[shahadi]

ISIS is using captured armor, such as M113s, as massive VBIEDs.

This is not usual, as in unexpected. As in nobody had weapons on hand capable of defeating armor. As someone who frequently guarded buildings in Iraq I can say I never saw any weapons on hand other than the occasional AT-4 that could have stopped an APC. Problem is that even if one was stopped (and any VBIED of that size would have totally fooked up whoever shot it with an AT-4), they came in on successive waves, up to 5 at a time, and no guard had a whole rack of such AT-4s. Iraqis don't even have a weapon as good as that, they have mostly bad RPGs, with about half the rounds being anti-personnel rounds.

So imagine you and your fire team are sitting on the room of a building, or manning some fighting positions, or sitting in a tower. You have three M4s, a SAW, a M320 GL, an AT-4 and some sort of larger crew served machine gun. You see an APC driving fast as fook right toward you. One of your dudes calls in the SPOT report on the radio as you ready the AT-4, all happening in seconds. You fire, take out the first one, a massive explosion blows your eardrums out and gives you a concussion, a long with your squad, and fooks up the fighting position, knocking everything all over the place. Ears bleeding, you look to see the BDA and you see a second APC driving through the debris from the blast, then a third, fourth, or fifth. What do you do now TL?

You are basically fooked. Even if you had air support by the time they get on station your position and all those behind it will be nothing more than chunks of rock and small bits of human pieces, that will be crawling with ISIS infantry that poured into the breach in company to battalion strength, who were following the VBIEDs in pick up trucks packed with dismounts. If that was an American unit guarding Ramadi, they would have seriously gotten fooked up, especially if they didn't have air support to come rescue them.

These type of tactics have never been used in Iraq, even against the US. They were used a bit in Syria lately and now we can see exactly how well they work when used in a properly coordinated plan. This stuff right here is kind of historic in warfare.

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Great stuff MarkSheppard. This is why I like to read this guy. What the TL do, he scrams... like fast... but he should have put down claymores, and/or old trucks, concrete slaps, anything else that could be used as a barricade.

My bad.

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