 Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with the next edition of Minuteman Tactics. As a reminder, we are using max velocities, tacticals, small units, tactical manual, tactical manual, small unit tactics, something like that. As our textbook for this college course, I highly recommend you read the chapter on offense before you watch this. However, if you don't care about that, don't worry, here we go. Just to be clear, this is of course, is not all there is to say about offense, but rather it's a start, right? It's some of the main principles and ideas that we have when it comes to offensive tactics. And it's not all of it. We could do probably an entire lecture series just on offense, you know, maybe we'll do that sometime. But right now, this is kind of the primer and the things you need to know in order to have a good framework for understanding, learning, and doing offensive tactics. And again, we are going to specifically look at it with an eye towards just the everyday Minuteman guy. And if China invades and Red Dawn happens, what does that mean for you and how you're going to operate? And what kind of offensive tactics and principles should you consider in how you're going to roll? So here we go. Okay, I'm pretty sure you can see these principles over here. So let's start with some basic principles that kind of help ground us a little bit, or maybe ideas of how we should think about offense. The first one you need to think about is ammo equals time, okay? Meaning that the faster you shoot, the less time you have, right? Because as you're shooting, when your gun runs empty, then you are of course mostly useless on the battlefield at that point as a fighter, right? Because you're out of bullets. So we don't need to be in a hurry to shoot. And in general, I like to shoot fast. I'm sure you like to shoot fast. And you know, I have a couple shooting standards where shooting fast is important and being able to dump a lot of rounds in a short amount of time is very important. However, in general, you need to understand that when you're in sustained contact or in a sustained attack, ammo equals time. And the more ammo you have, the more time you have to work things out and the less ammo you have, the less time you have to work things out. So you need to consider that as you consider your individual loadout, your team's loadout, and how fast you shoot, right? That's why earlier in the series we talked about fire control orders. Now I said, hey, you shouldn't have guys who are squared enough away to know about that and really think about their rate of fire. So you shouldn't need to issue these fire control orders. And I stand by that in our context of having some older guys who are a little bit smarter, a little bit wiser, they should be able to have enough self-control to remember that ammo is time. So you need to think about that as you're thinking about your tactics. Another principle, and this is probably my favorite, is cold aggression. He mentions that phrase in the book and I think that's a super helpful phrase. And you pick that up in other readings and other places, but this idea that, look, you need to be calculated. You're playing a chess match, right? You're not trying to be emotional. We don't necessarily want to be emotional fighters. We want to be cold aggression fighters. So we are emotionally cool and in that we are full of aggression to move things forward. Cold aggression. It's kind of a juxtaposition, kind of an oxymoron, and that's a good way to think of your offensive tactics is you're moving with cold aggression. It's calculated, it's thought out, it's not emotional, right? We're not reacting out of rage, like in good war movies, right? There's always lots of hot emotions. In general, you want to try to not operate like that, but have a cold aggression. You're continuing to press the enemy, you're continuing to push forward, you're continuing to be aggressive, you're continuing to hit them, and you're doing so with calculation and purpose and not just flailing about wildly. You see this a lot in UFC fighters, if you ever watch mixed martial arts or anything like that. There are fighters, right, who are emotional fighters. They're hot emotional fighters. And then there are fighters who are much more calculated, much more thinking. GSP, George St. Pierre is probably the most famous for being just kind of a calculated fighter, right? And some of his fights, a lot of his later fights, the older we got, were really boring because he was really good and really calculated and he never took risks, right? He had the cold part, like down to a T, but he wasn't aggressive to finish the fights. You want to have that calculated George St. Pierre mind and that extreme aggression to finish the fight. Some of you who don't watch fighting have no idea what I'm talking about. Don't worry, I think you get the idea. Momentum versus speed. So your attack doesn't necessarily need to be fast. It just needs to carry momentum. This is also a principle I learned when I took a CQB course. Speed isn't necessarily the end all be all, right? It doesn't necessarily need to be fast. It just needs to carry and keep that momentum. When bullets are flying and things are going bad, things will slow down. You're not going to operate at your fastest speed possible. It's certainly going to feel like things are operating quickly. It's about carrying that momentum. Remember, speed in combat isn't necessarily some objective measure of time. We need to do this task in this amount of time. You need to do that for your skill reloads and stuff like that, but that's not what I'm talking about. In the combat setting, speed isn't necessarily an objective measure. All you have to be is faster than the enemy and or faster than the enemy thinks you can be. That's it. That's the measure. It's a very subjective measure. The Marine Manual Tactics does a really good job of talking about speed. So if you're interested in further reading, I would tell you to look at that. But this whole idea that you just need to be faster than them or faster than they think you are. That's it. That's all you need to do for speed in order to be considered speedy on the battlefield. And to be able to carry that speed and carry that momentum and keep things moving, that's when you can really compound effects of your attack when you're able to keep the momentum up. You're able to take this position and then this one and this one and you're able to just keep that momentum up and keep going. Because you have four or five teams and you're able to rotate them through an assault cycle, which we'll talk about in a bit. But this idea of being able to keep up momentum and that's very difficult to do when people start to get tired or run out of water, run out of ammo or are injured or whatever. But being able to keep up the momentum is very important. Leaders lead. So I put this one in here because you may or may not think about it this way, but a leader's job on the battlefield is to lead. Their job is to not shoot. Their job is to direct people and organize the fight. That's their job. Their job is to lead and manage and organize the fight so that it goes well. This is why and historically in a lot of like particularly European armies, uh, they didn't even issue rifles or long guns to like lieutenants and combat leaders, they just gave them a pistol because in general their job is, their job is into shoot. Right? That's a secondary, tertiary function for a leader that is certainly not even close to a primary function. Their primary function is to lead. And that means you know physically moving your body. Hey, follow me. We're going this way. Right? That means, hey, I need alpha team over here, I need bravo team over here, and then myself and Charlie team are gonna lead the way in here. Like, that's leading. You need to manage and direct the fight. And this is kind of a silly example, but I was playing some first person shooter computer game with some of my friends, and we were trying to work things out, and I was directing them where to go so that we could do stuff. And every match, the bottom of the match, I had the least amount of kills, right? Because I'm not shooting. I'm telling them where to go so we can keep the shooting up, right? And again, I think that's a really small, silly example of how it works in real life. Leaders lead. You can ask that anyone who's been in the service, and they're gonna tell you that the good leaders are gonna lead and aren't getting preoccupied with shooting. If they're getting preoccupied with shooting, they're not leading, and that's a problem. So you need to put someone in that position who you trust to be able to do the leading and the thinking. Whether or not they shoot, I mean, they should be a good shooter by nature of having risen to that position, but that's really not the point. That's not their purpose. We don't need them to shoot. What we needed them to do is think and direct and lead. Super important, especially when it comes to attacks when, you know, that's scary because you have to usually expose yourself a little bit to get to where you're going, and the defenders are possibly already set, and that's a whole, whole problem. The last one is friction. You need to understand friction, right? Friction also, you know, some people refer to it as the fog of war, right? Like, things are crazy. You don't understand what's going on. You need to understand friction in two capacities. One, you will experience friction, right? When bullets start flying, simple tasks become very difficult, right? Read any combat account, read any study of it. That's just life. This is how it is. Why? Because you're getting shot at and people are trying to kill you, so all of a sudden simple things become super difficult, right? That's friction. It's gumming up the gears. Things that worked really smooth yesterday in training all of a sudden now are really difficult to do, which is why we rehearse these things ad nauseum so that you can do it when you're drunk and asleep and you're still able to function it, you're still able to know the process and just do it, right? Because when friction happens, we fall to our lowest level of training that we have mastered, right? You've heard that thing. You're not gonna rise to the occasion. James Yeager used to say this all the time, which was great. You're not gonna rise to the occasion. You will fall to the lowest level of training that you have mastered, and that's true. When friction happens, when shit goes crazy, that's what happens. You fall to the lowest level of training you have mastered. So you need to understand friction from that perspective. You also need to understand friction from trying to cause as much friction on the enemy as possible, right? When you are on an attack or even on defense, you are trying to cause the enemy friction, general chaos, and we're doing that by sending the pew-pews. We're trying to cause them as much friction as possible so their processes break down. So we're gonna see what their highest level of training is that they have mastered, right? We're gonna see how far we can knock them down to what training they have mastered. So that friction cuts both ways. It happens to everyone, and you need to try to inflict friction while having good, solid processes to work through your own friction. It's gonna be inevitable, you're gonna have it. The only question is, how are you gonna deal with it? So as we think about offense, these are some helpful thought categories or principles that you should definitely keep in mind. Now let's talk about some other definitions here. There's always this hasty versus deliberate kind of thought or how they break things down. There's a hasty ambush or a hasty attack versus a deliberate ambush or a deliberate attack, right? Just planned versus unplanned is the short of that, right? Hasty means like, hey, we were out walking and we spotted these guys and we decided we're gonna attack them. That's a hasty attack. Now, bigger level here, think about that. Is that something as just an everyday guy when Red Dawn happens and China invades that you're gonna do? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know, right? But probably not. If you're rolling around with six or eight guys, chances are you're not just gonna attack anything that you see, right? You're probably more likely gonna fall into the deliberate category, right? You're probably gonna be planning sabotages or raids or ambushes, right? You're gonna be thinking more insurgent-like. You're probably not just trolling around, looking for a fight. No, maybe, but probably not. You're probably gonna be much more into the deliberate kind of category. That still means you still need to understand how to do hasty drills, right? Like a break contact drill. Because again, you take contact, you don't wanna be there, right? You need to understand how to do that. We'll cover some more of this when we get to patrols. However, you just need to understand this distinction between like a hasty attack. We're just walking around. Oh, there's some guys. We're gonna go get a fight, get in a fight, or a deliberate. Okay, we know these guys are here. We know this is their disposition. You know, we've done some recon for the past week. And this is our plan to go in there and attack that. Suppressive fire. This was just a note from the book that I think is important. Suppressive fire, again, is accurate enough fire that the bad guy is being killed, wounded, or forced to take cover. That's what it is. And it's enough volume of that fire that they all have to take cover or become a casualty. That's what we want to do. We want to either force the enemy to take cover or become a casualty. One of the more helpful offensive battle drills that it's helpful to rehearse with your guys is the assault through. And by rehearse, I mean you can do this on a 20-yard by 20-yard plot of land with dry rifles, right? There's no active shooting involved to rehearse this. And when you rehearse it, I would suggest that first you lead it through and rehearse it, then Bob leads it through and rehearse it, then Joe, and just go through everybody and then start over and do it again. So everybody has to lead through it to understand it. You'll be amazed. Some guy will sit there five times or walk through it, but then when it's his turn to lead through it, all of a sudden he stutters and struggles, right? Because now he's forced to actually think about it. I like the assault through as a thought through process. Not necessarily because you'll be doing this. If you have no idea what an assault through is, don't worry, we're getting there. However, I like it as a good training process because it walks through kind of a general hasty attack cycle and how that might look. And there's a lot of different complicated pieces to it that help people understand how we're gonna operate together as a team. So it's slightly practical. Again, as your everyday Minuteman guy, you may or may not use it, but it's super helpful to start building team cohesion and how people work together. So I think this is actually a really good drill to start through. So here's how that rehearsal looks. Let's say you got a team of four guys. So your four guys, you're gonna say, here's us. Here is the bad guy, okay? That's the bad guy position. So we take contact, right? You can just talk this through as you rehearse this. Everybody takes cover and starts returning fire. This is gonna be your Alpha team. That'll be your base of support by fire, your base of fire position. They're gonna continue to keep the enemy suppressed. We just talked about what that means. Your Bravo team here, they're going to flank the bad guy. So they're gonna walk over here. They're gonna walk up here. Again, this is just rehearsing this. This could be on like 10 yards of land, right? Not a big deal. And they're going to get to an assault position. Now an assault through, if you don't know what that is, that's where everybody literally stands up, walks through the enemy position and puts two or three or five or whatever your SOP rounds in to any bad guy. Dead or alive doesn't matter. You shoot them whatever your SOP is, right? That's an assault through. We're just gonna stand and walk through our assault through shooting everything that is a bad guy. Dead or alive doesn't matter to make sure, right? So, typically you get to within like 35 yards. That's what the manuals say. Again, there's some flex here, okay? This is a battle drill. It's a starting point, not an ending point, okay? So as these guys stand up and start to walk through the enemy position, these guys are gonna shift their fire. Initially they're trying to suppress the guy, but as your team starts to enter here, they need to shift fire over here. One, because you don't wanna shoot your own guys. Two, maybe there's a second enemy position back here that they're shifting fire to. That could be an option, right? Or to prevent them from escaping in that direction, right? There are a couple of reasons you shift fire. The first one is to not shoot your own guys. The second one is to suppress either a different position or prevent an avenue of escape. So, your Bravo team assaults through, okay? And they end up right here. It's guy one, it's guy two. Then your Alpha team will then assault through this way and they'll end up right here. And again, you could do this with two full fire teams. You could do this with two full squads. This is absolutely scalable, okay? We're just saying four guys because this is an easy way to rehearse it. So you end up in this little L here and facing out. Now at this point, the typical acronym from the Army is BLAST, B-L-A-S-T. Blood Sweep, check yourself for, you know, make sure you didn't get shot because you're on adrenaline and you might not necessarily know. Lights on, they'll turn their weapon lights on. We're not gonna do that because we don't care. You can if you want in your team, but whatever. A is ACE report or IU's LACE report, which we covered earlier in the series, right? Liquid Ammo Casualty Equipment, Green, Yellow, Red. So we covered that in one of the earlier videos. And so ACE report, B-L-A-S is SAWS out. You don't have any SAWS, but if you had automatic weapon SAWS, you'd put them facing out, right, on your corners so that you can get effective protection in fields of fire. And then the last one is T Tactical Reload. So all of you guys would tactical reload, not at the same time, right? You wanna break that up, either having a team do it at a time or do it in buddy pairs or whatever you decide your SOP is. Now I just use BLT for the everyday Minuteman, right? Blood Sweep, LACE report, Tactical Reload. We don't need to turn our lights on, we don't have SAWS, so I'm not gonna cover that, right? So as an everyday kind of guy, I just use BLT. Blood Sweep, LACE report, TAC Reload. So everybody does that, okay? They do the blood sweep, you get the team lead, whoever that is, gets LACE reports. Now if you're doing this in a squad, right? Then are you doing this in a, yeah, a squad. Then the squad leader would ask for LACE reports, he would get a LACE report from Alpha Team Lead and Bravo Team Lead, right? He doesn't need all of them. The team leads collect the LACE reports from their guys and then issue that up. And then if we're doing this as a platoon level, well then all the team leads would get their LACE reports, they'd give it to their squad leader. All the squad leader would give all his teams LACE reports to the platoon leader, right? That's how you do so you flow up the chain. So it's not 30 guys yelling out LACE reports because obviously that's insane. Now, again, typical military assault through here, you're gonna do a couple different things to exploit this area that you just assaulted through, right? By the way, when you reach this line, this is called the LOA, I didn't mention that earlier, or line of advance, right? That's where your team lead would shout out LOA, LOA, and that way everybody knows to stop. We've reached our point of advance, now our assault through is complete, right? And typically in the manuals, they say that's 35 meters past the last dead body because they consider that outside of grenade range. You alter your SOPs accordingly, okay? Now, after we've done our assault through, so again, we've had Bravo team come through, we've had Alpha team come through, we've ended up in this L. We're going to send in our EPW team. That's enemy prisoner of war, we'll talk about what that means. Then our aid and litter team, then our search team, and then finally the demo team. So enemy prisoner of war team goes in first. That would just be a buddy pair, maybe before guys, depends on how big your element is. They go back through and make sure that all of the bad guys are in fact dead, right? There's no booby traps. They're basically marking the bodies that they've all been disarmed and checked that there's no booby traps. That's when or and or collecting any body who happened to have survived your assault through because maybe you really suck at your assault through job. That's what the enemy prisoner of war team does. After they have secured the assault through zone, right? Then you send in your own aid and litter team to collect your own casualties. You don't do that first, obviously, because you don't want to expose your team to further danger until you've been sure that you've cleared the zone is safe to enter. So then the aid and litter team would go in and get your own guys, right? That could just be a buddy pair that's been assigned ahead of time. At the same time, you could send in your search team. Your search team is going to go through now and actually do a detailed search of the bodies, right? Looking for documents, weapons, bullets, whatever it is that you want to be searching for, right? And again, these could all just be buddy pair teams. This could be a whole fire team. This could be Bob from Alpha team and George from Bravo team, right? However you want to break these down and task organized, that's up to you. But these are generally the teams that you send through. The last one then is the demo team. In the military, they blow up everything that they're not taking with them, right? You don't have explosives, so you'll have to figure out how you want to do that part. But this is the general assault through process. Now that's a lot. And I really like working through that process with a team. That's gonna help everybody know how the whole process works. You have to balance a lot of things at once. You have to remember a lot of different things in different steps. And it helps build team cohesion while at the same time being practical. So I highly recommend that you go out and try this one with your guys. There are two more techniques that he talks about in the book. One of them is a skirmish line. We already talked about that previously, one of the prior videos. The other is what he calls the move and fire technique. So basically you have a team of let's say four guys. This team is set, not moving, providing a suppressive fire. This team gets up and walks and just gets up and walks and still shoots as they're walking. And then they stop five, seven yards, whatever. And then they're set and they're still shooting. And then these guys get up and walk and then they shoot. Again, it could be successive or it could be alternating violence. We talked about that earlier in the series. But the idea is that instead of I'm gonna stop shooting, I'm gonna get up and move and scramble them in exposition. I'm gonna get up and walk there while still shooting so that we have a constant volume of fire going down range. I have not practiced this one a whole bunch, so I don't really have a lot of thoughts for you on that one. But that is a technique that I certainly think is worth considering. And there could be a use case for that. So consider that one. The other technique that he talks about in the book is a bunker assault or a trench assault. And this he really pulls straight from any US military manual. I would assume the British ones are pretty similar. But with that, if you have, let's say a bad guy bunker appeared, right? And they're shooting this way. So let's say you started taking fire from this bunker here and your team was down here. Part of your team will remain here and do their best to suppress the bunker. Your other team would go by some kind of circuitous route and you're trying to get a buddy pair to sneak up onto this bunker. Now, maybe you're able to send a full fire team up here of four guys. And two of those guys are gonna go in to do the final assault on the bunker while the other two pull security in this direction or provide overwatch or whatever. They could do a variety of things out there. But the idea is, and in the military manuals, really specific, it's like the Grenadier and Automatic Rifleman are the two that go in. But basically you're gonna go in, one guy wants to pitch a grenade in and then the two guys go in and clear the area. Again, you don't have grenades, so you're gonna have to think about what that would mean and how you would do that. But this is, again, you can find this in almost any American military manual of a basic bunker assault. Again, remember, battle drills are starting points, not end points. One of the things that's discussed in the textbook that is extremely helpful is assault cycles or how to move three teams through assaulting something to keep up that momentum while maintaining a reserve and maintaining an assaulting and suppressive element. So this is a potential way to do that. There are other versions of this. Pool in the last hundred yards also gives some other examples. He doesn't call them this, but it's essentially what they are when he goes through the urban warfare sections. So let's just use positions, we'll just say their houses for right now as an example. Right? Let's say you have a bad guy in this building here and this building and this building. Let's say you have three elements. That could be three pairs, although hopefully not if you're getting into this kind of stuff, but or three fire teams. This is for right now, let's just say it's three different fire teams, so four guys each. So you have fire team A, fire team Bravo and fire team Charlie. A way that you could do this assault cycle is you could have Alpha and Bravo suppress these two positions accordingly. Charlie would come up and take this position here. So now Charlie owns this position. Right? And again, that could be an assault through that we just talked about. That could be some CQB stuff because I got a clear house out. That could be the trench bunker assault that we just talked about, whatever. That could be however you're gonna handle that. That could be some way of occupying that position. At that point, Charlie could suppress both these positions. Bravo team could be unrest and or move up here to cover a flank. Right? Alpha team could move up to assault this position. Again, that could be the assault through. That could be the trench bunker, whatever. Now Charlie and Alpha team together will suppress this position while Bravo team comes in to assault this position. And then you can see how this is scalable, right? This can go on and on and on saying you have more positions over here or whatever, and then you're gonna continue to rotate those through. So the basic idea, right, is that you have one team that's support by fire, suppressing the enemy. One team that's assaulting and one team that's either covering up in a security element or in a reserve position, right? If it's a security, because maybe, hey, you don't know what's out here over here on this flank and maybe there's also a bad guy over here and they're attacking you. That's why we sent Bravo up there initially when we sent Charlie into assault, right? There's a reason for that. So what we wanna do is maintain a suppressive element and assault element in a reserve or security element and then cycle through those elements as we need to. So everybody gets a rest cycle and everybody gets an assault and a support by fire cycle. That way everybody shares risk equally among the team. You're able to arrest your guys and you're able to keep up that momentum. This can get complicated and when you start thinking about this on large scales, it can obviously get like really big, really quick. However, on a small unit tactics deal, this can be a very useful thing. Even if you only have six guys, when you understand this in principle, you can understand how to better reduce problems. Now, let's discuss flanking a little bit here. In the book, he makes a very good case for the 90 degree flank and in traditional American military doctrine, that's what we do, right? So we have a bad guy position up here. We have our Alpha team here. We send our Bravo team around right here and we attack, right? So even if we don't assault through, even if we just shoot at them, right? You have a nice 90 degree angle by which you are shooting the bad guy. We've talked about this before in other videos, right? But this is traditional American military doctrine, especially once you get into assault throughs, this way, A, Alpha team doesn't have to shift their fire until the last possible minute, right? If Bravo team were only at like this, weird 45 degree flank and came in, well then Alpha team's gonna have to shift their fire sooner, right? Let's say this is their cone of fire, right? Alpha team's gonna have to shift their fire sooner and Bravo's gonna have to go in unprotected because Alpha had to shift their fire away. So that's typically why American military doctrine prefers the 90 degree flank. Another thing you have to understand is this is designed around machine guns. I say this is designed around machine guns because you don't have any machine guns. And the idea here is that you're dumping a high volume of firepower into that bad guy from your machine guns. So when your team comes in here, you're lifting and shifting fire away. Machine guns are not known for their pinpoint accuracy. I say that because other countries around the world have done it different and for you this bears considering. Because you only have riflemen and again, hopefully they're more squared away guys who know what they're doing, you might wanna consider trying to send Bravo team all the way around to do a 180 so that the bad guy now has to fight in two different directions. If you think that's insane, you can look at German military doctrine from World War II where they did have machine guns and they would do this typically. It's also a bigger thing among Eastern armies to try to completely encircle the bad guy or at least get a 180 on them. So these are things worth considering and what does a flank mean to our team? How do we want to handle that? Are we comfortable with the potential risk here? Well, maybe if we say this is, if that's flat ground, definitely not. However, if maybe there's a very large piece of cover between the bad guy and us and we're confident that we can get all the way around them and then our friendly bullets are gonna hit that cover before they hit us, well then maybe we're gonna do that. You have to decide for you and your team and have some honest discussion about whether or not you trust people to do something like this versus just a 90 degree flank. This, I would much rather not be this guy, right? And if I had to be the bad guy, I would choose to get 90 degree flank versus 180 degree flank because 90, it still sucks and it's really hard to deal with and I'm probably gonna die anyway. However, I'd take my chances with that before I'd take it with this. So you have to decide for your team what that means, what your risk adversity or acceptance level is and how you'd wanna run your tactics based off that. When we talk about levels of warfare, the military manual is typically talked about three levels of warfare. There's the strategic, there's the operational and there's the tactical. The strategic is the big geopolitical thing, like, hey, we are partnering with these allies to do this thing in this nation to achieve these political aims, whatever. That's the big strategic level thing, okay? There's the operational, which is usually like in a theater of war or in a large area of operation. We're talking like hundreds of miles, right? That's the operational. Well, we're trying to push them from the south and pinch them from the north and cut off their oil supply and the big stuff. Then there's the tactical level, right? Which gets all the way down to that nitty gritty like you and your buddy behind that tree trying to get the bad guy over there behind the wall, right? Like on a small tactical level. You need to understand that what you do here influences what happens all the way up here. That might sound silly, but if you think about during World War I, Germany invaded through Belgium, right? And they came down into France through Belgium. And when they were there, they committed several war crimes, right? They had like some sniper in a village. So they rounded everybody up in the village and shot them all, right? That was a tactical level decision. Hey, we're getting sniped at here. We're sick of this. These people know what the problem is. They're not saying anything. We're just gonna start shooting them until we find out who the sniper is because all I care about is my guy's not dying right now. Well, when you do that, that boils all the way up to the strategic level. And now the Germans are painted as horrible monsters and evil people and how dare they could just execute innocent civilians. And it paints you in a very bad geopolitical strategic light. You need to understand that all wars are political. All wars, every war in human history ever was a political war. And what happened at the small tactical level influenced what happened at the huge geopolitical strategic level. That's true of all wars in human history ever. I bring this up because I'm always shocked by what I read very smart people in books and they say, we don't care what happens up there and the generals and their officers and all their fancy titles. What I care about is making sure me and my guys survive and I'll do anything I have to to make sure that they survive. And that's why all wars should be total wars and we should just do everything we can to obliterate the enemy as fast as we possibly can and as brutally as we can so they never screw with us again. And I've never been in combat and I certainly have sympathy for that perspective but what I would challenge those people to think is that you have to understand that all your actions on the tactical level boil up to the geopolitical level and that whatever war it is you're fighting you're there for a geopolitical aim. That's true of revolutions, that's true of civil wars, that's true of world wars, it's true of all the wars that humans have ever fought. And you need to understand that what you and your crew decide to do in the tactical level will influence the grand conflict that you're involved in. So if China invades tomorrow and it's red dawn is happening and your team decides to do X that will have a consequence Y on the large issue of getting China out of America. Those things matter. So you need to consider that when making your choices. Now the last thing we're gonna discuss here is forms of offensive maneuver. Now typically these are up at like the battalion level or bigger where we're gonna do a frontal assault with this division here but that's not what you're concerned with. We bring these in because they do work even at the minor tactical level and I think it's important to have categories to understand how you're placing your attacks and how you're planning through and thinking through your attacks. So the typical forms of maneuver and I'm just pulling this straight from the United States military manual, right? You have enveloping, turning, infiltration, penetration, frontal and flanking attacks. Now again, typically when the big army talks about this they're talking about big army stuff, right? Like divisions. Like we're gonna envelop this entire division by setting a division in here and setting them around but this works on the tactical level. So first of all, enveloping. An envelopment is here's the bad guy, here's you. You are trying to envelop the enemy kind of like that 180 that we talked about earlier. In order to, and this is important, in order to destroy them in place, okay? You're trying to envelop the enemy in order to destroy them in place. This could be a single envelopment. This could be a double envelopment, right? Now again, if you think about this as divisions this makes more sense, right? And you're like, well wait, aren't you gonna shoot each other again? Think about this as like a division. This is an entire division and we're sending another division over here and we're sending another one here to trap these three divisions in this big envelopment and then we're gonna cut them off from supply and crush them, right? But this works at the tactical level too where you're trying to just isolate that bad guy. The most famous double envelopment probably in the history of the world was the battle of Kanai, Kanai, where Hannibal just completely crushed the Roman legions in like 212 BC, 225. I can't remember the exact date. I did a video on that battle. It's on this channel. But you gotta think through envelopments, right? Napoleon did some envelopments. Scipio-Africanus did some envelopments. Like there are some fairly famous envelopments in the world and it's considered one of the premier forms of maneuver on the big level because you're able to surround and cut off and destroy elements in place and that obviously has good consequences for you. So you can think about envelopments all the way down to the squad level and how you would use that form of offensive maneuver in order to problem solve the situation that you have in front of you. The next one is a turning motion. Turning is set up very similar. So here's you, here's the bad guy and you're gonna send guys back here in order to get the enemy to leave their current positions and then come fight you back here, right? Maybe that's an oil depot that you're seizing back there because you want them, they have a very strong defensive position here so you're trying to turn them so they have to leave their strong defensive position to come back and protect their ammo dump or their gas dump or their water supply or whatever. It's an envelopment with the end goal of trying to get them to leave their current position and go fight you somewhere else. You're turning the battle, okay? Again, you can think about this on the tactical level, right? If your enemy's in a strong position here but you know that back there is their aid station or whatever and if you can get back there they're gonna be forced to turn to defend that well that might put you in a more advantageous tactical position. Think about it. The next one is infiltration. Infiltration is probably very useful for you as just an everyday minute man guy, big army as far as I can tell, never does this and I'm honestly surprised it's even in their manual but an infiltration is, let's say you have a huge city full of bad guys. Well you're gonna sneak, sneak, sneak a buddy pair in here and sneak, sneak, sneak a buddy pair in here and sneak, sneak, sneak a buddy pair in and all of a sudden you've infiltrated the city, right? All of a sudden you've got 400 guys in that city that all just came in and buddy pairs over the course of like a month and are just hanging out waiting for the attack and then they're gonna attack from the inside, right? That's an infiltration. The Japanese during World War II were extremely good at infiltration where they would sneak between foxholes, right? World War I, when you look at the Germans extremely good at infiltration, right? So this idea of just sneaking past whatever the enemy's defenses are, again that's all the way down to like foxholes and literally crawling between foxholes all the way up to sneaking guys into like a city or a big defensive position or a region or a mountain region or whatever in order to get past the enemy defenses and sneak in and then attack from the inside out. John Poole spends a lot of time talking about this because he's super fascinated with Eastern armies and this is typically an Eastern tactic. The next one's penetration. So for the penetration, basically let's say you have a defensive line, let's say it's barbed wire, and a bunch of bad guy foxholes. You're going to cause a breach in the foxhole or in the barbed wire in the foxholes. You're gonna attack laterally aside so you're finding a inflection point. You're gonna punch through that inflection point and then you're gonna explode and expand through that, right? Then you have follow-on teams who come in through that opening that you just made and go attack objectives in the rear and command centers and whatever, right? Typically you think of this kind of attack again you're trying to breach the wire or breach the wall, right? That's a penetration attack. You're trying to make a opening where there wasn't one before and then flood your guys through. That's a good, you can think about this again all the way down to that attack level with the barbed wire and the foxholes or the wall or whatever where you're trying to find that weak point and then snap it and then send everything in through there. You're basically, if you think about this like medieval warfare, you're creating a gate, right? And then you're flooding through. The next one is a frontal attack which basically as an everyday minute man without the resources of big army you should never ever do because that's just where here's the bad guy and you're just gonna send everybody in straight up the middle, up the front and usually what you're doing here is you're using overwhelming majority of firepower and force to completely bulldoze and crush the enemy, right? If you're a much larger element against a much smaller element you can get away with this. This is usually something we use to just bulldoze. Again, for you being an everyday guy and a minute man when Red Dawn happens you probably don't have the resources to do frontal attacks. So you should probably avoid that at all costs. What you should certainly understand what it is so that you can avoid it and also in case it was ever done to you, right? But you need to understand what a frontal attack is. The last one is flanking, right? Which we've already discussed here because you will have a support by fire element. You'll get another element out here and you'll attack from that 90 degrees versus the 180 or the envelopments that we talked about earlier. Two things that I want to note for the last thing in this video. The first one is follow on actions. When you're planning a deliberate attacks think about follow on actions. Follow on actions are, well if we're successful with objective A what's our objective B? If we're able to make this happen what's something else we could do to exploit that and benefit even more from this attack? What are our follow on actions in order to increase the effectiveness and momentum of this attack, right? It could also be you should have contingencies, maybe I should put slash contingencies here. What if this attack fails? Or what if this happens? Or what if the car won't start? Or what if this major piece of equipment fails? What are our contingency plans? Follow on and contingencies are important things when planning operations. And that could be as small as again you and your six guys trying to sabotage this light pole for this red dawn Chinese military base, right? You need to think about that and what are your follow on and contingency actions? The last one is surprise. Never underestimate the value of surprise. And as a small unit you need to harness surprise as much as possible. We talked about this earlier in the series when discussing camouflage and kind of the importance of that especially at the small unit level because you need to harness as much surprise as possible because you don't have firepower. You unfortunately can't call in those A-10 warthogs to just rain down hate on the communists. Rather, you have to use sneaky surprise in order to gain your advantage. The advantage of course, you're a smaller unit so it's easier to garner that surprise but you still have to work a ton to maintain and generate surprise. So think about that as a big principle when thinking about your red dawn offensive tactics. That's all I got for you today. I hope this was helpful. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg and you can go as deep down this rabbit hole as you want. Do brave deeds and endure.