Four Stages of Competence

This is an important concept to know about, the ideas of having the four stages of competence makes total sense. Read this and you will understand, that this is a very important concept to know about, and to shoot for Unconscious Competence since it is the highest level, and the level at which you just react correctly in situations. This post came from the Max Velocity Blog, see link at end of article

The Four Stages of Competence:

Unconscious incompetence

The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.
Comment: Sound familiar? All those across the internet heaping scorn on those who would tactically train, not recognizing their own incompetence or even the need to train? This is the bulk of ‘the internet.’ The reference to the ‘stimulus to learn’ is also very interesting, if taken in the light of the many comments you see along the lines of “things are still too comfortable right now.” For most of these people when they finally wake up, it will be too late.

Because why? Because PT is a basis for being able to conduct small unit tactics (SUT) and if neglected cannot be gained at short notice. Also, whether or not you can, or think you can shoot, anyone who trains at MVT knows that it is not a shooting class, but a team class about how to ‘shoot, move, and communicate.’ See those linked posts at the top of this page for more information on why that is not as easy at it reads on the internet.

Conscious incompetence

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.
Comment: This is the stage that many MVT students will come from. They recognize the need for the skill, and the value in gaining it. That value being the increased survival chances of themselves and their family. MVT offers an environment where mistakes can be made and learned from, where the price is not your life, or that of your kids.

The flip side to that is those that recognize the need, but will not train due to ego, or fear of failure at class in front of others. These are the types who try and eke out the knowledge solely from the internet, or who will only ‘train’ when surrounded by people they trust will not embarrass them: and thus, they avoid effective training due to false belief built on ego, and do not recognize that a training environment is designed to tolerate mistakes on the way to success. Perhaps they heard that in the middle of a simulated gunfight on the live ranges at MVT, a cadre would perhaps yell once or twice? Wow. They should have trained in Idaho, where the mobility training area was covered in numerous ‘Big Holes’ created by badgers (class joke – watch out for the ‘Big Hole’).

Conscious competence

The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.
Comment: This is where many alumni are, who have trained and built the basic skills, yet need to conduct continuation training back home in a competence environment, and would benefit from returning for more advanced classes and repetition of the basic classes. These are perishable skills and you cannot just train once and ‘be done.’ Those military or retired military who train may be here also, because they may have skill fade due to not operating any longer, or for some time, in an infantry role.

One of the reasons the 6 day combined CTT/CP class went away at the VTC (with the exception of remote classes) was due to this mindset where people could come in and ‘get it done.’ Yes, it was economical for flights from California etc, but so many times students would show up and then immediately realize that, for example, their PT sucked, but at that time they were locked into the class. It’s not that I don’t bang on about the need for at least a basic level of PT for these classes, but it seems many people are not listening. Oh, wait: Unconscious incompetence in the PT realm! I find it better for people to come and do CTT, go away and fix their PT and gear etc, then come back for either another CTT, or Combat Patrol, or Force On Force etc. If you are doing a combined class as part of remote training in Texas or Idaho, then please listen and go out and do some PT, even if it’s just hiking with some gear on. Please do same for CTT also!

Unconscious competence

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
Comment: if you show up to class with this level of skill, then you are in danger of being snapped up as cadre, so long as you show an ability to translate that skill into an ability to teach others. You have to be able to look inside yourself at what you are doing, and break it down into teachable parts.

To conclude, the D-K effect, and the Four Stages of Competence, are an interesting way to asses your own level of competence, and also that of those you come across on the internet. However, at the end of the day, always remember that despite your best efforts, “you can’t fix stupid!”

Max Velocity

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your Team

I have not been able to put much time into writing a new post myself, but I wanted to keep up on posting, so that you guys would have information and training to read and learn. Below is a post from Max Velocity, I know, I know, he is the MAN! I love posting up his stuff because I agree with him on most things, and he is very good at articulating himself.

Here is the article on tactical teams/groups that would be very good for you guys to read and heed:

Max Velocity,

Regardless of the SHTF scenario, anyone can appreciate that having a tactical team/group that is trained, equipped, and ready can be invaluable to one’s survival. So how do you get it started?

An effective tactical team will by nature be made up of fighting men. but what kind of fighting man? He should be a warrior. Notice I did not say soldier and this is an important distinction. What is a warrior? Where do I find them? Or better yet, how do I create them from those I trust and care for?

From Wikipedia:
“A warrior is a person specializing in combat or warfare, especially within the context of a tribal or clan-based warrior culture society that recognizes a separate warrior class or caste.”

Conversely, soldier is defined as an occupation.

A separate warrior class or caste. In class or caste based societies one’s “class” often is the biggest factor in defining who that person is and their lifestyle. This is the key to the whole thing. Warrior skills, training, and social functions are at the heart of who that person is. It is not a job, it is a lifestyle. Indeed, some soldiers may be warrior’s but not all warrior’s are soldiers. For our purposes, we don’t necessarily want soldiers, we want warriors.

Warriors are defined as such through their activities, and they do these things because that is who they are. Sometimes simply being of the male persuasion will put you in the warrior class, such as in many North American Indian Tribes. Being a warrior, was a defining part of being a man.

Soldiers do many of the same things and serve the same function, but they do it because that is how they earn a living. A soldier without pay quickly takes on another occupation and ceases to be a “fighting man”. Unlike warriors who are usually associated with tribal or clan based societies, soldiers are the typical fighting men of nation states.

So how do we distinguish ourselves as warriors, from the Soldiers, the Airmen, the Marines, Sailors, Police Officers, etc. etc. from other “fighting men” in this nation state society?

Unlike them, we don’t get paid for training. In fact we pay for it. We buy our own ammo, we equip ourselves, we hone our craft on our own time. We feed ourselves through other means and use our precious free time to maintain and advance our warrior skills.

This means daily training. The day you stop training is the day you cease to be part of the warrior class. It’s the day you are no longer a warrior.

We PT everyday right? Or often enough that we continuously improve without causing ourselves injury. (some PT regimens will cause injury if done daily) But PT in of itself is not a warrior skill. Plenty of athlete’s PT. PT does not place them in the vaunted warrior class.

In addition to PT which “people” should be doing, warrior’s should maintain skill at arms. One of the most inexpensive, effective, and quickest ways to do this is through dry fire. I dry fire daily, both fighting rifle and handgun for about 5 minutes each. Did you get paid? No. Did you improve your martial skill set? Yes. Are you doing this everyday? Yes. Welcome to the warrior class.

If you are unfamiliar with dry fire, check out andersonshooting.com and pick up “Refinement and Repetition.” So it’s geared to competition. So what? If your reloading at IPSC grandmaster speed, no one can argue that is not an advantage in combat. Just do it behind cover…

So now you found your first warrior. It is you. Daily you are “drilling” yourself in weapon manipulation. And hopefully this is in addition to the PT you are doing since you are a well rounded human being. Now for the team aspect.

You need another warrior besides yourself. Look for that one person who is committed as you are. The one who will spend 10 minutes every day, on his/her own improving their martial skills. Would it be that crazy if… maybe… on Tuesdays the two of you got together at the range and did a few fire and movement bounds? Maybe set up a drill for accuracy and time and compete against each other? You know, just for 2 hours after work on Tuesdays? Great. Not a big deal. Easy.

Then a third, maybe a fourth warrior? Those who are committed on their own to a warrior lifestyle on a daily basis to just a couple hours once a week for team based training? Any warrior’s worthy of the title can do this.

Say you have expanded at this point. 7 warrior’s are showing up on Tuesdays. Perhaps it is time to break into two for coordination’s sake. Wednesday works better for three of you. So another team forms. One trains weekly on Tuesdays, the other on Wednesdays. Great.

Hmmm how about squad training? Well team TYR trains every Tuesday, and Team Woden trains every Wednesday. Maybe… once a month we can get together for Squad level training? That’s not to hard is it?

Holy shit you have carnation instant fucking CUTT.

If you have had trouble forming a real CUTT, the key ingredient is warrior’s. You need true, defined by action and not words, warrior’s. It starts with you. Leadership begins with example. Don’t waste time on talker’s. Look for the everyday warrior.

It all just falls together. All because of 10 minutes of dry fire every day.

Soldiers don’t impress me. They show up for the cash. Anybody can be a soldier. Who are you? Are you a warrior? Can you then identify other warrior’s, and lead them? As I have shown above, it is really not that hard.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Flanking

This post is from one of my favorite sources who I make sure gets credit for the information. This is from Max Velocity's forum where he describes in very good detail about the use of the flank in maneuvering and attacking your adversary. This is more of the kind of information that I hope you guys start adding to your training and becoming more proficient at.

Max Velocity Source


In this post I am going to look at the use of the flank.

Small Unit Tactics (SUT) is in fact a skilled art that is largely overlooked due to lack of knowledge and training. One of the ways in which you can focus the effectiveness of your team when utilizing SUT is to use the flank.

Attacking from the flank is a highly effective technique that:

– Should keep you from fighting forwards straight across the main enemy kill zone, by use of a covered approach to a flank.

– Can give you an element of tactical surprise, if you can get to the flank undetected.

– Puts the enemy in a cross fire and allows the support by fire element to shift their fires away from you, but still firing and suppressing the enemy across your front, as you move through the enemy position.

– Never underestimate the psychological effect on the enemy of you assaulting from the flank. They may surrender or flee once they think you might be behind them. You can choose to kill them in place or allow them an escape route depending on your objective: kill the enemy personnel, or capture the location. If you are trying to kill or capture the enemy personnel, consider use of cut-off groups for any squirters.

‘Using the flank’ is a simple thing to state, and to pay lip service to, but there are a lot of tasks and skills that need to be mastered on the way to understanding how it may be used practically. If your training progression stops, like it does for so many, at cool guy stuff on the ‘square range’ you will never understand the use of the flank, however ‘tacticool’ it is to rush from barricade to barricade:

– Fire and movement, at its most basic form of ‘buddy rushes’ is a team movement technique that is in fact a basic drill. That is not a squad attack. Basic fire and movement is used to move about on the battlefield, and is is used to fight through enemy positions, or break contact. A squad attack should not be ‘bags of smoke and straight up the middle’ simply utilizing basic fire and movement. That is not to even mention the madness of the latest ‘squad attack’ fad I have seen on YouTube, where everyone advances stood up on line, shooting. Way too Hollywood!

Even if you think you are at very close range, you should try and get an element to the flank to suppress from there. It may seem a short distance, but rushing into the enemy guns is a long way however far it is. Eternally long! This applies to the ‘hasty attack’ which is an option when coming under enemy contact. My thoughts on breaking the contact into ‘near and far ambush’ are written here. If you can get an element to a flank, even if that is the support by fire element, then do so.

– This does not just apply to a squad hasty attack, depending on your numbers. You can go to a flank even if there are just two of you. Using the flank is a drill that is not automatic, but requires command input and leadership. You must understand the ground (terrain). It is still fire and movement, but you have an element providing support by fire while the other element moves to the flank, via a covered or concealed route.

– When we talk about flanking the enemy, we are mostly concerned with doing so as part of a squad hasty attack. A deliberate attack, or raid, is planned in advance based on recce. As such you will dispose your groups, your support by fire and assault groups, in such as way that you are already at that ninety degree angle and attacking from the flank of your support by fire element. That is part of your planning and rehearsal process.

– A squad hasty attack happens when you patrol into an enemy kill zone and are engaged. The idea is to place an element into a support by fire position and have them win the firefight to suppress the enemy, allowing maneuver. Your assault element(s) will use a covered approach to move to a flank, and assault from there, preferably at a ninety degree angle to your support by fire element. As a battle drill, the squad hasty attack follows these steps:

1) React to effective enemy fire. (Return Fire – Take Cover- Return Appropriate Fire).

2) Locate the enemy. Often the big challenge. Target indications are given: Distance, Direction, Description.

3) Win the firefight: regain the initiative and suppress the enemy. Commanders use fire control orders to achieve this, combined with utilizing rapid and sustained rates of fire. Ammunition = Time under enemy fire.

4) The attack. Broken down into:

– The approach: move to a flank using a covered approach. Move to a forming up point (FUP) before crossing the Line of Departure (LD).

– The assault: fight onto the forward edge of the enemy position (FEEP) from the LD. Fire and movement.

– The fight through: fight through and clear the enemy position to the limit of exploitation (LOE).

5) Reorganization: consolidate on the enemy position. Pay attention to sectors and depth/mutually supporting enemy positions.

– LACE: Liquids, Ammunition, Casualties, Equipment.

Utilizing the assault cycle will help you visualize how to cycle your elements through the various roles in the attack. This is why a 12/13 man squad, divided into 3 teams, is ideal.

So if you have two enemy positions/buildings that you need to assault, you will suppress them both and then move to a flank with your assault element. Your third element will likely be reserve/flank protection at this time. Once your assault element has fought to the LOE on the first position (or cleared the first building), they will most likely now move to a support by fire role to suppress the second position. It depends on the ground/spatial relationships. You then have the option of pulling in your reserve element as your next assault element. If the initial support by fire element is now out of sector and of no more use, move them to reserve/flank protection.

Note: with green/partially trained troops make an effort, if possible, to move them up to their assault launching point (LD) without moving them through the already cleared initial enemy position(s). Battle inoculation is good, but if it hasn’t happened up to that point, don’t let them see the results before it is too late and they are in it with no choice but to fight through. Seeing weapons effects up close and personal before they are expected to ‘go over the top’ themselves is not a good idea. Other than that, you ‘gotta be in it to win it,’ right?

Using the flank is primarily a concern when assaulting (attacking) an enemy but you must also understand how the enemy may use a flank attack against you, and guard against it with your defensive dispositions. Remember: all round security and mutually supporting positions. Flank Protection! This is important for the prepper crowd who may not have a real defensive plan in place. I talk about this at class: those winking muzzle flashes in the tree line above your log cabin may not be the totality of the ‘gun fight.’ They may in fact be the support by fire element, and if you don’t keep eyes out, the next thing you may know is the side of your building being breached by an assaulting force.

In order to be able to use the flank, you need to train yourself to think like an infantryman. You need to be able to conduct a rapid combat estimate and then implement it under fire.

In order to be able to think like an infantryman, you should train to understand the following elements:

– Understand ground/terrain with a ‘soldiers eye.’ You are looking at the shape of the ground and how it positionally relates.

– ‘Dead ground’ – what cannot be seen from potential enemy positions.

– Covered and concealed approaches. Relates to dead ground.

– Micro terrain: folds in the ground will provide cover. Running, crawling, low crawl?

– Spatial relationships between where the enemy is, where you are, and what options you have for covered approaches. It’s never going to be a 100% solution!

– Effects of direct fire and fire angles.

– Divide the potential approaches up: far left, near left, center, near right, far right.

– Once you have looked at potential approaches, overlay that with where the enemy position(s) are, where you are, what are your potential support by fire locations, what impact does that have on the assault angle, and what impact does that have on the next part of the assault cycle i.e. sequencing?

You are looking to get that ninety degree angle between your support by fire and assaulting elements. But you also have to consider where the enemy position(s) are and what effect that has. If there are two offset mutually supporting enemy positions, and the ground is ideal to go left flanking, but that means that the support by fire element cannot suppress the depth because it would effectively be positioned behind the assaulting element, then the assaulting element would get cut down by the depth enemy position. So does that mean we need to go right flanking? Or do we have a third team, the reserve/flank protection team, who we can send up with the assault element to suppress the depth enemy position while the initial assault goes in? Then maybe they assault the depth, with support by fire from the first assaulting team?

If when you are doing your estimate you realize that the enemy is too much to bite off, then this is where you consider breaking contact. You give orders to that effect and sequence your teams out using fire and movement. Similarly, if you are moving to a flank and run into the enemy mother lode, then you will need to break contact.

Make a decision. Yes. Do not dither and prevaricate.

But no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Do not be afraid to be flexible if that is the sensible course of action. New information!

But if you are going to be able to change the direction of the juggernaut, you need to be able to communicate that, and you need element team leaders who you can reach out to and signal your intent. Otherwise a sudden decision to break contact could leave an element swinging in the breeze. If you can’t communicate a change, you will have to go through with the plan.

As the squad leader, you will position yourself at the point of main effort. This will change. This is why it is ideal to be able to operate like a platoon leader, where you can move independently from team to team rather than being stuck as a part of one team. It is not your job to fire your weapon. You are there to influence and direct the battle. You will only fire your weapon, and get directly stuck in, if things start to go wrong and direct leadership is required. Heroes are only needed when it starts to go wrong! The squad leader will normally lead the assault element to the flank and direct the assault. Let the team leader run his assault, commanding in his own sphere. The squad leader will then direct the next phase, perhaps the reserve team now going to assault the next position.

As a squad leader, if you have the resources, it is useful to have an element that you can use to directly influence the battle. If you had a machine gun you could keep a machine gun group with you. This may mean in this context having a designated marksman (DM) under your direct control. You will then deploy this asset to influence the battle, perhaps to a flank. You could send the DM to bolster the support by fire element, or to watch a flank, or to suppress a newly discovered enemy position that is harassing the assault element, for example.

Movement under enemy fire is not about speed, it is about momentum. It may at times be about individual speed, such a running across an open area, but overall it is about momentum, Momentum is keeping the pressure of your suppressive fire on the enemy as you steadily maneuver to close with and destroy him. If you have a ‘shoot and scoot’ type enemy, you will never be able to close with and destroy him. Multiple enemy from multiple firing points at longer ranges is a problem. Just look at Helmand, where heavily laden troops find it hard to maneuver on the enemy, who is running around in sandals and scooting about on motorbikes. You need to balance your fighting load and your tactical fitness levels in order to remain mobile. If you are going to close with and destroy the enemy, you need to suppress him in place (Fix) in order to allow you to do so (Strike). By the time your assault element gets up there, you want the enemy to be dead or suppressed in cover. He may surrender as the assault team closes, or try to run. If he stays to fight and makes the assault team fight through, it’s big boys rules. Did you give him a chance to take a course of action other than fighting to the death? No live enemy left behind you as you fight through.

This is also one of the reasons that fire must be effective. It is not about volume/noise of fire. It is about accurate fire. Fire discipline. If you are shooting at positively identified enemy (PID) then your round count will be lower than in training anyway. Support by fire commanders will control fire to lessen the amount of ammunition used while effectively suppressing what needs to be suppressed. It is like being the conductor of an orchestra. Under enemy contact, ammunition is time. No-one is pushing a pallet of ammunition out of a C-130 over your position. You have your first line scales and any resupply you arrange for. Do you have a guy on a ATV with trailer, loaded with ammo cans, following your squad? Maybe you should think about it?

The skill is making your ammunition last by the use of accurate fire. Go to rapid fire when needed but then scale it back. Make your hits. Fire discipline and over-excitement is something I notice in training. It’s almost a cultural thing. Yahoooo!!! I call it having a ‘militia moment’ because it is undisciplined and if you let it get out of control, it will, with nothing to show for it but a ‘tactical yard sale’ of empty magazines.

The art and skill of SUT seems to have been largely lost throughout the years of the GWOT. I believe it is maintained in certain professional infantry units. Hosing the enemy down on a mountainside from your position on line behind a wall, and “calling for fire’ is not SUT. In fact, in these conflicts in the middle east, coalition armies are consistently out maneuvered by lightly equipped enemy forces. Now, I know there is a reluctance to take risks. Because why? BFYTW. But this is where there is a certain misunderstanding about SUT, due to ignorance:

Doing these techniques is not simply ‘running about’ in the face of the enemy. It should be done professionally with cold aggression. Use momentum to suppress and steadily maneuver on the enemy. You won’t be able to ‘call for fire’ anyway, because you don’t have the assets. So the answer is well executed SUT. Trading fire in a ‘gun fight’ from your wall to their wall is an exercise in futility and potential high casualties (or none) anyway. This is also why SUT needs to be divested from the training virus of ‘Law Enforcement’ style training. That sort of ‘gun fighting’ LEO based training is individual shooting skills. It is not SUT. It is some criminals in a car that you just stopped, or some drug dealers ‘in the hood.’ SUT is not a Clint Eastwood Western movie! Mostly in a collapse situation you can avoid that type of situation by effective patrolling/movement, defensive measures, and having security in place. Threat mitigation and avoidance. Team skills, even at buddy pair level.

Now, in a simple squad attack drill, the team that comes under effective enemy fire will locate the enemy, win the firefight, and remain for the first assault as the support by fire element of the assault cycle. Think of them as the leading left hand jab while you prepare the big right hand swinging in from the flank. However, the enemy has the initiative at first, because you didn’t spot them and the first you knew about it was your team coming under fire in the enemy kill zone. You may have casualties. As you gain proficiency, the squad leader will consider what is effectively a limited break contact drill to get the team in contact off the X. Bring a second team up to suppress while that first team maneuvers either forward, to the rear, or to the flank, depending on the lie of the land. Once they are in a safer location, they can either now remain as the support by fire element or you can replace them by maneuvering a second team to a better support by fire position, before then planning the assault.

You may not be able to get that perfect right angle between the fire support and assault elements. If they only get out to 45 degrees to your support by fire, then visualize what it will look like as they advance on the enemy: they are gradually going to mask to fire of the support by fire element. The support by fire will have to shift fire earlier. Thus the assault team will be more reliant on their integral fire generation as they maneuver on the enemy. In the same way, if they get too far in depth of the enemy, as they advance they are heading at an angle towards the support by fire element, who will in the same way have to shift fire away from them earlier. Also, if people talk about attacking the enemy from the rear, then in a micro-SUT situation such as this, it is a no-go. You will be attacking into your own support fires. You may attack the enemy in their rear, such as their supply lines, but not with your elements facing at each other. Don’t be on opposite sides of the enemy position, is what I am saying.

This is why that 90 degree angle is perfect. As the assault element sweeps in, for example from the right flank, the support by fire element is shifting fire away from them to the left. The assault element can be ‘fired in’ to the last minute. In order to prevent fratricide, you will need to have an agreed signal for shifting fire. At a very basic level, the support by fire leader can see the assault force moving in. You can use radio, flag, light stick, strobe, whistle or whatever to signal phase/report lines and shifting fire. Note that in thick bush/jungle, visibility through the thick vegetation may preclude a flanking attack simply due to the risk of fratricide. In these circumstances, it is often the case where we default to an on line ‘fight through’ style attack. In this way, all the friendly fire is going in one direction away from your skirmish line. This is normal for a FIWAF (fighting in woods and forests) situation. However, if you are skirmishing forwards on line, make sure you have flank protection elements looking out to the left and right, on the ends of the skirmish line.

If you find the ground and spatial relationship with the enemy/friendly forces does not allow you to get out to that 90 degree angle, then there are other options. Moving the team that initially comes under enemy fire has already been discussed. Perhaps you can only get a good covered approach and find a suitable FUP/LD out at a 45 degree angle, for arguments sake. So you move an element out to 45 degrees on the right, supported by an initial fire support element in the center. Perhaps now you move that fire support element out to the left at 45 degrees? You now have a ninety degree angle and what is called a double envelopment. Once you have those two elements in place, you can revert to the classic drill of one being fire support and the other being assault. You have an option as to which is which. Or, you can maneuver both of them, alternately, closing with the enemy before deciding which will conduct the final assault. If you had three elements, you can even leave one in the center to provide support, but if you do so keep an eye on the safety angles and have them cease fire at the appropriate time – they may not be able to shift fire left or right, due to the presence of the two enveloping elements.

There are any number of sequencing movements that you may do, with the intent of suppressing the enemy positions in order to allow you to maneuver onto them. Clearly, at squad level, at a certain point, beyond two small enemy positions, perhaps a couple of foxholes, it gets beyond a squad and you will have to bring in additional elements to suppress depth/mutual support while you maneuver. It becomes an operation for maybe two large squads, or a platoon. As part of the combat estimate, you have to train yourself to rapidly weigh the options and make a decision as to a course of action. Only you will know the enemy you face. If they are an untrained rabble, then a disciplined squad who knows how to shoot and use cover/concealment to maneuver, could cut through any number of them.

There are different considerations on the fight through for different types of objectives. A scattered enemy ‘in the open’ in temporary fighting positions can be dealt with by a simple fight through. If you get foxholes or bunkers, there are slightly different considerations but effectively you are breaking down your teams into 2 man groups so that one group can cover while another grenades the foxhole. It’s just a little more of a considered approach to the fight through, with coordination to blow each foxhole/bunker in sequence. Everything needs to be suppressed, in order for you to close with each bunker. If it’s a mutually supporting defensive line in depth, then I’ll see you in Valhalla, as you clutch your Medal of Honor!

Now, if you think about it, if the enemy is in a building, then you need to do this flanking squad attack maneuver in order to get up to the building. You can then breach and enter. It then becomes a clearance operation, and there are different considerations for MOUT. However, in simple terms you need to suppress the enemy in each building of whatever cluster of buildings it is, while you close with and breach/enter the first one. When that is clear, you sequence through the assault cycle to one building after another, attacking in echelon from one building to another.

In modern infantry parlance, we like to talk about attacking ‘in echelon’ which refers to the assault cycle and using an element to attack the first objective and another element ‘in echelon’ to attack the second and so on. ‘Back in the day’ of the NATO ‘T’ style FUP etc, we would move in elements side by side and attack on line with large group fire and movement. That’s not cool any more. Now we will put the ‘spare’ element as a reserve/flank protection while we assault the first part of the objective.

Now, having read all this, you may tell me that you are simply an armed civilian and that you have no intention of ever, under any circumstances of collapse and absence of the rule of law, carrying out an attack. You are only interested in tactical self defense. Fine. Even if you are conducting a break contact drill at larger than team level, you can use the flank. Simply bring up a team that is not in contact, while the team(s) in contact conduct their break contact drill, and move them to a flank to bring the enemy under fire. This will help the teams in contact break clean.

Any questions?

OK, let’s go….

Max

I hope you guys enjoyed that article. If you have a chance, visit Max's site, and attend his training if you can, it would be well worth your time and money!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More Training Videos

Here are some more good videos I found. Like I said before, I do not agree with everything in every video, but there is a lot of good stuff in them. Please watch them, and glean the useful information for use in your training for you, your family, or your group. This is good stuff, please take your training seriously, we do not have a ton of time left to prepare ourselves.

Advanced Training Vids

I am posting more videos lately because I want you guys to watch these, pick up on some of the points, see the differences in them, and then we will be building upon that during further posts on Advanced Training Tactics. So please watch, think about what they are saying, compare them against each other, see how they might fit together, then think about how you could incorporate these ideas into your training.


This one is old, but makes some very valid points:


Sorry, out of time today, more to follow. Lot more.

Also I wanted to say thank you for you guys that visit my blog, and especially those who come back! If you like what you read here, please pass it on to your friends and acquaintances.

Training Videos

I found some useful videos on YouTube for those of you that are more visual. I did not make any of these, and I do not agree with everything in them, but they have some good ideas, and some good points that you can add to your training plan.







I hope you enjoy these videos. There will of course be more to follow on these advanced topics we need to be training on to be really effective Resistance fighters.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Advanced training

Once you have gained a basic proficiency with the concepts of "Shoot, Move, and Communicate", then you are ready to move on to more advanced topics, and ideas. With that said, I recommend the following be added to your group/personal/family training plan:

Advanced camouflage techniques
Use of Micro Terrain features
Night fighting (proper use of night vision, yours, not the electronic type)
Silhouetting
Use of shadows
Crossing danger areas covertly
Hand to hand combat
Use of surprise
Recce
Obstacle crossing
Movement through gaps
Exploiting breakthroughs
When to pull back
Developing your senses
Hit and run tactics
Shell scrapes and fighting positions
Clandestine movement
Use of natural formations/plant life

I will have much more on this topic in future posts.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Team Tactics

Here is some great information and lessons learned from Max Velocity from the training he gives. He is a very knowledgeable guy and I love the way he is able to articulate himself. This article has some great information, and ideas. Use this information and add it to, or modify your current training to reflect ideas that you can incorporate into your training. I hope you are training!

Tactical Notes from FoF Team Tactics:

I found myself going over many of the same basic points again and again at FoF Team Tactics, which are the same points that I hammer at CTT and CP classes, and it took a lot of ‘dying’ on behalf of the students to really hoist these things in. At CTT, a mix of poor physical preparation on behalf of the student, plus the ‘firehose’ information dump of the class, often result in poor attention to some of the basic areas that will keep them alive in combat, such as taking effective cover, and moving rapidly from cover to cover, or no movement without effective suppressing fire. Ivan does not shoot back, but in FoF when the live enemy is putting UTM rounds at you, and they are striking you in the face, or zipping past your head, it really makes the point. Here are some notes:

Rehearsal of team SOPs is vital.

Make a plan, and have a leader. Follow the leader, and allow him to direct you to achieve the mission, which means paying attention.

Effective scanning is essential. Head out of your weapon! Situational awareness, which includes scanning to the flanks, or you will be rolled up. How many times do cadre tell the students “get your head out of your weapon” and “scan means scan” on a CTT class? Tunnel vision and staring at where Ivan last was seems to be the trend!

Ensure you look in often for hand signals, otherwise you will be in your own zone, and have no clue what is going on.

Hand signals are essential during silent patrolling. The leader needs to be able to signal intent. Some of the things that you will need to consider hand signals for, that you may not have considered before, are as follows (examples will be given at FoF classes):

•Axis of advance / on line.
•Enemy direction
•Hasty ambush
•Bounding overwatch – forwards and backwards
•Peeling
•Flanking
•Move up / get on line / change axis

None of these hand signals will work if team members are not paying attention, by regular scanning of their sectors and to their buddies. If you get a hand signal, react to it and make it happen.

When it goes noisy, you need to be able to yell. Team members must listen, and every man is a link man and must pass the direction on. You may still have use for hand signals at this time, particularly if units become separated on something like a flanking move. Ensure that if you see something, you also communicate it effectively to other team members and the team leader. No secrets!

Do not be too hasty to rush to your death – do not attempt fire and movement if the enemy is not effectively suppressed. Rounds whacking into your team members every time they get up to run forward means the enemy is not suppressed, and in fact you are under effective enemy fire.

Ensure you identify cover before you move to it – and do not be hasty to rush to your death.

Ensure that if you have any type of stoppage, you improve your position of cover. Kneeling in the open to take care of a malfunction is not the recipe for a long life. This is taught all the way from the square range.

Suppressing the enemy means exactly that – effective accurate fire that will change the behavior of the enemy to where he can no longer suppress you.

To suppress the enemy you have to ensure team members have located him/them – use target indication ( 3 D’s) and ensure the information is communicated along the line. If team members are having their own individual fights with ‘their’ enemy, it means as one group gets up to bound forwards, ‘their’ enemy is not suppressed, and will kill them. SCAN! Do not get tunnel vision.

You must suppress the entirety of the enemy facing your team if you are to move without casualties. Due to inherent safety angles of moving groups (target obscuration), this will entail breaking the F&M down into smaller groups along the line as you get closer (i.e. breaking down from pairs to buddy fire and movement as the team gets closer – now taught on both the CTT and FoF classes).

Ensure that you are actually doing ‘short bounds’ and not ‘hero bounds.’ Move fast and low from cover to cover. ‘Keep low, move fast.’

Never underestimate the actual and psychological effect of a flanking move. BUT: ensure you are watching your flank so it does not happen to you, and ensure that separating groups does not lead to blue on blue situations.

Positively Identify (PID) your target before you engage. Not everything out there is the enemy, and just because it is moving, it may well be an injured team member that you just lit up.

Untrained armed teams will be responsible for a large amount of fracticide, both due to incompetence when first encountering the enemy and attempting to effectively return fire, and also due to indiscriminate target engagement. A large focus of MVT training is on buddy awareness, and breaking the tunnel vision of your ‘relationship’ with ‘Ivan’ so that you do not kill your buddies. This is something that is not understood in the ‘tacticool’ world of the square range, and is applicable to real combat.

Training, or ‘operant conditioning’ will reduce freezing, something that was also apparent on the FoF class. Yes, you should not be too hasty to rush to your death and you should suppress the enemy as best you can before you move, and you should identify your next piece of cover before you move to it, but at the same time, if you are doing a maneuver, such as a peel, then do it, don’t freeze and become unresponsive to the team. That will likely lead to the team’s death in place.

If you have a competent leader with a plan, then you as a team member should allow him to ‘use you’ as a ‘tool’ to accomplish that plan. If you are a follower, be a follower. That still allows you, as a ‘battlefield sensor’ to input information on newly located enemy, or flanking moves, or whatever, but you should do that and remain as a responsive weapon that the team leader can use to accomplish the mission. In team tactics, the leaders are using the ‘resources’ to put effective fire on the enemy and maneuver to accomplish the mission. Team members must be an active and useful part of that scheme, or the maneuver will stall, and you will start to die.

You can only develop the competence stated in the paragraph above, where everyone is a useful and active/attentive member of a team, alert to the situation, if you have trained and moved past the tendency to be an unresponsive blob, locked in tunnel vision.

That’s all that comes to mind right now, but I will update as appropriate if/when I realize that I have missed something.

You may note that most of what I have mentioned here is to do with the actual practical application of fire and movement, and SUT. This is not the sort of thing that will be grasped by reading manuals or watching videos. It needs to be trained, and it needs to be trained enough, through a mixture of live firing and FoF training, so that students will grasp this at a deep and unconscious level, thus significantly enhancing their chances of survival in a combat situation.

I cannot stress enough how I urge you, if you are a one-time or some-time-ago alumni or simply a blog or forum reader, to invest the time to get to a training class. It should be at least an annual event, with home based training for the rest of the year. If you can get CTT, CP and FoF done in the first year, you are hitting the jackpot and will be making significant advances not only towards the survivability of your tribe, but also in becoming dangerous to your enemies.

Article from Max Velocity Blog

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Training Plan Part 2b

After my first magazine, and establishment of a par time, I’ll move up the 50 meter line and do the exact same thing, on the same target. Now, the target appears to be twice as large. While it would be nice if my times were twice as fast, the reality of how the human brain works means that my par time for 50 meters averages around .6-.7 seconds. Then, I step up to the 25 meter line for a magazine. Now, I’m looking at sold half-second par times, occasionally dropping one to 0.45 seconds. I’ve gotten a 0.39 second shot, exactly once, as I recall, without poring through my shooting log (In the interest of intellectual honesty, that was a fluke. I actually called that shot a “miss” before I heard the steel ring). My tested “pure reaction speed” is generally around 0.18 seconds (I test this by running the timer. With the weapon pointed in a safe direction, safety selector switch on “FIRE,” and finger already on the trigger, not even worrying about actually hitting a target, all I have to do when the timer sounds is squeeze the trigger. Testing this in classes, the average has been between 0.19 and 0.22, with three or four people total, over the course of a dozen classes, being faster than 0.16. I’ve seen TWO people that were at 0.14. One was a former fighter pilot). That means, even at a 0.5 average, I’m moving the gun into position, recognizing an adequate sight picture, and breaking the shot in roughly 3/10ths of a second. In my forties? I’ll take that.

Finally, I’ll step back to the 100 meter line and push myself to go as absolutely fast as possible. While I—obviously—want all of my rounds to hit the target, I don’t get upset if I miss either. I’m trying to push the limits of my ability. I EXPECT to miss! On this iteration, again working my way through an entire magazine, I only record the times on shots that hit. The average may only drop 0.01 seconds, but guess what? That’s 0.01 second faster than I was before. Over time, that will increase. I’ll be faster, but still hitting an acceptably challenging accuracy and precision standard.
Realistically, being able to get fast, accurate hits on targets, inside of 100 meters is the most important aspect of real-world combat shooting with a rifle, that we need to be focusing on. It is the NUMBER ONE priority for your carbine/rifle training. If I have time afterwards, and the range is long enough to make it possible, I’ll step back to 200 meters and beyond, and I’ll work snap shots from positions other than standing. At 200 meters, I’ll drop to the squatting and work on breaking my shots in less than 1.5-2.0 seconds. I’ll push out to 300, 400, and 500, and working on dropping into the prone and breaking my first shot in less than 3.0 seconds.

This standard is based on the doctrinal “3-5 second rush.” Assuming the guy I’m fighting is trained, I’m going to assume he’s well-trained, practiced, and disciplined. From the moment he moves, when I have an opportunity to notice him moving, and move to acquire a sight picture and snap my first shot, to get a hit, I have…three to five seconds…
That is ALL I do for my rifle live-fire range work, once a week, the first two weeks of a quarterly training cycle. I’m not going to lie to you. It is BORING! Not that I’m super-gifted, because I’m not. I’ve worked very hard to develop those abilities. If you do the work, you will get the results you need to get.

The last two weeks of the first month of the training cycle, dedicated to marksmanship-specific training, I’ll continue doing the snaps, but I’ll generally just fire ten shots at each line, finishing the magazine with controlled pairs instead. This reinforces that my positions are not only adequate to get me on target, but are robust enough to allow follow-on shots, if necessary. The catch is, I do these the EXACT SAME WAY that I do the single shot snaps, and I record my times meticulously, just like the single shot snaps. The thing is, while I think a 0.15-0.2 split time between the first round and the second round in the controlled pair is eminently achievable at 100 meters, your split times only matter indirectly. If you punch a round into a dude’s head, or groin, with a rifle, inside of 100 meters, you’re going to have time to get a second one into him. The reason I note and record my split times is because it is indicative of the strength or weaknesses in my shooting position. If it is taking me longer this week to get my sights back into alignment to break my second shot, that tells me that my position is loose, because I’m not managing my recoil adequately.

For the handgun, “snap shooting” isn’t really “snap shooting” of course. We don’t—generally—walk around with a pistol in our hands. That’s why we carry them, every day, everywhere we go, right? Because, we can have it, in the holster, ready at hand, but out of sight to avoid scaring people, or giving away to a potential bad guy that we’re armed and prepared to respond. All Walter Mitty, Red Dawn fantasies of the coming conflagration aside—seriously, does anyone NOT realize we’re living in the midst of TEOTWAWKI, right now? Seriously—for the vast, majority of us, in the event that we have to (get to?) use a firearm in a contemporary context, outside of LEO or mil work, it’s going to be our concealed carry sidearm. Sure, I keep my MK18 in the truck with us, everywhere we go. But…I don’t carry it into the grocery store. I don’t walk into my mother’s house with my rifle slung over my shoulder (the poor woman is uncomfortable enough knowing that her “baby” is walking around with a Glock concealed somewhere on his person).

Being able to get to—and use—your pistol, at an expert level is, by any reasonable measure, inarguably more important than whatever your skill with a rifle. Most importantly is the FACT that you’re actually likely to have the pistol with you when Jamal Jihadi or Carlos Cartel kicks in the front door and starts shooting people. Second, skill with the pistol transfers across to the carbine a lot better than the reverse.

What is involved with “snap shooting” with the pistol? Obviously, sight picture/sight alignment and maintaining them via a steady position still matter, but just as important—perhaps more important—is being able to get the thing out, and into your hand, in a manner that will allow you to make your first shot break within the time standard you establish, and is robust enough to allow for rapid follow-up shot (because, it’s a pistol, and follow-up shots are WAY more likely to be needed than with any rifle).

“Snap shooting” with the pistol is the drawstroke to first shot break. Period. While a sub-1.0 second drawstroke from concealment, inside of 10 meters/30 feet (yeah, it’s actually 33 feet, I know.) is easily achievable with practice, I think being able to draw and hit a 3×5 index card, on demand, in less than 1.25 seconds is a reasonable standard. Yes, the “vital zone” of an adult male is significantly larger than that. If you’re happy with a six-inch circle, or an eight-inch circle, that’s fine, but a 3×5, working to develop the ability to put it into a 3×3 or even a 2×2 circle, at speed, especially at closer ranges (call it, inside of 15 feet?). It also gives you a greater margin for error when your hands are sweaty, and your shaking with nerves, because it just got real, and you’re concerned about not missing the bad guy and hitting the wrong person…

After shooting my groups with the pistol, I’ll start at the ten meter line, and do a simple draw from concealment to first shot break, on the timer. With a double-stack Glock 19 or 17, I’ll run through two full magazines. The first will be with both hands working the gun. The second is shot, still from a drawstroke, strong-hand only.

I do the exact same thing with the pistol that I did with the carbine, except I’m drawing the gun from concealment, instead of coming from a ready position. I’ll move up to the seven meter line, and then the three meter line. Finally, I’ll move back to the ten meter line.

I’ll finish up shooting a group at 25 meters, just to reinforce precision and accuracy, before winding up.

Like the rifle/carbine, this is the entirety of my live-fire range visit with the pistol for the first two weeks of the training cycle. The second two weeks of the cycle, I’ll split the first magazine at each distance, shooting half the magazine, one drawstroke at a time, with both hands, before transitioning to the strong-hand only for the second half of the magazine. The second magazine at each distance is dedicated solely to controlled pairs, for the exact same reason I do it with the carbine.

Conclusions

The single most important shot you can fire in a gunfight is the first shot you fire. It’s going to determine the course of the rest of the fight. You can either make it hit, on time, or you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to catch up and fix your mistakes…

Spending a significant portion of your training cycle doing nothing but working snap shooting and first shot breaks from the concealed carry drawstroke will go a very, very long way towards ensuring that your first shot does what you need it to do.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Training Plan Part 2a

———-Brief Interlude for a Rant about Target Selection———-

There is a common belief among many trainers that you have to use “humanoid” or photorealistic targets for “combat training.” This is a persistent belief that, as far as I know, is based on the same flawed SLA Marshall “research” from World War Two that has convinced most of America that killing bad people is “unnatural.” We “need” humanoid” and photorealistic targets, in order to “overcome” our “natural, innate reluctance” to kill other people. It’s Pavlovian Operant Conditioning.

I’m only going to say this once, so pay attention: IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT TARGET YOU USE, AS LONG AS YOUR MIND IS RIGHT!!!!

There is a reason that the best trainers out there switch back-and-forth between bulls-eye targets, silhouettes, colored dots, and even index cards. IT DOESN’T MATTER!!! What matters is that you can, on demand, place a shot—or every shot—in as small a place as you have determined is necessary. I tend to rely extensively on basic buff-and-white IPSC standard silhouettes, when I am teaching classes. To make smaller target zones, I use 3×5 index cards and/or a Sharpie marker pen. In large part that is because I end up hauling a lot of stuff around the country with me when I travel to teach. I don’t feel the need to carry eighteen flavors of targets as well. I also come from a background that favored improvisation for achieving training goals in austere conditions. I am all about the “making do” mindset. My personal favorite target for training is a simple IPSC silhouette with a 3×5 index taped or stapled on it somewhere. In the center of the index card, I draw a circle around a quarter ($0.25 coin) with a Sharpie, then fill in the outline, as an aiming point.

If the only targets you can get your hands on are basic little bulls-eye targets from Wal-Mart’s Sporting Goods section? You’ll be just fine. Don’t sweat it. Even better, for about $5.00, you can buy a package of 3×5 index cards, a roll of masking tape, and a Sharpie, over in the Home Office section, and you won’t run out of targets for a year or two.

If you WANT to drop the funds to buy super-duper, ultra high speed, photorealistic targets of Islamic jihadist “tangos” to make you feel all Tier One JSOC Jedi? More power to you. You’d be better off spending that money on ammunition though.

———-End of Rant———-

With the rifle/carbine, I like to start out shooting a group at 25 or 50 meters, followed by a “real” group at 100 meters (my optic is engineered to be zeroed at 100 meters, after all). I am looking for a legitimate two minute-of-angle group. If your personal or group standards mandate a 4MOA group, then that should be your goal. If your group standards are less stringent than 4MOA, you need to find a group that is more serious. If your personal standards are less stringent than 4MOA, you need to straighten up, and set some legitimate standards for performance.

With the pistol, I shoot my groups at 10 meters and 25 meters. I legitimately expect a three-inch or better group at both ranges. I also practice, and recommend, either after shooting your groups with the pistol, or alternating on different range trips, shooting these groups with the pistol strong-hand only and weak-hand only.

It is important to point out that there is a distinct, critical difference between precision and accuracy, and group shooting is where you have the opportunity to validate both of these, without the pressure of time constraints. Shooting a tight, 2MOA group, that impacts eight inches from the anticipated point-of-impact is precise, but it’s not accurate. Shooting a 10MOA group the center of which is dead center on the intended point-of-impact is accurate, but it’s not precise.

A precise group that is not accurate may be indicative of a sight misalignment, like my earlier reference, or it may be a matter of you making the same mistake every time (“Glocking” the trigger is a good example of the latter). Your group shooting should focus on achieving the perfection in both.

Task: “Snap Shooting”

The first shot you fire in a gunfight really will set the stage for the rest of the gunfight, for better or worse. It needs to be delivered with precision and accuracy, but it also needs to arrive in time. Snap shooting is the best method I know of to achieve that ability level. It is so important, the first month of each quarter, I will devote my entire range session weekly to nothing but snap shooting. I will literally, spend an entire hour—or two, when you count pistol—doing nothing but shooting single shot snaps (draw to first shot break with the pistol).

The hardest part of building speed and accuracy is getting into a good, solid firing position, with an effective grip on the gun that will allow you to break an accurate shot, as fast as possible. A very dear friend who happens to be a long-time instructor down at Gunsite, once pointed out to some mutual friends we were coaching one day, “it’s not about shooting faster. It’s about shooting sooner.”
That is SPOT-ON! It is going to take you—as an individual—a given amount of time to break the shot, without disrupting your sight picture/sight alignment in the process. That time will vary from individual to individual, and while it SHOULD get faster with practice, at any given moment in your development as a shooter, that time is non-negotiable. Trying to go faster means you mess up and miss. It’s going to take you the time it’s going to take you, to break an accurate shot.

What you CAN do however, is move faster getting to the point of breaking the shot. That practice is best achieved during dry-fire. The key to this, of course, is that your dry-fire “shots” have to be legitimate. Hitting the designated/desired position, and then yanking the trigger, without paying attention to the fact that your sights just jumped six inches on the end of your muzzle, is not doing you any good. It’s going to be detrimental. It will mess your shooting up. Dry-fire is only valid if it’s valid.

For my live-fire visits, with the rifle, I start on the 100M line. On the timer, I will fire an entire magazine, one shot at a time at the target of the day. For my snap shooting, I’ll generally shoot steel, because I’m lazy and don’t want to bother walking downrange after every single shot to note hits and misses and tape targets. I start the quarter shooting an eight-inch steel plate, and over the course of the month, if I am making my time goals, I’ll reduce the size of the steel to six-inch plates. (My long-term, ultimate goal is a sub 1 second snap shot, from the standing at 100 meters, to a four-inch plate.)

It’s important to point out that I record, in my shooting log, the time for every single shot. I note any misses as well. At the end of each range trip, I will average out those times to find my “par time” for dry-fire training for the next week. If I miss more than three shots out of a magazine, I know I’m pushing too fast and will deliberately slow down, taking my time. If I miss more than five shots, I’m obviously having a really bad day, so I’ll just turn the timer off and focus on slow, deliberate aimed fire from that position and distance for the duration of the magazine. Generally however, on an eight-inch plate, I’m at the point that I can consistently get 100% hits at speed. My average, on demand par time runs between 0.85-0.9 seconds.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Training Plan Part 2

Developing a Training Plan, Part Two

Marksmanship Training

It has been correctly said that the most important shot you will make in a gunfight is the first round out of your gun. That shot can—and generally will—determine the course of the rest of the fight. Whether in a military/paramilitary context of small-unit combat, or an armed citizen context of concealed carry self-defense shooting, an accurate, precise first shot, well-delivered, can provide you with the time and reaction gap needed to allow you to deliver a second, third, or subsequent shots, as needed. A miss, on the converse, may well be just the motivation the bad guy needs to step up and deliver his “A game.”

This has led to the pithy cliché, parroted by so many, without thinking, that “speed is fine, but accuracy is final.” While there is a great deal of Truth in this old phrase, it has been too often misinterpreted by the corrupt and untalented, to intentionally obfuscate reality by convincing the ignorant that speed is completely irrelevant, as a way to absolve themselves of their incapability of teaching students to progress and shoot faster, while maintaining acceptable levels of accuracy. Training after all, has become an industry, and making money requires customers. Making students uncomfortable, by putting them in positions to fail, even in a learning environment, where they could learn from those failures, can lead to a loss of revenue when they decide to stay home and watch John Woo movies, instead of returning to be pushed to uncomfortable levels.

Worse yet, in my mind, are those who have, in some circles, long pushed the concept known as “combat accuracy,” that has been equally abused. I don’t know where this concept actually originated. I do know that I first heard it used by blindly loyal advocates of “pointshooting,” as an excuse for their inability to shoot with a degree of accuracy greater than “minute of the entire target.” Generally, in my experience, in the ensuing years, it has come to mean something along the lines of “well, if any of my guaranteed-lethal, buffalo-slaying, forty-something caliber bullets hit that bad guy anywhere, his head’s gonna get blown plumb off’n his neck! I’m ‘combat accurate’ and these here rounds is guaranteed to pole-ax a gol-durned horse!”

This is, on the face of it, ridiculous, and has been—rightfully–mocked among trained shooters of a…dare I say it….higher caliber. The real problem however, is that like so much within the modern discourse, neither conceptual approach is completely wrong, they’ve just been abused and malformed to fit certain narratives. It is true that, generally speaking, you cannot miss fast enough to win a gunfight. It is also generally true that, a couple of solid hits to a vital area of the human body will stop most threats from continuing their nefarious actions.

It demonstrably does not require the same level of precision to stop a carjacker crawling through the driver’s side window of your vehicle as it does to stop a rapist, holding a knife to your teenage daughter’s throat, across her bedroom. Within the training paradigm of marksmanship training then, we have to establish two separate, but balanced metrics of performance. We have to determine how accurate we need to be, and we need to determine how fast we need to be able to make those shots, on demand.

This is, at the most basic level, the single most fundamental determinate of skill-at-arms with personal firearms, whether sidearm or carbine. It’s not simply a matter of “can you make the shot you need to make, when you need to make it?” More accurately, it could be said that the important question is, “can you make the shots you need to make, in the time frame you need to make them in?”
If you cannot reach the standards for accuracy, within a given time standard, there is no reason to try and complete more complicated drills. If you can achieve the standards however—whatever your standards are—then achieving success in more advanced, complex drills is simply a matter of putting the marksmanship into application. Multiple shot strings are really no more than a matter of repeated individual shots, completed in rapid sequence. Multiple target engagements are simply a matter of repeated individual shots, on each target, completed in rapid sequence.

Regardless of the weapon in question—carbine, pistol, or shotgun, heck, even light machine gun, for that matter—marksmanship at speed is really comprised of a few interrelated things: your grip on the gun, your firing position, your presentation or drawstroke and presentation, sight picture/sight alignment, and breaking the shot in a manner that doesn’t disrupt your sight picture. It’s really that simple.

Basic Marksmanship Drills for Rifle and Pistol

Inarguably, it is extremely critical, at the beginning of every single range trip, to start out with a focus on basic, deliberate precision and accuracy. The best way to achieve this is to begin every range trip, whether with pistol or rifle, with shooting basic groups.

Task: Group Shooting

This will help you reinforce your focus, throughout the forthcoming range session, on things like pressing the trigger in a manner that will not disrupt your sight alignment, taking the time you need to get the accuracy you need, and—perhaps most importantly—it will validate, or invalidate your zero (as an example, on a recent “fun” trip to the range, my Glock 17 was hitting consistently to the left by six inches. Assuming that I was “Glocking” the trigger, I slowed down and shot a clover-leaf group at 10 meters, and the rounds were still six inches to the left. I fixed my sights, and brought the POI back to the center of the 3×5 index card. Had I followed my own advice and shot the group to begin the trip, this would never have been a problem).

Your group can be any number of shots. The Army, for the entire time I was in uniform, doctrinally mandated three-round groups. Most good trainers will advocate for at least a five round group, assuming that at least one will be a flier. I am comfortable, with my rifles, shooting a three-round group, unless I “call” one of my shots as a flier. If you’re not comfortable with your ability to “call” your shots, then shoot a minimum of five round groups. With my pistols, I actually like to shoot a ten-round group most of the time. A ten-shot, one-hole group, punching out the center of a 3×5 index card is a pretty good confidence boost before you even start shooting anything else.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Training Plan Part 1a

Being Mindful
When you push to the point of making mistakes, then it’s time to stop and pay attention to what your failure point is, and start “being mindful” of how to fix the problem. I used to tell people to “slow down,” but found that simply telling them to “slow down,” didn’t fix anything. They still made the exact same mistake, they just did it slower. Instead, it’s about shifting your mental focus from “going fast” to “think about what you need to do.” Calling it “mindfulness” makes it sound like some sort of New Age, Zen, Hippie stuff, but it’s really not. Focus on the process, including the overarching reason for the process (killing someone before he kills you or someone else) and what you need to perform in order to achieve the purpose. It’s training for performance, rather than outcome. If you perform correctly, generally, you’ll achieve the outcome you are seeking.

Be In the Moment
This is closely tied to the mental-spiritual concepts we’ve talked about in some of my more recent articles. Sometimes, on your live-fire days, especially, you need to just relax, and shoot a scheduled drill without trying to push your limits. This is about just shooting the drill accurately, and seeing how you do. Don’t push yourself faster than what you feel you’re capable of doing flawlessly. Often, shooters—especially eager novices—feel like this is an utter waste of valuable, limited training time. There are two distinct reasons I believe that taking the time to just be in the moment is absolutely critical, though.The first is for your psychological resilience. Just like making advances in PT means occasionally backing off, lowering the weights, or slowing down your runs, to let your body recover, and avoid physical burn-out, your brain needs that rest from constantly pushing at its extreme limits occasionally too. This is why I cycle my training through the yearly quarters, and this is why we occasionally just chill out and shoot a drill to “see what we can do.”

The second reason is the “spiritual” part. When the time comes and it’s on you to “beat the bad guy,” you’re either going to be able to do so, or you’re not. Nothing you can do, in the moment, is going to change your skill level. You’ll either be good enough, or you won’t be good enough. If you’ve trained enough, and the other guy hasn’t trained as hard, or as smart, as you? You’ll probably be okay. Ultimately though, you’re going to have enough on your mind, ranging from “OH CRAP! THAT DUDE HAS A GUN AND IS SHOOTING PEOPLE!” to the cognitive process needed to process data and determine if you can take a shot or not, or if you need to move to take a shot, etc. Your body is going to receive the command to execute, and it’s going to do what it is capable of doing, predicated on your training up to that point, at its own pace. If you’ve let it do so in training, then two things result: A) you have mental confidence in your body’s ability to do what it needs to do, and you can focus on your information processing, and B) if you do feel yourself getting panicked into a rush, you can let yourself “be mindful” of the process, by focusing on performing, rather than worrying about the outcome. You really cannot miss fast enough to win. You can, however, miss fast enough to hit somebody’s six-year old kid nearby. Continuing to “push” yourself to push past the boundaries of your ability at that point will NOT fix the problem. You cannot fix the problem of smoking a kid by then shooting their playmates as well.

Speed
Drills come in two basic, distinct flavors, when it comes to time metrics. Some, like your marksmanship and core skills drills, will be set up in a specific way, and should generally always be set up the same way. These are drills designed to determine specific time and accuracy metrics, and this consistency in set-up allows you to assess improvements in your performance. In this article series, this type of drill will have very specific standards metrics, for both time and accuracy. The standards provided are all realistic, reasonable metrics, readily achievable in reasonable time frames; by anyone sufficiently motivated to train regularly (we’re talking like 10-20 minutes every day for dry-fire, and 45-60 minutes every week or every other week for live-fire range trips. Really, if you can’t slice 15 minutes out of your day to gain proficiency with your firearm, you have no business carrying a firearm any-damned-way!).

Many of the application skills drills however, are not designed to be set up in a specific way, and doing so actually detracts significantly from the value of the drill. This, of course, means that comparing time metrics from one set-up to another is largely pointless. For these, a general time frame of how long it should take competent shooters to complete the drill will be noted, but the best metric you can take note of on these are things like time to first shot/hit, split times between shots (how well are you managing recoil and driving your gun back on target?), and how clear your communications are between partners, or how correctly you executed your decision-making drills.

Conclusion
This is intended to be at least a four-part article series. Part Two will cover the drills I use for dry-fire and live-fire training to improve marksmanship, under the description provided in this Part One. Part Three will cover Core Skills and the drills I use for those. Part Four will cover Applications Skills and some of the drills I use for improving those. Part Five will be an actual layout of a quarterly training plan for pistol, carbine, or both (we’ll see how tired I am of writing this series by the time I get there…) In the meantime, I seriously urge you to consider some of the conceptual ideas covered in this Part of the series, as you go about whatever practice you are currently doing. I feel obligated to point out that being able to achieve a given task or skill component correctly, consistently, is a prerequisite to “pushing” your ability, however. If you can’t hit an eight-inch plate from the standing with your rifle at 100M, then there’s no point in trying to push to hit that eight-inch plate from the standing with your rifle at 100M, in <1.0 seconds. If you don’t have the basic motor pattern of your speed reload drilled in, so instead you fumble it regularly, then going faster is NOT going to fix it. Pushing can only come after you’re able to perform the skill on demand, under a time constraint. I’ll share one of my “Mosby’s Maxims:” “If you can’t do it on demand, then you can’t do it on demand.” So-called “game players” are an imaginary construct of people too lazy to show up and do the work. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Training Plan Part 1

Developing a Practice Plan, Part One, By John Mosby

(One of the most frequent questions I get asked in classes is, “How do we practice this stuff when we go home?” The short, easy answer, of course is simply to follow the appropriate POI course outlines in the appendices of Volumes One and Two of The Reluctant Partisan. They are laid out in a manner that allows you to use each block of instruction as a practice session. If you lay out the fundamental skills needed to complete each block, and use them for dry-fire practice, then when you go to the live-fire range, you can simply shoot the table of fire for that particular block. In a couple of months, you’ve worked through the entire program, and—hopefully—seen some impressive improvements in your skill set.

During the last block of classes however, I was asked at least once, in each individual class, to post an article specifically on how I set up my annual training plan and break it into cycles….This is the first installment of a Five-Part series on the subject. –JM)In short, I divide the year into four quarters of three months each, and then I work through a three-block cycle, with each month dedicated to a particular training block. The quarterly training cycle includes three basic training blocks that, for the sake of convenience, I will label “marksmanship,” “core skills,” and “application skills.” Most of my regular training is my daily training focused on dry-fire training in the marksmanship and core skills blocks. That is because these are the foundation of skill, and if those two blocks are dialed in, the application is cake.

A typical live-fire training session will be composed of shooting 2-3 repetitions each of 2-4 specific drills designed to focus on elements of the current block of emphasis. An efficient training session, of course, should be set up in such a way that requires minimal shifting of the range set-up. A) this saves time, making my training more time efficient, and B) especially on public ranges, the less trips I need to make downrange to change the set-up, the safer I am from some knucklehead trying to show off for his wife or girlfriend shooting me out of stupidity. I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate, and I want my range trips to be effective, but I also need them to be efficient, so I make a concerted effort, if it’s a “working” range day, to be done in 45-60 minutes, at the outside (A “working” range day is when I’m there focused on my personal skills. A “non-working” range day is when I’m teaching the wife—although I generally try to maintain the same time constraints then—or when I’m at the range with friends and we’re just shooting different drills for fun and to spend time together, building frith (Fellowship/Comradarie/Team)

Every shooter with any length of experience is aware of some famous drills, has likely shot some of them, and probably has a favorite or two. It’s critical to understand however, that it is not this drill or that drill which is important. A properly designed practice drill is not about recreating specific combat situations. Instead, it is designed to achieve a specific training purpose. Generally, this is to measure your current level of skill and test your training progression, or to improve your skill. If a drill—no matter how well-loved—is not achieving that for your particular training focus, it’s pointless for anything beyond ego gratification.

Marksmanship

This block should focus on your ability to make progressively more difficult shots, at progressively faster speeds. Many shooters fall prey to the lazy hubris of believing since they can shoot an “acceptable” group, at a given distance, they are “good enough.” A popular one in “prepper” circles is the 4MOA standard of The Appleseed Project (Meanwhile, at the last rifle course, in AZ, I was publicly berating myself for shooting a 2” group at 50M, from the squatting position…until I realized we were actually shooting at the 100M line for that iteration). That’s just not an acceptable mindset in the real world of gunfighting. You should ALWAYS be striving to improve your accuracy and speed. Speaking objectively, there is no such thing as “accurate enough” or “fast enough.”

The balance between accuracy and speed is always going to be contextually subjective (that’s non-military speak for METT-TC dependent, by the way…).It’s subject to range, target presentation, and—above all—the limits of your personal skill and ability. This is why so much of your training time should emphasize making “impossible” shots in “impossible” times (Miss S, did you catch that?).

Core Skills

Core skills are those fundamental gunhandling and shooting skills that—along with marksmanship—are…wait for it…core to effectively prosecuting a fight with a firearm. This includes things like your drawstroke, or the presentation from ready with your rifle, reloading and other malfunction clearances, target transitions, and the other skills that will allow you to make each shot you fire a conscious action that occurs in a deliberate manner, but fast enough to solve the problem you are confronted with.

Application Skills

Application skills are those skills that allow you to translate your marksmanship and core skills into actual gunfight problem solving skills. This includes things like movement, use of cover and/or concealment, effective communication for working with a partner, safeguarding a principal like a non-combatant bystander or family member, while prosecuting the fight, and—the single most important skill in all of the gunfighting world—discrimination shooting with good, solid, accurate, rapid-fire thinking and decision-making under duress.

Critical Training Concepts

Perhaps the most critical training concept that you need to understand is that you’re going to mess up. That’s WHY we practice! Lots of shooters—and I’ve had a lot of them in classes—have this ridiculous notion that if they mess up in training and practice, that they’re a failure. It’s as if they mess up, such as blowing a shot, or even shooting a “no shoot,” in practice, that they are somehow indelibly imprinting training scars into their neural motor pathways. Incorrect! You ARE going to make mistakes. Even the experts make mistakes. THAT’S WHY WE PRACTICE!!!!!!

Make your mistake. Then, analyze why the mistake happened, and determine how to fix the deficiency, and then move on. That’s the point, people. Seriously. The first two times I fired for qualification in the Army, I failed to qualify and had to shoot it again (actually, the second time was as a private in the Ranger Regiment, and I had to shoot the qualification table FIVE TIMES that day before I finally managed to meet the standard!) Fortunately, I had good mentors who taught me to take the time to analyze the problems, and figure out how to fix them. Over the course of the rest of my career, I managed to never shoot less than Expert, and honestly? I’m ten times or more a better marksman and all-around shooter now than I was when I was a soldier.

Pushing Your Limits

Your dry-fire and live-fire practice should be about getting better. That means you generally have to push yourself to perform any given drill harder than you feel comfortable. If you’re not pushing out of your comfort margins, you’re simply not going to improve. When you push, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to blow some shots. You’re going to fumble and drop magazines during reloads. You’re going to trip, fall, and face plant in front of people (don’t ask…). You’re going to shoot “no shoots” as you push to go faster on discrimination shooting drills. The point is to push yourself to your failure point, and then to fix whatever deficiency created the failure. The majority of your training, both dry- and live-fire, should be of this type. It’s critical to understand though, that it’s not just a matter of “go faster!” You’re trying to determine when and how to move faster, but you’re also trying to determine how to modify your techniques to allow you to make the shots you need to make, in the times you need to make them.

It may be about accepting a “good enough” sight picture to get the shot you need to make. It may be a matter of changing where or how your reload magazine is carried to improve the efficiency of your biomechanics.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Limits and how to overcome them

Know Your Limits, by Molon Labe

In these times, there are many activities that we must train to be able to do, many skills we must know, and many tasks we are forced to accomplish to sustain our lives and those who we care about. In the days ahead, there will be even greater and more difficult things that we will have to do should a collapse or failure of civility occur to any degree in our area. Many things that are abhorrent to us may become required in order to righteously protect what is ours.

Taking lives in the defense of our lives, our property, and more importantly in defense of our friends and family, may well be absolutely necessary. This is a topic which is often neglected today but clearly shown in Holy Scripture. However this is one of the only skills that you cannot afford to do without or make a mistake. Realistically, you may not have to utilize the skills of a warrior more than 1% of the time, and probably less than that. But if a mistake happens during that 1%, you, and those you care about and are standing in front of, won’t live to enjoy the other 99%.

You must realize that I am not talking about going to the rifle range on a nice sunny day and excelling at punching holes on a non-moving paper target with all the time in the world. Certainly there is a place for that, but the best shooter in the world will not survive a violent conflict or be able to protect his family when the time comes if that person has not made the conscience decision beforehand that he or she will drop the hammer on that other living, breathing human being. That they will plunge that knife into the enemy’s neck, or bring that chair over their head, and repeat with savage fury until finished. If it isn’t in you to go up to that edge and know that you will, for a certainty step off and take that reprobate’s life from him, even as he comes at the unexpected moment to take yours, then you will not survive.

This cannot be overstated: Hesitation kills. Remember that! Most gunfights are over in less than four seconds. It has been stated many times over that a failure to plan is a plan to fail, and that is true. So the question is; what have you determined to do when the time comes that those you love are in danger? Even if you never have to endure a failure of society or go through a war zone, make no mistake, this is a cruel world and scumbags are everywhere. I’ve had a friend killed by a Muslim with a pistol at point blank range. A few of my friends have encountered men with lethal intent and had to defend their lives or die trying; they have survived and their enemies are either in the ground or in prison. None of these men had gone looking for a fight or had done anything stupid which should have been avoided. I’ve survived a potential violent conflict the best way, by keeping my eyes open and with the help of the Lord, escaping the narrow confined room where I should have been killed. In that case I didn’t have to snap the enemy’s spine or use my knife, but if I had, would I have been ready? If it quickly came to a “him or me” situation, could I have fought intelligently and fiercely? I hope so. I was young at the time, but I had already crossed that line in my head a hundred times before.

On a side note, you don’t have to be in a bad spot to be targeted by bad people. Sometimes they follow you. Or like in the case of my friend, they come to your door out of nowhere with a gun and a bag full of cutting tools and implements associated with torture. Had my friend not been the man that he is, he and his wife and two children would have been a sad memory instead of a shining example in our community. The point here is that you will not be able to decide when the moment of truth is: It’s going to choose you. And statistically, that means it will be up close and personal (and probably very dark, to boot).

Know Your Limits
In your mind, you have to know your limits. You have to know how far you are willing to take it and how much you are willing to risk to protect those you love. Ask yourself, are you willing to take a bullet, stop that bat swing with your arm, or get hit by that vehicle for someone you love? For principle? For right? No matter what the cost? Run through scenarios in your head, and know personally how far you will take it, for what, and why. For me, the idea of living the rest of my life knowing that I could’ve bit the bullet and saved someone I love dearly, but didn’t, is more horrible than death itself, regardless of how frightening the circumstances may be. What if it’s a little girl, or even perhaps one day, my own little girl? My mom, dad or sister? No, the preservation of their lives and the lives of my friends is more important to me than my own. And on the day, when that dirt bag has captured them and seeks to extinguish their life by the most barbaric means possible, or when those Religion of Peace types begin gutting, crucifying, beheading, raping, (fill in the blank), to someone I care about, in that situation time-is-life. Remember this, as Douglas MacArthur stated, “In war, you win or lose. Live or die. And the difference is just an eyelash.”

So let me now ask you. How fast can you get your shot off reliably from the method you carry? If it isn’t carried on your person, are you sure you can get to it, get it out and running before the gunfight is over? Remember from the first to last shot in a gunfight on the street, it’s going to be over in 2.5 to 4 seconds. When you’re slipping backwards in the dark and rain, that isn’t very long. If you intend on using an edged weapon or blunt instrument, how fast can you cover distance and disable your opponent, and how sure are you that you will be able to take down that threat? What if you are caught without a weapon? Do you have to resort to picking something up or can you kill with your bare hands? At what point in the fight will you draw your knife or gun, and why? If you take a single hit from a pistol caliber, you have perhaps as much as 95% chance of walking out of there alive; not so if you are stabbed in the neck. And never discount the method of making distance via your feet, sometimes referred to as the Nike Jitsu technique, if it is an option to you. If you are fired at while running away from an urban gang member with a pistol, statistics show you have a very good chance of not getting hit. Obviously, that isn’t always an option, from either a moral or strategic standpoint.

This is what you must know: You will probably not die from a single gunshot wound or knife slash. People survive them every day. If you are dealing with an opponent with a gun, the gun is probably going to go off; you may get hit. Knife, yes, you’re going to get cut, it’s not the end of the world. Pipe-bat-chain, yes, you’re going to get smacked and yes, it’s going to hurt, but that’s why we have casts and splints. The point is to keep fighting. It’s not over until you are dead, have given up, or have won. If you die, your worries are over. If you give up, you’re as good as dead, or you may have to endure a fate worse than death. But if you resign to fight until you can’t fight any more, or until you’ve no one left to fight, you’ve already won. Because if you do all you can and fail, it’s not truly failure. Failure is refusing to try.

Now if you know you’re going to fight and fight until you can’t fight any more, then what are some things that can help prepare you for that day and stack the odds in your favor? You must know your limits. That is, your current limits. Let us remember what Bruce Lee said once, “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

I know that I can draw my pistol and get a center mass hit reliably in under one second with movement in my open carry rig. Add 2/10ths of a second from concealment. I know that my carbine speed reload is on average 2/10ths of a second slower than drawing my pistol, but that if I have more ammo in my Redi-Mag, then I’ll take that extra time to get 30 rounds of .223 in the fight, versus 11 rounds of .45 ACP. I know that I can speed reload in pitch dark as fast as I can in the light, maybe faster. Sound impossible? The truth is that if you can perform an action without using conscious thought, if it can be controlled, regulated and maneuvered by using subconscious thought, it will be faster, smoother and more efficient. And this brings us to the next point.

Practice, Practice, Practice
Whatever action you may be called on to do when time is life, you’ll want to practice it until it can be done without conscious thought. The simple truth is that the better you become at subconsciously running your gun, then the better you’ll be able to use your conscious thought for solving problems. In conflicts there will always be problems that must be solved, obstacles to be overcome. One thing about guns is that sooner or later, (and probably sooner rather than later in battlefield conditions,) your gun will have a malfunction. So, can you clear your weapon’s malfunction quickly, no matter what kind it may be? How quickly? Can you do it without thinking about it, and keep your head in the game, thinking about the next move while you’re doing it? Make no mistake, this will take time and practice. A few inert rounds and some time spent with your weapons systems, off and on the range, dealing with malfunctions could very well save your life when it fails to go bang on the day. If you are carrying more than one weapon into the field or on the street, you need to know how quickly you can solve the problem, and at which point you swap to your alternate weapon or method. There will be no time on the day to stop and think, “Oh, yeah, NOW would be a good time to go to my back up!” It must be done via muscle memory or you’ll skip a beat, miss a step and be even further behind the power curve.

Don’t forget that your mind is your greatest and first weapon. It is the thing that drives all else and we want to keep it clear and have as few problems as possible to solve. So work with your gear and decide what your standard operating procedure is before it comes to it, and then practice it until it becomes instinct. When deciding your method in handling different situations or weapon systems, try to never go with a particular technique just because someone else said to, no matter how good or knowledgeable that person is, because people don’t always have the same body mechanics or application for any given situation. No, you’ll want to develop your own method based on good reasoning. If there’s a good reason behind why you’re doing what you’re doing, then at least you’re doing something right. But don’t stop there; look to see if you can find a better reason to do it any other way. Follow the 80% rule. You want to practice what is going to work for you 80% of the time or better. Ask yourself when you are doing your next dry fire practice or shooting at the range, or anything that may need to be accomplished during critical moments, “Is this going to work for me when it’s wet, when I’m tired, when I can’t think, when my lungs are working overtime to suck in some vital air, when I’m scared out of my wits?” And train to reality. Reality isn’t sunny and 75 on level ground with no pressure. Reality is dark-cold-scared with everything on the line and no do-overs.

How well do you perform when your heart is pounding at 145+ beats per minute, your legs and arms are smoked and your mind is struggling to find the answer to the current problem? Test yourself and know that at that point, the head shot at 25 yards is stupid with that pocket pistol, or manageable with that shotgun. Know that your speed reload falls to pieces if you go too fast, so you can slow it down, take a breath and think through the problem. If you train through enough stressful situations, running as fast as you can, then you’ll find where you melt down and where you need to be to keep things running quickly but smoothly. One important point to remember is that “You can’t hit by missing.” This means that if you’re going to miss, slow it down, correct it, move up, slow your heart and breathing or just man up and dig deep and do whatever needs to happen to get the job done right.

But don’t go faster than you can. I learned this lesson crystal clear when I was about 15 years old. I remember expending an entire 20 round magazine at a full-size steel through my rifle at 200 yards and never once hitting it because I was frustrated and was shooting way too fast; a shot that I should have hit the first time if I had slowed myself down a couple seconds. This was a stupid mistake that could have meant taking an innocent life through negligence down range on the day, because every missed round is a liability. But the point here is that if you shoot, move or operate too fast for your level, you’re doing no one any good. So if you find yourself missing, slow it down and get your hits. Again, this comes back to knowing your limits. Don’t go faster than you can on the street, means that you hit that failure point on the range, in training, so you won’t make that mistake on The Day. So where are your limits? Do you know them? Do you know if you can hit that half a head hiding behind your best friend when he/she becomes a hostage? It’s all on you.

Train hard. Fight harder. Live for God and do your best; leave the results to Him because they are His anyway. Love those you should and be ready to kill those who need to die. And always know your limits.

https://survivalblog.com/know-your-limits-by-molon-labe/


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Equip yourself for the troubled times ahead: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------