TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01 - TRADOC - U.S. Army

TRADOC Pam 525-3-7-01Operation Thunderstorm had only claimed about 40 injured or wounded, mostly from the RSTACompany that had picked its way through the heavily booby trapped jungle east of AO Foxden.Tasker watched the video, marveling at how smoothly everything had gone. The “show,” asthey’d come to call the post operation video, looked like a cross between an action movie and aPlayStation 10 war game. Specialists assembled data from all division systems, classed themelectronically, prioritized those that would go in the final edit, and then ran the resulting digitalstream through the DEMON system to produce the studio quality video they were now lookingat. 199 They watched the Ranger insertion and aborted mission. The scene next switched to anoverhead view of the Padang operation showing the coalition feint and the Anderian swarmingboats falling for the decoy and getting blown to bits by their own mines and coalition standofffires. The actual landings north and south of Padang drew the defenders away from theirprepared positions. British and Australian forces attacked them from the high ground behind thedefenders whose leaders had planned on dispersing into the foothills after a fight on the beaches.Instead, faced with annihilation, the vaunted Anderean brigades surrendered.The video displayed the airborne operations using icons on a moving map zooming in onactual buildings, the runway, and the terminal to show the details. Platoon and companysymbols dissolved into actual Soldier icons as the airport seizure unfolded. It almost looked likea choreographed and scripted play, which, in many ways it was. Not a single aircraft, civilian ormilitary was damaged. Anderean air defenses never got to respond, having been neutralized bythe Airborne Laser and other nonlethal directed energy systems. Red icons in and around theairport blinked off one after the other as the operation proceeded, and in less than 7 minutes ofthe video stream the airport was secure. General Tasker knew that the whole airborne operationhad in fact lasted 6 long hours. It was the phase of Thunderstorm that he worried about themost.The screen flashed with the flares and explosions in AO Foxden and showed the RSTACompany’s laborious efforts to clear routes through the jungle for the BCT. In addition to theFSV-R destroyed in the Condor, four others didn’t make it out of Foxden. Tasker wondered ifAO Aerie was as heavily mined, but thanked God that the Andereans hadn’t defended their minesand booby traps. It could have been a mess that would have slowed the assault on the capital,and speed was what made the difference in this fight.Ibn Ander just couldn’t react to all the reports of coalition operations from Padang to Dumaito Rengat to all around his capital. Striking at night in multiple undefended places and jumpingover the heavily defended ports and airfields, the coalition had overwhelmed the Caliphate’sforces.In TF Green’s Forward Command Post, the video continued. The 1 st Marine ExpeditionaryBrigade, reinforced with the 2 nd Stryker BCT from TF Green seemed to appear on the peripheryof Pekanbaru’s northern suburbs. Marines and Soldiers swept into the city overcomingresistance with an array of standoff strike systems that either eliminated Anderian weapons orneutralized the defenders. The 1 st Brigade took some time coming out of Foxden, but they didn’t210