 Hello everyone Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense and we are going to start the small unit tactics series With the chapter on field craft and basics again as a reminder We are using max velocity tacticals tactical manual small unit tactics It's a lot of tactics in one book Great book. I don't get any promo or anything for saying talking about this book But you should own this book and again We're going to use this as our textbook as we go through this series So today we're doing chapter one field craft and basics I would suggest that you read chapter one before you watch this But if you don't care about that or you don't have the book or you don't want to get the book or whatever That's fine But definitely at some point go back and read that chapter after you watch this lecture because that's going to be Helpful to further inform again It's kind of our textbook in this college lecture series So we're not going to you know sit here and read you the book But we are going to talk about concepts from that chapter and you having read that chapter is going to make this more informative In the introduction one of the assumptions that we made is that you are in general Squared away meaning you have a basic set of skills on how to operate your gun and possibly work with your guys So we are going to continue to assume that and there's only going to be a couple things We're really going to touch on in this chapter It's important to touch on just a few skills or concepts up front because again those are going to help inform your tactics Good teams are built off solid individuals, right? It's hard to have a high-functioning team if everybody in the team sucks at doing their job But if you have a bunch of high-functioning individuals that are really good at their job You still can have a poor team of course if they don't practice working together You see this in any professional sport you've ever watched in your life Everybody in that team is exceedingly good at their job That's how they got to be a professional basketball player or baseball player or football or whatever pick your poison And then on top of that they work together, right? So what we're going to talk about here Is we're just going to touch on that first part of being a high-functioning individual again I'm already assuming you have some base of knowledge here if not YouTube is your friend and classes are your friend Coincidentally, I teach those classes so you can come take one when it comes to your PC eyes or your PCC's PCC is pre-combat check PCI is pre-combat inspection the pre-combat check That's something that you do right on your own equipment on your own gear before you go out to train with your guys Or before you're you're gonna step off to do something that's going like you're gonna want to do a pre-combat check That means you're gonna go through all of your stuff Which we're gonna talk about how to do that in a second and make sure that it's squared away and good to go Because you don't want to be the problem guy because that's one embarrassing and two then you'll die the pre-combat Inspection that's something that your designated team leader is gonna do however you work that out in your group of who's gonna be in charge That's something that the pre that the team leader is gonna do they're gonna do the pre-combat Inspection to again check all the stuff that you should have checked to make sure that it's all in good working order a helpful acronym for doing that is Saupersso, I don't know how to pronounce that But you know it's there's a million acronyms in in the military and stuff And this is one that's actually useful for us as normal people to be able to check out what we need So the first one is security now I'll be 100% honest here. I don't know why that's there I think it's just there because you know we always need to be secure We always need to be checking security and security super important Which you know is true if you're out and about but in the context that we're talking about here with pre-combat checks and pre-combat inspections I just seems so perfect with so Things to go through and check ammo. Okay. Do you have enough? Do you have some kind of SOP? SOP standard operating procedure. We're gonna use that term a lot in this series. So make sure you get used to that one Ammo do you have an SOP for ammo? Do you have a in your crew? Do you have hey? We're all gonna carry five mags or seven mags or 25 mags. What's your SOP for your crew? Do you have enough does everybody have enough right when it comes to doing the pre-combat inspection? That's your job. Hey, how many mags do you have? I'm here to inspect everybody. Let's check everybody's mag Let's make sure they're all fully loaded pull a couple out at random and test them Right make sure you can get just into that front knuckle of your thumb. That's how you know There's 28 in there and really make sure that ammo is there, right? I heard one horror story where someone was doing a Pre-combat inspection and they started pulling out mags out of a guy's kit and they were full of blanks because they'd been training earlier and They've started checking all his mags and all of his mags are blanks, right? That's one that guy obviously didn't do his own PCC's and two that's why we do pre-combat inspections. So Keep that in mind when it comes to checking stuff You want to make sure to check things if you're the team leader Assume your guys are squared away and verify right trust, but verify you want to yes I trust you all you're competent and now we're just going to confirm that everybody's squared away And nobody missed anything because that's easy to do people miss things people make mistakes. This isn't about being a drill sergeant This is about having another layer of protection for everybody to make sure that stuff's good to go So check ammo because obviously that's important This is not necessarily in chronological order of how you should check them or level of importance See you even it's just how the acronym falls out. Okay? The next thing weapon Is there weapon functioning right? You can do a function check. Is it lubed? That's super important with ARs right in my opinion You should just take that bolt carrier out dunk it in a bucket of lube and shove it back in the gun, right? Is the gun properly lubed? Are all the optics working the lights working the lasers working? Do they have extra batteries for everything? Is there sling squared away and ready to go? Are there any loose bolts etc etc etc, right? Like make sure you're checking all that stuff on your own gun and then again spot check things on other people's guns to make Sure that they're functioning personal camo Right, so this is dictated by the environment that you're going in right But whatever that means for that environment whether it's full woodland be to use in face paint or if it's just like an over shirt over Slick plate carrier, right? Like what is the personal camo for what you're doing? That's what you want to inspect, right? Face paint is good if you're out in the field use it Any other there should be no exposed skin out in the field It should either be covered in paint or gloves or a shirt or whatever because skin especially for us Caucasian folks Shines Really well especially at like dawn dusk and night. It really shines So we want to make sure to cover that personal camo that also follows under things like, you know, is your hat or helmet scrimmed You know, do you have appropriate camo that's not going to interfere with your equipment? Is your BDU tailored to the environment stuff BDU battle dress uniform, right? Your shirt or your pants like make sure that's of course tailored to where you're going what you're doing Equipment so equipment is like standard equipment, right? So things like Your laser on your AR might be a good example, right? Or a smoke grenade that you carry on your team like is all of the general equipment Squared away ready to go, right? Is your water are your water bottles full think through stuff like that? Is your blade sharp is your lighter working check all of your equipment to make sure that's squared away ready to go Did you pack enough fuel tabs for your little field stove thing that you're gonna use to heat your water up to make some hot? Cocoa later when you have a nice relaxing evening radio radio gets its own category So depending on how you run radios, right? You're gonna want to make sure that your radios are squared away and ready to go Does every guy in your crew have a radio so you can all talk to each other all the time? If so are all the channels on the same does everybody have a spare battery everybody's radio charge, right? Does everybody have their call signs worked out like how are you gonna run your radio? Maybe radio just means that hey, we have a radio guy and we're gonna inspect the radio and make sure that's ready to go and I'll square it away special equipment So special equipment is something that you have that's just special just for this mission like maybe a set of wire cutters or a Sludge hammer or a crowbar or a breaching shotgun or something like that, right? Maybe there's some kind of special piece of equipment that you're bringing along just for this mission Your NVGs could possibly fall into here. They could also possibly just fall into your equipment, right? All that stuff that's maybe just special just for this outing Make sure that squared away and ready to go because you probably don't have that on your kit recently or often So you're probably not checking it all the time So you want to make sure extra special attention is cared to just the special equipment again Because if you're bringing it along just for this mission It's probably mission critical equipment and if it's not working. That's gonna be a big problem for you Orders do you understand your orders, right? Do you understand what we're doing? What our objective is what the commander's intent is we'll get into what that stuff means a little bit later in this series Do you understand that as the team leader? Are you able to clearly explain it? So everybody understands it, right? So this is a helpful kind of acronym to go through for your pre-combat checks Pre-combat inspections to make sure everybody's on the same page equipment wise and everybody's squared away to go Again, think of it as that extra safety net level of security to make sure Not necessarily to make someone do a bunch of push-ups Although hey, you can make people do push-ups in your crew if that's how you want to run it when it comes to Observation or viewing your sector generally if you're here and you're looking down this way You want to just kind of look in a lazy s pattern, right? You're scanning left to right near to far because you always want to be scanning particularly when you're out on patrol This is important, right? You always want to be looking around to see what's going on And so a really good way to do that is the s pattern. This is a common military Way to look at things that's been around for I don't know a long time probably my entire adult life Maybe longer but generally that's how we look at things So when you're out and you're patrolling and you're practicing and you're looking around think of looking in that s Right front to back like near to far. Excuse me and left to right real quick helpful tip on that when you're in the woods and stuff Remember to look through the foliage not at it. That will make sense Go out and practice that but make sure to look through the leaves through the foliage trying to see what's on the other side Rather than letting your eyes stop and focus on just those leaves There's a whole bunch we could say about nighttime and night vision and never both natural and artificial But again just to keep this quick because I'm assuming you have some familiarity here your natural eye takes a long time To acclimate to the nighttime. It's something like 30 to 45 minutes Okay, and it can get wiped out with any kind of white light and your night vision really gets Critically wounded should we say at that at that point and then takes another 30 40 minutes to develop So once you develop natural night vision assuming you're not running NVG's Make sure to do your best to preserve that natural night vision and not use any lights because that will of course hurt it If you are if you have time before you go out Sit in a dark room for 30 or 40 minutes to develop that natural night vision before you head out to do whatever it is You're going to do If you're using NVG's and stuff like that right that's going to destroy any natural night vision You had because your eyes are looking at a screen. That's essentially what you're doing, right? So your eyes going to acclimate to the light on that screen not the light in your surroundings Night vision equipment is fantastic and wonderful and you should own some and I've done videos on that But just think about these considerations if you have thermal so much more the better right thermals great when thinking in terms of your Personal camouflage and camouflage in general It's helpful to think about why things are seen right so Shape your your human eye understands how shapes work, right? And you don't want to have a shape that is distinctly human That's why we do things like put scrim on helmet because it helps break up the outline or the shape of Who you are and what a head looks like right the human face is Extremely recognizable and that's why we put camouflage paint to again break up the look of that face Because that distorts thing shine Things in nature in general right don't shine Maybe like water in a creek That's what the only thing I can think of but if you have anything metallic that shines right again That's gonna be instantly recognizable. That's why we paint our guns That's why we cover up shiny things as we don't wear Bright silver like sparkling armor like nights in the middle evil era, right? We're not trying to do that because we're trying to blend so nothing should shine on your equipment Don't clear coat your guns I've you know itself admittedly made that mistake before but when you paint your gun Don't put a clear coat on it because that's gonna give it a little bit of a sheen Shadow so again, you got you got to understand how things cast shadows particularly at night under moon shadow That can be a bigger deal But you have to need to understand how shadows work, right? use shadows to hide in when it comes to like foliage and stuff like that and At points you need to pay attention to where your shadow is casting or what kind of shadow your position is creating Surface, you know, I'll be honest I don't entirely know why that one's there that one kind of relates to shine But again, just this idea that if you have a non-natural surface, right? That's gonna be more easily recognizable than a covered or natural one Silhouette so silhouette is you know, we talked about like skylining yourself or again showing your outline again It relates to shape, right? A lot of these are interrelated, but like if you're on a hill And you stand right here on the top Well, that's terrible. You stand right here on the top of this hill, okay? And I'm down. I'm over here and I'm looking at you at that hill I can clearly see your silhouette and your outline, right? That's called skylining yourself. So be careful. Don't skyline yourself That's why we don't walk on the top of hills, right? We walk right here. So we're not skylining ourselves as easy But pay attention to what kind of outline you're giving in which direction Spacing, you know this one again, some of this stuff is a little nitty gritty for me And I'm kind of yeah, whatever but in general, you know, you want to break up your spacing between you and your guys Nature doesn't have even spacing, right? So if you're all perfectly spaced out, that's not exactly what you want You want to kind of vary that from time to time Or very distance between patrols and stuff like that movement quick jerky movement is gonna be more easily seen, right? The human eye again is very good in general and it's very good at picking up movement Most often things are seen because of movement, right? If you're really cammed up and you're looking good and you just plant yourself in the woods Chances of me seeing you are pretty poor, but when you start to move, that's when my eye can pick that up So we want to be very careful about movement. Sometimes it means you need to move really slow I mean, hey once the shooting starts obviously move fast, but up until then, right? You need to move slow The sniper manual from the US Army does a great job talking about stalking and moving slowly So we want to think about that when it comes to movement Sometimes depending on what you're doing and what you're after, you know Your patrol might take like an hour to cross a hundred yards It might take five hours to cross a hundred yards, right? Because you want to match your movement to not be seen depending on what you're doing in general If you're standing your area, right? Try to use your eyes to move as much as possible Try to swing your head in slow steady movements rather than like quick bird-like movements, right? You get the idea Muzzle flash first of all use a suppressor Okay, like that that seems pretty pretty obvious at this point So but second of all, you know understand that your muzzle flash both the sight of it again, particularly at night and the Dispersion that that it causes on the ground or whatever and and it's blast right can be a problem and give your position away That's again why we really try to use suppressors because they're great at controlling both of those things that being said You know, if you only have rock and a2 flash hider, those are pretty good at their job You just still need to be concerned about muzzle flash from time to time because that was one thing that can give your position away Down here aircraft and thermal Quick thing an aircraft you don't look up at aircraft, right? Because that's a good way to again give your position away and your face is easily recognizable So we don't look up at aircraft and thermal You know in the textbook, right? They talk when he talks about Using vegetation and mass thermal. I don't know about that everything. I know about thermal is it's really good And it's pretty hard to hide from so avoidance is your key your best prevention there However, you know, if you want to dig deeper into that and figure out ways to defeat thermal you can do that I just wanted to note it here when it comes to locating bad guys It's nice to be able to use distance direction and description the triple D as kind of a quick handy thing Right, you know 300 yards to the north by the red barn, right? Like that's a good way to help people locate on what's going on and where the bad guy is When you can find that out So that's just a helpful little acronym to keep in your pocket. Maybe make your teams SOP whatever in in the book He goes through this big thing about directly right and half left and whatever I just prefer the clock method meaning in front of me is 12 o'clock, right? And that's how I'm gonna use that to locate bad guys. So if up here is 12 behind me is six Three and nine, right? I'm gonna say hey 200 yards one o'clock, you know by the house That's where the bad guy is so that gives everybody a real good direction of understanding what's going on, right? 12 o'clock is right in front of us I'm saying one o'clock and I'm explaining the distance in the description That's the method that I personally am gonna use if you want to go into what he uses in the book Knock yourself out, but I've just found this to be much simpler two other things to talk about when we talk about locating bad guys One is tracers. So remember tracers work both ways if you're trying to pinpoint a bad guy And where they are it might be good for your team lead to carry like one mag with tracer rounds in it So that he can do that and direct fire onto where you need to direct it on to In general, I hesitate to do that though because again in our context, right normal everyday people We don't have access to all the firepower And so we need to probably can't work on being hidden and work on this camouflage thing much more than like big army Therefore it would probably behoove you more to not use tracers. It's an idea You can keep in your back pocket But in general I would probably stay away from that in our context in the book he talks about FCOs or fire control orders I in general think that that's probably not needed. We're not gonna spend a lot of time here on that But FCO fire control order, right like Bob I want you to shoot this fast at this guy on my signal or now or whatever Again, if we have everybody that we're assuming is generally squared away And we're letting people do individual thinking I don't think we need to be issuing fire control orders The one place where you might need to do that or would be helpful to do that would be crew-served weapons But you don't have any crew-served weapons. So that's probably not a useful thing But just so you know FCO fire control order a couple other things to note here hand signals You should have them in your crew. You should use them There are tons of YouTube videos out there and what hand signals are and which what you can do and whatever just remember There's no Bible of hand signals Okay, if you want to make a hand signal up for your team that means something Knock yourself out like it doesn't matter all the hand signals are made up anyway But just use what works for you and your team to be able to communicate Realistically you probably only need like five or ten hand signals to have a really efficient patrol So learn some of those go out with your guys and walk around and you're gonna get used to those real quick We're gonna talk about this probably more in patrols, but they talk about halts In this chapter and he talks about a short halt An admin halt and a sales halt, right? So sales Stop look listen smell That's what you're gonna do on that halt stop look listen smell So that's a often what you do when you go out on a patrol you're gonna your first halt's gonna be a sales halt Everybody'll stop for five ten minutes whatever you'll take your hat off You just kind of sit there and kind of get used to the environment, right? You're gonna stop you look around you're gonna listen to the environment. You're gonna smell what's there, right? When it comes to smelling you're smelling for the five F's fuel fire feces Food and something else. I can't remember freshly turned soil. That's what it is but That is something that you can do when you're out there and then on patrol you can take multiple sales halts, right? Whenever you get into a new environment, or you need to get reacclimated You can always take a sales halt But those are really to get used to your environment and then the last one is an admin halt again We'll probably cover more of this in the patrolling chapter, but a short halt is just hey We're just gonna stop for a minute admin halt is probably the leaders need to talk and conference and figure out what we're gonna do next These are the different kinds of halts that we'll get to later On halts, you'll have different levels of security The term you'll hear a lot is stand to that means everybody's on security, right? Everybody's alert with a gun loaded ready to rock. I hope your guns loaded. Otherwise. I don't know what you're doing Ready to rock and you most often do that at dusk and dawn because You know, that's where a lot of attacks happen, right? Again, that's more of a big army thing But it's still something to pay attention to and to be able to say hey We're gonna have a stand to right now and everybody knows what that means, right? Then you can do 50% security which is you know, everybody breaks down to their buddy pairs one buddies on security one But he's not and you could potentially go all the way down to 25% security now Listen if you're running around in a four six eight man crew You're probably not going to go down to 25% security because that means one or two guys are actually watching what's going on And one or two guys watching everything in an eight-man crew is just really hard to do, right? So the lowest you're probably gonna go It's 50% because then at least you got four guys that can pay attention to what's going on in the world if you got eight or You know again to most often though everybody's pulling security all the time because if you only got four or eight guys You just don't have that many people in order to give up security some other considerations when it comes to Fieldcraft and basics that I just thought about what as I was reading through this chapter and preparing this talk One poncho and poncho shelter right like if you don't know how to make a shelter with your poncho and some paracord You should probably look up how to do that And if your guys don't know how to do that you should probably look into how to do that So that when it comes time to bed down for the night or whatever and it's raining or whatever You can set up a poncho shelter that that's just something you should probably know how to do Nots you should be up on your knots Do you know how to tie a bow line knot right or a trucker's hitch or whatever if you're not practice that I try to practice my knots because I'm trying to improve in that area But that's something that you and your guys should know how to do and know a couple basic knots for again stuff You're trying to accomplish like building that poncho shelter those knots will come in handy Fire now listen most often you're probably not gonna be making a fire if you're out doing goon stuff Right because fires are bright However, it's probably always a good idea to keep a lighter on you just in case and it's a good idea to have Some kind of fire starter and have practiced that and know how you're gonna make a fire if in the inventive emergency You needed to do that March this is what I'm surprised wasn't in the the basics and field craft book But you should have a basic understanding of March, right massive believing airway Respiratory circulation Hemorrhage head hypothermia So you should have a basic understanding of how to do that if everybody on your team doesn't have a basic understanding of March Or how to apply a tourniquet or how to use what's in their i-fac or know that you use your i-fac on you And you never use your i-fac on someone else That's again something you should understand in your crew and you guys should talk through that team so piece You can have team so piece for literally anything right team standard operating procedures for little right literally anything But you should have thought about this a little bit beforehand The best way to find that out is to go out with your guys and do stuff and you're gonna come up with SOPs as you train and practice right like okay Well that doesn't work so in the future if this happens Everybody's gonna do X or Y or you know what? We're all gonna store our med kits on the left side right up front because that's just the simplest So we know everybody's med kit is or whatever But you need to start having team SOPs that comes from training together And that's where you're gonna start to build those team SOPs based on your guys's skill set What you're trying to accomplish and your tactics, okay? So this is the end of the first lecture on fieldcraft and basics Our next one I think is battle drills and movement so that will be a little bit more interesting And I'm sure all these are gonna get much longer than this video so buckle up to brave deeds and endure