OCS Day 55 (1/AUG/09)

August 16th, 2009 Doug Posted in Journal Entry | No Comments »

Soldiers in our rehearsal area.

We had one more day of rehearsals today before we go to lanes tomorrow. Overall the rehearsals went better today than yesterday, and I certainly think we are making progress.

Yesterday what would happen with rehearsals is that we would run through a scenario, sit and discuss (or argue about) it for too long, then run another, and someone else would make the same mistakes. Today things ran smoother and we got some issues worked out. For the most part we worked on deliberate attack again all day, but we did do a little bit of work on ambush. I’ll hold off for now on discussing ambush because I want to discuss what a field expedient OPORD is.

So an OPORD, as you may remember, has 5 paragraphs, and details an upcoming mission. The five paragraphs are Situation, Mission, Execution, Service Support and Command and Signal. These are the things I spent hours contructing instead of studying for history in week 6. Well, the planning squad leader in the field must receive, make, and give an OPORD in 30 minutes. Furthermore, he must actually begin giving his OPORD at around 10 minutes of his 30 minutes in order to give his team leaders time to disseminate the information and conduct rehearsals. So that whole process must be done in 30 minutes.

So obviously there will be no power point graphics or other such things. The planning squad leader’s task is to construct an OPORD in 10 minutes, giving the bare amount of information. He must use all five paragraphs of the OPORD, but specifically he will be graded on giving a terrain and enemy analysis as part of the situation paragraph and the completeness and logicality of the execution paragraph. So he must make deductions about terrain and enemy, and give a complete plan, beginning to end, that makes some semblance of sense. We are not being graded on tactics here, but obviously if something is seriously jacked up and makes no semblance of sense it will affect his grade.

So what I am getting at here is that the planning squad leader must give a field expedient OPORD. The common thing to do around here, and which I did, was to make a laminated cheat sheet with blanks on it, so when we are making our OPORDs we can just basically fill in the blanks on the cheat sheets with map markers. I included different things in mine than others might include in theirs, but essentially they serve the same purpose. And anyway, when reciting an OPORD it becomes almost a cookie cutter approach anyway out here, just like when executing an ambush. What I mean by this is that when conducting a deliberate attack, you just follow the steps. In the same way, when making and reciting an OPORD you more or less just follow the (though admittedly not as clear cut) steps, and you should pass the evaluation. More to follow on this.

Anyways, we finished our rehearsals about chow time (1700) ate our MRE’s, and were more or less done for the day. We did have to go sit in the bleachers because there was lightning in the area. You just got to love Army safety – go sit in metal bleachers because someone somewhere is a 30 mile radius saw lightning! It’s not quite as bad as I make it sound, but it sometimes seems like this. Anyway, the bleachers are covered and is grounded with lightning protection, so one the off chance it is struck we are protected.

Before I go here there are 2 nice things about being out here I want to mention. First, we are relatively self-autonomous. What I mean by this is that there is largely no cadre control over what we are doing during the day. Today we conducted rehearsals, but if we had wanted to sit in the air-conditioning all day no one would really have said anything. Well, no cadre would have said anything; our student leadership probably would have. In any case, we want to be successful tomorrow so that is not what we did.

Secondly is the amount of sleep we get. It is currently 1900 and I’m settling in for bed. We still get up at 0500, and getting 10 hours of sleep is foreign but awesome. Anyway, we will need it for tomorrow as we hit the lanes…