User blog comment:Codfan/Campers/@comment-1260687-20100205235545

To those who deride camping as a legitimate strategy, I present the ladies and gentlemen of the courtroom exhibit A: the Hunter-Killer team - a (usually) thirteen man (squad-sized) group of infantry Marines who camoflauge themselves in foliage, drainage ditches, bombed-out buildings, abandoned vehicles (anything really), and lie in wait (sometimes for days) for a particular target, or just some unlucky patrol who happens by. After the kill is made, the bodies are disposed of under cover of darkness, and the angels of death return to their positions, modifying them slightly, to begin their dark work anew. Also, exhibit B: the STA team. Surveillance, Targeting, Acquisition is the domain of the venerable Marine sniper. Usually working in teams of two to four (composed of one or two active long gun users, a spotter, and another Marine, usually the junior sniper, dedicated to providing security, and usually armed with an M16A4 rifle or an M249 SAW), they, like the Hunter-Killer teams, lie in wait for unsuspecting prey to walk by and die gurgling at the hands of an unseen foe. In a defensive format, such as holdouts in buildings, so-called "camping" comes into viciously effective play when the defenders are armed with shotguns, such as the M1014 JCS (a semi-automatic combat shotgun - the Benelli M4 for you civilians) or automatic weapons, like the M16A3 (a Navy-commissioned variant of the M16 with Picatinny rails and the A1 trigger group) or an M249 SAW (a belt-fed light machine gun used in the capacity of an automatic rifle in Marine Corps combat doctrine). These weapons enable the holed defender(s) to hold out against even vastly numerically superior foes by means of bottle-necking and rendering the numeric force multiplier useless, enabling the defenders to stall for reinforcements, attempt a breakout to friendly territory once OpFor has been pared down to a more manageable number, or to claim victory by means of the second scenario, and killing the few attacker left after a critically failed assault on the defenders. And a rebuttal to the "terrain" or "weapon spawn" camping accusations, this is no different than an assault force taking and holding an advantageous position such as a securable rooftop, a pillbox bunker, an armory, a camoflauged hilltop position, etc.; if the opportunity exists to shape a situation to your advantage and subsequently maintain that advantage so that victory is practically assured, it is criminally stupid to cast such an opportunity away.

So let's go ahead and clear the air here, and call "camping" what it really is: laying in the ambush. The doctrine of static assault has been one of the most successful and hard-to-combat strategies throughout military history, both for its physical and psychological effects on opposing forces; in gaming the principal does not change. Proper implementation of this strategy, especially in conjunction with synchronous conventional tactics, quickly pares down enemy numbers with comparaively few friendly casualties, while posing relatively less risk to the participating friendly units as compared to purely conventional combat.