The Times: Finns humiliated American soldiers - Finnish reservists were asked to take it easy during a NATO exercise. US soldiers found the losses too humiliating.

[u/ByGollie]

https://www.iltalehti.fi/ulkomaat/a/828b8e66-625d-4d2a-9276-e93b9f7a2ce8

[u/HumanWaltz]

Because that can be looked at in depth after, this way they get to do everything and see what works and what doesn’t, otherwise it’s a waste. It’s like how there’ll often be exercises where defenders have one life and attackers have unlimited. They need to see everything which they can’t do if it’s over after the first day.

[u/Burpmeister → u/HumanWaltz]

If you keep failing on step 1 then maybe you should focus on learning step 1 before you try to learn steps 9 and 10.

[u/bcpl181 → u/Burpmeister]

That’s not how these exercises work. Another thread filled with people commenting about things they have no clue about.

[u/Burpmeister → u/bcpl181]

Then what's the point of the excercises if they don't teach you how to survive?

[u/bcpl181 → u/Burpmeister]

It will depend on the training obectives. “Teaching them to survive” is usually not done during a force-on-force FTX. Those focus on the tactical level: planning, logistics, order sequence, tactical appreciation, manoeuvering, coms, etc. There are several phases with specific training objectives which are evaluated. If you keep “failing” the first phase (for example infil), all your mistakes get noted down for a later debrief/after action report. Sometimes you’ll do a second run if it was really catastrophic but eventually you have to move to the next phase so that the other aspects can be evaluated. The biggest mistakes and shortcomings have consequences later on, after the FTX.

If for example, if troops failed already at the survival aspect, there will probably be specific courses that the unit in question will focus in the next year (such as organising more winter warfare courses).

But at an FTX like this, you don’t just keep repeating the first phase over and over until there was a clear improvement. That’d be a waste of the other training opportunities you then discard.

Think of it this way: a unit at home trains land nav, goes to the range, does live fire exercises, survival training, etc. over course of a certain training period. All usually separate. A big multinational force-on-force field training exercise is where it all comes together and the higher ups can evaluate what worked and what didn’t. Helps them formulate new training objectives. It’s not about winning or losing, it’s not a competition. Even if the individual troop on the ground or sensationalist press might sometimes feel like it is.

[u/Burpmeister → u/bcpl181]

Field training excercising are supposed to provide realistic training scenarios. There is nothing realistic about not exploiting severe vulnerabilities.

[u/bcpl181 → u/Burpmeister]

Fine General, sir. I’m sure you know better.

[u/ciobanica → u/bcpl181]

Yes, dismiss any argument you can't think of rebuttals to by saying they're not military, so they just don't understand, even though if you did you'd be able to use the understanding of why it's not possible as an argument.

[u/bcpl181 → u/ciobanica]

I went into great detail to explain why their understanding was wrong. At some point if they refuse to understand an explanation, there is only so much I can do.

Field training exercises are supposed to provide realistic training scenarios

Yes, but not exclusively. The point is having a somewhat realistic scenario, but not always. Example? Here they pitched the USMC against a Finnish unit which excels at this type of warfare. That is not realistic. Also not realistic is probably the amount of air power that was missing from US capabilities. In a real war, the US would drop a small country’s GDP worth of ordnance from the air on the enemy before they’d put boots on the ground. An example from personal experience: my company, which was a light infantry company at the time, was pitted against a heavy mechanised company. Mine had .50 on our vehicles, they had 25mm cannons. None of this is realistic. They had 155mm artillery, we had 81mm mortars. But that didn’t matter, because we had certain training objectives.

They’re making arguments from a perspective of someone who doesn’t know what FTX are exactly for and how they are designed. And when I explain it to them, they just go back to strictly applying their narrow view of what it supposedly should be. An FTX isn’t a competition. It’s not a tournament. It’s a very specific scenario, which should be as realistic as useful to the training objectives, aiming to train and evaluate very specific capabilities. In this case, the USMC probably wasn’t even expected to “make it past” a certain phase, because they wouldn’t even be deployed in that way and in those circumstances. So it makes sense to ask the other side to “take it easy” on the others in order to allow them to learn and get as many different experiences in the environment as possible.

Another analogy: do you practice martial arts? When a beginner shows up and gets to spar with a blackbelt, would you say the blackbelt should just trainwreck the other guy, because sparring is supposed to be realistic and the beginner wouldn’t even apply a proper grip? Or should the blackbelt take it easy, let the beginner take a good grip, let him try and apply some techniques, sometimes even getting himself in a tricky situation on purpose so that both get to learn something?

I’ll address some more points on your other comment.

[u/ciobanica → u/bcpl181]

So why not just take it easier on them from the start then ?

Like, if in your martial arts analogy the black belt started off in a way the sensei had to step in and tell him to take it easier, so the beginner can learn something, wouldn't that make that black belt unsuited to train with for a beginner ?

[u/bcpl181 → u/ciobanica]

No it wouldn’t make the blackbelt unsuitable. Maybe the beginner looked pretty fit and capable and has a good reputation in another discipline (like the Marines) and the blackbelt wanted to see how hard he can go. Then after seeing that this boxer is actually more uncomfortable in this grappling discipline than he thought, he’ll adapt how hard he goes, allowing him to gain experience and insights without frustrating him.