Apophis

SOP (Radio) - The Contact Report

How many times has everyone heard the following type of conversation over TeamSpeak ?

Unknown voice over TeamSpeak says: "uhhh....there's some guys in the woods over there... uhhhh... they're coming this way now .... uhhh... I don't think they see me yet... uhhhh ... should I shoot them?"

.......then silence, followed by a message on your own chat computer screen saying "Bravo is down"

Obviously, there's a lot of missing information about the enemy threat, such as .... who was the friendly call sign that engaged, what type of enemy, where are they, what appears to be their intentions and what are you doing about it? The rest of the fire team are left in the dark to draw their own conclusions as to the impact on the mission and what they should do next. All in all, this is not a workable solution for any real life special forces team.

All military units are trained to use a standard NATO form of radio procedure for reporting encounters with enemy forces. The reason for standardizing the format of for contact reporting, is to minimize extraneous radio traffic by creating a clear and concise common approach. Therefore, everyone listening on the radio net understands exactly the nature and scope of the enemy threat. In our virtual Operation Flashpoint world we don’t use actual military radios, but with TeamSpeak , virtually the same methodology can be utilized.

Let's use the same example and send a proper Contact Report using |42nd| Badger reporting to |42nd| Eternal who is the Fire Team Leader.

Example with Fire Team under status condition "RED":

Unknown voice over TeamSpeak says: "Leader, this is Badger, CONTACT, Grid Reference A9, lightly armed enemy infantry in patrol strength, moving north east through woods, threat imminent, am observing."

|42nd| Eternal says over TeamSpeak: "Badger, this is Leader, ENGAGE, team disperse, go GREEN"

|42nd| Badger responds by hitting a pre-defined hotkey he's programmed. This results in |42nd| Eternal seeing on his chat screen the words "|42nd| Badger: cc", which gives him direct confirmation that |42nd| Badger has received and understood his transmission.


Note: refer to SOP (Radio) - Phonetic Alphabet for details on pronouncing grid references over radio net.
Note: refer to SOP (Radio) - "cc" for details on use of radio acknowledgments.
Note: refer to SOP (Tactics) - Fire Discipline for details on use of GREEN/YELLOW/RED RoE.

The form of the Contact Report answers the following questions:

1. Who is sending the report?
2. Where are the enemy?
3. What is their estimated strength, type and armament.
4. What appears to be their intentions and/or direction of travel.
5. What are you doing about them?
6. What are your recommendations?

Note: Contact Reports can be abused and over used. They're most useful in a situation where various fire teams are geographically separated performing individual mission tasks. If the entire nine man fire team is geographically on the same ground and everyone sees the same threat, often it's redundant to send a Contact Report, except if you believe that other team members can't see the actual threat. Therefore, information such as Grid References and possible enemy intentions might prove useful. The key is to use one's own best judgment. It should be noted that if there was a higher command structure above the nine man GR team we play in this game, then even if the team were all together, the Team Leader would send a proper radio Contact Report to that higher authority regardless.

After a bit of practice using this technique, it becomes almost second nature and makes it much easier to communicate enemy threats, providing the team leader better command and control capability, plus improving the overall SA (situational awareness) of the entire fire team. We would encourage all players on any Tactical Gamer Operation Flashpoint server, to utilize this standard NATO SOP methodology for Contact Reports as much as possible.