Ordnance

I received a question regarding my previous post asking if we knew what the ordnance looked like beforehand, or if we were looking for pressure plates. For this particular scenario, we were looking for a pressure plate because we knew there would be wires that would lead us back to the ordnance (which would be partially buried and thus difficult to find).

We didn't know exactly which ordnance we would find in this scenario, but we had a week or two of ordnance identification training before we did this ordnance reduction class. That class went something like this: we'd get there in the morning, and the Gunny would have ten pieces of ordnance lying out on the table. We'd walk around the room, classifying every piece of ordnance on the tables, and identifying the fuze, which you need to know to know which types of safeties to associate with the round. Once everyone was done, we'd go over the ordnance, talk about the characteristics of each piece, and what characteristics would make us give it the classification it had.

After a few days of that, we moved into the classroom, where we'd be given a picture of a piece of ordnance and have to find it in a computer program. Then we had to find the physical ordnance in the computer program. Once we'd completed each of those steps, then we started trying to identify the ordnance by looking at it via a low-quality camera mounted on a robot. Crawl, walk, run--the Marine Corps' favorite teaching method, and fairly effective.

I've opened comments up so that you don't need an account anywhere to leave a comment, so I hope that will facilitate more questions and comments. If you can, though, please leave me some way to identify who you are--your full name certainly isn't necessary due to privacy concerns, but a first name or first name/last initial would help. I'm 100% more likely to answer a question from someone I know than from some random person on the web that I've never met before. Thanks!