Winter warefare/survival ideas
- Thread starter Jarnhamar
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Perhaps if you have some SMEs in the unit, cover things like Ice Fishing, snaring, trapping animals.
Flawed Design said:
Went on winter survival training with the Rangers at the beginning of the month.
Started out with a series of stands on Friday morning, including shelter construction, fires, signals, and snares.
By noon, we were dropped off at a series of sites in quasi-randomly selected pairs. This is Fort Vermillion in northern Alberta; iirc, sunrise was 8ish and sunset was before 5. During the daylight, we'd improve the shelter, gather wood, and prepare a signal fire. DS would check in on us about three times a day.
Sunday morning, we'd be ready to start our signal fire when we heard the plane (...or be woken up by it). Ideally we'd have the fire going and visible by no later than the second pass.
We received detailed feedback perhaps once a day, identifying points to improve on.
It's a simple approach to the basics, with loads of practical hands-on time. The stands aren't terribly complicated to teach, and the depth can be tailored to the experience of the audience and the instructor. If there's a lot of variation in experience among the section, then it gets taught barebones and you get into more detail during the feedback chats in the evening.
Permission was obtained to set snares to catch animals and to cut down trees. We left Thursday evening (eleven hour bus trip), and were forbidden to bring any food with us. Made for a more interesting scenario, motivated folks for snares, and they were a lot more likely to chow down on squirrel.
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Mmmmmmmm squirrrrrell
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For basic winter indoc, I know somone is going to laugh at this, but if you can get an older (Mine was printed in the 1980s) copy of the Boy Scouts Handbook, it's a fantastic resource for teaching basic winter survival, it's written for young teens, so it's quite simple, and translates well into teaching green troops, but with the exception of weapons care/defences, it covers pretty much everything required by winter indoc, and indepth... very useful as a reference for the classroom "pre-training" portion.
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There is also a course that covers some of these things. The Basic Winter Warfare course. I am looking at the CTP right now. Now it is an actual course, and how well the FTX goes depends on if you run it on a base, or off base where you can cut trees and start fires and the like. We run that course on our regular training nights here at the armouries. Though for buget reasons, couldnt do the FTX, so that will have to wait till next year.
Once you get this qualification, you then can go on you Advanced Winter Warfare, its 3 months, in the NWT.
Once you get this qualification, you then can go on you Advanced Winter Warfare, its 3 months, in the NWT.
Forester said:
When it was conducted in a training area at CFB Edmonton when I did it, we were restricted from cutting trees. A little tougher to have green boughs for signal fires that way, and the Rangers' course I went on was a nice change.
You've got to get permission to "modify the environment".
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When we did it a few weekends ago, we where also not allowed to cut trees so we used "dead fall" and tried to make it not to obvious that any living trees where cut down....
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I suppose my unit is lucky as about half of our members own large farms. There is one farm that we use to conduct our FTX, so no rules against that sort of thing. Its too bad, as improvised shelter training in a more controllable environment like you get in central ontario is easier then learning the hard way in northern ontario. Last year our week long ex up north, we had alot of casualties from the improvised shelter nights from other units, as we were one of the only units experienced with it.
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Who dropped the trees?
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Starting a fire (or attempting to) from scratch is probably the most useful thing you can train.
Even with the bow and string thing, it is effin' hard!
Even with the bow and string thing, it is effin' hard!
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Flint and steel is easy to teach and learn. A kit takes up no extra room (an Altoid tin) and the weight is negligable. Even a novice can have a fire going in under ten seconds.Petamocto said:
One of those magnesium keychain sticks is even easier.
Jarnhamar
Army.ca Myth
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recceguy said:
Platoon medic and a chain saw.
We could have roughed it more and made true improvised shelters without any tools (paracord chainsaw) but as far a I was concerned it was 80% of the sections first time on a winter ex (let alone sleeping in an improvised shelter) so this was the ice breaker, next month we'll build from scratch.
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So it was done on private land with the owner's permission 
recceguy said:So it was done on private land with the owner's permission
Recceguy is trying to make a VERY valid point.....because if all this is not with the owners permission, or exceeds the permissions given, and you guys don't leave that area sparkling clean of everything you inflicted on it....it probably going to come back and bite you and the reserve units big time.....
From there, I can imagine risk adverse HQ's pontificating from on high, but the end result is this type of Ex being killed....
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recceguy said:
That's not from scratch any more than teaching them to use a Bic lighter and gasoline.
When I wrote "train", I'm talking about good old fashion wood on wood, like if you were in a plane crash with no preparation.
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Petamocto said:
Unless the plane I was on was the Silver Dart, I still wouldn't be making a fire with a bow. If you are totally unprepared and unimaginative you deserve to while away your hours recreating 'Quest for Fire'
And 'from scratch' would include your knife (steel) and an appropriate rock (flint).
Me, I'll be eating squirrel or some such cooked over a fire.
By all means, teach the bow and other methods, but you'll really have to be exceptionally hard up and lost to have to use them. Like the Boy Scouts say "Be prepared".
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