Milnet Decision Game 3: Enemy Across the Bridge
- Thread starter Infanteer
- Start date
Haligonian
Sr. Member
- Reaction score
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I just led this one for officer's PD. Wicked discussion.
Haligonian
Sr. Member
- Reaction score
- 382
- Points
- 880
Infanteer said:
We executed it with all the Bn's officers. We took two hours to execute it but the plan was 90 mins. It started with my intro, then a reading of the problem followed by questions. Participants then had 15 mins to come up with a solution then OC's had 30 mins with their people to discuss and then we had another 30 mins for solutions to the whole group and then another 5 or 10 min wrap up by me and the CO. I believe the 30 mins solutions with the whole group became more like 45 or 60 mins.
Discussion centered around what was the focus, the bridge or GOAT. It pretty quickly became evident that the Bridge was what was actually important, however, people still wanted to get rid of the enemy in GOAT and so the majority of responses saw a sequential approach of destroying the enemy in GOAT then taking the bridge. As part of guiding the conversation I asked them what they figured the enemy would be doing in the vicinity of the bridge while you were fighting it out in GOAT with a whole BG? The obvious answer that they would likely continue to reinforce or at least take advantage of that time in some capacity led to another discussion where I commented that we shouldn't assume we can have our cake and eat it too and that we must ruthlessly focus on our first priority and the main effort. This was a comment about tactics generally and not just for this specific situation.
In response to the COA that sees the enemy in GOAT being fixed while the main effort heads for the bridge there was a good point made about the difficulties of trying to command and control two separate tactical actions simultaneously and by night. I thought that was a great point and needs to be considered.
From an execution perspective I and then the CO noted that solutions needed to be stated as direction. I said this when we began the game but unsurprisingly for a group that is unfamiliar with these, most people still came up and presented it more like a back brief than a set of radio orders. It was great to see that what I thought to be one of the better solutions was given by one of my former pl comds who was familiar with these from doing them with me for six months, every week, in Latvia.
The Bde Comd has ordered these be done every week so it will be interesting to see how this evolves.
- Reaction score
- 4,319
- Points
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I printed my 'solution' in a PDF format from PPT, and am enclosing it here - as much as we all hate powerpoint, it's a visual solution, and in the absence of a whiteboard for me to explain it to you, it seemed like the best idea for me...yes, I know I didn't follow the format!
