Exercise Southern Drive 2005 Opinions

[MikeM]

I'm just curious to know what people thought about Ex SD in Ft Knox last week.

I thought it was fairly well run, but a little too much downtime for some things. The raid was alright, but we didn't need to go to Kentucky to do one, we should have been using the US assets that we don't have.

 

[Tpr.Orange]

I was there for the setup in dennison... There was a lot of sitting around there... like maybe 6 more hours then there should have been. But other then that the general consensus was a good ex all around.

 

[Pte. Bloggins]

I thought it was an excellent ex, at least on our end. There were a few hiccups here and there, and we sigs can all assert that Fort Knox Range Control are wonderful people  ;D, but overall it was a great time. Just some advice, don't try to drive a minivan or crew cab off road in the mud. It won't work. Or at least, make sure you get stuck near a sigs det so we can push you out.  ;D

Down time?

 

[Sharpey]

I didn't go, but I hear it was one of the worst Ex's ever created. Typical of a Brigade...Ex so nothing new.

 

[Sig_Des]

I had fun. There were certain things we did there that you can't do here. Poor Man's range was awesome, crawling towards 3 m60's shooting live ammo is something you don't generally encounter here in Canada.

Fort Knox Range Control SUCKS, like a veritable safety Gestapo!

There was a lot of downtime, but as far as the argument that we could have done that kind of ex here in Canada, you'd have to see some of the range setups that Fort Knox had.

IMHO, good EX

 

[MikeM]

I saw the ranges and fired on them, and yes they were excellent ranges. My comment was regarding the company level raid.

 

[Northern Touch]

Ranges were good, C9 range was sweet, and glad to see they didn't stop the range because of fire.
We clusterucked our raid, but I'll leave it at that.
I didn't think there was all that much down time, but since firing live required minimum 6 hours sleep the night before maybe i slept most of it away.

Poor mans range was fun, especially because while waiting in line you could butt stroke buddy and he would never feel it.  That was fun.

btw, if anyone has that Raptor vest  :-X.....PM me! ;D 
I promise I wont tell.

 

[Gayson]

It was a goog go.  I with everyone had the Miles Gear working for the raids.  We enemy force had most of ours going, but most of the Infantry did not have theirs.

 

[Sig_Des]

I didn't know anything about the raid except what we heard in the Contact reports. (I was in the TAC CP), but I did hear that A Coy pretty much killed itself, ran across it's own Firebase. I was personally a fan of the cheap booze. That was good because you had to drink more of it.

 

[Gayson]

That was A coys attack on the airfield.

They attacked in a big "L" shape and I am pretty sure, got all confused and screwed up when they discovered the trenches in the middle of the field were fake.

We did a lot of work to get those positions prepared for the Infantry and I think both the Infantry and us got some good training value out of those raids.

 

[Pte. Bloggins]

Yeah, that was us in the LS on the edge of the airfield providing comms for the enemy force.

We got sited in the worst location possible, then told to cam up the truck. Gee, I wonder what those 2 40-foot long things sticking up in the air are...and what's that really loud genny-sounding noise? Well, something must've worked since the attack bypassed us completely, we had to go looking for someone to surrender to.

As for the raid itself, it was quite entertaining listening to it over the radio..."alright, we're going to try it again..."

And American beer is nasty. I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Military Special... ;D

 

[foerestedwarrior]

B Coy attacked the Airfield. The "firebase", well i wont get started here, lets just say that the commander, had no interation with us at all until we stepped off from the ORV. Then he had us moving around like 30 times, we were engadged no less then 6 times by our own guys.

The ex overall, poorly run, very poorly. Most of you are just pte/cpl that showed up and shot. Well, lets see, they had almost no dedicated range staff, so my platoon was being run by me and one other Cpl, on almost every range, I was pulled away to A/RSO, and I have only done the theory portion of my PLQ, but that was good enough to A/RSO, on C9, C7, and pairs live fire.

The attack, well, a total wate of time, why waste two full days on something that we could have done in canada, in the same terrain type?? Most people probably dont realize the ammount of ammo we HAD, not shot, but HAD. On the C6 range, we had enough for 13 boxes per man, but only had enough time for 2. Every RSO I talked to, sent back alot of ammo due to time restraints.

Poormans, just didnt do it for me, apparently it is really neat to watch from the grandstands, but i didnt, so meh.

Conlusion, make sure you have enough dedicated staff to run the ranges so that when all of a sudden, on the live section attack, you have guys show up that you have barley seen all week, running the section. Huge cluster fu**.

*All my own opinion*

 

[rogi]

we could have done without all the waiting around at Fort York Armouries and at Dennison, the shacks were a disaster. it would have been nice if we would have had a chance to use the OBUA site, but i heard they were in constant use for obvious reasons.  other than that it was a lot of fun.

 

[Slim]

Hey all

I went on Southern Drive back in '01. Being in Intelligence we had a somewhat different agenda laid out for us but I did do Poorman's Range and did get at least to watch the attacks in the FIBUA site (now called the FISH site...Fighting In Someones House! ;D )

Just a request to make gents. Could we try and use spellcheck and some punctuation at bit please...I had trouble understanding some of the above posts.

Thanks all

Slim