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GWOT Sentry
Jan. 25th, 2019 07:30 pmGWOT Sentry
One of the first things I did, in between running convoys, setting up the defenses and now and then killing people, was to get a local area map set up under glass in the Security Office. It took a while, some PDF magic, and one 8.5" by 11" printer page at a time, but I managed it.
Why not on the computer? 1) Dependence on power. 2) Computer literacy of some of our guards. 3) Information security.
Each of our now twenty-two fixed perimeter security posts were now marked on the map, along with the progress of our fencing project.
The problem was that I could not spare twenty-two guards, even during the day let alone at night. But I needed all twenty-two positions covered, or we were all dead.
A second copy of the map, slightly smaller, was laminated pages laid out carefully and thumb tacked to two pieces of plywood on the roof of H building. Most of our buildings were four stories tall, so as not to put too much strain on the local fire department and the site's initially modest construction budget. So the permanently and heavily manned observation post on the roof of H building was duly christened "H5."
Both had grid references as well as bearings on them. They did not match lat-long coordinates or the military grid system. Also a deliberate choice.
The sentries we had were losing it for lack of sleep. Even the hard core guards, knowing full well this was all life and death, were starting to hallucinate. Sheer grit and endless caffeine can only go so far.
In the guard business, we have fixed posts and patrols. Someone standing somewhere watching something, which the military calls an Observation Post or OP for short, or someone driving around in a vehicle or walking around. We didn't have the gas for the former. Walking all night was hard when you're in good health on pavement and getting plenty of rest.
Let alone short on sleep and scared in the bushes and mud. So continuous walking patrols wouldn't work. I shuddered at the thought of bicycle patrols. Bad enough that supervisors such as myself used them from time to time, thereby making ourselves ideal sniper bait as long as we were on an object that raised our profile, moved predictably, made unique noises and required us to spend time staring at the ground in front of us instead of watching the horizon.
I put the schedule down. Then I picked it up, thought carefully, met Arturo's eyes and ripped it up.
"Arturo, talk to me about sentries."
"Sir?" he asked. I knew a bit about his background. Foreign military NCO. Phillipines.
"What does the military do differently from us? When you have sentries?"
"Always in pairs. They keep each other awake. Someone goes around and checks on them. You find them goofing off or sleeping, you beat the crap out of them. Or you find them dead and you tell everyone else how they died and why."
We didn't have the number of people to have the guards in pairs. But this was scary stuff, and well over half my guards had no military experience. Including me. That meant that real novice stuff, like not standing at the top of a hill so people can see you on the skyline - what the military calls the 'military crest' - can and had already cost us lives. That also meant we couldn't pair off an experienced sentry with a rookie, because almost everyone was a rookie, again including me, and my handful of trained military personnel were desperately needed to do other things.
Time and time again, we'd chased off intruders and broken attacks by having a handful of my trained soldiers appear suddenly in a show of force. Every military manual and history of war I'd ever read emphasized the importance of keeping that small trained handful, a "reserve," ready to respond. The first side to commit their reserve usually loses. The side that doesn't have a reserve ALWAYS LOSES EVERY TIME.
So I couldn't use my trained soldiers as sentries much either.
I refused to accept that we were all dead. I'd survived a nuke, a nuclear wildfire, a regional trauma center overrun by mass casualties, a day of post apocalyptic post checks in which most of the people I'd checked on were dead or dying, and then come here. There was an answer. I was just too stupid and tired to figure it out.
Better go do another patrol of the posts.
Then it hit me, like a sledge hammer to the temples.
Fuck this shit.
"Arturo, I'm promoting everyone to supervisor."
"Huh?"
"What do the supervisors do? Check the posts. So what we do is get rid of the guards as static post guards, promote everyone to supervisor, and have them patrol from post to post all night."
"How do you keep them from killing each other?"
A very real danger when people with guns meet in the dark.
"Pick a direction. Clockwise or counterclockwise. Change occasionally based on a system."
"How about rest?"
"They can rest at fixed posts, but not too long at each one. Keep them moving. A self-screening mesh of roving sentries."
Arturo blinked.
"That's fucked up. But I think I've heard of that."
"Where?"
"Viet Nam. North Vietnamese Army. Not the Cong, not the guerillas. They sneak around, they're the infiltrators. The NVA, the Northern army."
"What else do you remember?"
"They didn't have many officers, like us. The peasants were barely trained at all. So when they had static posts, they always had to have three, not two. A corporal and two privates. Two men can agree to goof off. But when one is in charge over two, they don't dare conspire with him and he will report them if they misbehave. If he decides to goof off, they can both turn their boss in."
In some parts of the world, when you have to guard a post, but no one is reliable, you just add more guards. The perimeter guards of the US Consulate in Benghazi were a crew of a dozen ... all paid so one or two of the most junior would be embarrassed by the others into actually doing the job. Somewhat.
"But sometimes they didn't have enough soldiers to put everyone out in posts of three. So they had patrols of three instead. The senior man makes them do it, the two juniors do most of the work. That's also how they did their infiltrating - the senior man would be in charge, and the other two would cover him as he crawled in. Sometimes he would send one of the junior men in, sometimes he would go in himself, but either way, there would be two to cover the one's movement."
"So I guess what we're doing is infiltrating our own perimeter, constantly."
I remembered suddenly a lesson from the Napoleonic Wars. A constant feature of those decades long naval fights was a small warship that had trapped one or more merchant ships in a small harbor or a cove. Taking over one of the merchant ships by stealth at night was called a 'cutting out expedition.'
Some of the warship's crew, often as many as they could afford to lose, would get into a few of the ship's boats with cutlasses and muskets and go play pirate.
The merchant ships would - with perhaps a dozen armed men each - load guns, rig anti-boarding nets, keep shot ready to throw down into and sink small boats alongside, huddle together for mutual support - in short do everything they could to defend against the attack they knew was coming. But not exactly when. Against thirty angry trained sailors out for blood or gold or both, they could do nothing once the large boarding boat, and sometimes more than one, hooked up to the side of the merchant. So sometimes they would have two men row around the ship in a small boat, basically a rowboat, so they would have warning to see the attackers coming. But the boat would have to row around the ship - or ships - to be able to see in all directions.
The guard boat, as it was called, would be the first to be snuck up and silenced. The same problem as the sentries on land, but on water. A guard boat which rowed busily around the ship made noise, and the attackers could just wait for the boat to be on the other side of their victim before attacking - or use the noise to sneak up on it from behind and kill them silently with cutlasses or belaying pins or sandbags to the head, the latter two basically batons and blackjacks.
But a guard boat creeping along slowly, with cloth between the oars and the oar locks and the oars never breaking the surface, was a grave threat to a cutting out expedition. The guard boat by sneaking around could see further, be more alert, and the attackers wouldn't notice the guard boat before the guard boat noticed them and sounded the alarm.
One musket shot from the guard boat and the cutting out expedition would become a much more even fight, as all the merchant ship sailors would immediately rush to their guns.
So we would 'row' around our own perimeter. No or very few fixed posts - maybe the two gates, a couple key perimeter OPs with great sight lines and excellent defensibility. But when your 'relief' arrives, you put on your gear and sneak out into the night to the next post, and the next, and so on. Take your breaks and eat your meal at one of the handful of fixed posts. Maybe set a number. "Three's a crowd." If two are already at a gate and a third shows up, the one who has been there longest has to go back out again.
I started taking notes.
"Sir."
"Hmmm?" I looked up from my sketch.
"Won't the patrols be predictable?"
"Not really. We'll say it's OK sometimes to cut across, other times you have to hit every post in turn. Tell Dispatch by landline what your plans are. But it's OK to change them a little, as long as you never double back on yourself.
Thus avoiding the men meeting in the dark problem.
It also solved our communications problem. The patrollers would have radio but rarely if ever use it - only to sound the alarm or call for help. Routine coordination would be from wireline phones at the posts. No reason why we couldn't keep on installing the phones, we just wouldn't need to have a person stuck next to them all night.
I grabbed the Voice over IP manual from the pile of manuals in the bookcase. I flipped through it quickly. "Caller ID suppression. A phone can require a PIN code for the following operations..."
Yes, what I was thinking was possible. Put PINs on all phones on the perimeter. If you pick it up without using a PIN, we know - in the Security Office - it's someone who is not one of us, and the caller ID tells us where.
If it's one of us, they call with a blocked number, using the PIN, and tell us at once instead, "Echo 18, Post 7."
Nice.
We could also use lock boxes at the locations which were out of range for Ethernet and therefore VOIP. We had the boxes, for emergency phones in the parking lots, just weld a hasp to them.
I sketched quickly.
"New plan for tonight. We're going to have a skeleton crew hold Posts 1, 2, 7, 14 and 18a. Everyone else patrols in a team of three. That's three teams. You lead one, George leads another, I lead the third. We drop and pick up people from the posts. As we learn what the fuck we're doing, we drop the patrols down to two per patrol and increase the number of patrols. When we're ready, we have some two person patrols and some one person patrols.
"It takes about two hours to circle the site. Double that, allow lots of time for breaks and for just sitting and watching at posts. Check my math. That's three patrols per twelve hour shift per team. Three teams, that's nine damn patrols. That's a patrol past each point every eighty minutes, just to start. More as we get better at it.
"Is it doable?"
"A lot more than waiting around the dark and freaking out thinking about being sniped or knifed."
"While we still have some light, run some more water out to each of the major posts. Charged batteries too. Another charger at the South Gate where we have power. A microwave to the South Gate too, with some mugs and bowls. That just became our meal area for the sentries."
There had been much bitching about sitting in holes getting cold in the dark. This would help.
Arturo nodded and started setting up the logistics. That was the easy part.
Teaching every single one of our guards how to walk around in the dark would be harder. But in the long term, a lot healthier.
Another bonus was that it would force all guards to become familiar with the entire perimeter, and end another source of complaints. "Why does she always get the nice comfy post with the old ratty couch, and I have to sit on the milk crate?"
I already saw the next step. Set a thief to catch a thief.
In other words, train the guards to actually infiltrate protected facilities. That way they would know all the tricks.
Now we just had to follow through. If we lived that long.
One of the first things I did, in between running convoys, setting up the defenses and now and then killing people, was to get a local area map set up under glass in the Security Office. It took a while, some PDF magic, and one 8.5" by 11" printer page at a time, but I managed it.
Why not on the computer? 1) Dependence on power. 2) Computer literacy of some of our guards. 3) Information security.
Each of our now twenty-two fixed perimeter security posts were now marked on the map, along with the progress of our fencing project.
The problem was that I could not spare twenty-two guards, even during the day let alone at night. But I needed all twenty-two positions covered, or we were all dead.
A second copy of the map, slightly smaller, was laminated pages laid out carefully and thumb tacked to two pieces of plywood on the roof of H building. Most of our buildings were four stories tall, so as not to put too much strain on the local fire department and the site's initially modest construction budget. So the permanently and heavily manned observation post on the roof of H building was duly christened "H5."
Both had grid references as well as bearings on them. They did not match lat-long coordinates or the military grid system. Also a deliberate choice.
The sentries we had were losing it for lack of sleep. Even the hard core guards, knowing full well this was all life and death, were starting to hallucinate. Sheer grit and endless caffeine can only go so far.
In the guard business, we have fixed posts and patrols. Someone standing somewhere watching something, which the military calls an Observation Post or OP for short, or someone driving around in a vehicle or walking around. We didn't have the gas for the former. Walking all night was hard when you're in good health on pavement and getting plenty of rest.
Let alone short on sleep and scared in the bushes and mud. So continuous walking patrols wouldn't work. I shuddered at the thought of bicycle patrols. Bad enough that supervisors such as myself used them from time to time, thereby making ourselves ideal sniper bait as long as we were on an object that raised our profile, moved predictably, made unique noises and required us to spend time staring at the ground in front of us instead of watching the horizon.
I put the schedule down. Then I picked it up, thought carefully, met Arturo's eyes and ripped it up.
"Arturo, talk to me about sentries."
"Sir?" he asked. I knew a bit about his background. Foreign military NCO. Phillipines.
"What does the military do differently from us? When you have sentries?"
"Always in pairs. They keep each other awake. Someone goes around and checks on them. You find them goofing off or sleeping, you beat the crap out of them. Or you find them dead and you tell everyone else how they died and why."
We didn't have the number of people to have the guards in pairs. But this was scary stuff, and well over half my guards had no military experience. Including me. That meant that real novice stuff, like not standing at the top of a hill so people can see you on the skyline - what the military calls the 'military crest' - can and had already cost us lives. That also meant we couldn't pair off an experienced sentry with a rookie, because almost everyone was a rookie, again including me, and my handful of trained military personnel were desperately needed to do other things.
Time and time again, we'd chased off intruders and broken attacks by having a handful of my trained soldiers appear suddenly in a show of force. Every military manual and history of war I'd ever read emphasized the importance of keeping that small trained handful, a "reserve," ready to respond. The first side to commit their reserve usually loses. The side that doesn't have a reserve ALWAYS LOSES EVERY TIME.
So I couldn't use my trained soldiers as sentries much either.
I refused to accept that we were all dead. I'd survived a nuke, a nuclear wildfire, a regional trauma center overrun by mass casualties, a day of post apocalyptic post checks in which most of the people I'd checked on were dead or dying, and then come here. There was an answer. I was just too stupid and tired to figure it out.
Better go do another patrol of the posts.
Then it hit me, like a sledge hammer to the temples.
Fuck this shit.
"Arturo, I'm promoting everyone to supervisor."
"Huh?"
"What do the supervisors do? Check the posts. So what we do is get rid of the guards as static post guards, promote everyone to supervisor, and have them patrol from post to post all night."
"How do you keep them from killing each other?"
A very real danger when people with guns meet in the dark.
"Pick a direction. Clockwise or counterclockwise. Change occasionally based on a system."
"How about rest?"
"They can rest at fixed posts, but not too long at each one. Keep them moving. A self-screening mesh of roving sentries."
Arturo blinked.
"That's fucked up. But I think I've heard of that."
"Where?"
"Viet Nam. North Vietnamese Army. Not the Cong, not the guerillas. They sneak around, they're the infiltrators. The NVA, the Northern army."
"What else do you remember?"
"They didn't have many officers, like us. The peasants were barely trained at all. So when they had static posts, they always had to have three, not two. A corporal and two privates. Two men can agree to goof off. But when one is in charge over two, they don't dare conspire with him and he will report them if they misbehave. If he decides to goof off, they can both turn their boss in."
In some parts of the world, when you have to guard a post, but no one is reliable, you just add more guards. The perimeter guards of the US Consulate in Benghazi were a crew of a dozen ... all paid so one or two of the most junior would be embarrassed by the others into actually doing the job. Somewhat.
"But sometimes they didn't have enough soldiers to put everyone out in posts of three. So they had patrols of three instead. The senior man makes them do it, the two juniors do most of the work. That's also how they did their infiltrating - the senior man would be in charge, and the other two would cover him as he crawled in. Sometimes he would send one of the junior men in, sometimes he would go in himself, but either way, there would be two to cover the one's movement."
"So I guess what we're doing is infiltrating our own perimeter, constantly."
I remembered suddenly a lesson from the Napoleonic Wars. A constant feature of those decades long naval fights was a small warship that had trapped one or more merchant ships in a small harbor or a cove. Taking over one of the merchant ships by stealth at night was called a 'cutting out expedition.'
Some of the warship's crew, often as many as they could afford to lose, would get into a few of the ship's boats with cutlasses and muskets and go play pirate.
The merchant ships would - with perhaps a dozen armed men each - load guns, rig anti-boarding nets, keep shot ready to throw down into and sink small boats alongside, huddle together for mutual support - in short do everything they could to defend against the attack they knew was coming. But not exactly when. Against thirty angry trained sailors out for blood or gold or both, they could do nothing once the large boarding boat, and sometimes more than one, hooked up to the side of the merchant. So sometimes they would have two men row around the ship in a small boat, basically a rowboat, so they would have warning to see the attackers coming. But the boat would have to row around the ship - or ships - to be able to see in all directions.
The guard boat, as it was called, would be the first to be snuck up and silenced. The same problem as the sentries on land, but on water. A guard boat which rowed busily around the ship made noise, and the attackers could just wait for the boat to be on the other side of their victim before attacking - or use the noise to sneak up on it from behind and kill them silently with cutlasses or belaying pins or sandbags to the head, the latter two basically batons and blackjacks.
But a guard boat creeping along slowly, with cloth between the oars and the oar locks and the oars never breaking the surface, was a grave threat to a cutting out expedition. The guard boat by sneaking around could see further, be more alert, and the attackers wouldn't notice the guard boat before the guard boat noticed them and sounded the alarm.
One musket shot from the guard boat and the cutting out expedition would become a much more even fight, as all the merchant ship sailors would immediately rush to their guns.
So we would 'row' around our own perimeter. No or very few fixed posts - maybe the two gates, a couple key perimeter OPs with great sight lines and excellent defensibility. But when your 'relief' arrives, you put on your gear and sneak out into the night to the next post, and the next, and so on. Take your breaks and eat your meal at one of the handful of fixed posts. Maybe set a number. "Three's a crowd." If two are already at a gate and a third shows up, the one who has been there longest has to go back out again.
I started taking notes.
"Sir."
"Hmmm?" I looked up from my sketch.
"Won't the patrols be predictable?"
"Not really. We'll say it's OK sometimes to cut across, other times you have to hit every post in turn. Tell Dispatch by landline what your plans are. But it's OK to change them a little, as long as you never double back on yourself.
Thus avoiding the men meeting in the dark problem.
It also solved our communications problem. The patrollers would have radio but rarely if ever use it - only to sound the alarm or call for help. Routine coordination would be from wireline phones at the posts. No reason why we couldn't keep on installing the phones, we just wouldn't need to have a person stuck next to them all night.
I grabbed the Voice over IP manual from the pile of manuals in the bookcase. I flipped through it quickly. "Caller ID suppression. A phone can require a PIN code for the following operations..."
Yes, what I was thinking was possible. Put PINs on all phones on the perimeter. If you pick it up without using a PIN, we know - in the Security Office - it's someone who is not one of us, and the caller ID tells us where.
If it's one of us, they call with a blocked number, using the PIN, and tell us at once instead, "Echo 18, Post 7."
Nice.
We could also use lock boxes at the locations which were out of range for Ethernet and therefore VOIP. We had the boxes, for emergency phones in the parking lots, just weld a hasp to them.
I sketched quickly.
"New plan for tonight. We're going to have a skeleton crew hold Posts 1, 2, 7, 14 and 18a. Everyone else patrols in a team of three. That's three teams. You lead one, George leads another, I lead the third. We drop and pick up people from the posts. As we learn what the fuck we're doing, we drop the patrols down to two per patrol and increase the number of patrols. When we're ready, we have some two person patrols and some one person patrols.
"It takes about two hours to circle the site. Double that, allow lots of time for breaks and for just sitting and watching at posts. Check my math. That's three patrols per twelve hour shift per team. Three teams, that's nine damn patrols. That's a patrol past each point every eighty minutes, just to start. More as we get better at it.
"Is it doable?"
"A lot more than waiting around the dark and freaking out thinking about being sniped or knifed."
"While we still have some light, run some more water out to each of the major posts. Charged batteries too. Another charger at the South Gate where we have power. A microwave to the South Gate too, with some mugs and bowls. That just became our meal area for the sentries."
There had been much bitching about sitting in holes getting cold in the dark. This would help.
Arturo nodded and started setting up the logistics. That was the easy part.
Teaching every single one of our guards how to walk around in the dark would be harder. But in the long term, a lot healthier.
Another bonus was that it would force all guards to become familiar with the entire perimeter, and end another source of complaints. "Why does she always get the nice comfy post with the old ratty couch, and I have to sit on the milk crate?"
I already saw the next step. Set a thief to catch a thief.
In other words, train the guards to actually infiltrate protected facilities. That way they would know all the tricks.
Now we just had to follow through. If we lived that long.
