Hi Hoz,
thank you for your interesting comments! Here are my playtesting impressions, maybe it's interesting to compare them with your experiences.
I was the first playtester for this mission within the HFC (I'm the second HFC staff member besides Andreas) and I beat it a number of times on veteran, using different approaches. My favourite way is to position myself on the roof of one of the bunkers (I prefer being a sniper, so this was the most comfortable place for me) and direct my men from there. I then distributed them to the different houses within the camp; soldiers with LAW covering the different directions close the walls and entrances, myself supporting them from above by directing fire and killing infantry. This worked pretty fine; I repeated it a few times, just to be sure it wasn't luck
The second approach was to stay on the ground with them, equipped with LAW, but this was a bad experience for me... we were overrun. I guess this depends on my personal (sniper) playing style, because I also watched Andreas fighting with his men on the ground, equipped with heavy weapons - and it worked fine for him.
Another good idea was to enter one of the watchtowers in the corners of the camp. It took a few attempts to chose the right one, but once I positioned myself in the watchtower (again as a sniper) we defended the camp quite easily and the enemy didn't break through as they did when I laid on the roof.
In my opinion this mission is quite balanced (and not an easy one), and beatable (I finished it most of the time successfully on veteran). Because I take care of distributing my men carefully and positioning myself, I definitely need some time at the beginning of the mission, so I didn't have the impression of "downtime" - the attack started the moment I finished my preparations and that was good timing.
Denny