doing now. I think that you've missed the point. The battle drill is a building block. It's a place to start. And your team should work that and run it and make it their own and make some tweaks and have a couple different variations on it and should have some different plays that they're able to run as appropriate to the situation. They shouldn't just take the stock out of the book, play, and be like, okay, well, we got that. We're ready to go. The problem, of course, was just taking it right out of the book and saying, okay, well, we did what's in the book. We know what we're doing. It's, you know, check that off. It makes you extremely predictable. You only have one play. So you become extremely predictable when you're encountered by an enemy. Two, anybody who's actually read the book knows what you're going to do. Goes back to the predictability part. So if the enemy knows what you're going to do and you're highly predictable, that's not a good spot for you to be in. So we use battle drills as a starting point, not an end point. I mean, you go out, you drill by the book, you work that with your team, and then you start working on different variations or customizations or team SOPs or whatever in order to make it your own. You've got to make it your own. Otherwise, you're just going to be predictable and easy to defeat. That's my preamble. Let's jump in. When we talk about principles for how we want to think about running these battle drills, the governing principles that are going to govern how we engage the enemy. We want to think react immediately. We're going to react immediately. We're getting shot at. We're going to react immediately. We're going to talk about how to do that in a second. Then the next thing we want to do is win the firefight. We want to win the firefight. We want to gain fire superiority, meaning what we're trying to do is shoot more accurately and with more volume at them than they are shooting accurately and with volume at us so that they are forced to stay behind cover or be wounded or killed. That's what we're trying to do. Once we have them pinned, we have them either behind cover or taking casualties, then we are able to move. We're able to maneuver on them, going to a flank, going to a 180, whatever. We'll talk about that in a bit. We're trying to maneuver at that point. Then of course, we're trying to finish the fight. We're trying to completely either cause them to flee from the field or eliminate them on the field or whatever our objective happens to be at that point. That's what we're trying to do. So we're trying to react. We're trying to win that fight. Then because we're winning the fight, we're trying to maneuver to finish the fight. That's kind of the four step principles that we're trying to think through for how we're running these battle drills and what we're trying to accomplish with the battle drills. Now, when you start getting shot at, you have two options. The first one is TR, take cover, return fire. Most often, if you ever watch any combat footage, this is what happens. You start getting shot at, you don't immediately know where that's coming from. So you're just trying to get behind some cover so you can not die. You're going to take cover and then you're going to start returning fire in an appropriate direction that you think the fire is coming from. The other option, of course, is the RTR, which is return fire, take cover, return fire. Meaning we start getting shot at, I'm going to bring my gun up, I'm shooting on my way to get to cover, then I'm getting behind the cover, then I'm going to start returning fire. Those are your two options. Most often, in reality, any battle accounts you read, any battle footage you watch, you're taking cover and returning fire. Now, let's talk about that. That happens most often in American military because the American military tends to go loud and proud. They carry the 800 pound stick. They are the big boys on the field. So the American army in general doesn't really do sneaky, sneaky very well. Typically, they're just walking out because they're either trying to move to contact. They're trying to flush the bad guys out. They're out patrolling on a ground domination activity. We'll talk about these later. But they're out there just doing stuff and they're not necessarily being sneaky. And so they get shot at because they're easily visible. That's kind of been the way we've operated for the past 20 years. Now you could say, oh, why do you operate that way? Well, because of the firepower that the American military carries with them, they can do that. You don't get to do that as much. Now, does that mean you're never going to get in contact unexpectedly? Absolutely not. However, just keep this in mind that ideally you don't want to be the one being shot at. You want to be the one doing the shooting. That's a mindset thing that I just want you to keep in mind because you don't carry the firepower the American military does. You can't get on the radio and call in some 155 millimeter Howitzers. You don't have those choices. Now, you still need to understand how to react to contact. But as a mindset thing, I want you to take a note there that the American military has typically experienced it one way because of how they've chosen to operate and you shouldn't choose to operate that way. Keep that in mind. So take cover, return fire, most common reaction probably again all that whole discussion we just had is a caveat. Or return fire, take cover, and then return fire. Those are really your two options. You're trying to not die immediately in this part. You're trying to react immediately. When it comes to taking cover or moving between cover, we typically, it's a very common thing. You've heard the I'm up, meaning I get up from behind my cover. I'm sprinting as fast as I can. He sees me. That's how you say it. I'm up. He sees me. I'm down. So I'm up. I'm sprinting to cover. He sees me. I'm down. So you're only up for a couple seconds. You're only making rushes that maybe three to five yards at a time. It's you're trying to make the bad guy play whack-a-mole, right? Like if you just get up, I'm up. He sees me. I'm down. And then you move that fast and you're up and down that quickly. You're not going to be a good target. And you don't want to be a good target. So when we talk about working cover, moving between cover, you want to keep that moniker in your head. In the book, he goes into about working cover and how to do that. We're not going to talk about that here. Again, you should have an idea how to work cover. I'm assuming you know that. If you don't, go take a class. Come take a class with me. We talk about that. It'll be a lot of fun. Two of the toughest things that you can do in combat are figure out where you're getting shot at from. SLA Marshall talks about that a lot. I think it's courage under fire or men under fire is the title of the book. I can't remember right now. But he talks a lot about how figuring out where you're getting shot from is very difficult. And then of course, moving a casualty under fire is also extremely difficult. Extremely physically taxing. If you ever just go practice moving a casualty, right? Have one of your buddies lay down and you're going to move them 50 yards or 100 yards. That's extremely tiring. Now imagine trying to do that while you're getting shot at. And you can imagine how difficult that's going to be. It's not going to be a good day for you. So keeping that in mind, there might be times when you need to do a cover shoot or shoot at pieces of cover. This became very popular during the, I believe there was the Rhodesian wars in Africa in the 70s. And I can't remember which side, but one of the sides started doing this and their kill ratios went through the roof. So here are some ways to think about that. Okay, so say you're out with your boys here and you're getting shot at from these three pieces of cover. Maybe it's a wall, maybe it's a dirt mound, maybe it's just some foliage, whatever, you don't know. Maybe it's something that bullets will or won't penetrate through. You're not sure. Point is you're taking fire, but you don't know exactly where you're getting shot from here. In this case, you want to have a battle drill where your entire team is going to dump bullets into all the cover that they see in their sector of fire, right? So I'm going to scan left to right. Everything that I think there could be a bad guy behind, I'm going to dump three rounds in, right, or two rounds into. Maybe I'll put one to the left or the right in the center. Maybe I'll just kind of dump two in that area. But my point is I'm trying to send bullets out to everywhere. I think it's likely for a bad guy to be. And then hopefully we're going to kill or wound the bad guys on the other side of that. And then we can make an action and decision from there. If that decision is we're going to, you know, break contact, if we're going to assault proof, we're going to flank, whatever. We can figure that out part out later when we get to the other battle drills. But this battle drill, the cover shoot battle drill is something that you should think about, right? Basically, everybody is going to expand a magazine or two, dumping bullets into everywhere they think a bad guy could be. So if this is you, you're going to, you're going to shoot here a couple rounds, here a couple rounds, here a couple rounds, right? Now imagine that this is a wood line. So imagine this is a wood line and it's like 50 yards long or something like that. Same principle applies. You're going to start spitting bullets all along the wood line. Maybe you'll spend a magazine or two. Now if your whole team is doing that of four guys or six guys or whatever, you can imagine that wood line is going to get a lot of lead. And that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to send as many bullets out to the most likely places you think bad guys would be in order to either kill or wound them and then you can make a decision from there. This is what we call the cover shoot battle drill. Again, remember it's a starting point, it's not an end point. This being the starting point, not the end point, you can just think and be creative about different ways that you and your team would do that. Maybe, you know, this guy's going to shoot, then this guy's going to shoot, then this guy's going to shoot. Maybe they're all going to shoot at the same time. Maybe you're going to have a breakup into buddy pairs and while one buddy pair does that, the other buddy pair is doing something else or readying smoke or whatever. You have a variety of different options. The only limit is your imagination. So think about, again, think about this drill in context of how you would want to adopt it and change it for you and your crew. Let's talk a minute about formations. When you and your guys are out moving and grooving on patrol, right, you want to walk in a certain pattern. You don't just want to be a gaggle, right? You want to move at the formation. Well, formation allows you to bring different weapons to bear at different times. It gives you good 360 coverage and it really allows you to organize what you're doing here. You don't just want to walk about like a bunch of idiots in like a mob, right? Mobs, historically in combat always get just absolutely crushed. Almost every time go read some history, okay? Formations. We've been fighting in formations for all of human history and there's a reason for that. So the most common formations that you're probably going to use, again depending on what you're doing, depending on where you're going, are probably these three. So you have file, right? Which is just one guy in front of another. You're spaced out five to ten yards-ish. In the most common place you're going to use this is in the woods, okay? And or at night. So in that case, those those gaps will probably be closer because you need to be able to maintain visual contact with the guy ahead of you and guy behind you, right? So in the woods or in the snow, if you want to hide your numbers, right, you're typically going to move in file. It's a very common formation. Now the not great thing about file is that, you know, everyone's because everyone's right behind each other, you can only get one gun to the front. So if you start taking contact front, you're going to have to move out and everyone's got to get online, okay? We'll talk about that a little bit later. But that's a very common way to move. Go do a semester at one shepherd. You'll find out that you're in file, you know, 90-95% of the time because again, you're moving through the woods a lot. Another common formation that you'll use in maybe more open country is the wedge, right? Again, this, you know, this is a we're building these in a fire team, right? So you could have two wedges like here's one fire team and then you could have another fire team behind you here, right? But or maybe adjacent to you to the next to the side, but you could run in a wedge. The great part about a wedge is it lets everybody shoot to the front really quickly. You have everybody can turn around and shoot and pretty much everybody can, you can get at least two to three guns to each side, right? On this formation, both this guy and this guy can shoot this way. If they get contact left, they get contact right. All three of these people can shoot right. Again, your spacing's five to ten-ish yards, maybe 10 to 15 depending on how open the country is. You just need to maintain that visual contact. Ideally in the wedge, everybody should be able to maintain contact with the team leader who typically goes right about there. For you, you're probably not going to use this formation as much. However, it's good to know and good to have in your back pocket so that, you know, people know what they're doing and you can use that. The more tools you have in your tool belt, the more options you have. The other one, super common again is the double column, right? Typically you're going to use this along established paths or roads because here you're able to give good security, you're able to stagger everybody out, maintain good visual contact. This is a super common way to move down roads or established paths. That's really the only place that you use that one. The last option, which I guess I didn't write up here yet, is just a line. Everybody getting on line with each other. You're going to want to be here once you're about to establish contact or in contact, right? You want everybody to be on line so you can concentrate maximum fire power front. Now are there a ton of other formations like diamond and box and all this other stuff? Yes. However, these what four formations are really going to get you through 95-98% of the scenarios that you're probably going to be involved in. Everything else can be useful and you can look into it and you can do some more research there. These I've found are the most common, most used ones and so that's why we cover them here. Again, you've got to get out and you've got to practice this stuff with some other guys. Okay, let's talk about shoot, move and communicate, right? Those are the kind of major three things that you as a grunt in the field doing the fighting have to do, right? You have to shoot. That's pretty obvious, right? We're going to shoot the bad guys. We have to maneuver on the bad guy, right? Being flanking or moving to cover or whatever and then communicate, right? Of all of these, communication is the hardest and it's the one to break down first, right? Things are loud, bullets are flying, stress levels are high and when all of that happens, communication is the first thing to break down. It's the hardest one to do, first thing to break down. So a good way to mitigate that, just a side note here, is to have good team SOPs, right? Things that we've just trained and practiced on a bunch and we just automatically do this under these circumstances. That's a good way. That turns communication from explicit verbal communication into implicit communication because you have a high amount of time working together and because of that, you have built some team SOPs and you just know the other way your other guys are going to move, think and do their fighting, right? So we want to push as much of that communication down to the implicit level as possible rather than explicit because explicit just takes more brain power and you want your brain power to be focused on the fight, obviously. We're going to talk about the communication as we work through the different movements, if that makes sense. So typically when you're out in the field and you're moving in one of our formations we talked about earlier, there are typically three ways that the army talks about doing that. They have traveling, traveling overwatch and bounding overwatch. These three are actually useful in our context as well. So let's talk about what these are. Traveling, that's just moving along, right? You got your guys in your wedge formation here and you're just moving, right? You're moving this direction, you're traveling. That's it. The military manuals describe this as the least amount of security and the quickest speed, right? Because everybody in your crew is walking. Imagine you have 15 more squads or whatever and you're all just traveling. Again, in your context you probably only have four, six, maybe eight or 12 guys if you're super lucky, right? But you don't have a lot of guys in your context. So for you this just means all four of you or six of you or whatever are moving together. Traveling overwatch. Honestly, of all of them, this is the one you're probably almost never going to use because you don't have enough guys. But traveling overwatch would look like, hey, here's your alpha team, right? And then you have your bravo team, maybe 50, maybe 100 yards back and they're moving. So the idea here is that if alpha team gets in contact or bumps into the enemy or whatever, you've got time and space, right? Because you have like 50 to 100 meters here for bravo team that's not engaged in the initial firefight to maneuver or to have the team leader come up and check out what's going on and come back and make a plan, right? You have time and space there to make a decision. Now, again, if you have the guys, that's not a bad way to run things, right? Like in the real army when they run platoons, right? They usually move in traveling overwatch. So I have a first squad up here and then they'll have, you know, 50, 100 meters in their second squad and their command element and then, you know, 50, 100 meters in their third squad, right? So that they put, they build in that distance so that everybody doesn't get in contact at the same time. You have options to maneuver and all that kind of thing. If you've got the guys, that's all great and well, but in your context, you probably don't have that. This is typically the way, like I said, most military units move for all the reasons we just described, traveling, they only usually do in, you know, safe areas. For you, probably not going to be the case. You'll probably just default the traveling. The last one, which I think you actually can do, ironically, is bounding overwatch. Bounding overwatch happens when you are expecting contact, right? So you would have Alpha team here, right? Like I said, it's two guys. Bravo team here. Alpha team is going to move up to this piece of cover or that wall or that block or that street or that tree or whatever, okay? Bravo team will stay put while Alpha team moves. Maybe this is five yards, maybe it's 25 yards, right? Something like that, but not far enough that they're outside the range of support of Bravo team so that if Alpha team starts getting shot at or whatever, like there's some bad guy over here, right? And they start shooting on Alpha team, Bravo team can still engage that thread, right? If they move like 200 yards, well now you're outside the support umbrella of your other buddy team, right? So you don't want to do that. But anyways, Alpha team will move up, then Bravo team will move up, then Alpha team will move up, then Bravo team will move up or that's called successive bounds. You could also do alternating bounds, right? Where Alpha team moves here, Bravo team moves all the way up here, then Alpha team moves all the way to the next one, you know, you alternate like that. Whatever. You can work that out for yourself. I say that you can probably do that one because if you've got four guys, I mean that's two teams, right? Two guys can stay and watch, give overwatch and if there's a problem they can engage, the other two guys can then move, right? This is a good way to move if you're expecting contact. And honestly, when we get into the more fire maneuver stuff in a little bit here, this is going to come up a lot. When you're shooting, often this is how you're going to move with one element stopped and doing the shooting to provide some kind of suppressive and cover and the other element doing the movement, okay? We'll talk about that in a bit. When it comes to these movements, right, you have to have ways to signal back. Maybe that's a radio because all the guys in your crew run radios and so you just signal that, hey, we're set and they know they can move. Eventually, when you do this enough, you should be able to do this without talking, okay? So just consider that. Now, let's discuss some battle drills that aren't necessarily in our textbook and or are covered later in the textbook, right? The first one is just what I refer to as just your classic fire and maneuver. Your classic fire maneuver, let's say your bad guy is up here and say your bad guy is up here for whatever reason, right? On a classic fire maneuver, let's just say this is a street, okay? You got some cars on your street, okay? You got a couple houses right here. Over here you have Alpha team, which is two guys and Bravo team, which is two guys, okay? Your bad guys down here. You got some cars on the street and some houses. Classic fire maneuver, Alpha is going to shoot at the bad guy. Bravo team is going to make that bound up to maybe this car, right? They will then shoot at the bad guy. Alpha team will then move up to the next piece of cover. Maybe it's this car, maybe it's this house, whatever, okay? Alpha team will move up, then they will shoot, then Bravo team will shoot or move. So one team is set and shooting, the other team is moving. It's pretty simple. Typically, you know, if you ever go to a class and you do this, typically you're going to talk, right? And the way you're going to talk with is one team will, both teams will be shooting. One team will say moving, meaning, hey, everything that's going on right now, can I move? I'm going to move. Can I do that? The other team would respond move, right? You really got to yell from the diaphragm when you do this, when bullets are flying. Meaning, hey, I can cover you, go ahead and move. I got you, okay? Then they know they have permission to move. They'll move and you use that moving move call the whole way down. There are some people who would say, when you get there and you start shooting, you should say set or ready. I don't, I'm not a fan of that personally. I'm a fan of as little talking as possible. How do I know they're set? Because I hear them start shooting and or better yet, I can look over and see them that they are in fact shooting at the bad guy. So I know I'm okay, right? But moving move is kind of the typical call that we'll use as we move our way down the street. Again, the more you practice this with your crew, you should be able to do this without talking, right? If you're practiced and you're working with your crew, you should know that, hey, we've done this enough. I know when I can move. I know that I can move unless they say I can't, okay? Or whatever other SOP or team thing you work out, but the goal should be in my opinion to do it without talking. That's a classic fire maneuver. This could be one guy and one guy. This could be a team of two or a buddy pair and a buddy pair. This could be a team of four guys and a team of four guys, right? That could be a multiple level things here. It always works. It could be a whole squad and a whole squad. You probably wouldn't want to move eight guys at a time, but you get my general drift here, right? As long as you have two elements, they can move and shoot together, okay? You could even do this with three elements, right? Or maybe you have a third element down the middle of the street that they're going to move car to car. These guys are going to move house to house. You can work that out. You can see how that can get more complicated. Or you could have three buddy pairs and they're all moving independently with their buddy, right? So, Alpha has two guys and they send one guy here, then this guy comes up here. While they're doing that and they're shooting and moving together, Bravo team is doing the same thing, right? They're going to send one guy up here, then they're going to send another guy up there. You could do that too, right? You can see how you can multiply this out and it can get pretty complicated pretty quickly, particularly from the enemy perspective, right? If you see a bunch of guys moving and shooting independently, you get target confusion. It happens, right? That is an overwhelming effect on you. I've got multiple guys moving and shooting on you at the same time. We'll talk about skirmish lines in a minute. Usually, when we talk about shoot, move and communicate, this is the classic example. This is the classic starting point that we go to. The next battle drill that's helpful is peeling. Or I think it might be called the Australian peel, I think I've heard it referred to. But peeling. Peeling comes in two different types. What I just call the normal peel and then the center peel, so normal peeling. Let's say there's a bad guy up here. Let's say you and your crew are moving down a road and you start getting contact from this enemy over here and they're like, I don't know, a hundred yards away and they're shooting at you. You guys were traveling this way, right? And for whatever reason, you decide you need to get back to this huge piece of cover. Maybe it's a building. Maybe it's a hill. Maybe it's a really tall wall. Maybe it's whatever. But you need to get back there. And how are you going to do that? Well, one of the ways is you can peel. So everybody is already online. You're shooting at the bad guy. This guy peels out to the end. And then as he passes this guy, he taps him on the shoulder and says, last man. That lets him know, hey, you are the last guy in the line. Everybody's waiting on you to move. That's what that means. Once this guy hears that and he's ready, he can peel out here. Again, tapping the other guy to say, hey, last man so that he knows he needs to move. And then you just continue to peel all the way down with a little bit of practice. This becomes a really aggressive flow. Even if you're prone, you have to get up, tell the other guy, last man, run to the end of the line, get down and prone and get shooting again. Even if you're doing it that way, because there's a lot of up down, right, that takes longer, it still can become a very aggressive flow. And depending on how many guys you have, anywhere upwards of six, as soon as you're getting tapped, you're probably moving. Just, you're getting tapped. You're going to maybe send one or two rounds quickly and you're up and you're moving. And it becomes a very aggressive flow. Just take some time to practice. And really, all you got to do for safety is make sure you're staying online with everybody else and you're going to be good to go. The other kind of peel is called a center peel. So say you're moving down that road, maybe in that double column-like formation, right? And again, you start getting fire from an enemy down the road or something like that. And you decide, or it could be a trail, this could be anything like that, right? Any kind of linear object, you decide you need to get out of here. One of the ways to do that, you can even do that this in the middle of the woods to be honest, would be a center peel. And what that means is the guys up front are going to dump five rounds or maybe a magazine or whatever. A lot of high volume fire very quickly, right? I like five rounds. That's kind of my go-to, but you do what you want in your team. And then they are going to turn and sprint down the center and get to the end of the line. As soon as they pass this second line of guys, they're going to snap their rifles up. They're going to dump their rounds, whatever that is for you. And then of course, they will turn and sprint down the line to the end of the line and onward you go. The obvious big safety concern with this battle drill, right, is flagging and or shooting your friends, right? You don't want to do that. It's very, very important that you keep your rifle down until your buddy is past you. Then you snap your rifle up, deliver your rounds, and then you turn and go, right? That's the major safety concern with this battle drill. Again, however, remember these are plays and tools that you keep in your pocket and you bring out the appropriate play as is necessary. Another battle drill I would like to talk about here is the skirmish line. I think this one is very underutilized in common American military tactics. Underutilized meaning I've never seen it in an American military manual. However, I think it's super effective. So with a skirmish line, everybody is online and say these two are Alpha pair, these two are Bravo pair, and these two are Charlie pair. We mentioned this earlier, but what you're going to do is staying in your swim lane. In your head, you're going to break up your area in front of you into a swim lane, and each swim lane should probably be about 10 ish yards wide. And then staying in your swim lane and working with your buddy, you're going to move up to your next piece of cover. Maybe it's a rock, maybe it's a tree, maybe it's a low deflate in the ground, whatever, you know, maybe you're doing this through the woods. Obviously, hopefully you're not doing this through an open field that would be bad, but you're doing this, we're somewhere where you have cover. And you and your buddy are going to fire and maneuver up your lanes. Everybody does that at the same time. Again, as you can imagine, if you're the bad guy and you're trying to shoot people, you're essentially forced to play whack-a-mole, right? People are popping up at random shooting and moving and you have to try to move your gun to try to shoot them while you can while they're up. It creates a very difficult spot for the bad guy. I call this a skirmish line. This is talked about in this book later in the later chapters, which we'll touch on it again, we get there. This is also taught by a pool in the last 100 yards, which is helpful. So this is a pretty good method to have for creating lots of chaos with really not that many guys. You can imagine if you had, you know, 10, 12 guys online doing this at the same time, or 15 guys online doing this at the same time, that's going to create a lot of chaos for the bad guy very quickly. But for you as the user, it's really not that difficult. All you have to do is generally stay online with your buddy and then you can move and everybody just needs to roughly focus off the leader, right? So let's say this is your team lead right here, right? If this pair is making sure they're trying to stay roughly online with the leader and this pair is trying to make sure they stay roughly online with the leader, even if you have another couple sets out here, if you can just stay online with the crews in your lanes next to you, in general, you're all going to stay online pretty well. So when the shooting starts, this is super helpful, right? And again, if you can do it without talking with your buddy, all the more the better. It's also super helpful for when you want to just do it as a stalking line. Meaning, hey, we think there's a bad guy over here. I saw him and I'm excited, you know, prepare for action. We're going to get online and we're going to get in a skirmish line. And then we're just going to move like this without shooting until we take contact, right? So everybody's going to get down in the prone. This guy's going to get up and move to his next position to cover sneakily, then the next guy and everyone's going to play whack-a-mole like this without shooting until we bump into the enemy or until we see him. And then we're going to, of course, continue to try to do this and just assault right through. We'll cover assault throughs later. But these are different battle drills that you can use in those contexts. Again, remember, they're all football plays and you're just trying to find the right one. Now, let's talk about noisy versus silent communication a little bit. I mentioned earlier, I like to drive as much of the communication down to that implicit level as possible. When we're doing this in the shooting starts, the typical thought is, well, it's loud anyway. The shooting starts. Be as loud as you can in order to command the situation. I have come around to the opposite side of that theory, that school of thought, which is to try to stay as quiet even when the shooting starts as possible. The reason being, I would like to try to maintain as much tactical surprise and stealth as possible, even when the shooting starts. For example, imagine if your entire team runs suppressors and they're not talking and everybody just silently moving and shooting. That would be extremely unnerving as a bad guy. It would either be unnerving like, why is it so quiet and there's only just random shots happening here and there or it would be confusing like, I don't even know what's going on and then you're overrun and dead. In either event, you maintain a degree of tactical stealth that I think is beneficial, particularly when in your context, you do not have overwhelming firepower. You do not have the ability to call in lots of artillery or air cover or air support or anything like that. You have to maintain every bit of stealth that you can scrap together and I think it would behoove you to maintain that as much as possible, meaning not talking. Typical American military tactics doctrine is based around being loud. We're going to send lots of firepower. We're going to yell a lot. We're going to get up and scream and we're going to do all this really loud. If you look at like other armies historically, particularly Eastern armies, they usually don't do that. Yes, like Japan during World War II had the human Banzai attacks, which were very loud and obnoxious, and also intimidating because a bunch of people just charging at you screaming. However, they also were very good at being sneaky and they didn't have the yelling and communicating that we have when they were doing their tactical movements. I think it's worth considering trying to do something like this super stealthily and not yelling. Now, are there times in combat when you have to do lots of yelling? Yes, I'm sure there are. However, if you can maintain as much tactical stealth as possible through team SOPs and lots of repetitions and training, I think that's going to benefit you more, again, particularly in your context as just an everyday guy where you don't have access to more firepower. In our textbook, he talks a lot about different squad sizes or whatever. I'm a big fan of 16 is the perfect squad size. I made a video on that. You can look for that on my channel. If you're really interested in knowing more about that, we're not going to cover that here. The last thing that I do think is just worth mentioning here is the position of the team lead or the squad leader. Again, for you, that's probably just a team leader because you probably only have four or six guys, but in general, you want your team leader to be in a spot where they can influence things the best. That might mean on a typical wedge formation that you run your team leader at the front. That could happen. You could decide, hey, we want a specialized point man out here and we don't want our team leader up here. We're going to run our team lead back a guy or two. That could happen. You have to decide that for you. Again, where do you think the team leader is going to be to influence the sway of the battle the best? If you have a team leader who you're deciding, hey, in general, we're defaulting to this guy to tell us what to do, his job is to think on how to utilize us during the battle. That's his job. His primary job is not to shoot. His primary job is to think my primary job is to shoot. You should have some designated team lead. Chances are, if you've been friends with the people that you are practicing with for a long time, you probably already have that worked out already. If you don't have that worked out already, just practice together a bunch and switch off being the team lead and the natural whoever everyone defaults to is going to come out. If you ever are fortunate enough to have more people and you have to worry about a squad leader or even a platoon leader, something like that, typically, let's say you were running a team up here and you were running two more teams in the back, right? And you're all moving that way. Maybe your team lead would end up being right around, maybe your team lead would end up being right around here in the center, or maybe you would run him back with this team or back with this team, right? You don't necessarily want him just hanging out by himself in the middle, because that could obviously be bad, but maybe your team lead has some kind of command element that he moves within the center, or maybe you end up running your second team just off the side of him right here, right? And so this team, it doesn't exist, and you run kind of like an echelon formation. That could happen. You can get creative. But again, remember, where you want your leaders is where they can influence the battle the most. That's typically where we want to think about placing our leaders. Again, in our context, we're not going to have military like discipline. We're just everyday people. You're going to want a guy whose job, again, is to think through the problem. That's how you need to think of your leader. Who do I trust to think through this problem while I do the shooting? And in general, that's who you're going to want to default to as your leader, right? Someone who's fairly quick thinking, someone who has a good understanding and grasp on tactics and spends time reading books like this and watching YouTube videos like this. That's who you want to have the person like, I trust them to do the thinking while I do the shooting. That's kind of how you want to think about team leader. And then when you think about placing them in your team, you want to think, I want to place them where they are going to be able to influence and help the battle the most. I hope that's helpful. I'm sure this video is very long by this point. And I look forward to seeing you on the next installment of Minuteman Tactics. Do brave deeds and endure.