British Royal Marine commandos force US Marines into humiliating surrender halfway through five-day

Embarrassing.

Trounced on home turf: British Royal Marine commandos force US Marines into humiliating surrender halfway through five-day war training exercise in Mojave desert


Royal Marines commandos 'dominated' US troops and forced them into a humiliating surrender just days into a mass training exercise in the Mojave desert, it has been revealed today.

British forces took part in a five-day mock battle at the US Marine Corps' Twentynine Palms base in southern California, one of the largest military training areas in the world, and achieved a decisive victory against their American counterparts.

The Royal Marines, along with allied forces from Canada, the Netherlands and the UAE, destroyed or rendered inoperable nearly every US asset and finished the exercise holding more than 65 per cent of the training area, after beginning with less than 20 per cent.

I don't know WTF has happened to the military. Why are we paying for this?

 

*yawn*

Read through this already several times. Is all a garbage article that tells almost nothing about who was involved. For example, it had a "multinational Force", from three nations on one side.

And I happen to know that on the opposition, it was a single Battalion.

During almost any operation at Stumps with forces not stationed there, the Marines are expected to lose. They are almost always outnumbered, and in this case I bet by a lot. Since it seems to be probably at least 2-4 battalions, against a single Battalion. And an AAV battalion at that. Yes, I know enough that I was able to figure out it was the 3rd AAV out of Camp Pendleton they were fighting against. A "light" Battalion, that has lost half of it's strength since 2012. The last cut just this year when they lost an entire Company.

At the start of the year, 3rd AAV had Alpha through Dog Companies. But sometime this year Dog was disbanded (as were Echo and Fox in earlier years), and now they only have Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie companies.

 

Win some, lose some.

In the end, it's professional soldiers fighting other professional soldiers. None are superior to another, they're all human being and victory or defeat is the result of many things. No nations armies are undefeated, not even the Marines.

 

I also have taken part in dozens of these. Hence, the abundance of memes about the games like that they have been running for about 20 years now.











In almost all such exercises, they were stacked from the start. They are not like chess games, one side from the very start has a lot of advantages that the other does not. And as normally in cases like this the "home unit" is expected to lose. And the 3rd AAR is one of the units based there. In other words, they are the sacrificial goats in all such exercises. Just as when I was in the 2nd Marine Division and we were doing such war games with the 4th Marine Division, we were expected to do the best we could, and in the end die gloriously.

Because it was not training for us, it was training for the other units.

Most wargames are basically exactly like Fallout: New Vegas.

 

That's not surprising. No offence to the US Marines, flashback time. In 1989, my infantry company scored a 4-week deployment to Hawaii, where we trained with the US Army rangers. We did an exercise in the "Kahuku's". In an area of about 2.5km long and at the widest approx 50m and the narrowest approx 2m on the top of a ridgeline. Our exercise mission was to get from point A to B and to advance & engage the 'enemy' force. It was a company spread out in their formations with the exercise to last 4-5 days anticipated, unfortunately for the US Rangers, we reached the objective in 5 1/2 hours of fire & movement. Aggressive and swift movement and everyone knowing what to do was key. For the remainder of the time allocated, we took in some unofficial sightseeing. Ahh, those were the days.

 

I bet the jarheads' trannies would beat the Brit's Marine trannies in the future, though.

Go Brandon!

 

Captain: "Sir! The 4th Transexual Company has taken 41% casualties!"

General: "What? When did the enemy attack?"

Captain: "The enemy hasn't attacked yet, sir."

 

There is nothing that suggests they were outnumbered at all. Why not give the British commandoes some credit for winning the exercise? Maybe they got lucky, or had a better plan. Who knows.

 

It was a training exercise at 29 Palms.

I have been in a great many such exercises, have you? In almost all of them, the "home team" conducting the training is expected to lose. It is set up that way on purpose, because the purpose is to give training and confidence to those taking the training.

It was the exact same way when I was in Panama for Jungle Warfare School. It ended with a 1 week war game, against the very people who taught us and had been operating there for years.

They lost, we won. That is how those almost always are, the same as when we trained Marine Reserve forces during their 2 week summer drill in North Carolina. That was our home base, we knew everything about it. Yet, we still lost. Because we were designed to lose, it was training for them, not for us.

 

we did reforgers in the 70's and 80's, had Brits and Aussies very good beer drinkers too. tough as nails

 

That's because our beers average 4.5% alcohol content. American beer is like water.

 

Americans guzzle faster to make up for that.

 

You should try this stuff if you can get your hands on it. My personal favourite. Guaranteed, you start spinning after one, maybe two beers.

Coopers, Sparkling Ale.

 

I will even take it a step farther.

Back in 1986 my unit was doing MOUT training at Camp Pendleton. For those that do not know, that is "Military Operations in Urban Terrain", in other words fighting in a city. And every major military base has a "combat town" set up just for this purpose.

My squad was taking the turn on the assault, and as we were walking up the road to get there a column of M-60 tanks started to pass us on the road. I waved at the commander of one and gave a hand signal we wanted to move in behind them. He gave me a "thumbs up", and we did just that. Using the tanks for cover as we approached the town.

The umpire came out screaming, saying that we could not do that. I laughed and said I was doing as I was trained, and using any cover and concealment I had available. In this case, taking cover behind the tanks so we would not loose any to snipers on the approach.

He then screamed at me there were no tanks, and we could not do that. The of course had continued on down the road, but I pointed to them and said "Staff Sergeant, how could you not see the tanks? They were right there!"

Needless to say, he was not amused and we had to return to the starting point Where I lost 4 men to sniper fire before we reached the town itself.

But that is very much how those kinds of things are played out.

In the annual games involving Atropia and Donovia, they are usually held in at least 4 stages. And each side will win and lose parts of the engagement. But it was designed to be that way at the very start. Nobody wins or loses, they are mostly concerned that your unit was able to do it's job properly in that area of the engagement.

 

OK, it was a "multinational force", and they were going against a Battalion.

That means 3 Rifle Companies, and a Weapons Company. Most powerful single weapon they have is the TOW anti-tank missile, and the 81mm mortar.

Now tell me, did the Royal Marines send just a company of their forces? Because I know myself at "The Stumps", that it is mostly done with a regimental sized force as the "visitors". At least 2-3 Battalions. And most times at least two of those if they are Marine units are tanks, and amphtracks (APCs).

So yes, they were outnumbered. That is how that training is always conducted.

Now, care to provide a reference that actually gives the number and disposition of the forces on the UK side? As I said, it is not there at all. One of the reasons I called this a "junk article" is the huge amount of information that is not said at all.

And in almost all of these, the "home team" are the defenders. And traditional military doctrine is that you attack an equal force with at least 3 times as many personnel as the defenders have. Ergo, the Royal Marines were part of a larger Regimental sized organization (3 Battalions or more).

 

I've heard of this occurring several times.

 

I worked with them many times also.

In 1987 we did some training with the Aussies at Lejeune. And two years later I was back in that same training area, but our lines were set up on the other side, in their old position.

And one of the guys when digging a foxhole discovered that 2 years earlier some Aussie had buried a 6 pack of Foster's. I made it a point that each guy in my squad could have half a beer. It was a nice change of pace that night in the hot and muggy North Carolina summer.

 

Do you remember the Aussie unit at all?

 

You gonna show 'em how it is done?

 

35 years later? Are you kidding? *laugh*

I never actually met any of them, we were just the "OPFOR" that they were operating against.

 

That's pretty sad. I remember almost every unit I encountered during my 14 years of service. That was 21 years ago when I became a civilian.

 

We would do 3-4 different rotations as the "enemy" each year, and I served from 1983-1993, and from 2007-2021. Most times I never really met them. Would see them across a field, the decisions of which unit won was made by the umpires, we never actually "fought".

The ironic thing is, many years later I would meet one again. I went through JOTC ("Jungle School") in Panama in 1987. A great many years later when I joined the Army, my First Sergeant had been a PV2 at Fort Sherman at that time. We both joked that we might have even met back then, or he might have assisted in one of the classes given to us 25 years before. And the ironic thing is, he never questioned me after our first conversation when I described the "Green Hell", or described how to make a "Field Expedient OE-254" radio antenna out of commo wire, sticks, and MRE spoons. A real "MacGuyver" kind of thing, that as far as I am aware was only taught at that one school. I even knew Commo guys that had never heard of that before (and I can still come close to making one today if I had a need).

I literally "fought" dozens of units, where I never met or saw a single one. A great many of our "engagements" at places in my latter service were at say Yuma. Where they were not even in the same state. Say a Navy Fighter unit doing an attack on an area of the California Coast, and simulating they were attacking us. Meanwhile we were getting injected RADAR feeds into our systems, and acting as if they were actually where we were in Arizona where we were.

This is often the way of War Games in the 21st Century. A battle where each unit is hundreds of miles away from each other. The computers largely deciding who won or lost. It is only at a few places like Fort Irwin and 29 Palms that units actually "fight" against each other where they can see each other. Even many of my engagements in Yuma were against civilians. One memorable one was an attack by an Mi-24 HIND helicopter. Literally flown by civilians, as it was chartered by the military for the operation. Most times, they were rented by movie companies. Our simulation for that exercise for a "cruise missile" was actually a Bede Aerostar, the same type of jet as seen in the Bond movie "Octopussy". Once again, the plane and pilot hired from a civilian company.

I have met and served with a great many over the years. Specifically "Embeds", where a Royal Marine or Norwegian Soldier would be attached to our unit for 3-6 months. Or doing schools with people from many other countries. My second turn at NCO School had some from Jordan, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the class as students. And at Fort Bliss I worked with students from Germany and Japan regularly. But they were all students or assigned to the school, not in actual "combat units". I do not think I met a single one of those I "fought" against, as we might see a dozen or more units as we were playing "Bad guys", but never met any of them. Especially as I was married at that time, and had a new born son. So I rarely spent time off on base where I might have met them at the E or NCO club before or after such exercises.

And realize, Lejeune is huge. Well over 100,000 Marines and Sailors are there, you can literally be stationed there with friends and family and never meet them. I had two cousins stationed there when I was, and I only met them when we made the effort. Never once in the line of duty.

 

Our military is more concerned with hunting down white rage and trans inclusion these days.

Not shocked.

 

Sounds like you had fun. The professional enemy for the 'friendlies'.