Platoon House

John has been developing his rules 'Boots on the Ground' recently which cover company level actions in modern Afghanistan and we have been playtesting it with various tactical situations based on the Royal Anglians tour (of 'Ross Kmep in Afghanistan' fame).

My 'A Platoon Commanders Insurgency' rules, based on Johns WW2 tactical rules work fine for a platoon but won't scale to a company, the latter being Johns design objective.

This was the third outing for the rules, this time covering the defence of a platoon house.

The village with the District Centre in the middle. The bazaar is to the left, Mosque and medical centre to the right and the main LZ to north in the open ground east of the road.

For some days the company had noted various combat indicators, particularly an increase in attacks on patrols and the gradual disappearance of the civilian population. At the time game starts, most of the buildings around the centre are empty, the shops in bazaar are boarded up and patrol activity has been reduced to a minimum.

Defence of the district centre with sangars in on the roof of the five buildings with machineguns and other weapons, a section of 81mm mortars dug into the centre of the courtyard and the rest if the troops safely under cover. We used a representational map of the district centre for this.

The DC centre map on the main table.

Suspicious activity! Insurgents manage to drop mortar rounds on the Mosque.

Followed up by sniper fire on the NW sangar. Our own marksman comes off worst and is a T2 requiring evacuation.

A wandering Afgan policeman trips an ambush from the medical centre, which attracts return fire from every MG on the roof. Amazingly the policeman survived unscathed.

Two platoon moves out to secure the ad-hoc LZ for the evacuation. A group of Afghan police can also be seen 'exploring' the Bazaar.

The Chinook arrives escorted by Apaches.

CSM moves the casualty out to the Chinook.

Insurgents fire an RPG at the grounded Chinook. This lands alarmingly close but fortunately doesn't do any serious damage. A storm of return fire keeps the Afghans busy.

Chinook takes off safely.

Apaches provide close fire support aginst Taliban positions in the town.

Having suffered moderate losses and failing to down a helicopter, the Taliban move away into the countryside again.

So, another exciting day in Afghanistan. The rules seem to work fine for the RPG style 'umpire vs players' scenarios we've been doing and they are streamlined enough to be able to run a full reinforced company engagement with fireteam bases in a sensible amount of time.