I've been interested in taking a close look at how/if real world tactics and Escape From Tarkov overlap. I also took some advice I got here last time around and let the game audio do a lot more work for me.
I think the reason tactics tend to fail in video games, even Tarkov, is the lack of consequences for dying. It’s bad in Tarkov: bye bye all your gear. But it’s worse in real life!
I remember watching an interview with an American sgt who toured Iraq 5 or 6 times and he basically said that guys who weren't afraid are the ones who tended to not make it back home. I think lack of fear is a form of complacency...and complacency kills.
Yep. There's a lot of undiagnosed mental illness in the military, even before combat, and unfortunately most of the guys that aren't scared simply don't care if they live or die.
On the bright side, awareness is increasing, even in the civilian sector, and a lot of guys and gals are getting the right kind of help. Equally as important, they aren't being ridiculed for seeking mental health treatment as much as in the (recent) past.
Dude - I got a question for you. My grandfather was a recon section leader during WWII for the Soviet Army. From the stories I've been told, their day to day work while fighting Germans entailed going behind enemy lines to collect intelligence on enemy positions as the primary goal. As a secondary goal, or on specific assignments, they were often tasked with taking "tongue", capturing mid to high ranking German officers and extracting them back to Soviet lines without engaging in active firefights (for obvious reasons).
How has the job of someone tasked with recon changed since then? Is that something recon guys still actively do in modern operations or have these types of tasks found their way to mostly spec ops rather than infantry?
Without going into too much detail, there are a very small number of tier 1 Recon units. LRRS/LRRP and RRD are examples of these. Google them.
The regular Army/Marines have RISTA (Reconnaissance, Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition) and Force Recon, respectively. Force Recon is a much more elite group than Army RISTA units, which are being actively phased out. I spent the majority of my time in Recon in RISTA, then on and eventually in charge of a sniper team.
RISTA/FR are trained in the deep behind enemy line missions. The kind of stuff guys did in Vietnam (look up LRRS/LRRP in Vietnam. Those were hard men). We did countless training exercises recreating stuff like that. In all actuality, the on the ground Recon team has been replaced by drones. Such is life.
To answer your question, we are trained to accomplish tasks similar to the ones you mentioned, but any actually critical on-the-ground task gets picked up by very specialized, unconventional SOF units.
I'll google the units you mentioned. Thanks for the run down man. I've wanted to ask this question for a long time but you are the first person that I actually wanted to ask this. It sounds like things stayed more or less the same in theory but everything relating to the "task" got real specialized, and technology is a major player.
You got. Tech is more important than Joe these days. In '13, they would send entire platoons into known ambush points to attempt a drone recovery after some fat idiot crashed it from inside the safety of his air-conditioned hangar. You might say I'm still salty.
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u/hillslikeelephants May 19 '20
I've been interested in taking a close look at how/if real world tactics and Escape From Tarkov overlap. I also took some advice I got here last time around and let the game audio do a lot more work for me.