A four-hour ATV ride

Priscilla, Michael, Kathleen and I drove ATVs on cross-country trails for four hours yesterday at Mount Magazine State Park. The trails were rock-filled, curved, uphill and downhill, none very steep.

Priscilla, Michael and I had driven much the same course last August. At that time I told Priscilla the ride was the most fun I’d had since the last time I drove an M113 APC cross-country, in 1989. Driving an APC is a lot less work than driving an ATV, but more dangerous.

At the end of the ride in August, Priscilla said I had not kept up with her. That was true, in a sense. I had not maintained highway distance, but as I mentioned to her yesterday, “I kept you in sight and was in position to give covering fire, if necessary, and I checked the hillsides for bunkers or other sign of enemy.”

Which leads to a thing I wrote about a dozen years ago.

Tactics

Sometimes when I’m driving along a highway and see a particular piece of terrain, I put together a defense plan or an attack plan. In a defensive plan, I look at the hillside or hilltop and figure out where I would put machine guns to cover likely avenues of approach and where to place grenadiers to cover dead space. Dead space consists of those areas covered from fire of flat-trajectory weapons -- rifles and machine guns. A small fold in the ground is dead space, as are gullies and ravines, clusters of boulders. A grenadier, with a high angle-of-fire weapon, can place HE rounds in or on areas of dead space.

In a defense plan, I also try to figure out where the enemy will come from, how he will approach the hill, and where I can begin engaging him with fire. You want to engage the enemy as far out as possible, to begin attriting his numbers before he can adequately engage you. An enemy attacking on foot is at a disadvantage, unless he has sufficient supporting fire from artillery and mortars and can force you to remain under cover. If you have to remain under cover, you can’t place fire on the enemy.

There comes a time in any attack, though, when enemy artillery and mortars have to stop firing on your defensive positions. That is an aspect of timing. If the support fire stops too soon, you can leave covered positions and begin engaging the enemy infantry. If the support fire stops too late, the enemy infantry will run into their own fire, or they will stop advancing.

Planning an attack on a piece of terrain, I try to determine the best avenues of approach. Covered and concealed avenues are best, of course, but seldom available. I study the terrain, determining dead space and if I could use that space to approach the position.

A basic problem in an infantry attack for the last two hundred years is found in the final four hundred meters. At that point, defensive fires are most intense, because four hundred meters is about the maximum effective range of almost all rifles – the range at which a marksman can hit a target. Machine guns can cover to just over one thousand meters, but a defender will not fire his machine guns at that range. Infantry doctrine states machine guns are not fired until the enemy threatens to overrun a position. That threat occurs around four hundred meters.

If the enemy attack is with tanks and mounted infantry and you are dug-in infantry, all bets are off.

The kind of defense and attack I sometimes plan were almost never a part of my war, but I consider them anyway. I often wonder if others from my war consider such things, and if they don’t, why not?