Books are great. I’m not a fan of fiction in the same way I’m not a fan of TV. It just doesn’t feel productive. However, they are great resources for those Airsoft players looking to improve. This week I’ve had an email from Royce in Hungary, who is looking for book recommendations on recce/scout style gameplay. It’s probably worth sharing with everyone then.

Firstly, a bit on recce/scout roles. As a sniper, much like most snipers, I can quite easily go off and disappear for a few hours and score a few sneaky kills. It’s been done to death as a role stereotype and that’s what everyone now expects from a sniper; although at a recent event in the UK attended by a lot of leaf suit snipers out in the jungle, I have seen a video of a sniper walking down a road with some other players out in the open, using a thermal scope to take pot shots at targets, so the stealth game still needs some work in some groups.

But that’s only one side of sniping. If you’re playing as part of a team, you have to be asking “what more can I do to help my team?”. Assuming you’re not playing to get attention on your yOoTuBe ChAnNeL, you’re looking to be as useful as possible to your team which is fighting for objectives. One of the greatest contributions is using your stealth skills to help provide information on the enemy to your teammates so that they know where the danger is and can work to eliminate it, rather than just pinging everything that moves . Much the same as our real world counterparts, the battle is won not by superior firepower, but by communication, information and teamwork. I see it done well at Milsims and England games but almost never at skirmish level. The biggest issue is generally lack of coordinated comms – I’d say about 1 in 10 players carries a radio, I’d wager half probably aren’t turned on or have broken headsets, and the remainder will operate on squad channels but not as a coordinated team. Which is a shame because that’s what wins you games.

Before I jump down too much of a rabbit hole on recce/scout roles and squad tactics, which have probably been covered in one of the previous 260 articles anyway, I’ll get down to books. Obviously as a blogger I’m quite a fan of the written word anyway; it’s a much easier medium for people to digest and work through at their own pace. So I do have a few books lying around. Airsoft books are rare, and I think most players prefer to divulge information over social media because they can rack up followers and likes which might get them their own discount codes or something. Do I necessarily want to know how Airsofters do it though? Unfortunately, although there’s some good advice out there (Verage Airsoft springs to mind), there’s a hell of a lot of shit out there too. I’d much rather read material from guys who have served in warzones to see what they have learned, or read through real military handbooks which are obviously based on experience, than sit and watch some 16yr old kid called Aaron who makes gaming videos in his Mom’s basement and “absolutely destroys n00bs” when he spawn camps in Airsoft at some disused farm shed running around wooden pallets with an ARP-9 that his bro HPA’d for him.

It’s not taking it too seriously, it’s not trying to be a walt. If you want to get good at playing with guns, learn from the guys who do it as a career.

The highest recommendation I have for any Airsoft player, especially Royce of course, is this.

Paintball and Airsoft Battle Tactics (link to buy)

This is written by a guy with a PhD who writes real steel infantry tactics books. He’s good, very good. And this book very nicely covers all the basics. Everything from organising fire teams to setting up patrols, the basics of camouflage and comms, and tactics. Now, the question was about recce/scout work but I find with 95% of players these days, nobody knows the basics. If you can master everything in this book, it goes a long way to improving your whole game. On top of which, you can add in specialist knowledge that you want or need for specific roles.

For example, my top pick for sniping is this. Illustrated Manual of Sniper Skills by Mark Spicer. I have a fair few sniper books but this one is the most complete. Is it all relative to Airsoft? No, because of ranges, but the knowledge and a lot of the techniques are. In Airsoft we need to stay connected to the ever developing world of camouflage, and Airsoft specific weapons but those updates are more easily available through social media, sites like stipsniper.com etc.

I have a few old school military books too. The Commando Pocket Manual and the SAS Pocket Manual, as well as an SAS history book that I can’t find anywhere to link (I have a lot of SAS related stuff because my dad served with them during the Dhofar War in Oman during the 70’s so it’s something I’ve always had an interest in). They’re not massively useful to Airsoft but I do find it interesting reading through a lot of old techniques that are still very relevant today. I did have somewhere a Soldiers Pocket Book which is a much better and more complete guide to useful skills, but I can’t find it to add a photo. There are a lot of good infantry manuals out there which will provide some pretty in depth reading, although I find the Paintball and Airsoft Battle Tactics covers what you need in a more concise and easy to read package. It might be that you stumble across the odd sentence or paragraph that is useful or can be applied in Airsoft. First example I find in the Commando pocket manual is a “three-quarter hip position”

The idea being that under stress, it’s quicker and easier to shoot a pistol in this position than to spend extra time getting into an upright position, extending your arms straight and shooting in a competition-style two handed position. Little details sometimes make all the difference.

If we’re talking recce, then being comfortable outdoors is a key component and general fieldcraft skills never go amiss. There are plenty of good books out there, the Bible of all survival though is the cheap and very portable SAS Survival Guide, by former SAS Director of Survival Operations (cool job title) John Wiseman. I always keep a copy handy in my kit. Another good read is Bushcraft and Survival by Luke Tully. These sorts of things aren’t essential, especially given that most skirmish players will have some sort of music festival type camping setup or just book into a hotel. But it’s extra skills meaning you can leave them all in the car park with their warm beers and leftover pizza while you go and set up under a tarp on the far side of the site, ready to go at dawn. Practice makes perfect, although reading and learning in advance certainly helps, especially if you have to buy some gear for it in advance. Thanks to reading Luke Tully’s book, I now wear a Casio FW-91 watch.

If you do want to go even deeper, I recommend this book on Tracking. The Complete Guide to Tracking by former Chief SAS Tracking Instructor Bob Carss (more SAS based goodness. I’ll buy something SEAL related soon to balance it out…). Tracking is very specialised but it’s interesting to look at how people impact on the environment and how to read it. Not just for detecting enemy movement, but also to be aware of the impact you’re making and using that to evade detection. Yeah, that’s a little more hardcore but you can’t have too much knowledge.

Beyond books, where else is worth a look? Garand Thumb on YouTube is one of the few channels I have time for and his recce stuff is superb. I might look at doing more recce/scout type stuff myself too; I think it’s a very unexplored part of the field in a time where everyone is concerned with posing for photos, running around like lunatics and trying to film crazy fast action while wearing the most ridiculous thing possible. Recce is the quiet art, much like sniping before it became a mainstream drama. On Instagram, Selous Tracker did some useful content for scout related stuff before stopping posting last year. There’s good info out there if you look beyond Airsoft and go and find the experts.

Get the basics right and everything else falls into place. Learn to move undetected, use cover, know how to operate as a team and that’s half the battle. I find with the books it isn’t just the information inside, as much as it’s just getting me in the right frame of mind when I step out at the weekend to play. I’ll never remember all of it, but when you look around the safezone most of those guys learned what they know from doing knee-slides on COD, so it’s definitely a step up.

Hope this helps Royce, and for anyone else who is reading, always feel free to reach out and say hi. Emails sometimes fall into junk but my socials are always open.

Any suggestions from anyone on further reading?