Unsupported Speculation

My generation was the one to make the first Rainbow 6 game for PC. The kids nowadays would consider the graphics unacceptably cruddy, but it was a perfectly serious tactical shooter, as well as the FIRST or close to the first FPS where one hit with a bullet and you were dead, permanently.

It simulated many things, such as the varying lethality of where bullets strike if you take hits, as well as firearm accuracy being influenced by how quickly or slowly you are moving. It did this back then with a delay of a wide crosshair that slowly closed into a small crosshair once you had stopped moving.

This was so that, according to the simulation, if you RAN and then stopped and had to aim at a Tango, the crosshairs would be as wide as they could be, and if you fired before they had tightened all the way, 95% of the time all your shots would miss, and each shot slightly widened the crosshair. This encouraged players to instead move in a quiet walk which kept the crosshair only a little widened, and once you spotted a baddie, it was only a short moment before you had a perfect shot.

Now everyone who caught the fetish for tactical bullsh*t back then when I was growing up knows about how it looks when CQB guys breach a door, one going left, and the other going right. I don’t know if it is like this for other people, but for me it tended to make me think that all building problems like this were solved with either two people or two GROUPS of people. Hallways contribute to this idea, such as one group watching the reverse direction down the hallway while another group advances.

However, looking at old Iraq war stuff, how the US Army prepared for the war in Iraq was to train the vast majority of the Army in the building raid soldier size of the Rangers. The Standard size of a squad in the US Army is 8 Soldiers, but for building raids, the Rangers used 12 Soldiers.

The reason seems to be the combination of three things; One, the rifleman theory of pin and flank. Two, the design of a Fireteam of 4 Soldiers. And three, and what this entry is about, the reality that I at least learned from countless hours of playing first person shooters until I couldn’t stand them, which is that buildings tend to be designed with rooms that always leave you needing an extra third guy or team to search through them safely.

Now pin and flank is just the idea that one soldier needs to keep firing shots at the cover that an enemy is shielding himself behind, while a second friendly soldier moves around to the enemy’s side to shoot him. For a little history, this is actually what the original M-16 was made to do, and officers post-Korea were thinking about making a carbine which by design wasn’t as accurate as the longer guns that were typical of World War 2 and Korea. Their theory was based on the statistics that their soldiers tended to not hit the enemy with great accuracy during real firefights, and so the original M-16 was designed to pepper a location with hits in order to force an enemy down, so that another soldier could wheel around to the enemy’s side. This newer idea makes sense in light of the ideas of World War ONE, of looking gallient with a long trench coat, and with chivalric calm and benign faces, aiming and popping barbaric enemy Huns with single shots.

But getting back to pin and flank and fireteams, what needs to be remembered is that that was a 2 Soldier example above, but then you can keep multiplying the numbers upwards to larger and larger sizes of soldiers who basically follow this exact same principle, which is one large group of soldiers lays down fire to keep enemy soldiers from being able to safely fire back, while the other group of friendly soldiers moves around to the side to eliminate them all.

And so a Fireteam specifically is 4 Soldiers who can divide into two groups of 2 Soldiers, one laying down covering fire, while the other two go around the side. It is the basic unit because if a soldier laying down covering fire needs to change magazines, then it is less likely that there will be much of a pause in the covering fire. There is probably also an idea there about cover fire, which is that once you have TWO guys smacking rounds around the area of an enemy, the enemy is less likely to ignore it.

Now take a look at this blueprint:

Generated by ChatGPT.

There are two entrances to this office-style room layout, one at the bottom and one at the top. If you can imagine going into this building with a number of people, you may be able to see how the doors themselves cause nerve-wracking problems. This is a nest of difficult to resolve issues, because multiple hostile and armed people inside the building don’t just stand around, but may run around, appear out of nowhere in a doorway or from around a corner, or charge. You can also add: Pass THROUGH rooms and out other doorways than the one they initially went through, shoot from AROUND corners, as well as shoot straight through the doors and walls if they are particularly angry.

Going THROUGH a door into a room means you turn your back to the space you were outside the door. That leaves that area of space outside the room unwatched for a while unless you have people there to continue watching things for you. No duh. No one wants to be shot in the back.

Also, forward progress often stops if the number of people you have can only handle two directions at a time. What is forward progress? It is just how consistently you are searching the entire building for people with guns, without little breaks in your flow from either having to stop to wait for other team members, or various delaying logjams such as doors and passageways that make everyone want to stop and think.

Play an FPS to understand what I mean about that last one, because sometimes you turn a corner, and the scenario before you through your bullet-resistant, zero-reflection, quietized, combat goober goggles fills you with tactical dread. I’m sure people that actually train in room clearing share pictures of these places as jokes ( Aw FUCK no! -shudder- ).

This is why a lot of this crap is theoretically solved with a basic group size of 3 Soldiers, and then multiplying that number upwards. For a very small space, three soldiers allow one person to dip into a side door real quick while one faces forwards outside the room towards where they are going next, and the other keeps an eye on the direction they came from. This of course isn’t ideal at all, but becomes much safer once you have 3 small teams of 2 Soldiers for a total of 6 Soldiers. Multiply 3 Soldiers by 4, and you get 3 Fireteams of 4 Soldiers for a total of 12 Soldiers, and THIS design has interesting properties.

For instance, the same way you can multiply numbers of soldiers upwards, you can also divide them on the fly, even all the way back down to 2 Soldiers pinning, and 2 Soldiers going around to the side of the enemy, OR even just ONE Soldier pinning with the other going around the side.

A 12 Soldier size solves a lot of problems for a building like the one above, and with some sort of theory founded in a whole lot of practice clearing spaces like it, you would end up with a matured theory of very quickly and methodically moving through the entire space without many logjams, covering all directions of threat, and knowing how to subdivide the 12 Soldiers you have available in order to solve all those sh*tty little floor layout problems.