Principle among the abilities of a successful infantryman in PR is the ability to meld personal and squad responsibility. While the goals and object of personal play and coordinated squad / team play are often similar, they are just as often intrinsic opposites. On the one hand, squad coherency is paramount for providing a strong base of fire and mutual support to be able to achieve objectives… On the other, squad coherency severely limits the ability of the individual to adapt in the most expedient way possible to sudden changes in a tactical climate.

Pitfalls of Coherency

Spacing – Easily the most significant problem with squad coherency is the general spacing of squad mates. Even the best squads tend to bunch up at key moments: halt orders to drop a rally point, sudden halts due to contact or stops to change orders. It is at these points that squads are most vulnerable to area of effect weapons such as grenades or RPGs or even a well placed machine gun burst.

A healthy 10 meter spread is not a terrible idea – such a spread largely increases the frontage of your unit aiding in spotting enemies at initial contact, spreading out your unit to avoid serious ambush and making the unit harder to spot.

Spacing, the converse – Knowing that a squad behaves in certain ways gives good insight on best possible times to engage a squad. When putting fire on a squad you are likely to change their posture from one of overland movement to engagement and in that transition squad mates are likely to collide with one another’s spacing in a domino like effect. After the first rounds are fired, nearest contacts belly up while others run forward to get into firing positions, often exposing themselves and bunching up. Knowing this, then, we can presume that the best moments to deploy a launched grenade can be within five or so seconds after initial contact on a squad that is moving together.

Further, the Orientation period in the engagement is likely to have a certain acceleration period attached to it in which the attacking unit has a great deal of mobility. With their enemy rushing to get firing positions or bellied up trying to survive, the attacking unit can enjoy freedom of movement for at least a limited period of time. This allows for individuals or fire teams to flank for kill shots.

Personal Initiative – The ability of a combatant to be able to force his agenda upon his enemy, to force the enemy to react to decisions made by him and then exploit this paradigm are signs of dominating combative initiative. One of the first casualties of squad play is personal initiative. With personal initiative go other traits such as aggressiveness, situational awareness and overall individual survivability.

Players in squads that are concerned about playing with their squads lose large portions of their personal initiative as a result of trying to maintain coherency and function in support of their squad. This sacrifice makes them far less likely to react in as intelligible of a fashion to sudden changes in the area around them. This is bad and is often the reason that whole squads of high performing players are wiped out by sudden attacks of isolated enemies.

Instances of High Casualties in High Level Squad Play

Overland Movement on a Bearing

Probably the most common time that my squad has been wiped out has been during overland movement as a unit. By not monitoring our spacing and frontage we were far too easily spotted a target when moving in a group. Further, our insistence on operating as a squad generally blunted the tactical awareness of members and created an unwieldy unit that took far too long to orient towards sudden appearances of danger.

Breaking into logical subdivisions such as fire teams can reduce the Smallest Tactical Unit size to a more manageable and faster thinking unit with less issues of coherency. By tracking fewer squad mates over less frontage the amount of data that must be monitored to remain in coherency and mutual support is significantly reduced thereby allowing more time to be spent scanning for targets or adapting to whatever situation crops up.

On an individual level by simply moving on an oblique path towards an objective, be it a move order or a flag, can significantly increase survivability. Moving in a straight line (ie on a bearing) makes your movement highly predictable and also provides a bearing to your enemy. The human eye will naturally find movement and then correlate this movement on a planar frame of reference – this implies that anyone moving parallel to you (your squad mates moving on the same bearing) are far more rapidly spotted and engaged. This phenomenon is responsible for the large amounts of casualties in initial contact when moving in coherency with a squad. By taking an oblique path you are able to break up the parallel quality of your squad movement as well as increase the ability to spot targets by taking a different angle at your destination. These are all good things.

Prolonged Squad Contact

We have all been here. Several minutes into a drawn out contact with an enemy squad (likely supported by a near by rally) we are over run from a flank by several enemies that were able to break contact and re-engage at a different time and place than we were expecting or oriented to.

Essentially a firefight boils down to a race for a Nash Equilibrium where the best choice is to defeat your opponent and the most direct answer (in the case of Game Theory, the action with the highest ‘weight’) is to flank your opponent. You and your opponent will eventually choose to flank each other in a kind of a Mexican Standoff. Beat them to it OR be waiting for them when they make their move.

Successfully flanking an enemy as a squad requires at least an element of your unit to break contact and begin to flank. Likewise, your opponent is doing the same thing. In either case, your squad mates are transitioning from an Engaged posture to one of aggressive overland movement… albeit with a raised level of situational awareness towards your recent firefight, but still not a fully engaged posture. What this suggests is that if you can anticipate the bearing and timing of your enemy’s flanking maneuver, you can catch them moving overland on a bearing aggressively (ie not focusing on danger – YOU) in an attempt to flank you. As per the earlier example, this is one of the highest casualty points in PR.