Low Light Force on Force with Randy Harris

Last weekend I attended Randy Harris’ Low Light Force on Force class. This is one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. In fact, I’d kind of been badgering Randy to teach it ever since he mentioned the possibility of doing a low light class about a year ago. I’ve had a little experience shooting in low light conditions at the Utah Polite Society night shoots, and it was enough to convince me that this was a subject demanding further training. While this was primarily a force-on-force class, we also did a bit of live fire shooting to explore issues like muzzle flash when shooting in low light that you can’t really examine with airsoft guns.

The class had six students. Two were Suarez International Staff Instructors (Alex Nieuwland and myself). I knew two of the students from previous SI classes in the southeast, but the other two were new to me. Five of the students had previously been to other SI classes, but one had only taken a class from that school in Pahrump. Most of the class was held in a warehouse in Chattanooga, with a trip to a local range for low light live-fire on Saturday night.

I used my G17 airsoft guns for the force-on-force and my Glock 21 for the live fire portion of the class. I also brought my Nok training knives, which saw quite a bit of use. For flashlights I used a Surefire 6P and a Firstlight Tomahawk (a small L-shaped light that allows you to hold both gun and light in something close to a normal two-handed grip.

Friday Night
The class began at six o’clock Friday. This evening session was largely a brief introduction to the SI force-on-force curriculum to get everyone on the same page before going into the low light stuff, though we did step outside for a bit of low-light work towards the end. Everyone introduced themselves and we signed the usual waivers. Randy started off with both the standard gun safety lecture and a force-on-force safety lecture.

As usual for a Suarez International FoF class, we began with the suicide drill, also known as the Matt Dillon drill. Two students set up facing each other at 5-7 yards and tried to draw and shoot the other without getting shot in return. At seven yards, sometimes one student or the other missed, but at five yards stand and deliver was pretty much mutual suicide (hence, the name of the drill).

The solution to this is to move without leaving a forwarding address before the bullet arrives. If you’re not where the assailant expects, he’s going to have to take a second or so to figure out what’s going on before he can shoot you. Randy explained the basic idea behind getting off the X, then volunteered me to talk a bit about the Pekiti takeoff. The Pekiti takeoff is a footwork technique we’ve adopted from Filipino martial arts for rapid, explosive movement that does a great job of getting you off the X in a hurry. Randy also talked about the Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop, developed by John Boyd to explain how people process information, and how getting off the X requires the bad guy to go through his OODA loop again before he can shoot you.

We moved outside to the parking lot. Randy pointed out that despite it being well after sundown, it was by no means dark. There was a streetlight across the street that provided some illumination for the parking lot. Some folks, particularly those selling tactical flashlights, make a big deal out of the percentage of gunfights that take place “during hours of darkness”. What they neglect to mention is that all this means is an incident occurred between 6pm and 6am. Very few of these gunfights actually take place in complete darkness. Indeed, it would be hard to find many totally dark spots in an urban area other than windowless interior rooms. Unless you live out in the boonies somewhere or you carry a badge and search darkened warehouses as part of your job, we’re really talking about low light, rather than complete darkness.

We did some get off the X drills and in these lighting conditions (probably pretty typical for an urban area at night) nobody had any trouble seeing and recognizing the other guy going for his gun. I noticed that most of the other students were getting off the X directly to the right or left. I remarked on this to Randy and he talked a bit about the different directions we can use for getting off the X and why the forward angles (1 and 11 o’clock) are usually better against an opponent armed with a gun.

Randy gave his PESTS lecture. PESTS is an acronym that stands for Pay attention, Evade or escape, Stop their encroachment, Tell them to back off, and Step to 3 or 9. Pay attention is simply remaining alert. The first step towards dealing with any potential problem is to notice it and the earlier you can do this the better it is. Evade or escape means moving away to avoid the approaching BG. Stop there encroachment refers to taking measures to keep them from closing the distance on you. In daylight, the preferred method for doing this is the fence: hands up at chest height, palms out. This is not only a universal gesture for stop, it also gets your arms up where they can block or parry an incoming strike. This isn’t as effective as a stop signal in darkness though. This is where a flashlight comes in handy: illuminating someone is a good way to signal them not to come any closer. It can be very effective, particularly since the criminal element may assume that someone carrying a light is probably a cop, or at least not someone to mess with. There are two ways to approach this. The less aggressive way is to aim the light at their feet. This gets the message across without being provocative. Flashing them in the eyes is much more aggressive, and may end up provoking a fight, but it sends a stronger message and provides a greater tactical advantage by screwing with their vision a bit. Tell them to back off is pretty self-explanatory. Stepping to 3 or 9 is a way to check for an accomplice approaching from behind you without taking your eyes off the first guy.

We worked some more get off the X drills, including some using the flashlight. Randy talked about the flashbang technique. The flash part is briefly hitting them in the eyes with the beam of your light. The bang is following that up with your pistol. Of course, this assumes that you already have the light in hand. Trying to quick draw the light before or at the same time you draw your pistol just isn’t realistic. Getting hit in the eyes with the light was annoying, but in these conditions and at these distances the blinding power of a tactical light was somewhat overrated.

With this, we wrapped things up and adjourned until the next morning.

Saturday

After a relatively late night, Randy was nice enough to let us sleep a bit late, so we reconvened at 10 o’clock. We began with a brief review of the previous night’s festivities.

One of the difficulties with this class is that the warehouse where we were working had some skylights, and didn’t really get all that dark during the day, even with the lights off. There was a smaller room that got pretty dark with the windows covered up and we did most of our dark work in there.

Randy put us in the room and had us observe how visible he was coming through the door using a flashlight to floodlight the room. He contrasted this with using a brief flash of light to illuminate the room for a moment. Each of us gave the room a brief flash as we went by the door. As this went on, Randy had some people start making silly gestures to see how well people were really seeing what was inside the room. Even with really brief flashes they did pretty well. When I did it, instead of shining my light directly into the room, I bounced the beam off the room’s white ceiling. Randy picked up on this and we talked a bit about how this technique provides a more consistent illumination than having the bright spot at the center of the beam blowing out the less well illuminated portions of the room.

Since some of this material involved basically doing and entry on this room, we segued briefly into some discussion of CQB, mostly along the lines of “this is why doing room entries is really dangerous and you should avoid it if at all possible.”

We regrouped in the main warehouse and Randy talked about flashlights and flashlight techniques. There are two main roles for the flashlight: target acquisition and target identification. As we talked about the previous night, gunfights seldom take place in absolute darkness. Target acquisition can often be accomplished without using the light. In many circumstances, target identification doesn’t require the light either. Outside at night we didn’t have much trouble picking up on the drawstroke as a hostile action without using a light. There are circumstances where a flashlight is needed for target ID, and occasionally even for target acquisition, but they aren’t anywhere near as prevalent as the flashlight vendors would have you believe.

Randy divided tactical flashlights into three generations. Generation 1 lights are your traditional Maglights and similar brands. They are big and heavy, making them cumbersome to use with a weapon (but also making them excellent impact weapons). Generation 2 lights are your large rechargeable lights. These are popular with police officers because they use their lights enough for the cost of batteries (particularly expensive ones like CR123s) to be a concern. Generation 3 technology was originally developed for weapon lights, but it eventually migrated into small, powerful, hand-held lights like the Surefire 6P.

Moving on to flashlight techniques, we started with the FBI technique. The light is held at arm’s length, away from the body. The idea is that the enemy will shoot at the light, rather than at you. This seems to be a technique predicated on using the light as a floodlight. If used appropriately, in very short flashes, moving after each flash, the light shouldn’t be on long enough for the opponent to draw a bead on you. It can also make it hard to keep the light and gun coordinated. Nevertheless, it can be useful for things like shooting around cover.

We moved on to the Rogers technique, more commonly known as the Chapman technique. This is primarily a technique for big Gen 1 or 2 lights with side mounted switches, like a Maglight. The light is held in the support hand in a sword grip (like you might hold a fencing blade), up against the gun and gun hand, with the support side thumb on the switch and the smaller fingers wrapped around the gun’s grip as much as possible. This worked much better with a C-Cell Maglight than it did with a larger diameter D-Cell light. An alternative is the Ayoob method, which also brings the gun and a large flashlight together, but doesn’t try to wrap any support hand fingers around the grip of the gun. Another variant called the USMC method is useful for lights with very large bezels. It basically hooks the bezel on the knuckles of the primary hand.

The over/under technique, sometimes called the NYPD technique, puts the light under the butt of the gun.

The Hargreaves technique is for lights with tailcap switches. You hold the light in front of your pistol’s grip (or the magazine or magwell of a long gun) and pull it back to press the switch against your hand/magazine to illuminate. This works well with rifles that have straight magazines or magwells, but not so much with curved magazines like an AK.

The Harries technique is another method for Gen 3 lights with tailcap switches. The light is held in the support hand in an icepick grip. That hand is tucked under the primary hand and the two hands are held back to back. Randy emphasized that this technique was developed for use with the Weaver stance, maintaining it in an isosceles stance can be tiring. It may be easier to keep up for long periods if you relax the hands into more of an X, rather than holding them tightly back to back. For lights with switches near the bezel, the Van Keller technique is similar, but with the palm up and the light in a sword grip.

The Puckett method is intended for large Gen 1 and 2 lights with switches near the bezel. Grab the light by the bezel with your finger on the switch and rest the tail end of the light on your shoulder. This position not only supports the light, it also chambers it for use as in impact weapon.

The neck index is similar to the Puckett method, but intended for small Gen 3 lights with tailcaps. Hold the light in an icepick grip and hold it up against the base of the jaw. This keeps the light aligned where you’re looking and in a good position for use as an impact weapon. Along with the Puckett method, it is not a weapon focused technique, making it suitable for pre-fight uses of the flashlight as well as during the fight.

The last technique Randy talked about was the syringe or Surefire technique (also called the Rogers technique, just to make things confusing). This involves clamping the light between the fingers of your support hand as you grip your pistol in both hands. You pull the light back against the base of your thumb to activate it. Surefire makes a rubber ring that goes around a light and makes this easier, but it can be done with an unmodified light as well.

We tried out the different light positions using our own tube lights and the Maglights Randy brought. If I were using a big light, I would probably go with the Puckett method. With a small tube light, neck index seemed to work well, though Harries had advantages also. Syringe was useful, but fiddly to get set up. Randy also had me show off my Firstlight Tomahawk and how it could be used in conjunction with a two-handed firing grip on the gun.

We took a break for lunch. After eating we did some getting off the X. Because the skylights didn’t leave us with a lot of real darkness, Randy had us put our sunglasses on under our masks to simulate darkness. This was better than nothing, but not as good as really doing it in the dark. We worked gun against gun at first, then Randy introduced a knife wielding assailant into the equation. When I went up against the knife, I used my usual technique of bolting away from the guy and not worrying about the draw until I’d built up a bit of speed. This led to some more discussion about what directions to use when getting off the X, and how the response to a knife wielding assailant may differ from a gun wielding one.

After a while we moved into the dark room and did a bit of getting off the X there. The size of the room limited movement to a couple of steps, but it gave a much better feel for how this sort of thing would work in the dark, particularly from the bad guy’s perspective. After several repetitions, we started throwing in the flashbang technique. At this distance, roughly 4 yards, the blinding power of flashlights was definitely overrated. Throwing in the flash probably gave up as much in extra time to get off the X as it gained you by disrupting the opponent. I tried using the strobe function on my Firstlight Tomahawk as well. According to the students playing my adversaries, the strobe was no more effective than the solid beam.

We moved back out of the dark room and Randy talked about jamming the bad guy’s draw. Basically, if you’re within two arms’ reach of the guy and you see him going for his gun, you’re usually better off going hand to hand and trying to keep the gun in the holster than just getting off the X. Randy explained how to do this, then get to the guy’s flank where you can get your gun out and go to work on him without too much interference. We practiced this for a while, then wrapped up our force on force training for the day.

We broke for dinner. I had a nice meal with Randy, Alex, and one of the students from the class.

Saturday Evening – Live Fire

At 6 o’clock we rendezvoused at a local gun range for the live fire portion of the class. This was an indoor range, so we were kind of limited in what we could do compared to some SI classes, but it was sufficient for the purpose.

First off, Randy had us shoot a five shot group using our sights, just to establish a baseline. Everyone in the class shot pretty well. Next, he had us to go to full extension, acquire a good sight picture, then close our eyes and fire. We shot a five shot group this way, closing our eyes for each shot. The groups were a bit bigger than the ones with the eyes open, but not a whole lot.

Of course, this only really tests your ability to hold the gun steady without visual input, it doesn’t say as much about your ability to point the gun. Randy had us shoot another five rounds, closing our eyes as we went from the #3 position of the drawstroke to #4 (full extension). This established our pointing abilities. Again, groups widened a bit, but not by much. We followed this up by shooting rapid fire pairs and triples with our eyes closed, testing the ability to return to a proper point after recoil without any visual input. This also worked pretty well, with handspan sized groups for most students.

At this point, we’d pretty well established that we didn’t need to see our sights or even our gun in order to get good hits at 3 yards. Randy turned off the range lights and brought out a couple of lamps. We fired with the targets backlit first. This makes it pretty obvious where the target is, but doesn’t give you much visual input on your gun. Again, shots were definitely combat effective even with the limited visibility. We moved on to shooting with the light behind us, so we were backlit. This would have been a really sucky situation if the targets were shooting back, but against paper, this is actually easier than shooting with the targets backlit.

Randy reduced the light even further so that the targets were barely visible. We practiced using the brief illumination of the muzzle flash to adjust our subsequent shots. Interestingly, if you have everything really well lined up, you actually get a split second view of your sight alignment at the moment of discharge in the muzzle flash.

We brought the flashlight to bear, using the flashbang technique. In really dark conditions like this the reflected flash of your light can actually screw with your own vision a little bit. Next Randy had us floodlight the target with our lights, as if we were working form a solid piece of cover and shoot using the light. We worked this using the neck index and Harries techniques. I also tried it using both by tube light and my Firstlight Tomahawk. I had a jam during one of these drills, which I fixed using non-diagnostic malfunction clearance (no way to see what the problem was in the dark). However, I ended up dropping my light during the clearing process, while trying to rack the slide. It either requires more practice or tucking the light under my arm before doing malfunction clearance.

Our last drill of the night involved imagining the two sides of the booths as different pieces of cover and moving between them. I used my Kriss Super-V magazine (a 30 round Glock .45 magazine) for these drills. I intend to use it as my nightstand magazine and I wanted to see how it worked with a flashlight, particularly with the Harries technique (it works pretty well, as it turns out).

We finished up for the night at around 8 o’clock.

Sunday

At 9 o’clock the next morning we reconvened back at the warehouse. We began with a review of Saturday’s material. Randy gave a brief lecture on basic hand to hand, then segued into knife defense. He kept it mostly to very simple techniques: block or parry the attack with one hand and palm strike the guy in the face with the other as you pushed him off and moved away. We worked these in the light until everyone was comfortable with them, then moved to the dark room.

The hard part of doing knife defense in the dark is figuring out where the incoming strike is coming from well enough to block it. Even if you know what you’re doing, poor or incomplete blocks are going to be par for the course. The flip side of this is that the low light affects the assailant’s targeting as well. What is intended as a slash to the throat may end up anywhere between the ear and the shoulder. We worked the defensive techniques against high and low line attacks for a while, then introduced the flashlight.

Yesterday, the effects of a tactical light at about four yards weren’t that impressive. Inside arms reach is a different story. At this range, a quick flash from a typical tactical light will not only take out your low light vision for a second or so, it will also do a good job resetting your OODA loop. This is how well it works when you know it is coming, I can only imagine that it would be even more effective against someone unprepared. As long as the good guy got the assailant directly in the eyes with the brightest part of the flashlight beam, they almost always got past the assailant and out of the room without the attacker even taking a swing at them. In contrast to the flashbang technique we talked about earlier, Randy called this streaking, because first you flash them, then you run.

Giving them a good solid shot in the eyes does take some work though. Just like with a pistol, accurately point shooting with your flashlight requires practice. It’s also important to flash your light briefly, then move, rather than leaving the light on as you move. Dragging the light while it’s on gives the bad guy a pretty good idea which way you’re going. Out in the open this would matter less, but in a confined space like this it can be deadly. Alex dragged the light when I was the BG. Knowing which way he was going I was able to reach out, clothesline him, wrap him up in an one armed bear hug, and go to work on his kidney with a training knife.

The need to flash the light briefly, then douse it immediately makes clicky tailcaps undesirable. These switches allow momentary illumination with gentle pressure on the switch, but click on and stay that way if you press too far. This sort of carefully calibrated pressure is a tall order under stress. Even under just the stress of force-on-force, folks with the clicky tailcaps had difficulty. Several locked their lights on when they intended just a brief flash. On a tactical light I want a pure momentary switch that I can mash down as hard as I want that will still go off as soon as I let up.

After a short lunch break we did some work against multiple attackers at very close range. This is a really lousy situation to be in, and there are no really good answers. The strategy Randy recommended was to jam one attacker’s draw and use him as uncooperative cover against the other. This takes quite a bit of aggressive action to pull off, and whether it works or not largely depends on how long it takes the second guy to spin through is OODA loop and start coming after you.

As usual, after doing this in the light for a while we moved into the dark room. With two assailants in there, the small size of the room really came into play. Lots of folks ended up either running themselves (bad) or their opponents (good) into the walls. I ran Alex into the doorjam spine first (sorry about that Alex). We also brought the flashlight into play, flashing one opponent in the eyes and jamming the other. Given the limited space and proximity to the door, getting out of the room rather than engaging in a gunfight inside often produced the best results. My best performance was probably the one where I just went between the two assailants, planted a hand on each of their chests and shoved them into opposite walls on my way out the door (being 6’5” has some advantages).

This was our last exercise. Randy handed out the certificates and asked for some feedback about the class. Everyone seemed thoroughly satisfied with the class.

Final Thoughts

This was quite an illuminating class (pun intended). Randy did an excellent job, as always, and he had a really good group of students to work with.

The best thing about this class was that it was focused on techniques, rather than gear. A lot of folks get caught up in the hardware aspect of low light shooting: flashlights, night sights, etc. In contrast, this class was very fight focused.

If there’s one thing this class will do, it will change a lot of students’ minds about how to utilize a flashlight. In most circumstances, there is enough ambient light to acquire a target without flooding the area with light. Often there is enough to identify a target without using the light even briefly. I was already most of the way down this road, but I think it was an eye opener for many of the students.

One of the biggest things I got out of this class was how to use the flashlight effectively to impede your opponent. The blinding effect of a tactical light has definitely been oversold. I don’t think any light you can reasonably carry on a daily basis is going to be an effective blinding tool at five yards. At one yard, however, it can be startlingly effective. Not only does it impair vision, it resets the OODA loop, giving a second or so of lag time even in an opponent that knows it’s coming. Getting a solid, center of the beam hit on the opponent’s eyes is important though; this is a technique that requires practice to use effectively.

While this class made some of the limitations of the flashlight clear, I still think it’s an important piece of carry gear. Not only is it an effective close range distraction tool, it’s also an important element of pre-fight maneuvering in low light when the BG may not be able to see you put your hands out to stop his encroachment. I also use a flashlight for more mundane tasks than any other piece of carry gear. As far as which flashlight is best, one thing this class definitely established is that come on momentarily when you press lightly and click into constant-on mode when you press harder, are a bad idea on tactical lights. The key to using a flashlight in a fight is to use it only in brief flashes. The idea that in the middle of a fight you will be able to calibrate your pressore on the switch so that it’s hard enough to activate the light but gently enough not to click the switch just doesn’t hold up in force on force.

This class has also persuaded me to switch from my Firstlight Tomahawk back to my Surefire 6P for daily carry. A tube light like the 6P seems to be easier to aim directly at the eyes because you can use it from the neck index and it makes a better impact weapon. For the moment, I’m forced to go with the 6P whether I want to or not. When I got home, I realized that my Tomahawk must have taken an airsoft round in the lens and it was cracked pretty badly. I called up the folks and Firstlight and they said to send it back and they would get if fixed at no charge. Excellent customer service.

The other oft-discussed piece of night fighting hardware is night sights. I don’t have any on my airsoft gun, but the Glock 21 has a set of Warren Tactical Sevigny Carry night sights. These have the tritium vials in the straight 8 configuration (one vial in the front sight, one at the bottom center of the rear sights, so you line them up by putting the front vial directly on top of the rear one. I didn’t absolutely need night sights for any of the live-fire shooting we did, but they did provide a reference point when it was really dark and I couldn’t see the gun itself. I think this does help for hand eye coordination. I do think I like the straight-8 configuration better than a three-dot setup though. I would say that night sights fall into the “nice to have” category, but they’re not absolutely vital.

This was really a great class. A lot of confrontations take place in low light and developing some familiarity with these conditions before the fight is very important. A lot of the low light material out there is very flashlight centric, this class really did a good job putting the light into perspective and teaching where and how it’s useful and where it’s not. I would highly recommend this class to anyone who carries a firearm for personal protection.

Advanced Kalashnikov Rifle Gunfighting with Gabe Suarez

Last weekend I took Advanced Kalashnikov Rifle Gunfighting from Gabe Suarez in Florence, SC. This is the second time I’ve taken this class in the past three months. I’d signed up to take it out in Prescott as part of the Red June block of classes before the class in Florence was announced. Despite this, I decided to sign up for the class in Florence, primarily because I knew a bunch of my friends would be signed up as well. Gabe was nice enough to let me take advantage of the 25% discount for returning students despite the fact that I hadn’t actually taken the class the first time at the time I signed up.

This class included an even larger proportion of Suarez International Staff Instructors than the 0-5 foot class, including Randy Harris, Alex Nieuwland, Scott Vandiver, Michael Swisher, and myself. The class was around 20 people, so a good quarter of the students were SI instructors.

I shot the class with my SGL-31. I used this rather than my usual Arsenal SLR-107F because I the SGL-31 didn’t have an optic on it at the moment and I wanted to shoot the class using iron sights. The majority of the class were using AKs of one description or another, varying from Fuller built guns down to WASRs or Maadis. Despite being an AK class, there was a substantial minority using ARs of various types, along with one XCR (in 7.62x39mm) and one Mini-14.

Because I just took this course so recently, this review isn’t going to have my usual level of blow by blow detail. If you’re interested in the content of the Advanced AK class, see the writeup I did back in June. What I’m going to do instead is concentrate on differences from the Prescott class and whatever points that I found particularly interesting.

Saturday

This class was held on September 11th-12th, 2010. Gabe opened the class with a prayer for those lost 9 years ago. He explained that he makes a special effort to teach a tactical class on September 11th. Next year he’s going to be teaching a counter-terrorism course with Sonny Puzikas. The date really puts these skills, and the reason most of us are learning them, in perspective.

We started with some discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of the AK. This was sort of interesting given how many people taking the class were using other sorts of rifles. Gabe made his usual case for the AK, which I think is quite good (after all, it convinced me to switch to the AK). Gabe explained why retaining empty mags is a good idea. Then we did some dry magazine changes, first stationary, then on the move.

Moving on to shoulder transfers, we did some work stationary, then did the slalom drill. In Prescott, the slalom drill was part of the AK Force on Force class. There we slalomed down a line of students, but because this range had a set of tall wooden posts every other lane at the 25 yard line, we slalomed through them instead. Basically, you treat each post as a left or right hand corner, switching shoulders as appropriate. This is really an excellent drill for getting people used to transferring from shoulder to shoulder, particularly for taking corners and shooting around cover. Our last drills of the morning were dry practicing 360 degree position shooting.

After lunch, Gabe ran through the ready positions, and we practice mounting the rifle and taking a dry shot from each position. After everyone was comfortable with the different positions, we went live. We moved on to snap shooting from the ready, then did some live shoulder transfers. With these fundamentals in place, we went through the basic get off the X drills in the six major directions. The range wasn’t really the best for practicing getting off the X. It was a gravel surface, with concrete sidewalks in front of each target running straight up and down range. Thus lateral movement involved stepping from sidewalk to gravel to sidewalk, with the attendant possibilities for tripping or loosing footing. This wrapped up the first day.

Sunday

We started out the second day doing transitions from rifle to pistol. Gabe demonstrated our method and talked about why we prefer a simple two-point sling. We did some dry transitions, then did it live, but stationary, and finally did it on the move. Next we moved on to after action drills. Gabe explained the process, then we put it into practice, first dry, then live. We practiced addressing targets to the sides or rear while getting off the X both dry and live. Wrapping up the morning, Gabe talked a bit about hitting people with rifles. In Prescott this was part of the force on force class, but here he incorporated it into Advanced AK.

After lunch, we moved on to the team tactics unit. Gabe gave a basic explanation of fire and movement and how two people or units can keep fire on a target as they maneuver. We did some dry practice with muzzle aversion and trigger finger discipline to ensure everyone could do this sort of thing safely. Next Gabe lined up the students in two parallel lines and had each student fire a burst at the target, then file back to the rear of the line, reloading on the way, all the while keeping their muzzle safely straight up in the air. I stepped out on this one and helped Gabe keep an eye on the students as they did the drill.

Moving on to the usual 2-man bounding drill, the students moved down the line of targets in two man teams keeping a constant fire going all the way down. Randy and I sat this one out to help keep an eye on the students as they did the drill. The students in this class did pretty well. Only one pair managed to get both guns empty a the same time so that I had to shoulder my rifle to provide some supporting fire.

While the perpendicular sidewalks down every lane made things more difficult for the bounding drill, Gabe found a way to use them (and the fact that he had some rifle qualified instructors) to give students a chance to do some drills they wouldn’t normally see unless they took the High Risk Operator Team Tactics class. We started out doing the same 2-man bounding drill moving towards and away from the targets. The sidewalks ensured that students would stay in their own lane and not get in front of the other and we had three instructors to keep an eye on two students. Everyone did the drill dry, together, then we did it live one 20man team at a time. Moving forward and back revealed an interesting tradeoff that wasn’t evident with the lateral bounding drill. The further the students moved on each bound, the quicker they covered the distance, but the harder it was to communicate.

Finally, Gabe capped off the class doing an Australian Peel. This is a reaction to contact drill for a small unit that wants to retreat from contact with a larger (or better dug in) opponent. The unit starts out in a line, with alternating students covering the right and left sides. When the lead man yells “Contact front” (or just opens fire) the line splits, with alternating students moving right or left as appropriate. This leaves the team in two parallel lines, with the team leader in the center at the front. The team leader than the first man in each line fire at the enemy. When the team leader is ready to move, he turns around and heads up the middle to the back of one of the lines. The front of the right hand line fires until he’s ready to move, then turns and heads up the middle to the back of his line. The front man of the left hand line does the same. This keeps at least two guns on the enemy at all times and by alternating movement from the head of each line the entire unit moves further from the enemy. When the team leader comes to the head of the line and feels they’ve broken contact sufficiently to withdraw, he orders the unit to head for the rally point.

This is normally a pretty advanced drill, but the sidewalks made it possible to keep everyone lined up and Gabe had Randy and I to help watch the lines and ensure everyone was doing what they were supposed to. He split the class up into two squads and ran the drill a couple of times each. They did pretty well, for having only half a day of team training. I would really love to see this in action from a squad of really well trained troops with fully automatic weapons.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed this class. I have to admit being a little dubious about how much I would get out of it taking it again so soon, but I wound up very satisfied. As a student, shooting it with iron sights provided a different experience from doing the class with a red dot. I was pretty gratified by my ability to execute these drills. The previous class, and the practice since, really paid off. As an instructor, I got a lot out of watching Gabe adapt the class to the students and the facility. It covered the same fundamental skills as the class in Prescott, but it definitely wasn’t exactly the same class.

This was a great class with a great bunch of guys and a great instructor. I would highly recommend it.

Chris Upchurch
Suarez International Staff Instructor
integratedpersonaldefense.com

0-5 Feet Gunfighting with Gabe Suarez

Last weekend I had a chance to take 0-5 feet gunfighting from Gabe in Florence, SC. This class focuses on very close range confrontations, within arm’s reach. We spent the first day and a half doing force on force, then finished up with half a day of live fire.

This was a fairly large class with around 24 people. It included quite a few people I've shot with before on various occasions, including several SI instructors: Alex Nieuwland, Scott Vandiver, and myself. SI instructor Randy Harris joined us for the second day.

For the force-on-force portion of the class, I used a pair of airsoft Glock 17s. I decided to experiment with carrying a gun on each hip (for similar reasons to the dual AIWB rigs some folks are working with lately). However, my strong side drawstroke is so ingrained I ended up going for that gun 95% of the time. The only times I really used the support side Glock was in some of the hands on drills where someone could foul your draw and I wanted to test going in the unexpected direction. I shot the live fire portion of the class using my usual Glock 21. I also carried a Glock 30 on the support side, but it saw little use.

Day One

We began the class signing waivers and promising on video not to sue anyone. There was a fairly standard safety briefing covering the four rules. This was followed by a force-on-force safety briefing. The most important point is ensuring that no live weapons of any kind make their way into the FoF training environment. FoF is a cooperative effort, most drills require the participation of one, or more, students playing the role of the bad guy. These students need to fulfill their roles in the drill rather than departing from the script in an attempt to 'get' the other student. Since these are cooperative drills, it is important to provide the right level of resistance or force. You want to provide your partner with real opposition, so he can see what doing it against a live opponent will be like, but you don't want to break your training partner. This class had quite a few more seasoned warriors and Gabe wanted to make sure everyone went home in one piece. Finally, stop really means stop. Anytime Gabe or someone else yells stop, you need to stop immediately, not get in one more hit, then stop.

Gabe led a nice discussion of the difference between a proactive gunfight, one where you are ready and the one initiating the action, and a reactive gunfight, where the gunfight is unexpected and your adversary is the one initiating the action. Gabe had a particularly nice turn of phrase to describe this. He said "A reactive gunfight is one for days when you're the subject of a country song." Your dog died, your girl left you, and your car was stolen so you have other things on your mind than staying in condition yellow all the time. Proactive and reactive gunfights unfold very differently and they require different tactics and techniques. This class was going to be dedicated to the techniques required to win a reactive gunfight at very close ranges: the eponymous 0-5 feet.

We started off with a drill where one student pushed or shoved the other, either on the chest or on a shoulder. Rather than resisting, the second student was to relax, let him move you, then come back to the same position. This was sort of a Systema-ish way to get everybody loosened up. After a bit of pushing and shoving, Gabe had the shoved student start trying to get to the shover's flank, rather than stepping back into the same position. The idea of seeking the flank (or preventing the opponent from seeking yours) was a running theme throughout the class.

There is an old gunfighting adage that, "Distance is your friend." The reality is that this isn't always true. Distance is good for a proactive gunfight, but often in a reactive gunfight, closing with the enemy can be the best choice.

We started out with the Matt Dillion drill, also known as the suicide drill. Two students face off at about four yards and each try to shoot the other before getting shot in return. The shots were generally almost simultaneous. Given handgun rounds poor terminal effects, getting the first shot in by a few tenths of a second probably isn't going to prevent you from getting shot.

The solution to this dilemma is getting off the X. If you aren't where the bad guy expects you to be, this will require him to reorient himself before being able to shoot you. That second or so is enough for you to draw and shoot him a couple times before he has a chance to shoot you. Gabe explained about the options for the different angles you can get off the X towards, and how moving to the forward diagonals makes it most difficult for the bad guy to track you with his gun. The idea of getting to the opponent's flanks like this is one that would come up again and again in the class.

To put this into action Suarez International has developed techniques for moving off the X quickly. Gabe described and demonstrated the Pekiti takeoff, which we've borrowed from Filipino martial arts. This involves dropping to a lower base, and using that drop to reposition the feet and orienting the hips the direction you want to go. Combined with dropping the shoulder and ducking the head in your direction of travel, this can produce some truly amazing results.

We started out working against a gun pointed directly at the head. With a properly executed Pekiti takeoff, you can be out of the opponent's sights before he has a chance to pull the trigger, courtesy of the shoulder drop and head duck. For the first round of takeoffs, we concentrated on moving, just getting out of the way without attempting to draw the gun. One thing I noticed several students doing was trying to keep their eyes on their opponent. If you do this right, you're not going to be able to keep staring the opponent in the eye. You can see his lower body in your peripheral vision and that's enough to keep yourself aware of his location until you come back up with the gun.

Once everyone had enough repetitions of the takeoff without drawing the gun, Gabe added the drawstroke to the mix. Students had to get off the X and draw. Giving them something else to think about at the same time ended up screwing up a lot of people's takeoffs. If they concentrated too much on the draw, they failed to get out of the way of the incoming round. After everyone was up to speed with the draw, Gabe had the students getting off the X start shooting as well.

At this point, Gabe explained the principles of metal on meat point shooting. This is the simples type of point shooting we teach and at the ranges we were shooting, it was more than sufficient to get reasonably accurate hits.

Instead of just a single shot each, we ramped up to three shots. The bad guy fired one at the student's original position, then tracked him with the next two, while the student got off the X and fired three shots. I didn't bring a long sleeved shirt for the FoF, so I took some pretty good shots to the arm during these drills.

After lunch Gabe gave the attitude and alertness discussion. Basically, he talked about how to avoid getting into the sorts of situations he was training us to fight our way out of. While it's certainly possible to fight and win at these close ranges, most of us don't want to go there intentionally. If possible, you would like to fail the "interview" process the bad guy uses to select his victims, either by your attitude and appearance or your actions, including verbal disengagement. An important part of this is recognizing what's coming, preferably as early as possible. If you can't avoid the fight, you can also use this process to start the fight in the best position.

We began the real up close and personal stuff with a simple drill where one student grabbed the other by the collar and the other had to break his grip and get to the flank. This helped acclimate students who hadn't done any hands on stuff before and reinforced the idea of trying to find the flanks.

Moving on to ground fighting, we entered a realm where I don't really have much experience. This was one of the reasons I really want to take this class, and go to Tom Sotis' seminar that includes the anti-groundfighting module in Chattanooga in November. We began by just trying to fend off the opponent with your feet. If he's armed with a contact weapon and you keep him out of reach like that, there's not a lot he can do to you until he gets by your legs. The trick is keeping your legs pointed at him as he moves.

It's possible that a good swift kick to the right spot may take him out of the fight, but this isn't allways that easy. Instead we just want to push him off hard enough that we have the time to draw our gun and shoot him. For this class, we simulated this, since kicking full force to get that sort of effect would probably result in some messed up knees and ankles.

If he gets past your legs, you may end up fending him off with leg pressure, rather than kicks. He may just get past one of your feet, leaving one of your feet on his hip or leg and the other around one side of his body. If he gets by both feet, you'll be fending him off with your knees, with your feet on either side of his body. Finally, if he gets by your knees, you'll have him in full guard, with your legs wrapped around his waist. In all of these cases, he's in a position where he can really get to you, whether he's barehanded or armed with a contact weapon. On the other hand, if you've got your legs on either side of him, you don't have to worry about him reaching your flank. The priority is getting the pistol out without him fouling your draw (which can be a problem in full guard) and shooting him as quickly as possible. One difficulty in this situation is that it can be difficult to bring your elbow far enough back to draw when you're flat on the ground, particularly with strong side hip carry. The solution is to raise your hips by levering yourself against the opponent. This should provide enough room to draw, as well as making it more difficult for him to foul your draw.

While we want to be able to fight on the ground if we have to, it's not someplace we want to stay. Gabe showed us a technique for getting up while keeping the gun on target based on a kettlebell exercise called the Turkish Get-up. This gets you up using both legs and one arm, leaving the other arm free to keep shooting the bad guy. I'd done a bit of this in Roger Phillips's Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class, as well as quite a few Turkish get-ups, but it was definitely pretty new to some of the other students.

We worked a drill where one student started off on the ground versus two knife armed attackers. Needless to say, this is a pretty sucky position if you're the guy on the ground. Generally trying to get up took too long, the best bet was to fend off one attacker with the legs while shooting the other.

To cap off the day, we worked the same sort of drill starting off standing, rather than lying down. This was basically a variant of the classic Tueller drill, except that you faced two opponents and started off at 12 feet, rather than 21. If you concentrated on getting off the X away from the knife wielding assailants, then drawing and firing once you were up to speed, this drill is actually pretty easy. We did the same at 9 feet, which is still quite doable, and at 6 feet, which gets rather iffy. At 6 feet, the odds of getting stabbed go way up. These sorts of distances really require some empty hand skills as a solution to the initial attack. This would be our first order of business tomorrow.

During the day, some questions about CQB had come up, so after the 0-5 foot instructional material was done for the day, Gabe gave a quick overview of some of the SI CQB techniques. Since I took this class just last month, I was able to help out a bit with this.

Day Two

At the end of the first day, we looked at how to defeat a knife attack at less than half the standard Tueller drill distance by getting off the X away from the attacker. This morning we looked at how to deal with knife attacks where the assailant is too close to get off the X without getting stabbed. The solution in this realm is to use empty hand combatives to fend off the initial attack and create enough time and distance to bring the gun into play.

I had some experience with this from AMOK! but it was clearly new to other folks. We primarily concentrated on blocking with one hand and hitting with the other as you got off the X to his flank. In real life the hit would be delivered to the face, but we didn't want to break our training partners, so instead we delivered it to the shoulder or chest. The idea is to push him off (or push yourself off) to gain enough time and distance to deploy the gun.

One way this sort of response may fail is if that striking hand gets tangled up or the assailant manages to grab it. In that case, the first thing to do is to get to his flank to minimize his ability to get at you and bring the gun into play from there. This may involve drawing with the support hand. Gabe showed us what Randy calls the "Australian Homie" shooting position: with the gun upside down working the trigger with the little finger. Since I had both an airsoft gun and a training knife on the support side, I worked with those a bit.

Moving on to opponents with firearms, we worked on fouling the opponent's draw and jamming the gun in his holster. This works particularly well if you can get to his flanks. Gabe showed one way of accomplishing this fairly easily. When you're jamming the gun into the holster you're already exerting a pushing force on his strong side hip. If you pull forward on the support side shoulder, you can spin him around. Once you're behind his support side arm, there's not much he can do. You've got an opportunity to draw your own weapon and shoot him in the back.

While tying up his gun in the holster is obviously desirable, we may have to confront the drawn gun at very close range. In these circumstances, the best option is the disarm. I've been taught disarms by a couple of different instructors, including Gabe. They can all work, but Gabe's are particularly simple and forceful. Most of them operate on the same principles. First, get the gun pointed somewhere other than at you, through a combination of knocking the gun away and moving your body out of the line of fire. Grab the wrist with one hand and the gun with the other, wrist goes one way, gun goes the other and you've got the gun and the BG will probably end up with a broken finger (or may even shoot himself). Gabe taught slightly different variants for guns pointed at the head or upper chest, and guns pointed at the lower chest or abdomen, but the only real difference was whether you grab the gun fingers up or fingers down.

Regardless, Gabe emphasized following up the gun grab with immediate additional attacks: palm strikes, elbows, knees, hitting the guy with the gun you just took away, and driving the guy with your body weight. The idea is to tenderize him enough that you can break contact and turn this into a gunfight, either using your own weapon or the one you just took away from him.

Disarming an opponent from the front is easiest, because you have access with both hands, but we also worked disarms from the side and back as well. From the side, you either wanted to move the gun forward and the body back, or vice versa, depending on where the gun was pointing (ahead or behind the ear if it was pointed at your head or ahead or behind the arm if it was lower down). If the gun went forward, you could grab the wrist and finish with a conventional disarm. If it went backward, it was generally easier to lock his gun arm up either in your armpit or the crook of your elbow, then continue the assault with your other hand.

From the rear, it's just a matter of turning to one side or the other and ‘rolling off the gun’ so to speak. If the opponent's gun is biased to one side, turning away from it is generally the best choice. If he's got a hand on your shoulder pushing or pulling you, go with that movement and use it for your turn rather than resisting. If he's right in the middle of your back and not pushing or puling, pick a direction and go with it.

Wrapping up disarms, we broke for lunch and got ready for the live fire portion of the course. Mindful of the potential safety issues with going from a day and a half of force on force to working with real guns, Gabe had Randy recap the standard safety rules.

We started off with some basic get off the X drills to the 1 and 11 o’clock directions.

Next, we moved on to a series of drills involving support hand draws. Gabe demonstrated a method for drawing the pistol upside-down from an appendix rig with the support hand and rolling it on the chest to get it right-side up. Something similar can work with strong side hip carry, but I prefer going around the back, grabbing the grip of the gun and drawing, then regripping the gun once you have it out. I also threw in a couple of draws from my support side Glock 30, which was definitely much easier.

Next, we worked with the Australian Homie from the ready position. Again, this involves holding the gun upside down and working the trigger with your pinky. This can make for a very fast support side draw from an appendix holster and a passable one from a strong side hip holster. The trick is shooting from this position. Working the trigger is actually relatively easy. The difficult part is acquiring a grip that avoids having the slide recoil into your hand or arm, potentially tearing them up a bit and probably malfunctioning the gun. We did a few shots starting with the gun in hand, which went relatively well for me. Doing the same from the holster, on the other hand, was a bit more dicey. We drew, fired a few shots, then transferred the gun to the strong side hand and fired a few more. I got a couple of shots off every time, but endured some slide action on my arm and eventually failed to cycle the gun. This was relatively easy to fix once I transferred hands, but still a less than optimal situation. It’s quite difficult to acquire the right grip grabbing the gun out of the holster, even when on the range. This is good to know how to do, but I think I’ll stick with reaching behind the back as my primary method of support side access. Carrying a second gun on the support side is looking better and better.

Next up was shooting from the ground. We started out with our feet facing the target. After drawing and firing between our knees, we had to get up while continuing to fire on the target. I’ve this with feet towards the target in the Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class, but we moved on to other directions. Due to the danger to other people on the line involved in drawing with your feet pointed directly to the right or left, we had them pointed towards the 2 and 10 o’clock positions instead. The key thing here was to make sure you didn’t shoot yourself when coming across your legs in the 2 o’clock position (for right handed shooters). Our last drill of this series had us on our backs with our heads towards the target, drawing and firing directly with the gun upside-down. I’ve done this before, but only with the gun already laying on the ground and pointed downrange. Doing this from the draw obviously means that the guns are going to be pointed uprange as you draw. To ensure nobody got shot, Gabe had everyone not shooting get off to the left side of the range and emphasized the need to bring the gun directly up and over, not straying to the right or left. As always, shooting upside-down was a lot of fun.

Moving on, we did a series of drills on how to defend the Sul position against an attacker at close range. Gabe gave a short lecture about what Sul is and why we use it for the benefit of those without previous experience in an S.I. class. For threats to the front and sides, defending Sul involves rotating the body and shooting from something like a retention position, possibly throwing in a strike with the support side hand if necessary to get it out of the way. For threats from the rear, you can either twist, or, if the opponent has you in a bear hug, just reach down with your gun and fire a few rounds into his leg.

One potential difficulty with engaging someone with a semi-auto at these sorts of very close ranges is the possibility of pushing the gun out of battery before you fire, giving you a dead trigger. The best way to handle this would be just to pull back a bit, or just avoid pushing the gun into the opponent that hard in the first place. In a hand to hand struggle over a gun this may not be possible. Gabe demonstrated some different techniques for holding the slide in battery: grabbing the slide as if you were reloading, pushing on the back of the slide with your support hand, or using your body to hold the slide in battery (we used our upper arm, but in a real fight your chest may be more likely). In all cases, pushing the slide forward will prevent it from cycling, so you will have to clear the malfunction before shooting again. Nevertheless, these techniques could make it possible to get off an all-important shot that could win the fight. Using these techniques isn’t what I call pleasant, but they work and don’t do you any permanent damage.

Our last shooting of the class was the t-shirt drill. When drawing from underneath a cover garment, one ever-present danger is the garment fouling your draw. Particularly with a closed front cover garment, this can result in your gun being tangled up under the shirt when you need it most. In this drill we all put on old/cheap t-shirts that we didn’t mind putting some holes into and deliberately covered our guns with the shirts. The first shot fired from underneath the t-shirt will make a hole, which we enlarged by shoving the gun through it while firing follow up shots. Once we got the gun completely through, we transferred it to the other hand and continued to shoot while we pulled our primary hand back through the hole and resumed a two handed grip.

This concluded the shooting portion of the class. Gabe handed out the certificates and we broke for the day. The majority of the class would be back the following day for Advanced Kalashnikov Rifle Gunfighting.

Final Thoughts

This is really an excellent class. It’s the kind of thing I think a lot more people need to learn. Realistically speaking, the 0-5 foot realm is where citizens are most likely to get into a fight. I’ve never heard of a mugger or armed robber plying his trade from seven yards away. They’re going to be up close and personal and anyone who carries for self-defense needs to know how to handle threats at these distances.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many places to go to learn this sort of thing. Most gun schools either ignore these distances entirely, or rely exclusively on gun focused retention shooting solutions. You can learn how to defend against these sorts of attacks at some fight-focused martial arts schools, but these often teach pure hand to hand solutions. If I’ve got a gun, or even a knife, I’m going to want to get that into play as soon as I can rather than engage in a fistfight with this guy. Very few places really integrate hand to hand and handguns the way this class does. The skills taught in 0-5 feet are vital for prevailing in a real world confrontation. I really believe everyone who carries a handgun for self-defense should take this class.

Chris Upchurch
Suarez International Staff Instructor
integratedpersonaldefense.com

Getting the Most Out of a Suarez International Class

Suarez International classes are one of the best investments you can make when it comes to self defense. We’ve got a really great curriculum and our instructors are top notch (if I do say so myself). As with many things in life, however, how much you get out of it depends on how much you put into it. A bit of preparation beforehand and some regular follow-up afterwards can dramatically increase the amount you learn and how much your skills increase. Based on my experience in quite a few SI classes, both before and after I became an instructor, here are some things that I think you can do to help you get as much out of the class as possible.

Before Class

The starting point for getting the most out of an SI class is to choose an appropriate class to begin with. If you don’t have the fundamental skills to do well in more advanced classes, you’re not going to get as much out of them. Suarez International classifies its classes into three levels: basic, intermediate, and advanced. Knowing whether you’re ready for an advanced class is pretty simple: if you’ve taken an intermediate level SI pistol class and can perform the material, you’re good to go for advanced pistol classes. The same goes for rifle classes.

Deciding between a basic or intermediate class requires a bit more judgment. The intermediate level classes don’t have a hard and fast prerequisite, but they do carry a disclaimer that says “THIS COURSE IS NOT FOR THE NOVICE SHOOTER”. We’re not really talking about accuracy here, we're talking about gunhandling. Our intermediate level classes are very dynamic, and you need good muzzle and trigger finger discipline to safely participate. To really get the most out of these classes your basic gunhandling skills, particularly the drawstroke, need to be ingrained to the point where they are almost automatic. These courses all involve dynamic movement, in order to learn this effectively, you can’t be thinking your way through each step of the draw. For long gun classes, the equivalent would be mounting the rifle or shotgun. If you have any questions about whether a particularly class is appropriate for your level of skill and experience, either call SI and ask, or post a question on Warriortalk. There are plenty of experienced folks in both places who can help you find the best class for you.

We throw a lot of information at you in SI classes, to the point where it can be a bit daunting at times. It helps a lot if you've had some exposure to it beforehand. Infidel Media Group publishes books and DVDs by Gabe and other SI trainers. They’re no substitute for coming to a class in person, but watching them it advance can make it easier to process all the new material you’ll see in a class. Most SI classes have a DVD equivalent. In many cases the class and the DVD have the same name, but there are some exceptions (for instance the DVD equivalent of the Defensive Pistol Skills class is called Combative Pistol Marksmanship). Again, if you have any questions ask on Warriortalk or call SI. The situation with books is a little different. Not all SI classes have a direct book equivalent, sometimes material from one class is distributed over several different volumes of Gabe’s writings. I find all of Gabe’s books that I’ve read worthwhile, but it’s a bit more difficult to say, “if you are taking this class you need to read that book”. One exception is Roger Phillips’ Point Shooting Progressions book. I can absolutely say that if you are taking an SI Point Shooting Class you will get a lot out of reading Roger’s book ahead of time.

While I recommend watching the DVD, I would advise against trying to practice material from the DVD beforehand. One of the big advantages of coming to a class, rather than just buying a DVD is that in class you have an instructor to watch your performance on the drills, critique what you’re doing, and generally make sure you’re learning this the right way. Practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent. If you practice a technique you’ve only seen on a DVD, you run the risk of doing it incorrectly and having to unlearn it in class. Instead, practice what you’ve learned in previous classes to make sure you’ve really got that material down before coming to a more advanced class. As I mentioned earlier, to get the most out of intermediate and advanced classes your drawstroke (or long gun mount) needs to be really solid. Practice these until they’re utterly ingrained.

Finally, bring the right equiptment to class. Every class comes with a list of required equipment and other stuff you need to bring. Make sure you bring everything on these lists. The listed number of magazines is a minimum. More magazines are always better. Load your magazines before class (classes often include dry drills, so it’s good to leave leave one or two empty for that purpose. Similarly, stated ammunition counts are minimums, bring more if you’ve got it. If you have a second gun, or spare parts and the knowledge to install them, bring them.

Test your gear before coming to class. Don’t bring a gun you’ve never shot, or a holster you’ve never drawn from. Some folks say that an SI class is a great way to test your equipment. It’s certainly true, anything you bring to an SI course will get run hard, but this does not absolve you of the responsibility to test your gear beforehand. I have seen students come to class with equipment problems that fifteen minutes on the range, or even fifteen minutes of dry practice, would have uncovered. Some of them had to struggle against their gear through an entire class.

If you’re coming to a rifle class, zero your rifle ahead of time. For intermediate and advanced rifle classes, generally the shooting exercise in the course is shooting from prone to verify everyone’s zero. We can do some corrections, but there isn't time to zero everyone’s rifle from scratch. If you come with an unzeroed rifle, you’re going to be shooting a poorly zeroed rifle for the class. In basic level rifle classes we understand that not everybody knows how to zero their rifle, that’s one of the things we teach in the class, after all. If you do know how to zero your rifle, however, it’s still a good idea to do it ahead of time. That way you can spend more of the class working on your marksmanship, rather than your gun.

SI classes are usually held on outdoor ranges and training will continue even in inclement weather. Make sure you have appropriate clothing, rain gear, headgear, sunscreen, and plenty of water. Temperature can vary throughout the day, so wearing layers can make it easier to adjust as the day goes on. Bring more layers than you think you'll need. Many ranges where we teach don’t have seating available, so a camp chair is a good addition to your gear.

During Class

As mentioned earlier, we throw a lot of information at you in SI classes, enough that most folks won’t remember it all. Taking some notes will help you retain more of the information we cover in class. This is where having watched the DVD or read the book really comes in handy in cutting down on the amount of note taking. If you remember something from the DVD or book, you may not need to take notes on it because you already have a reference for that information. I find it helpful to take really terse notes that will be just enough to help me remember things until that evening, when I can flesh them out a bit more.

After Class

After class start out by going back and watching the DVD or reading the book again. After you’ve seen these techniques in action and done them under a watchful eye of an instructor you can pick up on some subtleties you may have missed the first time out. It’s also easier to place some things in the proper context once you’ve got some actual experience with them. Go over your notes to review any material from the class that wasn’t in the book or DVD.

At SI, we teach more in one of our two-day classes than some other schools teach in four or five. This is one of the things that make SI classes such a bargain. One of the ways we accomplish this is not to do as many repetitions of each drill. We still think you need these repetitions, but we assume you’re an adult and you don’t need an instructor standing over your shoulder for every one of them. There’s an old saying, “Amateurs practice until they can get it right, professionals practice until they can't get it wrong.” In class, we’ll give you enough practice to get it right. It’s your responsibility to go home and practice what you learned in class until you can’t get it wrong.

In the intermediate and advanced classes, SI teaches lots of things like dynamic movement and shooting from unusual positions that will make many more traditionally minded folks, including many range operators, freak out. This can make it difficult to practice skills from SI classes in a live-fire environment. If you’ve got access range where you can shoot during dynamic movement, definitely take advantage of it. If you don’t, however, you can still practice almost everything we teach using dry fire or an airsoft gun.

Finally, we hope that you sign up for another class. One of the great things about SI is the variety and depth of the courses we offer. There’s always more to learn.

Thanks to my fellow SI instructors for feedback on this piece and additional ideas for getting the most out of a class.

CQB class with Gabe Suarez

Earlier this month I took the Suarez International Close Quarters Battle (CQB) class from Gabe Suarez in Prescott. This class is a rather unusual: a course on how to defend yourself with a firearm that involves absolutely no shooting. Not even airsoft guns for force-on-force. As Gabe put it, this class is more like chess than UFC. Unlike most of the more advanced SI classes there is no rolling around on the ground with a rifle or wrestling with another guy while you try to get your pistol into play, this class has a much more intellectual bent. There is certainly a physical component, but it involves how to move into a position where you can shoot, rather than how to hit or shoot someone. The goal of this class is to give students the skills they need to maneuver into a position where any gunfight will be as one-sided as possible.

The class had ten students in it, including three SI Instructors: Richard Coplin, Jon Payne, and myself. One of the students was a LEO, while another was in the Executive Protection business, but the rest of us were common citizens. One student could only attend the first day, so we dropped to nine on Sunday (which worked quite well with three man teams).

Friday Evening

Unlike most SI classes, this one began on Friday evening rather than Saturday morning. The topic involves quite a bit of theory and explanation that Gabe wanted to go through before we got to taking corners and going through doors. If he hadn’t, the next two days would have been filled with interruptions for questions about the lecture material.

We began by talking about defining your mission. A citizen defending his home has a very different mission than a police officer searching a structure. The citizen who lives alone or who has gathered all his family members in one room has a very different mission than one who hears screams from the children’s room. The mission will affect the tempo of movement, willingness to use deadly force, and the amount of target identification required before shooting.

While there are many possible variations, Gabe grouped them into four missions: setting up an ambush, search and clear, locate and kill, and traverse and escape. If you’re home alone and hear intruders, it’s much better to bunker up and call 911. While it’s politically incorrect to say so, in this circumstance you’re effectively setting up an ambush set up an ambush and letting the intruders come to you instead of playing hunt the burglar.

Although staying put and calling for help is sometimes the wisest course, you may not always have enough information to do so. When you are woken by a crash from downstairs, you may not know whether it was a burglar knocking over a lamp or a picture falling from the wall. There are circumstances where a sound is suspicious enough you don’t want to roll over and go back to sleep, but doesn’t provide enough information for you to call 911. These are circumstances where a civilian may want to search and clear a structure. For a police officer, circumstances requiring searching a structure are far more common. Burglar alarms, open door calls, and 911 calls from citizens reporting an intruder in their house may all require searching a structure.

Searching and clearing is a slow and deliberate process, but sometimes circumstances call for more speed. If you’re fairly certain there are intruders in the home and you need to retrieve your children from their rooms, you may not have time to clear the house in a slow and deliberate manner. If you start hearing screams from your daughter’s room, deliberation is probably going out the window. Nevertheless, rushing heedlessly through the house could get you killed before you get a chance to help your daughter. It is possible to trade safety for speed without entirely giving up the former. This is locate and kill. The police equivalent is hostage rescue or warrant service. Time is of the essence, requiring the sacrifice of some of the safety afforded by a slow and deliberate search.

Traverse and escape occurs at a similar tempo to locate and kill, but the goal is to elude the opponent, rather than find him. If you and your family are in a public place in the middle of an active shooter or terrorist incident, the immediate objective is to get those whose lives you are entrusted to protect out of there as quickly and safely as possible. Bodyguards have similar obligations to their protectees. Of course, police officers, and perhaps citizens without protective obligations (as their conscience dictates) in the same situation may find themselves in a locate and kill mission rather than traverse and escape.

After the discussion of missions, Gabe moved on to six tactical principles. #1, keep your mission in mind. #2, look ahead and have a backup plan. Don’t just get fixated on the immediate problem you’re trying to solve, think ahead to the next problem and have an alternative ready for when things go wrong. #3, understand distance. More is generally better, but more is not always available, especially in a CQB environment. #4, know the tradeoff between benefit and liability of different courses of action. #5, risk is the currency of tactics. As Gabe put it, “Hunting an armed human being inside a structure is not safe.” Almost anything you try to accomplish is going to have some element of risk. Understand what risks you are taking and what you are accomplishing by taking them. #6, every movement should put your eye and gun muzzle on a potential threat.

We moved on to a discussion of architecture. Gabe asked us to name architectural elements that could be obstacles during CQB, and we came up with more than a dozen. Most of this bewildering variety, however, can be viewed as combinations of corners. The corner is the fundamental building block of CQB. If you have the skills to take a corner, applying those to T-intersections, doorways, windows, stairs, balconies, even furniture is not much of a leap.

Step 1 when approaching a corner is to recognize that you have a corner, preferably as far in advance of it as you can. Step 2 is to identify it as right or left handed. Right and left hand corner terminology can be a bit confusing. In CQB it doesn’t refer to which way the corner turns, but which hand it’s easier to use to negotiate it. Thus, when a hallway bends 90 degrees to the left, it’s a right handed corner, because you can lead with your right hand when rounding it. Step 3 is to identify the apex, the point of the corner that’s going to be your pivot point.

Once you’ve identified all the characteristics of a corner, it’s time to start slicing the pie: moving carefully in a circle that pivots on the apex and examining the area beyond the corner one small slice at a time. The goal is to locate a possible opponent before he is aware of you. Once you’ve located him, you have a decision to make: take the corner or pull back. This is where keeping your mission in mind is important. If you are investigating the crash from downstairs in the middle of the night and you see a stranger going through your silverware drawer, that pretty much answers any question about what the noise was. You may decide this would be a good time to withdraw t a protected position and dial 911. On the other hand, if your kids are in a room somewhere beyond the burglar, withdrawal may be out of the question.

If you are going to take the corner, Gabe recommends moving out decisively and shooting the opponent on the move, rather than rolling out and risk having him see you. The overall effect is much like getting off the X in a reactive gunfight.

With the cornerstone laid, we moved on to talking about more complex situations, starting with a T-intersection at the end of a hallway. A T-intersection is basically two corners you have to work at the same time. Since we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads, you need to work one side up to the point of decision, then turn around and work the other side. If you aren’t able to identify a specific threat without exposing yourself, you have to make a decision about which side you think is more dangerous (or if they’re equally dangerous, just go with your strong side). Move decisively out into the intersection and glance for a target in the direction you’re going. If there is one, engage. If not, immediately look behind you (with your gun following your eyes as quickly as possible) for a threat in that direction. Having to divide your attention like this is obviously a lot more dangerous than working a single corner.

A doorway is a lot like a T-intersection. Unlike the intersection, you may not be confined to a narrow hallway. On the other hand, if the door is closed, you may have to negotiate opening it as well, which can be a challenge. If a door is closed, consider your mission and think about whether you can bypass it. Perhaps you can put something in front of the door that will alert you if an opponent opens it behind you. When approaching a closed door, look for the knob and hinges to get an idea of which way it swings. If you can see the hinges, it opens towards you, otherwise it opens away from you. Be on the lookout for a self-closing mechanism. These make it much more difficult to deal with a door (to the point where if you have to deal with one, consider other entry possibilities). If possible, approach the door from the knob side. Turn the knob quietly and swing it open, then back away to give yourself a little distance. Once the door is open, treat it much like a T-intersection.

When entering the room, you need to triage possible threats. Check the hard corners (the corners on either side of the door) first. If the door opens inward, check behind it next. Then check behind furniture, then under furniture and inside closets. The logic behind this order is that not only are the hard corners the most dangerous spots, they’re also where someone determined to do you harm is most likely to hide (the interior of a wardrobe is a lousy place to ambush someone). Someone hiding under the bed is probably more concerned with escaping detection than doing you harm.

Finally, we spent some time talking about stairs. These can be tricky to clear, combining horizontal and vertical corners. The military prefers to clear down stairs rather than up, largely because they have grenades, which work better going down. For those of us without access to handheld explosives, clearing up is generally easier, because you can lead with your weapon, rather than your feet. However, you often won’t have much choice in the matter: if you start out in an upstairs bedroom, you’ll end up clearing down whether you want too or not.

We wrapped up the evening with a discussion of gear. This isn’t really an equipment focused class, but we talked about lights (both weapon mounted and handheld), night vision goggles, weapons, armor, a trauma kit, and a cellphone. This last item is one of the most important, because it allows you to decline the role of burglar hunter and call in the professionals.

This concluded the Friday night braindump. Tomorrow we would start putting this into practice.

Saturday

We spent most of Saturday in the upper level of SI Headquarters in Prescott. This is a large open area with reception desk, lined with offices on one side and a conference room and two bathrooms on the other. There were lots of corners and opportunities to practice clearing rooms.

We began by working on some simple corner exercises. Gabe pointed out that it’s important to scan both at eye level and down to the floor as you take each slice of the pie. This is partially because the opponent may be crouching down for concealment, but more because the feet are often the first thing to become visible. As usual, Gabe emphasized moving naturally, with your toes pointing the direction you’re moving as you slice the pie, rather than side stepping with your toes pointed at the apex. Keeping your toes pointed in the direction you’re going allows a smoother gait and a more natural stance, as well as making it easier for you to bolt forward or pull backwards as the situation requires.

If the student clearing the corner did a good job leading with their eye and gun they almost always saw some sign of their opponent before the opponent saw them. Usually a bit of foot, pants, or shirt gave the opponent away. The problem lies in determining if this was enough to justify shooting. Again, this depends on your mission. A homeowner who knows everyone who lives in the house is safely behind him may be able to make that determination simply based on the presence of someone who should not be there. A police officer, or a citizen doing traverse and escape from a public place is probably going to require more information. It’s possible to continue slicing the pie to get a better look at the opponent, but at some point he’s going to see you and then it’s a much more even fight. We don’t really want to give him a sporting chance. One option is to get lower. Most adults tend to only notice things at eye level. If you crouch down or drop into Spetsnaz prone you can roll out further with less chance of being noticed, but this is still risky. Gabes preferred solution is to adapt getting off the X to clearing corners. If you come around the corner at a good clip, you have a little bit of time before the opponent can cycle through his observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop and adjust to hit you. During that half second or so, you can see if he has a gun, how he’s acting, and generally whether he presents a threat. If he does, you can still get a few shots off before he manages to get his gun around and shoot you.

Gabe had a couple of long guns available, both short barreled rifles: an Uzi, and a Suchka AK. I did a bit of work with the Suchka to see how it worked taking corners. Gabe suggested arresting the sling (grabbing the middle of the sling with your support hand and clasping it to the forend) to prevent it from possible swinging wide and revealing your location to the fellow around the corner. His other suggestion was to cant the gun outward about 30-45 degrees. This not only helps you expose less of your shoulder and head, it also keeps the elbow tucked in tight, rather than sticking out. Rolling the gun out can also be helpful with a pistol, though the advantages aren’t quite so pronounced.

One thing of absolute importance whether you’re using a long gun or a pistol is to be able to use it ambidextrously. Switching to the left side for a left-hand corner allows you to expose so much less of yourself it is an enormous advantage. Gabe demonstrated a couple of techniques for using a pistol on opposite side corners and while they’re better than nothing, they don’t even come close to the advantages of ambidexterity.

After we were fairly comfortable doing corners, we moved on to doors. If the door is closed, you need to deal with that first. We discovered that there’s a bit of an art to shoving a door so it swings open and stays there. Too soft, and it will stop half open. Too hard and it will bounce off the wall, making noise and swinging back in your way. As we talked about the previous night, doors are essentially two corners. You need to pie them both, looking deep into the room, then decide how you’re going to enter. The fundamental decision is which of the hard corners (those on either side of the door) you’re going to head for first. Sometimes the geometry of the layout will make this decision for you, sometimes you will perceive more danger on one side of the room or the other. When you go through the door, it’s important to do it at an angle where the opening is wide enough to get through easily. When you’re through, you’ve got a fraction of a second to scan the hard corner in front of you for threats and either address them, or conclude it’s empty. If there are no threats, you need to immediately look behind you and check the other corner.

This is where the advantages of a team really come into focus. One guy can do a great job taking a single corner. As soon as you get to something like a door, however, one solo guy is really trying to do the work of two or three. While the team tactics were reserved for Saturday, Gabe gave us a quick preview to show how much easier this sort of thing is with two guys.

Gabe also showed us how to deal with self closing doors using one of the building’s exterior doors. The short answer is it can be done, but it really sucks. You’ve got to stay in physical contact with the door, which keeps you up near the fatal funnel and makes you a much better target.

We took a break for lunch. Mark Swain came in and opened up the One Source Tactical warehouse for business. I bought a couple of the new US PALM AK battlegrips to equip my AKs before the AK class next month.

After lunch, Gabe showed some pictures of a house he looked at in Scottsdale. It had some of the most difficult sets of features imaginable. Combinations of doors, stairways, and windows presented some very complicated clearing problems. Even with just half a day and an evening of this under our belts we were able to do a pretty good job identifying (if not solving) the danger areas.

Gabe brought up a couple of discussion points based on what he’d seen during the morning. One was that if you need to make a big change in orientation (like addressing the hard corner behind you after you go through a door) it’s better to bring your gun back close to the body and drive it out in the new direction than to swing it at arms length. It’s both quicker and less prone to overswinging past the target. The other thing he mentioned is the need to move smoothly and quietly, or as he put it, “Move more like a cat and less like a dog.”

We moved on to talking about low light tactics. There was quite a bit of discussion on how to use lights properly. When doing this kind of thing, Gabe advocates having both a handheld light and a weapon light. The weapon light makes it a lot easier to switch hands and operate the gun and the light at the same time. The handheld light allows you to use a floating light to illuminate from a different angle (over the top of an obstacle while you look around the side, for instance) or to set a light down illuminating an area while you move away and do something else (this is a pretty good way to cover your back while you address another danger area, since an opponent probably won’t want to move into a brightly illuminated area).

Rather than using a constant beam, Gabe advocates quick, irregular flashes from the light. This makes it harder for the opponent to pin down your location and is much less of a bullet magnet than a constantly illuminated light. Another technique he talked about is bouncing the light off a wall or ceiling to illuminate a room. This is particularly good with more than one guy, where one can illuminate from a relatively safe position while the other is essentially invisible as long as he stays out of the beam itself so he can move around and get a good angle. Another trick Gabe showed us was using the flashlight briefly when moving through the door from a brightly illuminated area to a dark one to keep yourself from being silhouetted.

After working in low light for a bit, we moved on to complex problems. Boy was this one a doozie. Each student was asked to clear the upper floor of SI HQ by themselves. This is a large open area surrounded by offices, bathrooms, and a conference room with almost a dozen doors opening on to it. Gabe was usually nice and declared some of these safe, but it was still a tremendously challenging area to try and clear single-handed. Each student got a different starting point, so there was some variety in the problem. After each student cleared the area, Gabe and the peanut gallery had a chance to critique his performance. As we went along, Gabe started spicing things up by asking other students to hide in some of the rooms to provide a challenge for the student searching. There were some mistakes that were common to several students. Most commonly, students were rather noisy, especially when they got near critical points. Clearing, particularly single handed, really depends on stealth. Noisy footsteps can mean the difference between sneaking up on a bad guy and walking into an ambush. Many students became fixated on a particular problem and didn’t pay any attention to uncleared areas behind them. Sometimes clearing by yourself means turning your back on potential threats, but you still need to glance back there occasionally. Some extended their gun through doors before committing to the space, giving away their position. Others lingered in doorways or exposed themselves too long.

Sunday

Gabe brought in a suppressor for his Suchka to give us a feel for how adding one changed the weight and balance of the weapon. He also showed off his red dot equipped Glock in a CQB configuration with a Streamlight light/laser combo and a happy stick. This lead to a bit of discussion of lasers and how they compare to a red dot. Gabe likes lasers for some very specialized applications, but generally finds a red dot far more useful.

After playing with the cool gear, we moved into a lecture on team tactics. While a team of highly trained operators is obviously the best case, that level of support probably isn’t very likely for most of us. More realistically, we may have access to someone with some weapons training, but without the sort of tactical skills like the ones taught in this class. This doesn’t make them useless in a CQB environment, however. A big part of the danger in clearing a structure alone is having to turn your back on other danger areas while you try to clear a particular room or corner. Even relatively inexperienced shooters can help mitigate this provided they can do four things: hold, point, press the trigger, and follow orders. You can plant them in a particular spot, pointed in at a danger area, tell them to shoot anyone who comes out that door, and rely on them to keep doing that, until you tell them otherwise. This last part is the difficult bit, since they need to keep covering their assigned danger area even if you get into a gunfight while taking the corner behind them. If they turn around and pay attention to what you’re doing, you could both end up dead from a second opponent coming from the danger area to investigate the sounds of gunfire.

Compared to team tactics in rural environments, team members in CQB operate in far closer proximity. Out in the boonies, elements of a team may spread out 40 yards apart or more. Inside, you want to be in visual, if not physical, contact at all times. This kind of close coordination is necessary to keep everyone on the same page and keep it functioning as a team rather than a gaggle of individuals.

We talked about various formations. While the arrangement of team members can vary, they’re all built on the same basic fundamentals. Each team member has a given sector that it’s their job to cover as you move. Different formations can emphasize forward coverage, or coverage to the sides or rear.

Gabe also talked about something I’ve never heard mentioned positively in an SI class before: walking backwards. In most cases, Gabe is not a fan of backpedaling. It’s slower than pointing your toes in the direction you want to go and it makes it too easy to loose your balance and go over backward. Everything has a place, however. If you’re the tailgunner on a formation and your job is to cover the rear, or if your formation needs to withdraw, backpedaling is going to be an effective solution.

There are several methods for taking a corner with two people. One os to use the second team member to cover another danger area while the first takes the corner solo. If you don’t have another danger area to contend with, one team member can crouch or drop down to Spetsnaz prone and roll out below the line of sight while the other moves dynamically, putting two guns on the target from separated positions. The third method is to have both team members move dynamically around the corner in formation. This is the most difficult, as it requires very closely synchronized movement from the two shooters.

While two team members don’t really offer huge advantages over one when taking a simple corner, the advantages of a team really become evident when taking doors. The ability to address both hard corners almost simultaneously is huge. Gabe’s favored method for doing this is the criss-cross. You start with the #1 guy and the #2 guy on either side of the door. The #1 guy crouches down and goes through the door towards the opposite hard corner (if he’s on the right side of the door, he goes toward the hard corner on the left). The #2 guy moves just and instant later. He goes high, using his support hand to push down on the #1 guys back ensuring he remains out of the line of fire if necessary. This results in both shooters entering the room almost simultaneously. Executed well, it’s really incredibly slick. Even if the opponent initially sees the #1 guy’s back, before he gets a chance to fire the #2 guy is going to be in there t take him out.

Sometimes circumstances may not allow the criss-cross. For instance, if both shooters are on the same side of the door and you don’t have the ability or time to set up one in either side, The #1 shooter can enter at a crossing angle as if it were a criss cross while the #2 shooter buttonhooks around to address the other hard corner. This doesn’t get a gun on that second corner as fast as the criss cross, but it’s still pretty good. An alternative is for both shooters to enter on the same diagonal line as a criss cross, but one directs his attention to the rear to address the other corner (much like getting off the X on a 7 o’clock line).

Gabe also talked about an alternative to the buttonhook. Rather than swinging around the corner in a tight arc, you basically come into the door at an angle, then plant your foot on the floor up against the door jam on the opposite side and push off it to change direction. This is faster than a buttonhook and it results in your entering the room at an angle, rather than running right down the wall. Running the walls is a widely used tactic in the SWAT world, but it’s not one that Gabe really approves of. If there’s someone in the hard corner, coming in parallel to the wall is just like taking the 12 o’clock line and charging right towards the opponent when getting off the X: there’s no relative movement at all, making it easy for the opponent to hit you.

The other major situation that might prevent a criss-cross entry when taking a door is a room with only one hard corner. If the door is near the corner, rather than the middle of a wall, there’s no place for one of the guys doing a cross cross to go. In this case, the second guy can buttonhook in behind the first.

Another possibility that Gabe mentioned, but didn’t really approve of was a ‘guns only’ entry. In this case, team members remain outside the room and just lean in, weapon in hand, to get a view of the hard corners. Gabe doesn’t really like this because if there’s someone there, you’re pretty much locked into a stationary position trading gunfire with the guy. This sort of thing is favored by some, including the Israelis, for very quick clearing in an active-killer type situation. In that kind of situation, where it’s obvious from the sound of gunfire where the killing is going on, Gabe favors simply bypassing rooms on the way, treating each as a danger area as you go by.

This lead to some discussion of CQB equivalents of the Australian Peel (for rearward movement under fire) and bounding overwatch (for forward movement under fire).

We also had a nice discussion about how to use these techniques with family members. This segued into a more general discussion of preparing your wife and kids for how to act in a high risk situation. This sort of family readiness is a really important area that often gets ignored, even by folks who dedicate a lot of time and effort to increasing their own level of readiness.

Gabe wrapped up the lecture and discussion and we split up into two-man elements. We started out working some corners, trying the different methods described earlier. After we had a chance to work with corners we moved on to doors. To me, the criss-cross entry method really proved its mettle. It sounds a little complicated at first, but even relative beginners like the folks in the class were able to get it to work reliably. It is incredibly effective on getting guns to bear at both corners as fast as possible.

With some experience working in two man teams on single corners or doors, we moved on to three man groups and more complex problems. Each team had to clear about half of the second floor of SI HQ, either the conference room and bathrooms, or four offices. Compared to what we did yesterday, clearing similar areas solo, doing it with three was far easier. Not only could you conduct two man entries, the third guy could cover danger areas not yet searched so the other two could concentrate on one problem at a time.

With that, we broke for lunch. During the break, the topic of conversation turned to knife fighting. Gabe talked a bit about his ideas on knife use, and showed off some of the techniques he was working on (somehow Jon always seemed to end up as the demonstration dummy). They’re really some interesting ideas, oriented heavily towards the use of the knife as a defensive weapon in a non-permissive environment where you can’t carry a gun. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m really interested in seeing how this goes.

After lunch we resumed work in three man teams. This time, one team had to clear the entire second floor while the rest of the class watched. This is a fairly big problem, with lots of different danger areas to keep track of. Generally, one team member covered the unsearched areas while the other two worked on the problem at hand. We ran each team through it once, then switched team leaders and did it again. The second time through, when I was team leader, Gabe made us do it without speaking. This added an element of difficulty. It also slowed things down and made us take our time a little more, which was his objective. I think I did a pretty good job. I took a slightly different path than other folks did, one that allowed us to use all three of us to clear the trickiest pair of offices in the corner, rather than just two.

After each three man team had a chance to clear the upper floor twice, we moved downstairs. The lower level of SI HQ is more of a warehouse type space. This is where One Source Tactical does it’s business. There was a loading dock area and a couple of computer workstations in the front, and a back room with couple of rows of shelving filled with tactical gear. A small bathroom provided a place to hide. The more devious hiding spot was ‘the cave’. This is basically a full height crawlspace underneath part of the upper level with bare dirt and rock for the floor and cinderblock walls. It’s also pitch black, providing a good chance to use our low-light skills. Many of the students had been down here, but we hadn’t done any tactical work downstairs yet, so this was a new challenge. As Jon Payne put it, “This is going to suck, but it’s going to be a good kind of suck.”

We started with three man teams, while three other students hid in various spots. Our job was to spot them before they spotted us. My team was the second through and we suffered some communication problems. One team member saw the door to the cave and told the team leader “door”. The leader said “okay”, intending it to mean, “yes, I see the door”. The team member interpreted it as, “ok, take the door” and yanked it open and entered, leaving the team leader playing catch up and me standing there all by my lonesome covering unsearched areas. The student hiding in the cave would have been able to get both of them without being seen. The other difficulty we encountered was when the two team members searched the bathroom using their flashlights. As I pointed out later, there was plenty of ambient light in the room to search without using a light to telegraph your position. A light is vital in some places, like the cave, but they should be a last resort, not a first resort.

After every team of three had a chance to run it, we moved up to teams of five. While not quite as dramatic as going from one guy to three, a team of five offered a lot of advantages. Each team member has a smaller responsibility, allowing him to devote more attention to it. This allowed us to move faster and still search more thoroughly. We divided up our five man team into two, 2-man elements and a team leader (though the two man elements kind of got mixed up later on). Richard Coplin had a unique solution to the cave: he opened the door and reached around to the light switch and turned it on, turning it into a very different sort of problem.

After running everybody through in a five man team Gabe brought out his night-vision monocular and gave us a chance to go into the cave and try it out. He had a blue gun with Trijicon night sights and had us clap the monocular over our left eye while we held the pistol in our right hand and superimposed the three dots of the night sights (seen through the right eye) on the target (seen through the left eye and night vision monocular). It was pretty neat. Just as we were finishing up the batteries gave out (one of the potential disadvantages of this kind of technology). I was surprised to learn that it ran off AAAs. I was expecting some sort of more exotic battery.

We adjourned upstairs for the final debriefing. This was only the second time he taught the class and it’s still evolving, so he was really interested in our feedback. We talked quite a bit about the class, and what other, complementary classes we’d like to see. After some good discussion he handed out the certificates and we left.

Final Thoughts

This was really a great class. It was rather different from other firearms classes I’ve taken, much more about movement and the mind than it is about direct confrontation. As Gabe said on Friday night, it’s more like chess than UFC.

Despite this course’s name, and it’s placement in the High Risk Operator series of classes (which are otherwise oriented more towards light infantry tactics) this class was definitely oriented more towards citizens who want to defend their homes and loved ones than SWAT team members or military servicemen. Gabe is a former SWAT guy, but he clearly recognizes that you can’t just scale down SWAT tactics to one guy and have them work for the individual operator. When you can throw a flashbang and six guys in armor with automatic weapons at a problem, you can use tactics that just aren’t going to work for one guy sneaking around with a pistol.

Even the team tactics work we did on Sunday recognized that your team probably won’t be six highly trained guys who work together on a daily basis. It’s likely to include folks who can shoot, but don’t necessarily have tactical training like this class.

While I emphasized the civilian aspects of this, it seems to me that this class would also be really useful for an ordinary patrol officer. Indeed, it seems like the class drew on Gabe’s experience on patrol as much as it did on his SWAT experience. He talked quite a bit about working solo, with a partner, or with pick-up teams where not all members have the same training or level of experience.

This class really gave me a greater appreciation for the pistol as a CQB weapon. I can just imagine trying to do some of these things using a full length rifle in some of the tighter spaces of my house. Short barreled shoulder weapons like the Suchka and Uzi Gabe had available during class help, but even they can’t match the flexibility provided by a pistol. There’s definitely a balancing act between the added firepower of a long gun and the added length. I don’t think I’ll be giving up on my AK as a home defense weapon, but it may stay in the bedroom (or slung across my back) if I need to move around the house. I’ll also be looking pretty hard at acquiring a short barreled rifle or pistol caliber carbine to try to fill the intermediate role between a full length rifle and a pistol.

One of the thing that makes a pistol so flexible is the ability to move it in and out from a retention position to full extension as the available space dictates. Even though this was a non-shooting class, I was still struck by how useful the things I learned from Roger Phillips in Point Shooting Progressions and Advanced Point Shooting Progressions. Being able to effectively use all points on the retention continuum is a great asset in confined spaces. The non-horizontal shooting exercises we did in APSP blend nicely with “the muzzle follows the eye” principle of addressing danger areas. I was really glad to have taken his classes before taking this one and I think the skills mesh very nicely.

Although this class had some coverage of low light techniques, it was of necessity fairly brief, as just one element in a much broader program. However, it does leave me very much looking forward to Randy Harris’ low light force on force class in October. I’ve done a bit of low light work before this, but it’s an area that merits going into in a lot more depth.

One of the things Gabe emphasized is the need to learn this stuff slow before kicking up the speed. You really need to master doing things at the search and clear speed before you can move up to the locate and kill or traverse and escape speed. Moving faster will still be more risky, but if you know how to do it slow, you can still be reasonably safe at higher speeds. Gabe says this problem even affects some SWAT teams. They’re so eager to get to the high-speed hostage rescue stuff they don’t really master the fundamentals. I’ve certainly got a lot of practice ahead of me in both the physical aspects of taking corners and doors and the mental aspects of planning and thinking my way through the tactical problems presented by different environments before I’m really good at this.

Overall, this was an excellent class and I learn an enormous amount. I would encourage people not to let the name of the class or the subject matter intimidate them. If you intend to defend your home or carry a pistol into public places that might attract an active shooter or terrorist, this class provides fundamental knowledge that you really need. The ability to win a head to head fight is certainly vital, but if I can, I would much rather maneuver and use the environment to my advantage to make any fight as lopsided as possible. The knowledge from this class is a big step enabling me to do that.