yea I know this threads been dead for a while but I just wanted to say Crashdown wasnt as bad as people are making him out to me. I like the show a lot, I thought season 1 was good and season 2 just blew me away but a few things bother me.
The biggest weakness was the subordinates. They had horrible attitudes, Crashdown didnt need all the doubting and second guessing, he needed them to follow orders and do what they were told, and the things he was telling them to do were not out of line. They definitely lacked the "warrior ethos" todays military strives to cultivate. In today's army they probably would be punished for their actions.
First off, you just crash landed and made a lot of noise on the way in. You grab what you can and you go. You leave as soon as possible because the bad guys just saw and heard that big smoke trail you made on the way in and are moving to you. This is true even when not crashing. When you make a helicopter insertion as soon as the birds leave you grab your pack and run for the nearest covered and concealed area because company is coming.
The chief did a good job in telling the LT that they should make sure they had all their equipment. As the senior enlisted man he should've been acting as the platoon sgt and part of that job is to sweep the area to make sure nothing is left behind whenever the patrol leaves an area. But not at the cost of getting caught by the cylon welcoming committee.
The 5 graph plan surprised me. That's a tool the military actually uses a lot but it's called an operations order and it is used in the field. When an oporder is properly briefed it takes about 2 hours to get it all out. Oporders are very detailed and are performed for every mission. Often you get an oporder before you go out on mission and you get follow on missions while in the field in the form of fragmentary orders. If the Lt did something wrong it was that he wasnt detailed enough when he was briefing the plan. Now unless you have plenty of time and are in a secured area while in the field you usually wont do a full blown oporder but instead brief a frago but you still use the original oporder. You'll say something like "situation (paragraph 1) is the same, no changes" and also service and support (graph 4) and command and signal (graph 5) usually remain the same. I was impressed that Crashdown used a terrain model to brief his plan.
As far as the criticism that Crashdown was too by the book, in the military the book is derived from lessons learned in real world applications. If its in the book, it means it works. The problem is its a pain in the ass to go by the book all the time because it takes a lot of discipline. When you start to get tired you start taking shortcuts and that's where you get in trouble. In the military if you can do everything by the book you will greatly increase your survivability.
There's a saying in the army that goes "poor plans violently executed are better than brilliant plans poorly executed." If you want to maximize your chance of living through a fight, when you're committed and you're told to go you go and you go hard. Violence of action will save your life, the hesitation, the refusal to perform their part of a plan they raised no objections to earlier, by cally and others put everyone's lives in danger. The chief argued that the patrol should hit the dish a "klick" away. A klick is 1 kilometer and in that terrain you're not moving 1 kilometer safely (meaning tactically in a manner that would prevent you getting discovered and engaged) in much less than hour. Realistically, if your friends are in the sky above you at that moment you hit the cylons where they are or the rescue plane is done.
All that noise from cally and the others about how the Lt couldnt expect them to do the things he was asking them to do was horrible. There are plenty of stories about how in major battles where the entire chain of command was wiped out in the first few minutes of a battle, privates would take charge of companies of men and win the day. The military might not expect kittens to fight like lions but it does expect them to try. Now in their situation where they had just crashed they should have initiated their escape and recovery plan which usually means avoiding contact with the enemy but when the enemy is gearing up to shoot down your ride home you should probably do something about it. As the senior enlisted man it should've fallen to the chief to keep everyone else in line and squash the whining.
The biggest weakness was the subordinates. They had horrible attitudes, Crashdown didnt need all the doubting and second guessing, he needed them to follow orders and do what they were told, and the things he was telling them to do were not out of line. They definitely lacked the "warrior ethos" todays military strives to cultivate. In today's army they probably would be punished for their actions.
First off, you just crash landed and made a lot of noise on the way in. You grab what you can and you go. You leave as soon as possible because the bad guys just saw and heard that big smoke trail you made on the way in and are moving to you. This is true even when not crashing. When you make a helicopter insertion as soon as the birds leave you grab your pack and run for the nearest covered and concealed area because company is coming.
The chief did a good job in telling the LT that they should make sure they had all their equipment. As the senior enlisted man he should've been acting as the platoon sgt and part of that job is to sweep the area to make sure nothing is left behind whenever the patrol leaves an area. But not at the cost of getting caught by the cylon welcoming committee.
The 5 graph plan surprised me. That's a tool the military actually uses a lot but it's called an operations order and it is used in the field. When an oporder is properly briefed it takes about 2 hours to get it all out. Oporders are very detailed and are performed for every mission. Often you get an oporder before you go out on mission and you get follow on missions while in the field in the form of fragmentary orders. If the Lt did something wrong it was that he wasnt detailed enough when he was briefing the plan. Now unless you have plenty of time and are in a secured area while in the field you usually wont do a full blown oporder but instead brief a frago but you still use the original oporder. You'll say something like "situation (paragraph 1) is the same, no changes" and also service and support (graph 4) and command and signal (graph 5) usually remain the same. I was impressed that Crashdown used a terrain model to brief his plan.
As far as the criticism that Crashdown was too by the book, in the military the book is derived from lessons learned in real world applications. If its in the book, it means it works. The problem is its a pain in the ass to go by the book all the time because it takes a lot of discipline. When you start to get tired you start taking shortcuts and that's where you get in trouble. In the military if you can do everything by the book you will greatly increase your survivability.
There's a saying in the army that goes "poor plans violently executed are better than brilliant plans poorly executed." If you want to maximize your chance of living through a fight, when you're committed and you're told to go you go and you go hard. Violence of action will save your life, the hesitation, the refusal to perform their part of a plan they raised no objections to earlier, by cally and others put everyone's lives in danger. The chief argued that the patrol should hit the dish a "klick" away. A klick is 1 kilometer and in that terrain you're not moving 1 kilometer safely (meaning tactically in a manner that would prevent you getting discovered and engaged) in much less than hour. Realistically, if your friends are in the sky above you at that moment you hit the cylons where they are or the rescue plane is done.
All that noise from cally and the others about how the Lt couldnt expect them to do the things he was asking them to do was horrible. There are plenty of stories about how in major battles where the entire chain of command was wiped out in the first few minutes of a battle, privates would take charge of companies of men and win the day. The military might not expect kittens to fight like lions but it does expect them to try. Now in their situation where they had just crashed they should have initiated their escape and recovery plan which usually means avoiding contact with the enemy but when the enemy is gearing up to shoot down your ride home you should probably do something about it. As the senior enlisted man it should've fallen to the chief to keep everyone else in line and squash the whining.
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