Fieldcraft exercise ideas

That is true. It’s one of the activities that is reasonably practical under the Covid rules, gets everyone into the fresh air, and the Cadets enjoy it.

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I wasnt very clear.

I need an option for cadets to ‘attack’ a target.
Think water balloons, cap gun, etc etc…

Anyone got any suitable, safe, within the rules ideas?

After target reccee and patrolling and all that jazz, I would like for them to be able to follow it up with something.

What do others do?

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Short answer is nothing physical, unless you have a SAAI to teach the session, run the rehersal, and then supervise the final attack.

We withdraw, and call in “airstrikes” using radios. The troops get min safe distances, a selection of weapons, and aircraft types, and select what they think is the most suitable solution for the target they’ve recced.

It’s not as much fun as using supersoakers and waterbombs, but that’s the modern RAFAC…

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Like this. Thanks

If anyone has other ideas keep them coming.
Thanks.

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With the right planning and an M Qual present I’m sure something can be done within regs to make an air element look more realistic. That’s as much as I’ll say on a public forum.

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I know you said attack a target like a water baloon, but when I was in the scouts we played this game called the Y games which could be changed if needed to be safer.

But what we did was have 2 teams, and each team had a pole (with colored string on to tell the difference). Then the leader of each team hid the pole somewhere. Then it was basically first team to find the opposing teams pole and bring it to the umpire, who was just the scout leader. And when it came to attacking, it was a case each person had a blue or red string round there upper arm, and to, “kill” someone you had to wrestle them and pull the string off their arm. This is the part you’d probably need to adapt.

So, capture the flag, basically…?

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Yes, except in a normal game of CTF you know where the flag is from the start

24hr Ration Pack

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Just to see if anyone has any experience of this before I start combing the Policy documents.

I’ve been approached by a Squadron who have an interest in running an Escape and Evasion exercise in Wild Country.

My initial reaction is that this would be Fieldcraft and not AT, but it’s not something I’ve come across before, can this sort of thing be authorised by the Fieldcraft Officer?

Surely the sqn should reach out to both SME’s?

Involve both of them from the get-go in planning.

This is a wierd one. Under the fieldcraft banner they could do it with just FCIs… who are not assessed on incident management / map reading ability.

AT you’d need HML / ML in wild country. Interesting one!

Personally it sounds more fieldcrafty than adventure training.

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If it’s going under FC would it not need to specifically meet a training objective within the FC policy?

What is the policy on doing FC in wild country?

This is 100% FC just by the term escape and invasion.

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The question to ask is why? What is the training objective and how does the planned exercise meet it.

A themed ex is fine, it’s good to have a ‘battle picture’ to work with but my concern would be that wild country is adding a risk to an activity without directly adding training value. FT is around the application of field skills and (limited) minor tactics, being in different terrains might be more in the scope of AT or even DofE. We’re not training them for Junior Brecon.

This does come up from time to time as we don’t teach ‘survival’ or even bushcraft as such but others including the Scouts do. Maybe we should but it would be outside the scope of the current FT training syllabus.

Edited to add: this is from an FCI’s viewpoint I’m not an AT bod.

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Remember that some training areas are also wild country, or at least HML territory in the AT world (think Dartmoor, Leek, Sennybridge).

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This!! knock yourself out on defence estate where you are not going to scare the living daylights out of little old dorris who is going for a casual dog walk

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See my point above though…just cos it’s defence estate, doesn’t make it not wild country.

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True, and that would need to be reflected in the paperwork. An ECO would have a job getting an exercise signed off in the middle of Dartmoor but there are plenty of more accessible training areas around Oakhampton that look and feel like Dartmoor without creating extra risk

What we used to do all the time before H+S went mad!

God forbid we let the kids out in the great outdoors.

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