Reality Based Training

I know several fighter pilots. In particular I talked with an A-10 Warthog, “tank killer”, pilot. He’s a great guy and a great father and husband. To meet him and get to know him away from his aircraft you would probably not guess that he was a pilot. He and I talked about controlling that fear and adrenaline dump that comes with a combat situation. He and I did some shooting together and I asked him how he kept control? He said because he had done it before. Training. Reality based training.
It’s been said that you never want to run into something for the first time in combat.
I’ve talked about the OODA loop (OODA=observe, orient, decide, act) and also the Fight or Flight survival trigger and its various components. I also talked about how it is necessary to go through those mechanisms as quickly as possible in order to go from a reactive to an active response to the attacker, and that it is a key factor in upping the odds in favor of your survival.
I will assume that those of you who are reading this that have had firearms instruction or combat training have heard of the effects that a spontaneous, unexpected threat stimulus has on the body. And I’m sure that we all were taught and all agree that one of the effects is that our fine motor skills go to heck in a hand basket in a high stress environment. In addition to tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, increased heart rate, the adrenaline and cortisol hormone cocktail totally negate your ability to execute fine motor skills in a gross motor skills environment. It is often described as wearing gloves or oven mitts. We’ve all been taught that. We all agree on that, right?
Tell that to a Fighter Pilot. Here you have an individual flying at Mach II in the cockpit of a $55 million dollar machine, 20,000 feet in the air, directing flight control over a bank of controls and instruments, both heads up displays and dash mounted, in charge of fire control, cognizant of the rest of his squadron and in contact with them, tracking radar both for position and possible enemy birds or radar lock on his position. In addition the pilot is following his mission directives and reporting status back to command. That is a pretty high stress environment if you ask me. And it sounds like the pilot is using some pretty fine motor skills.
Yet, it is true that all of the effects of adrenaline and cortisol that I mentioned previously are real and they do take place. So how is this possible? How can a fighter pilot use all of these finite motor skills in a high stress, gross motor skills environment? Because he has done it before. Why is it often bad guys win?” The answer is, because they’ve done it before. It’s the same answer here concerning the fighter pilot. Actually it’s the same principle. Funny thing about Principles and Concepts. They are completely objective. They don’t take sides. They don’t change. They are universal and they apply equally as well for bad guys as they do for good guys. How do we make them work for us? Reality based training. This is the game changer. This is what separates the traditional rote memorization of skills and techniques from the evolutionary, adaptive ability to effectively apply learned skills and decision making processes in the fluid, dynamic environment of actual combat. You may ask, just what the heck is he talking about? We’re going to take a brief historical look at the evolution of Reality Based Training. The goal of reality based training is to identify and analyze the combat environment and to reproduce it as closely as possible in training.
Enter Colonel John Boyd, aka 40 second Boyd, a nickname he earned as a fighter pilot in combat training because of his ability to gain the superior position on opponents in 40 seconds or less. John Boyd was a fighter pilot but was also one of the most influential and important Military analysts and strategists of modern times, also known for the concept of the OODA Loop. Boyd was in part responsible for the modernization of fighter pilot combat training and architect of the Air Force Fighter Pilot Training program which was also the model used to create the Air Force Red Flag Training and the US Navy Top Gun fighter pilot training program.
How does this relate to our discussion? I will ask another question. When do most fighter pilots get shot down? On their very first mission. Boyd and others looked at the data from decades of armed combat and were made aware of a very important statistic. Statistically it is most likely that a fighter pilot would be shot down on his first or initial combat engagements. However, if they survived their first 10 or 12 missions their survivability jumped dramatically. In fact so dramatically that statistically those pilots were almost never shot down in combat. As a result of this discovery many things were learned. One of which was that the environment of air combat did produce all of the damning effects of high stress, high threat physiological and psychological responses that we discussed earlier. This was not good for a pilot engaged in aerial combat. Oven mitts and tunnel vision do not enhance your survival skills at 17,000 feet.
By looking at this phenomena (the spike of survivability after a dozen or so sorties), much was learned about the human’s ability to adapt and prevail in spite of the effects of high stress in a combat environment. The most obvious is simply the benefit of “Combat Experience,” the more you engage in combat the better you are at it. As this was analyzed it was deduced that the more an individual faced these high stress environments, the more he was able to maintain both physical and psychological self- control in spite of the effects of large amounts of adrenaline, and cortisol, the increased heart rate and all the other stress responses and their resulting influences. And the more times he faced these environments the more he manipulated the environment and the less the environment manipulated him.
So in terms of Fighter Pilots it was proposed that if you could get a pilot through his first 12 Combat missions in training before engaging a real enemy in real combat then perhaps the survival rate would increase. And it worked. By creating as close a combat environment as possible in training and putting the pilot through that stress again and again you are in essence inoculating the individual to the stress of combat before he is actually exposed to it. Hence the term, stress inoculation that is now commonly used to describe this process.
Again, the question is; How does this relate to personal or individual combat? Well, principles don’t change, they don’t care where and how they are applied and they don’t care if you are a good guy or a bad guy.
Combat is combat. It doesn’t matter if you are engaged in a dog fight with an Iranian Mig or a bad guy who’s slinging lead or fists in your direction. You will experience all of the deleterious effects of a high threat, high stress event. A large part of your ability to prevail and survive will depend on whether the event controls you or if you control the event.
In terms of hand-to-hand combat the “Top Gun” training principle applies equally as well. The more experience you have had in gun fights or street fights the less you are “infected” by the stress of that action.
In terms of most people, they do not have the “privilege” or “misfortune” of actual combat experience and just as with fighter pilots you must in some way prepare yourself for it.
Reality based training is one of the best ways to gain at least an approximation of that experience. How do we accomplish that?
Welcome to a new ammo called Simunition. It enables the use of real guns firing wax bullets in gunfight simulations. It has become one of the standard training evolutions for almost all operators, agencies and departments around the world. Using Simunition, you could put operators into active force on force scenarios and run them through time and time again to give them their version of Top Gun training. And it works. Air soft training is a legitimate alternative to sims training, much easier and cheaper to use. I’ll admit it’s not quite as “real” but it also produces dramatic experiential results.
In terms of hand-to-hand combat there is of course no substitute for training. The key is taking the standard forms of training from the mat or ring to reality based training. Once again the need is to analyze the combat environment and reproduce it as closely as possible in training.
You must develop your own reality based training.
What are the basics of what you do or what you think you’ll be doing, in a defense situation?
Will you be sitting down? Maybe at a desk or in a vehicle? Will it be night or day? Would you ever have to fight with one arm? Would you be in a bathroom stall? Walking? Running? With someone? Will you be in a confined are or in the open? These are just some of the ideas you need to consider if your own situation. If you’ve got training partners you can get even more creative with multiple attacks, surprise attacks, attacks from behind, in a car, backed into a corner and any number of various scenarios.
You can introduce weapons, for example, fighting your way of a surprise weapons attack. A sock with a couple of whiffle balls stuffed into it works really well and it stings like hell. It’s very important to bring pain into the training as this really ups the stress level. Always wear eye protection.
These are just a few examples of how to start introducing some reality training into your conventional program.
Now mind you, you don’t have to practice these skills at the expense or exclusion of your other/current training. Remember, the first time you want to get attacked between two parked cars isn’t when a bad guy is really trying to kill you. You want it to have been two dozen times before in training.
We haven’t even touched kicking, grappling or ground fighting skills in regard to this subject, but I think you can see that any basic skill set you possess can be enhanced to reflect a more reality based, “Top Gun” approach.
So, what if you are someone who can not participate in active physical training for whatever reason. What can you do? Remember how real a dream feels? Do you have an imagination?
A few years ago a Arizona Highway Patrol officer spoke of this experience. Another officer radioed in that he was making a stop on a highway in the Arizona desert. He did not know that he was stopping a wanted felon. When the officer exited his unit, the bad guy wheeled out of his car with a nickel plated .357 magnum and fired off a round striking the officer directly in the belly. The officer went down and the bad guy took off. The officer crawled to his car and radioed “I’m shot, I’m shot” and fell back onto the pavement. The officer telling me the story arrived on scene about 5 minutes after the call. The downed officer was dying right in front of him and going into deep shock. Officer #2 tore open the downed officers clothes looking for a way to stop the bleeding. Funny thing though, there was no blood. He turned him over looking for an exit or entry bound and couldn’t find one. The officer in his hands was slipping away. There was no wound. The bullet had struck his belt, traveled around his side and out into the weeds. When the ambulance arrived they told officer #2 that 5 more minutes and the first officer would have been a goner. As you know, shock will kill you dead. So what is there to be learned from this? When the officer was shot, his thoughts were, “I’m shot. I’m dying.” The most important point here is, “If the mind truly believes something, the body follows suit. In effect the officer was willing himself to die and the body was following suit, shutting down the system.
So how can you develop training for yourself? You can use creative visualization to train. You can imagine the attack scenarios. But this has to be a vivid, HD quality movie that you watch. Imagine the sounds, the smells, the details of the attacker and the attack. Create your response, your vicious, ferocious response and your survival. The more real you make this waking dream the more “experience” you garner from the exercise. And you can let your imagination run wild. I hope that you realize that this also is as valuable as a training aid to anyone who is actively training in any form of combat, not just for those who are unable to train. There are certainly other aspects that go into the process of hardening the target including physical fitness, research and education. But, remember the Highway Patrol Officer? If you can imagine yourself dying, you can imagine an attack, your response, your survival and your experience. The use of creative visualization is not the real thing, but it can be the next best thing and in the game of life and death I will stack the deck with everything I can in my favor and so should you.
I watch a You Tube channel called Nutnfancy. In his testing and shooting guns he runs what he calls a “Run and gun”. This a course he sets up out in the Utah desert where you run and have several shooting scenarios and targets. He times them so some stress is added. You can see him at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbT5ssxEDZHNyz28N4Ov7Wg.
You can devise your own training program. Make it simple. Part of my “workout” is shooting from different positions. From behind something, looking through something, angles, you get the idea. People watching me think I’m nuts. But standing and facing a paper target only teaches you technique. It’s important to practice good technique but there comes a time when you know how to hold a gun, aim a gun, and trigger control.
I’ve shot with air soft and I like this training. I’ve shot in a shoot house and I like that too. I’ve never used Simunitions but would love to.
Find a program you can use to give you that reality edge over your attacker. Make yourself a hardened target.
Semper Paratus
Check 6
Burn