AIr Assault 101

Air Assault Task Force can be unforgiving to the beginning player (or the advanced player, for that matter). We have striven to make AATF the most realistic simulation of air assault combat ever created. As such, the things that will get you killed in combat will probably get you killed in AATF, too.

Don’t feel bad. U.S. Army officers train their whole life to fight wars and still get their butts kicked by the OPFOR at places like the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk , Louisiana . Fighting wars is hard stuff.

What we are going to try to do now is give you a brief, nitty-gritty, how-to on one of the most complex, difficult operations a US Army infantry battalion does: the air assault. Before we start, there are a few general concepts that you have to keep in mind when fighting in AATF. Don’t worry, we are not about to bore you to tears with an essay on the principles of war. Whole books and manuals have been written on these, and they can do a lot better job than we can. But two principles must be mastered if you are going to fight and win in AATF.

Synchronization

In warfighting, this word is best defined as “Getting all the pieces working together at the same time”. If you have played any of the scenarios yet, you see the enemy do this. Your infantry platoon is wandering through the woods, from the LZ to the objective. You hit a minefield. Suddenly, his infantry teams “light you up” with direct fire. Artillery or mortars begin falling on your head. Damn! Restart!

You have to learn to do the same thing to him. It’s harder to do when you are in the offense. Artillery missions take a few minutes to begin impacting. Fixed-wing aircraft take as long as fifteen minutes to reach the target area. Your attack and carry helicopters travel at different speeds. Your infantry moves very slow once it is on the ground. And you have to get eyes (recon, UAV, air) deep enough so that you can observe for your indirect fire systems.

If you can master this, you will (almost) always win.

Mass

This is only subtly different from synchronization, and some will argue that it is the same thing. The real difference between the two is focus. Synchronization is useless if you are doing everything at once, but you are doing it all over the map. You have to focus your assets at the decisive point on the battlefield.

This is best illustrated by a bad example. You are beginning your air assault and your attack aviationd detects something on one LZ. You go to investigate. You begin prepping the objective with artillery. Your carry helicopters move to another LZ, finding it “hot” (occupied by enemy, and their not too happy). You start moving your close air support, but it will take 15 minutes for it to arrive on the battlefield. You finally get your infantry on the ground and they run into an obstacle and start taking fire from an enemy machine gun. &$%^@#$! Time to hit Restart!

In this article, we are going to talk about how to apply these two concepts to an air assault. For this discussion we are going to use the scenario, JRTC 01: Airfield Seizure (Tutorial), from Air Assault Task Force. This scenario is included in the demo, which is available here.

Air Assault Task Force is available from Shrapnel Games. To check out the website, go here. There is also a ProSIM Company Air Assault Task Force page here.

The only way to really get this stuff down, though, is practice. With time you will get an intuitive feel for how long things take to happen and when certain events have to be initiated and where. We have also included FM 90-4: Air Assault Operations on the game CD. This is the definitive work on this subject, and the source for the following discussion.

What is an air assault? Acording to the FM 90-4: Air Assault Operations…

Air assault operations are those in which assault forces (combat, combat support, and combat service support), using firepower, mobility, and total integration of helicopter assets, maneuver on the battlefield under the control of the ground or air maneuver commander to engage and destroy enemy forces or to seize and hold key terrain.

OK. That didn’t help much. Perhaps it is better to break it down into its essential components. To be an air assault, an operation must…

• Be offensive (as opposed to defensive)
• Integrate helicopters and ground combat forces
• Destroy the enemy and/or seize terrain