Night shift battle captain

My two weeks of leave ended on Friday, just in time for a simulation exercise that started Sunday evening. My role in it is to be the night shift battle captain. From 6pm to 6am my job is to monitor the happenings for the battalion, generate orders to imaginary subordinate units, and report simulated incidents to the next higher echelon.

It's not a bad gig -- there are very few distractions, so it's easy to concentrate -- but it's taking me a while to clue in on what's going on and why we're involved.

If this were a game, we logistics support units would be the benchwarmers. In reality, these scenarios are designed for the combat arms units -- the "starters," if you will. So while I'm up all night waiting to do something important, there's not really a whole lot to worry about.

And whatever significant actions ("SIGACTS") there are tend to be pretty silly. For instance, I received a report from one of the "gamemasters" that one of our units had spotted a possible enemy contingent of 400 personnel about 2.5 km outside our imaginary base.

"What were they doing?" I asked. Unknown.
"What weapons did they have?" Unknown.
"What equipment did they have?" Unknown.
So one of our units -- a shower facility company, no less -- spots a small battalion's worth of possible bad guys mulling around but can't tell us what they're doing or even confirm the simple question if they're carrying guns? If ask me, that's a pretty rotten piece of intel work there, my friend.

If this were Afghanistan, the base defenses would be responsible for clearing out any bad guys, but as it is, or job was to sit tight and wait for someone else (a combart arms unit) to come fix the problem. In situations like this, playing the game is almost an insult to your intelligence.

Battle captains in real life have an important role. In former Army CPT Will Swenson's Medal of Honor experience, the battle captains received letters of reprimand for leavng him out in the cold during an enemy attack. [Source]It speaks volumes that the unit "lost" his award nomination in the wake of the attack, but the worst thing is that his heroic actions might not even have been necessary were it not for the failures of the battle captain on duty.

For simulation purposes, I'm glad there's not much to do. However, I'm simultaneously irritated by the lack of attention we logistics units get. If we're important enough to man a command post 24-7 for your week-long exercise, I think we should at least get something out of the experience.