Operations Security

This is Steven Petrick Writing.

You may have heard the term "operations security" and maybe you think it does not apply to you as a mere gamer.

Think again.

While I was at Fort Benning, I had a battle with an opponent flying a Hydran Dreadnought. I was operating two D5 hulls backed by an F5 Scout. After some maneuver, I finally decided the time was ripe for an attack run. Confident that my opponent (who was, after all, a little less experienced than I was) would be taken completely off guard.

As I lunged in, he met me with a full round of overloaded hellbores and fusion beams. I was actually quite angry and believed at first that he was cheating. But when I asked him how he could have possibly anticipated that I would attack then, he responded "you launched drones last turn". Inexperienced he might have been, but he HAD been paying attention and HAD learned the pattern of my operations. Rather than have my drones destroyed in penny packets, I try to mass them, so I had developed the habit of launching a spread of drones on the turn before I made an attack, so I could launch more drones on the way in. This would tie up my enemy's phasers.

He had caught me.

It was an important lesson, and I learned to occasionally launch a couple of drones when I was not going to attack, simply to confuse my opponents about what I was really up to.

Operations Security. Look over your own operations and consider what your enemy may know about you.