Welcome all to the latest major SITREP and as I'm sure many of you are aware, the first for many months. The SITREP is the primary communication detailing roadmap progression and changes to SOP - it contains key updates from the senior staff and from across the senior chain of command. As mentioned in the latest TAFFCAST both the resources and the priorities of the unit have shifted in recent months, so I'll primarily use this opportunity to get you up to date on those priorities and efforts.

If this is your first SITREP, then a warm welcome to UNITAF, I hope you are enjoying your time here so far.

Finally, this SITREP has some really important changes detailed in it, while they are not particuarly sexy - they are fundamentally important and you should acquaint yourself with them.

Notable Campaign Updates

• Operation Honeybadger - to continue early June, due to MSG Zuka being on leave
• Operation Eiche - is approaching completion, due to be replaced
• Operation Posideon - cancelled due to technical challenges
• Operation Giantsbane - to continue next Friday and then due to move to Red Army on the Eastern Front

There are plenty of opportunities to get involved, new campaigns are required and new teams too, check out j3-operations, especially the pinned messages for more information.

P15-189 Cancellation and No-show Policy (CNP)

This is a new policy

• introduces penalties for cancelling deployments within 24 hours of the deployment starting
• introduces penalties for arriving late to deployments
• introduces more servere penalties for no-showing deployments

These penalties are in the form of global fatigue, more information around this change can be found later in the SITREP.

See the full policy and details here: https://unitedtaskforce.net/training/sop/administration/cancellation-and-no-show-policy-cnp

P15-145 Policy: ORBAT Slot Allocation

This is a revised procedure, version 4

• added information about fatigue multipliers, as introduced later in this SITREP

See the full procedure and details here: https://unitedtaskforce.net/training/sop/administration/orbat-slot-allocation#_Combat_Fatigue

P3-9 Rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict

This is a revised procedure, version 4

• clarified and simplified the law on avoidance of damage to civilian property or buildings
• removed specific restrictions above and beyond the above for religious buildings or sites

See the full procedure and details here: https://unitedtaskforce.net/training/sop/basic-infantry/laws-of-armed-conflict-loac

P3-155 Captured persons (CPERS)

This is a revised procedure, version 4

• if a CPERS is not actively roleplayed by a player, certain procedures no longer apply, 1 minute must be observed before the determination is made

See the full procedure and details here: https://unitedtaskforce.net/training/sop/basic-infantry/captured-persons-cpers

P10-42 Reports: ACE

This is a revised procedure, version 5

• clarity on Launcher ammo, reloadable launchers belong in ammo, and disposable in equipment

See the full procedure and details here: https://unitedtaskforce.net/training/sop/communication/reports-ace

Updated to version 2205.08 effective immediately

1. The time taken to construct trenches is doubled

Approved pending server testing

• UNICrates
• Breaching Charge
• Better Inventory
• Sanagasta (Map)

Approved

• Lambs_RPG_CUP 
• Lambs_RPG_RHS 
• Sugar Lake (Map) 
• Napf Island A3 (Map)
• Bala Murghab, Afghanistan (Map)
• Bastek (Map)
• Metis Marker (CORE) - must be added to all mod lists

More information about mods can be found here: https://unitedtaskforce.net/operations/mods/pending

Roadmap update

With this SITREP bridging the quite large distance from the last, once the rollout of any required fixes for the CNP and Fatigue multlpliers has been deployed, the expetected order of updates is;

1. Lessonplans
2. Role Certification System
3. Master After Action Reports

The next major SITREP is planned for the start of June, between now and then I expect we'll roll out some QOL features in addition to the above.

United Task Force turns 3 this June

Some exciting news is that we will be celebrating our third birthday as a unit this June, I officially opened UNITAF on June 1 2019 and our first deployment took place June 16 2019. Since then, 500 real humans have deployed on 800 operations over the last 3 years. It's been an incredible ride and in some ways, exceeded many of our expecations. Yet, we still have big plans and a long way to go. Anyway, it wouldn't be a birthday without a party, so aside from the medals, here's what you can expect between June 16-18th when we celebrate 3 whole years of UNITAF;

• UNILIMPICs will return as teams from 1, 2, 3 and 4 TROOP compete against eachother for the title of the UNITAF Olympic Troop Champions in three nailbiting olympic themed events.
   
• Lt Gen Chad P Franks has got into a spot of bother and to save my job special (SCP) deployments have been authorised to counter the threat
   
• Finally, 1Lt Mattjamco is rumoured to drop the highly anticipated 50,000 hour, 3 year anniversary special - we'll announce the premiere details soon

I hope you'll be able to join us for the celebrations and each of the events will post specific announcements soon, if you'd like to do anything special for our birthday, just let us know!

Combat Fatigue review and multiplier introduction

As some of you may recall, in the annual survey we started exploring changes to combat fatigue. In recent months we also observed that post-covid deployment trends meant that the average fatigue window has reduced from around 15 minutes to about 7 minutes. Ideally, we would like the fatigue window to be between 15 and 30 minutes, to allow for less of a mad scramble during release times, and also to ease pressure on the server during release and up-tiering windows.

Over the last few months we've been making changes to our core systems to add support for a Fatigue Multiplier, all fatigue bonuses and penalties listed in policy are now refered to as "base seconds" and all penalties and bonuses are multipled by the fatigue multiplier in the daily calculation. Until now the fatigue multiplier has been 1x, meaning the base second penalty for example for attending one deployment of 60 seconds would be 120 seconds with a fatigue multplier of 2x.

From today, the fatigue multiplier will be 2x, this will double all forms of fatgiue both local and global on the next daily update, doubling the average fatigue as desired above. We'll trial this over the next month and observe the results - depending on how this works we may adjust the multiplier over time, but we'll always give plenty of notice if we decide to do so, ideally we would not need to change it again.

To aid in this change, the current fatigue multiplier is now shown in the fatigue breakdown on tier progression, but note that it will not take effect until your first update after this SITREP is issued, which can take up to 24 hours.

Combatting lateness and no-shows with the CNP policy

The TLDR of the new CNP policy is: that we expect everyone to not be sat on an ORBAT within 24 hours of deployment if they are not reasonably certain of their ability to attend.

Nothing is worse than spending tens of hours crafting your mission, writing your OPORD or planning your ORBAT than when a handful of late cancellations or no-shows arrive, especially for those who couldn't get a slot in the first place.

As you will have seen above, we've introduced new penalties for being late, cancelling with in 24 hours and no-showing deployments - read the full details on the CNP policy at the top of this SITREP. The purpose of this policy is to shift slotting behaviour to deter slotting where the actual ability to deploy is uncertain. This has been designed to counter pre-lock cancellations by creating a gradual penalty that starts 24 hours before a deployment. This should improve organisation by reducing late cancellations and creating a greater importance of only slotting when certain of ones ability to attend, and therefore reduce administration workload in the opening stage of deployments. 

This was a difficult mechanic to introduce because until now, we have not tracked the specific history of slots that any given person has held across a deployment - which wouldn't allow this to work because it would have been possible to switch slots, cancel and avoid any penalty. To properly track true time on an ORBAT we've built new systems to allow it to track fully all slots that a user has moved through, it also now times how long you have been on an ORBAT in total, allowing us to understand better slotting behaviours. We use this data to penalise harder those cancelling on short notice who have been on an ORBAT for a long time, versus those who have been on it for a short time.

These developments will enable us to make more quality of life updates, such as showing how long a user has been deployed in a certain slot, how long a vacant slot has been vacant for, and resetting up-tiering properties of vacated slots, where for example a 2-UP candidate could snipe a recently vacant slot above or before a person who has it's required tier.

So, when cancelling deployments you'll now be prompted with a message, depending on whether it's more or less than 24 hours until the start time;

Note that these penalties will be phased in over the next 7 days and only for deployments released after the date of this SITREP - this will allow us to monitor data and make any required fixes before it is rolled out completey. Obviously, you'll be able to see a breakdown of LCP and LAP on your fatigue breakdowns;

Promotions

Congratulations to all those joining and especially for the promotions issued over the last few months, we welcome some new blood to the ORGCOC but also congratulations to 1Lt Mattjamco, on his recent promotion, and all those SP2, SP3 and PFCs.

Medals issued

These days I get to issue a lot of medals and below are some of the highlights over the last few months - congratulations everyone.

Check out j10-website-changelog for the latest changes, as many developments, QOL and features are posted there and not always featured in SITREPs.

Deployment ratings

We've seen a strong recovery in April for mission ratings, which is testiment to the work everyone is putting into J3, and focusing on the issues we've outlined in recent months, we're still working hard here to implement new systems to help with this, but we'll give you more information on those, once they come into action.

April though was the best month since last November, which is a great recovery. If your interested in all the reasons behind this, we touched on it in the latest TAFFCAST.

Patreon supporters

Thanks again to our supporters on Patreon, you contributions don't go unnoticed and ensure we're able to continue to provide the network on an ongoing basis.

https://www.patreon.com/unitaf