The Lost Art of the Ambush
This short article is taken from our new Small Unit Infantry Ambush Tactics book. The article is drawn from the book’s introduction and discusses how the doctrinal “schoolhouse” mentality has caused many small unit leaders to forget the hard-earned ambush lessons of previous conflicts. We welcome your reactions, comments and ideas on our Facebook page and if you like the article, click below to check out the book on Amazon.
The Lost Art of the Ambush
The ambush is one of the most commonly practiced but least understood tactical skills in the modern U.S. military. The reason for this is rooted in the U.S. Army’s decision to use small unit tactical scenarios or “lanes” as the basis for most leadership training across the Army. Leadership is obviously a complex art that is difficult to teach and evaluate. Specific skills and attributes required for effective leadership can vary depending on a leader’s occupational specialty and mission set. Therefore, the Army picked small unit infantry operations as a baseline for teaching leadership to all of its personnel, whether they are infantrymen, logisticians, pilots or mechanics etc.
When Army officer cadets go through training, they run through small unit tactical lanes as part of their evaluation, even if they are destined never to fire a weapon in combat. Basic training and basic non-commissioned officer schools also make use of small unit lanes for training and evaluation. Many of the Army’s most respected leadership schools such as Ranger School primarily focus small unit tactical lanes. Components of special operations force qualification courses like the Special Forces Qualification Course look very similar to Ranger School and once again use small unit tactical lanes as the primary medium for training and evaluating candidates.
When students enter any of the “schoolhouses” mentioned above, they are generally coming with extremely varied levels of experience. Even those attending Ranger School or Special Forces Qualification are sometimes new recruits with no combat experience and little more than basic training under their belts when it comes to tactical knowledge. When it comes to basic training and cadet training, the average level of experience is generally even lower. This means that the small unit tactical lanes used for training and evaluation in these various schoolhouses need to be very basic and start at the beginning, assuming students have no prior tactical experience.
Keeping things basic means keeping operations small. Squad-level operations are simpler and easier to conduct than platoon or company level operations, so the primary focus of schoolhouse training is on squad-level tactics. However, according to U.S. Army doctrine there are only a small number of tactical tasks or missions that a squad is capable of conducting by itself, namely recon and ambush. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of tactical lanes run in most schoolhouses end up being ambush lanes for the sake of simplicity.
However, in reality, conducting an ambush is no simple task. Therefore, schoolhouses have had to break down and simplify the ambush into a rigid, predictable set of steps that are easy for inexperienced troopers to remember and execute. Breaking the ambush down in this way also makes it easier for instructors and evaluators with less tactical experience to grade student performance by simply awarding either a “go” or “no-go” to a list of clearly defined and observable criteria. Throwing realistic variables or a living, thinking enemy into the scenario is rarely practical since most students have enough trouble just completing the assigned tasks in the proper order, even when the enemy simply walks down the road and then rolls over and dies as the first shots are fired.
All of this means that most Army personnel get plenty of opportunities (at least more than other tactical tasks) to practice this sort of canned, ambush checklist over and over. As a result, most Army personnel come to identify the word or concept of “ambush” with what they experienced in the schoolhouse which is most-likely very far from what a real ambush might look like in combat. The same pattern exists in leadership and small unit tactics training programs of other services but is somewhat less prevalent than it is in the Army.
Like most military doctrine, there is nothing wrong with the traditional schoolhouse ambush formula as long as it is understood in the context of what it was originally intended to be. Schoolhouse training and the doctrinal publications it is based on are meant to be a starting point or foundation upon which to build additional levels of tactical mastery. Unfortunately, most military personnel never have the opportunity to proceed to this next level and end up repeating the same, process-based training evolutions over and over and developing an inaccurate impression of ambush tactics as a result.
Even advanced schools like Ranger School and Special Forces Qualification encounter similar problems. While such schools provide some outstanding training opportunities for small unit leaders and tacticians, most Ranger Instructors or Q-Course instructors will tell you that there is simply not enough time to cover tactical subjects like the ambush in the detail they would like to in the ideal world. A particular frustration among instructors is that the Army’s elite training schools are increasingly open to new recruits, meaning that training needs to accommodate the “lowest common denominator” instead of moving on to more advanced subjects with the more experienced students.
In contrast to the way most military personnel have come to understand ambush tactics over the years, as a result of the problems just discussed, the actual art of ambush tactics extremely broad and complex. Infantry and special operations forces have been developing and enhancing ambush techniques for centuries. Most recently, U.S. Special Operations forces in Vietnam developed extensive experience conducting ambushes and reacting to ambushes while fighting against a highly skilled and fiercely motivated enemy. Many of these Vietnam-era warriors had the benefit of being able to learn from senior leaders who fought against the Japanese and Germans in World War II. If you review tactical manuals published in these periods you will find many creative ambush techniques and ideas that are no longer included in modern doctrine. As ambush tactics were simplified over the years, in some cases to accommodate the requirements of leadership schoolhouses, this invaluable tactical knowledge and experience was lost.
Our latest book aims to help fill the gap left in modern military doctrine and training by offering a simple and clear discussion of the more advanced ambush techniques that were learned in blood during World War II and Vietnam, as well as more modern tactics developed by infantry and special operations forces during the global war on terror. In addition to Special Tactics publications, some other authors have recently identified the need to capture lessons learned and tactical expertise in small unit combat. In particular, the book Special Reconnaissance and Advanced Small Unit Patrolling by LTC (ret) Ed Wolcoff provides an in-depth reference drawn from the vast experience of U.S. Army special operations forces in Vietnam and applying those lessons to modern threats.
We hope you found the short article useful and once again we welcome your reactions, comments or suggestions on our Facebook page where we frequently hold constructive discussions on tactics with people from various tactical backgrounds and experience levels. Also, click below if you would like to check out the full book on Amazon.
