We were recently lucky enough to be invited to a range day sponsored by Osprey Armament – in association with Defense Logistics Support and PWT3 Development. This “Overmatch Concepts” Range Day was held at the Osprey Range located in Council, North Carolina. Our host for the day’s events was Retired US Army Major General David Grange, head of Osprey Global Solutions and a legend in the Ranger community.
The event kicked off with the usual admin brief for range safety and MEDEVAC plans along with the facility layout. Then, General Grange jumped right into a brief overview of the day’s events, which included an operational vignette, weapons demonstrations, and round robin group visits of products and services from partners of Osprey Global Solutions.
As it turns out, the day was set to be filled with a wide variety of technologies ranging from low to high tech. In addition to weapons there were ISR capabilities including trackers and forensic evidence collection as well as medical, and training demos. While some of it might seem old-hat, the attendees included military, LE, first responders and industry. Everyone saw something new.
The Operational Vignette was a scenario involving a raid on a terrorist bomb making element that has infiltrated the area of the Cape Fear river, represented by the buildings down range. A tracking team confirmed the location of the bomb making element, and passed the information along to an assault team who took down the building. Afterwards, an EOD team disarmed the explosives while a rescue team stood by to provide rescue and medical services as needed. It was constrained by both time and the limits of the facility but included examples of a wide variety of the “Overmatch Concepts” that were the point of the entire day.
One thing I noticed was a lot of work on battlefield obscurants. Long a bailiwick of the military engineer community, it was refreshing to see a renewed effort on their application for some more non traditional roles. MSI Delivery Systems was on hand, supplying obscurants via their AB2K Multi-Mission Aerosol Delivery System. The standalone version of the AB2K-MMADS is capable of dispensing up to 50,000 cubic feet of smoke coverage per load. A dependent version with a high capacity backpack can dispense over 320,000 cubic feet of smoke coverage. Additionally, the AB2K-MMADS can easily be configured to dispense smoke mixed with irritants for crowd control, or specialized chemicals for uses such as decontamination and infestation control.
There was also a team on hand using a remote control plane as a UAS surrogate investigating the aerial delivery of battlefield obscurants. Although it took a few runs for the effect of the test obscurant to become noticeable, testing is ongoing, and from what we’ve seen so far the system does have promise.
Additionally, the obscurant used at the range was water based; an oil-based obscurant is also being tested.
Look for several more stories today which provide details of some of the weapons we encountered. We’d like to once again thank MG Grange and his team for their hospitality and for setting up a great program.
