Short answer – as real as you want it to be.

Or, for many of the younger players coming through, not at all. It’s just a chance to cosplay and have some fun. This is a topic I can expand on into different aspects of the game and I will do some more in the near future. But for today, it’s more about how realistic the tactics are.

This week I’ve been having some time off from work (sorely needed) and I filled an afternoon with my daughter watching the rather excellent Bravo Two Zero film. There’s a cool battle scene here which is worth a watch, it’s about an SAS patrol in the 1991 Gulf War, but this isn’t a film review. My daughter, and my son, are both Army Cadets. She recognised a lot of the practices in the films and it led to some discussion about Airsoft.

“Why do Airsofters not know how to fight?”

A good question. Obviously, we the Airsoft community have not had the combat training that she’s had, even though it’s just the basics. On the same day, I notice a young lad from Ascension Airsoft, who make slings and bb’s, argue that he doesn’t see the relevance in real world military tactics when applied to Airsoft and has an Instagram rant about it. Since the beginning of this blog many years ago, I’ve always maintained that the sniper discipline in particular bears almost no resemblance to the real thing.

And yet, I agree with her.

I think on the whole we have an attitude of “this is our thing, we know how to do it” within Airsoft that sits somewhere between arrogance and ignorance of those who have served for real. Rarely do we see real military tactics and techniques in Airsoft although granted the weapons do change a few things, such as not needing to C-clamp a long AR. I’ll discount sniping entirely because it really is a different discipline, because we don’t have that monster range advantage.

CQB is an interesting one, certainly listening to the Ascension viewpoint that, having done training with ex-special forces, most of it was irrelevant. “His boys” apparently are much better, more experienced at Airsoft and I think are offering courses. Loud, aggressive, high speed type play is my guess without having seen them anywhere ever in the UK scene. And yet, when I do think of my own experiences, the guys who seem to do the best are in fact the ex-military types and it has nothing to do with speed and aggression. I know a lot of them, I’m fortunate to play alongside them, and they’re always just that much better positioned than even the most experienced airsofters. They watch angles better, they move more carefully and considerately. Do they breach buildings any differently? I don’t know, I haven’t done it for real but they’re almost always the last ones standing. Having recently had a crash course on CQB courtesy of some of the guys from Anarchy Airsoft, utilising electronic targets and having all the data logged, there’s a lot to be said for knowing your angles inside buildings, so I certainly wouldn’t be discounting real world experience, although we all know that the weapons are different. Indeed, the best player I have ever seen set foot on an Airsoft field (this guy) has done his Army training and it shows. I’ve watched him hold off full teams on his own.

But CQB is not life, unless you play in those little warehouse type sites. My daughter plays at Dirty Dog, which does have CQB elements but there’s a lot of outside woodland type play too in a variety of terrain. And I know what she’s getting at.

At your typical skirmish, most of the players have a tendency to stand, huddled in their friendship groups, or occasionally take a knee or hide behind a pallet to avoid incoming fire. It’s not great but we can all admit, that’s usually the limit of things for 90% of Sunday skirmishers. Now, I’ve been in the game since the mid 90’s, I’ve been to all sorts of events from skirmish, to milsim, to generic sponsored big games. I’ve seen how the game has changed (not evolved, just changed), and I’ve seen a hell of a lot of teams and players.

What I’ve never seen, if you watched the video above, are things like dropping to prone (smaller target), bounding forward, covering fire etc at skirmishes, although occasionally at milsim. I hardly ever see players drop to the floor and crawl when they need to and that’s possibly down to the more movement-restricting kit we have now. Most players would respond with “don’t need to/can’t be bothered/don’t know how/I don’t take it that seriously” (and yet these will be the ones who drop serious amounts of money trying to improve their game instead). And they’ll go bigging themselves up on social media afterwards. It might be laziness, it might be that they genuinely don’t care about performance, or it might be that as a community we’re not as invested in the hobby as much as we once were. It could be media; when I first started, I would watch war films and think “I want to do that”, whereas now players play Warzone as Nicki Minaj and think “I want to do that”.

And yet, as my daughter points out despite only having about ten skirmish days under her belt so far, the real world tactics are just much more effective. I do have a harrowing memory from my early days of being in a group of very well-equipped and confident local players, in a defensive position, facing across an open field against a group of young cadets with rental guns who arranged themselves in a line and started bounding towards us. We laughed. We had LMGs. They were only kids. Suddenly a hail of fire came in and cleared our whole position in seconds and I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

I’m not suggesting that every Airsoft player will need or want to undertake some kind of military training. I know most are happy just turning up, flapping their arms around and slinging plastic in all directions. But there are books out there, there are videos if you go looking beyond the repeated “bb hits players in head haha” shit, and if you get some friends together it takes very little to learn the basics as a team. Training used to be a thing but I don’t hear of much now within teams; it does seem to have become a product for some companies to sell to individuals instead. Airsoft is all about angles, movement, positioning and cover and if you can master those, you can save a fortune on misfiring, expensively upgraded wall-hanger rifles and kit and still wipe the floor with everyone else. You get out what you put in, as with everything in life.

Or you can strap on your bump helmet, NVG’s, plate carrier, and go and take photos of yourselves. Each to their own I guess.