Battle Tracking Basics

I'm a Retired Marine GySgt and you guys do a good job explaining things in layman's terms for folks. Semper Fidelis

As always, thank you for helping us to go from civilians to 5th Gen resistants

Playing Arma and just creating your own scenarios can teach you a lot of the symbology as well; was actually surprised how many of the symbols I knew from just playing a game!

This is the manliest arts and craft project I've ever witnessed.

I've watched this 3 times over the last few weeks and still keep picking new information up. You sir, are doing your fellow countrymen a great service.

That's the best battle tracking lecture I've ever heard. Thanks

Great work as usual, but 3 points. The Map under redlight realy showed the importance of differenciating the Symbols for blue red and yellow forces by shape not by colour. Even my LTC who trained me in tactics didnt consider, that under redlight all symbols are black, this is why you need the difference shapes. Yes from an S2 perspective one overlay to track red and blue is enough. But you can prepare Maps way better with multiple overlays. If you are interested, I can show you my maps from Officerschool and Infantry School. The Quote: "No plan survived first contact with the enemy." is from Moltke( the older, trust me I am from the prussian part of westphalia) And yeah for the crayon eater crew you can quote Mike Tyson "Everybody got a pan until he gets punched in the face!"

I am not a prepper or military, but this is really fascinating to me. You explain things so clearly and simply.

I did this for a full year in Iraq to complete my staff time… it was awesome and definitely put me ahead of my peers, sharpened the edge…

Ive always had this fantasy of battle tracking with the little green toy soldiers from the kids play room. Something about that just feels fun.

Always ready to learn from the S2 team. Thanks!

We called them Deck logs in the Navy. I filled that position many times. High speed maneuvers, and actions we used specific abbreviations. These logs were rewritten hours later fully expanding all abbreviations etc. These become permanent records and are sent off. Amazing how much data we took in seconds or minutes.

"Back in the day" for me means pre-BFT:) Corkboards, maps, pins, paper or acetate overlays, colored pencils/alcohol markers. This was a big part of running a heavy mortar FDC..of course, we also used similar low-tech methods to compute the firing data.

Bro this is awesome even for travel, hiking and reporting. Very nice.

All this discussion of how to run a TOC or COC, and the elephant in the room is the modern era of drones and guided munitions against large static soft targets like TOC and COC base-X tents. Fantastic job discussing all the seats at the table and little jobs to be thought about! This next decade is going to really put another level of friction against the COC teams in hostile environments doing all of these critical jobs.

Ahhhhhh, the memories of acetate overlays and grease pencils…. 🫡

As a colorblind person, I highly respect the choice to use both color and shape

My Sunday night just got a whole lot better! Thanks man! Can you do a guerilla tactics/sabotage episode?

I send up my mavic to "battle track" my kids around the neighborhood. I've also used it for milsim paintball to be my "eye in the sky". Send up to 400' camera straight down. Shoot, move, communicate.

Very important to do shape and color when designating enemy and friendly forces because if you look at a Red symbol under red light you won't know what color it is