WARRIOR TALK NEWS

My Impressions of The FS-2000

We have been talking about this rifle for a while and now I want to do a proper article on it in the same form as I did the 556R.  We ordered one of these rifles for a student and got a second one for T&E.  I know when I first looked at the rifle it looked very unusual.  Those looks have been the source of ridicule by "the ignorant" on the internet to whom anything not a version of the M4 is some sort of curiosity. But as soon as I began working with the rifle, from learning its manual of arms to running it through our rifle drills, I saw its serious benefits.

A trait shared by all other bullpup rifles, the FS2000 is short.  It is as short as an SBR rifle, and its balance is directly at the pistol grip.  Unlike other rifles, this salient point makes the rifle fast.  The unusual balance is yet another cause of derision by the uninformed, yet its balance is one of the greatest assets it brings to the fight.  In fact, I will say that the FS2000 is much quicker into action than any other rifle we have worked with, including the SIG and V-93 series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The manipulations are quite simple.  Simpler than even the AK as a matter of fact.  The bolt manipulation is reminiscent of the old HK "Legacy Weapons", the MP5 and HK53.  The non-reciprocating bolt handle is pulled back and either released into battery, or locked back in a recess like the MP5. I have found myself using the HK manual of arms more and more with this rifle. More on that later.

The safety mechanism could not be simpler.  It is ambidextrous, positive, and more conveniently located than any other rifle system, except perhaps the AUG. Magazine insertion and extraction is simple as well.  Grab the magazine and pull it out.  there is a button that must be depressed to extract it, but that is naturally taken care of grabbing the magazine.  To insert the magazine, sim0ple insert hard and tug to ascertain seating. This magazine operation has been a point of contention with the bullet golfers that like to leave a hansel-and-gretel trail of magazines on the range.  For those with less sporting points of view, the rifle encourages retention of spent magazines...just like the AK system.

The FS will not accept any polymer magazines.  No P-mags, no Lancers, Troys, or even TSD Magazines.  Is this a worthwhile trade-off?

Well, take it from one who has spent the equivalent cost of a nice suburban house making and marketuing his own branded magazine...the need to use metal GI magazines is definitely NOT a deal breaker given the advantages of the system. 

We have been using either standard "New" GI magazines or the excellent DSG Arms teflon coated magazines.

The trigger is fine for a military rifle and was actually better than the stock triggers on many of our Colt 6920s and SIG M400 rifles in inventory.  It is very much like a Glock trigger and only a problem if one is looking for reasons to dismiss the rifle.  With the stock OEM trigger I was able to hit a steel IPSC silohuette repeatedly at 500 yards. Can it be improved?  certainly it can.  We added one of those neu-trigger units and that lowered the perceived weight considerably.  The Neu-Trigger group is quite anachronistic about doing business, not having a proper online store and not being able to accept payment in any other way than a postal money order. Regardless, we muddled through and obtained some samples of his product.  There is a company that could make a fortune if it stepped into the 21st century. 

The OEM handguard is fine, but we have determined that a bullpup rifle benefits greatly from a VFG. This makes a very maneuverable rifle even more so.  To that end we obtained an FN handguard and added a Magpul VFG.  The OEM handguard is heavy and obvious its original intent was to mount a grenade launcher.  I suspect that inevitably, an after-market handguard will be available.

On my original FS2000 (I have three now) I had an ACOG 3X calibrated for .308.  Having a 1:7 barrel, I can run 75 grain bullets with a similar ballistic curve as a 7.62x51. Alternatively, I can remove that ACOG from the Picatinny rail and replace it with an Aimpoint T-1 or Trijicon SRS for use as a CQB weapon.  Similarly, I can replace the 75 grain ammo filled magazine with one loaded with more expansive or frangible ammo for the indoors application.

This last month we conducted an SMG class in Prescott and found several Bullpups in attendance.  Having to loan out both of my SMGs, I used my Steyr AUG and FS-2000.  I will discuss the AUG in a seperate article very soon.

In running our various movement and point shooting drills, many of us found the FS-2000 to be as fast as the SMG.  Roger Phillips noted that it handles far more like a big pistol than a small rifle.  It can be run single handed in an emergency problem without undue strain on the operator, yet just as easily move back into rifle realm for long or extremely precise shots.

And then Chambers and Nichols, two of our former US Army staff  instructors conducted their Vehicle Operations lecture, we immediately saw the advantages of the bullpup inside and immediately outside a motor vehicle. As Nichols noted, firing a centerfire rifle inside a car is like a knife fight in a phonebooth as the expended hot cases fly everywhere.  Not so with the FS's forward ejection.  The fired cases dribble out under control and substantially cooler than "fresh from the chamber". As well the fast handling and short length allow for some immediate action on any point on the clock while seated...almost instantly.

One interesting attribute of the rifle which I will leave for you to ponder is that one can fire up to five rounds without a single fired case being ejected from the weapon.  One attendee noted that such a thing would have been very beneficial to certain dark ops when deployed with frangible ammunition.

All in all, I am quite impressed with the Bullpup concept and the FS-2000 in particular.  As we progress into 2013, I suspect we will be doing similar write ups on the Steyr AUG, the Tavor, and the FN P-90.  I am not about to sell anything off, but for now, the rifle I find myself training with the most seems to be the FS2000.   

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Submachine Gun Gunfighting in Prescott

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Director of Marketing

Last weekend we held the first Suarez International Submachine Gun Gunfighting class. Gabe has been pushing the SMG or Pistol Caliber Carbine (PCC) for quite a while. We’ve had students bring SMGs to our rifle classes (I had one student run the first day of Rifle Gunfighting with a full-auto Uzi) but this is the first time we’ve gotten enough interest to hold a specific class.

We held our annual instructor summit on the Thursday and Friday before, and many of the instructors stuck around to help teach the class. In addition to Gabe and myself, we had John Chambers, Randy Harris, J.D. Lester, Doug Little, Dr. John Meade, Greg Nichols, Alex Nieuwland, Jon Payne, Roger Phillips, Don Robison, Dr. Keith Seto, Cullen Smith, Wayne Uhrman, Scott Vandiver, and Brent Yamamoto. There were nine students, so this class had one heck of a student-instructor ratio.

By far the most common weapon in the class was the Uzi. We’ve been selling these at One Source, so that’s not really a surprise. Most were in their stock configurations with 16" barrels, but two were SBRed (both Gabe’s that he loaned out to students). The only Mini Uzi in evidence was Gabe’s, the others were all full size. In addition to the plethora of Uzis one student brought a semi-auto HK UMP .45 and another an FN PS90. Scott Vandiver was the odd man out with a 9mm AR.  

From top to bottom: The Uzi, Mini Uzi, FN PS90, HK UMP .45, 9mm AR.

We had a couple of full auto guns in class. Randy Harris brought his FA Uzi (with suppressor), while one of the students had a Swedish K.

Suppressed Uzi, top, and Swedish K, bottom.

Both Gabe and I had loaned our Uzis (all of his Uzi's in Gabe's case) out to students, leaving us SMG-less.  I carried my FS2000 during the class and Gabe got some use out of his AUG, as well as his own FS2000.

Gabe with AUG, top, and FS2000, below.

A few students were kitted out in full LBE and a couple carried extra mags in a shoulder bag. Most either carried extra mags in mag pouches on the belt or worked out of their pockets.

Saturday

We started out with the usual admin stuff: waivers, the safety lecture, etc. Gabe had all of the instructors introduce themselves, followed by all of the students.

We launched into a fairly extensive discussion of the context of the submachine gun. This is very much an in-between weapon, with some of the qualities of a pistol and some of the qualities of a long gun. You can shoot it much quicker and more accurately than a pistol, thanks to it having four points of contact, yet it lacks the noise and muzzle blast of a full power rifle. SMGs can be very compact, particularly when SBRed, allowing carry of a long gun in environments where a full length rifle, or even a SBR in a rifle caliber, would be impractical.

Underarm assault.

After the lecture, we started with some dry work. Gabe explained the different ready positions and had the students practice moving between them and shouldering the rifle from each position. He demonstrated how to reload the Uzi and talked a bit about our philosophy of of retaining magazines when possible. As one student put it, “Ammo don’t come in magazines.” If you blithely discard your magazines you will eventually end up with a single shot club.

Shoulder transfers with an AUG and Uzi.

At Suarez International we’re real big on ambidexterity, being able to fight effectively from both sides. Part of this is the ability to smoothly transfer the rifle from one shoulder to the other. Gabe demonstrated the procedure. This is actually a bit different with a SMG than it is with a rifle, because with many submachine guns (including an Uzi, particularly one with a vertical forward grip) you don’t need to move your hand from the forend to the magazine well.

We finished up the morning with transitions to pistol. With a two-point sling we can transition pretty much the same way we do with the rifle, dropping behind our head so it hangs it diagonally across the back. Several folks in the class were running one-point slings. While we continue to prefer two-point slings for most situations, a short weapon slide an SMG mitigates some of the disadvantages of a one-point sling. It should be considered, particularly with SBRed subguns that are on the smaller end of the spectrum.

With this, we broke for lunch.

Randy Harris, checking out the Swedish K.

Gabe, demonstrating the proper shooting position with the AUG.    

After lunch we moved on to live fire. Gabe started with the basics of marksmanship as applied to the SMG. He emphasized body position and trigger control. We worked this a bit dry, then started with some live fire. We shot a series of three round bursts at five yards, ten yards, and twenty yards. The students generally started shooting fairly slowly, but were encouraged to speed up their trigger fingers as the drills progressed.

Shooting from the prmary shoulder.

Randy's suppressed full auto Uzi.

During a break I shot a bit of video of Randy Harris shooting his suppressed full auto Uzi. The big can on there makes it very quiet with the subsonic ammo.

After shooting from the primary shoulder we did the same from the support side shoulder. This was a bit less familiar to most students but they did quite well. Finally, we meshed the two sides together with the transfer drill, moving the rifle from one shoulder to the other and back again. They all worked through a magazine or two doing this.

Next up was getting off the X. Gabe talked about why we like getting off the X, including his experience outside a convenience store in Southern California. He gave the clock angle lecture and described why we prefer getting off the X to the forward oblique angles if possible.

Moving to the 3 o'clock.

He turned it over to Jon Payne to run the drills for the 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock directions. He started with a dry pacing drill, having everyone walk right and left in front of the target, to get them used to moving with the weapon shouldered and changing shoulders on the move. The key here is to get your toes and hips pointed the direction you want to move, to avoid sidestepping and backpedaling.

After getting everyone comfortable moving with the rifle, Jon moved on to getting off the X to the 3 o’clock. He had everybody run the drill dry until they had it down pat, and then we went live. Next up was the 9 o’clock direction. This is a bit more complicated for most people since right handers have to incorporate a shoulder transfer as they get off the X. Again, we practiced it extensively dry, then went live.

Randy and Roger demonstrating the virtue of the forward oblique angles.

Randy Harris took over to teach the forward oblique angles: the 1 o’clock and 11 o’clock lines. He started by saying, “Roger and I are going to have a gunfight” (the folks on WT have been waiting for this for years). Using verified empty guns, he and Roger Phillips demonstrated how getting off the X to these angles effectively lets you get way off the X very quickly, disrupt the adversary’s OODA loop, and acquire his flank or even get behind them. At Randy’s invitation, John Chambers stepped in and demonstrated how the unique balance characteristics of guns like the Uzi or a bullpup can let you do some pretty wild stuff. One of the things he demonstrated was the ‘Hebrew homie’, extending the Uzi or bullpup and using it like a big pistol.

John Chambers demonstratres the Hebrew homie with an AUG.

Brent Yamamoto and some students getting off the X to the 1 o'clock.

Randy had everyone work the forward oblique angles dry. After everyone had this down cold, we went ahead and did it live.

Getting off the X to the 11 o'clock.

For our last instructional block of the day, Roger Phillips went through the takeoff concept. Roger has been responsible for a lot of our evolution in this area and he does a great job presenting it.

The Takeoff.

This finished up the formal training day for us. We had quite a variety of weapons here, so afterwards there was quite a bit of shooting other guy’s guns. Randy Harris kindly let me shoot his full auto suppressed Uzi. With the added weight of the can on the front there’s hardly any muzzle rise. I also had a chance to shoot a student’s full auto Swedish K, which was a real blast.

Randy shooting the Swedish K and J.D. Lester shooting Randy's suppressed full auto Uzi.

Chambers transitioning to a TSD Classic Bowie after running the Swedish K empty.

After having our fun, we adjourned to a local mexican place for a nice dinner. Frankly, as fun as shooting the full auto guns was, this kind of fellowship with like-minded people is one of the highlights of the class.

Sunday

We reconvened on Sunday morning. Gabe asked if anyone had spent a lot of time seeing their sights the previous day and segued into a discussion on point shooting. Not so much the methodology, but the context where we use it. There are some trainers out there who are adamantly opposed to any form of point shooting, but as Gabe put it, “Limited experience gives limited perspective.”

A student asked about the recent shooting in New York where a pair of NYPD officers confronting a man with a gun hit several bystanders. This turned into a very interesting discussion of mindset (if you haven’t seen Gabe’s mindset DVD, I highly recommend it).

After the lecture and discussion we split the class into two groups. One group went over to the 100 yard range and practiced some longer range shooting with the SMG. The other group stayed on the main range and worked some more on getting off the X. After about 90 minutes, the two groups switched.

Over on the 100 yard range, we started out at 25 yards doing some shooting from a kneeling position. Position shooting with an SMG takes a bit of adaptation. They generally have a much shorter handguard than the rifle, which gives a bit less flexibility in hand position (in return, requiring more flexibility in body position). The further an SMG is from the standard rifle form factor (such as the PS90) the more adaptation it requires.

Kneeling with the Uzi and FS2000.

Sitting with the Uzi and PS90.

We did some work from kneeling, sitting, and shooting from supported positions, starting at 25 yards and moving back. In addition to looking at these as shooting positions Greg Nichols also demonstrated addressing 360 degree threats from positions other than standing. After everyone shot steel out to 75 yards or so, we started taking shots at some of the range’s steel targets set up on the hill. Most folks were able to ring the big steel gong up near the top of the hill at about 250 yards. Many were able to do so with their pistols as well.

Supported positions with submachine guns and bullpups.

Greg Nichols demonstrates 360 engagement from kneeling.

Over on the CQB side, Roger Phillips led the students in putting some of the takeoff techniques he’d discussed the previous afternoon into practice. We used these to do some more work on the 1 o’clock and 11 o’clock lines. Compared to a rifle, the relatively short length and balance of the SMG allows you to do some interesting things, such as staying in the partial transfer (switching shoulders but not switching hands) considerably longer than you can with a rifle. The students ran a drill to the 11 o’clock entirely from the partial transfer.

GOTX with a partial transfer.

John Chambers demonstrated the one-handed shooting (the Hebrew homie) again and the students tried it out on a drill going to the 7 o’clock. Dr. John Meade stepped up to describe our after action drills (including the medical self-check) and ran the students through those.

The Hebrew homie with a Swedish K.

While the second group was doing this, Gabe and several of the SI staff instructors gathered at the back of the bay and played around with some dry exercises with the bullpups and Uzi. It was pretty impressive to see how fast an extremely knowledgeable group of guys. This half-hour discussion has really laid the groundwork for a revolution in rifle and SMG gunfighting that’s going to completely transform how we teach folks to shoot with bullpups and certain SMGs over the next year. I have seen the future and it is going to blow your mind.

Just a taste of what's to come from SI with the bullpup.

Gabe showing off some rifles.

During lunch, Gabe did a bit of show and tell, talking about some of the platforms we offer through OST. He showed off the HK system rifles: the V–93 and PTR91, as well as the SIG 556R. Moving on to the less conventional rifles, he showed off the bullpups: the AUG and FS2000. Gabe made a special offer to folks at the class who wanted to buy the FS2000 for a very nice price. After lunch everybody had a chance to shoot the different different rifles.

Once everyone was done having a bit of fun with our guns, Gabe drove his jeep onto the range and Greg Nichols and John Chambers gave a brief introduction to vehicle operations with a special emphasis on the role of the submachine gun and bullpup. The short length of these weapons makes them a lot easier to handle inside a vehicle than a full size rifles. Folding stocks on the rifle can offset this, but the fighting capability of a rifle with the stock folded is limited until you can get out and get it unfolded. The ability to shoot them one-handed makes them especially suitable for the driver, who will often need to shoot one-handed.

John Chambers and Greg Nichols demonstrate how handy SMGs and bullpups are in a vehicle.

The SMGs offer some advantages over weapons that fire rifle cartridges, particularly in terms of noise and muzzle blast. Shooting a full power rifle inside a car can be punishing (as anyone who’s done vehicle hides in our Guerrilla Sniper class can attest). That said, rifles offer some real advantages in terms of range and penetration (important if a situation involves shooting at other vehicles).

John and Greg lay down suppressive fire from Gabe's Jeep, dismount, and assault the target.

Greg and John demonstrated a live fire response to contact, shooting from inside Gabe’s jeep, then deploying out and assaulting the target (letting them shoot from inside his car displays some serious trust on Gabe’s part). Gabe demonstrated one of the unique characteristics of the FS2000: in addition to it’s short length, its forward ejection system means that cases dribble out the front. They’re often deposited outside the vehicle and if they end up inside, they’ll be dropped gently, rather than flying out the ejection port and around the passenger compartment. This is an underappreciated feature.

Shooting the FS2000 from inside the jeep.

Moving on, J.D. Lester and John Chambers demonstrated deploying the Uzi from two different covert carry options. J.D. showed how to deploy the Uzi from the Suchka Bag, as seen in his recent article on the topic. John Chambers showed how to deploy it from a very innocuous looking Dell laptop case. John doesn’t lock the Uzi stock shut, so he can just grab it by the butt of the stock and as he pulls it out of the bag, the stock will open and lock into place in one smooth motion as the gun comes out. Unlike the Suchka bag, the laptop case isn’t big enough to accommodate a 16" barreled Uzi. It works great for an SBRed gun, but if you don’t have an SBR you can also store the Uzi with barrel removed (reinstalling it only adds about 10 seconds to the deployment time if you practice).

Deploying the Uzi from a laptop case.

We finished up the class doing some extreme close quarters shooting with SMGs. We do this sort of thing in many of our pistol classes, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done with long guns. The effects of muzzle blast alone can be pretty devastating.

John Chambers demonstrating extreme close quarters shooting with the FS2000.

Warning: Doing extreme close quarters drills with a full auto Swedish K may cause face-splitting grins.

With that, we wrapped things up. Gabe handed out the certificates and we went our separate ways.

Final Thoughts

This class was really a unique experience. Having more than fifteen instructors meant that students got a huge amount of individual instruction. Gabe could call on highly experienced instructors with specialized knowledge like Roger Phillips, John Chambers, Greg Nichols, John Payne, and Randy Harris to teach particular material. If you ever have a chance to come to a class associated with one of our instructor gatherings you should be all over it.

The submachine gun curriculum is truly outstanding. There’s precious little SMG/PCC training available to civilians, and what little there is tends to be adapted from law enforcement training, or training designed to sell submachine guns to law enforcement (I’m looking at you, HK Training Division). A class like this, that teaches how to use a SMG for self defense is a must for anyone considering a pistol-caliber long gun for self-defense.

If I seem to mention bullpups almost as often as I do submachine guns in this writeup, that’s no accident. Bullpups and certain submachine guns have some similar characteristics that mean it makes sense to address them together. SI is getting much more into bullpups, and it’s clear that we’ll be traveling even further in that direction in the future. In addition to the class material, the instructors also kicked around ideas on how to employ these unique weapons. What we’ve done here will lay the foundation for some truly revolutionary new material.

Any chance to shoot something with a fun switch is a great pleasure, and I have to thank Randy Harris for letting me shoot his suppressed full auto Uzi and a student (Saladin on WT) for letting me shoot his Swedish K. Now the only problem is that I want both!

Truly an excellent class, with great fellowship among the students and instructors.

Team Tactics in Kingman

This weekend I attended Gabe’s three-day Team Tactics course in Kingman, Arizona. This is actually my second exposure to this curriculum; I took it from Eric Pfleger up in Anaconda, Montana last July (the Arizona desert was quite a contrast from the high country of Montana).

For the most part, I carried my new SIG 556R, though I also brought my FS2000. I fed both out of a HSGI battle belt equipped with TACOs (one of the nice things about the TACO mag pouches is that their universality makes it easy to switch between rifles that take different magazines). For a secondary, I had my TSD Glock in the Blade Tech WRS holster. I also carried a Camelbak water bladder to help keep myself hydrated (this is Arizona, even in November it’s still dry as hell).

Most of the students in the class brought ARs of one sort or another, though there was a strong minority of AKs. At the start of class there were a pair of M14s in use, but one shooter shortly switched to a much lighter AR. There were two students with SIG 556s (a SWAT and a Patrol) and one SCAR 16.

Friday

We began the class on Friday morning with the usual admin stuff: waivers, introductions, safety and medical briefings, etc.

Gabe explained that this class would be taught from the context of the guerrilla or insurgent fighter. He led the class on a discussion of the guerrilla fighter, using exmaples from history, including Francis Marion, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Cuban Revolution, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and others. The lack of reinforcements and logistical support have a big impact on tactics and training, and understanding this context is important for what we will be doing over the next three days.

We moved on to some dry work. This class involves a lot of moving around people with loaded guns. We choreograph things so that students should never end up in each other’s line of fire, we need some additional layers of redundancy. These are built around some specific applications of the four rules of gun safety.

The general rule is that you don’t put your finger on the trigger until your gun is aligned with the target and you have decided to shoot. In this class, you need to maintain a situational awareness of your teammates and other things that are going on around you, so students are often pointed in and shooting, they have to take a quick glance to the side or rear to keep an eye on their teammates. When your cheek comes off the stock, your finger needs to come off the trigger (even if the gun is on target and you’ve decided to shoot). If you aren’t looking at the target you shouldn’t be shooting it.

We had everyone unload their rifles and divest themselves of all loaded magazines, then worked this dry. The students point in with their finger on the trigger, then look right, left, or behind them on command. We did quite a few reps of this to really ingrain that finger coming off the trigger when your cheek leaves the stock.

The other general rule is that you don’t let your muzzle cover anything you aren’t willing to destroy. This implicitly assumes that the world downrange is static, and the only variable is where your muzzle is pointing. In a dynamic class like this, your muzzle may be minding it’s own business pointing downrange when something you don’t want to destroy tries to move in front of it. In that case it’s your job to avert that muzzle and prevent it from sweeping your teammates.

To practice this dry we had everyone line up shoulder to shoulder and point in. Gabe walked down the line in front of them and they averted their muzzles as he went past. When he was satisfied with this, he started sending students from one end of the line, walking down to the other end, forcing the students in line to avert their muzzle for each one walking past. We continued this drill in kneeling, then in prone. No matter what position you’re in, you have to get the muzzle pointed in a safe direction if a buddy walks in front of you. After quite a while, Gabe was finally satisfied with the state of everybody’s muzzle aversion.

When you’re operating by yourself, tactical communication isn’t really an issue (if you have communication problems when you’re the only one there, consult a psychologist). Introduce another person, and all of a sudden things get a lot more complicated. Two people acting together without good communication or coordination can be less effective than a single person acting alone, because they get in each other’s way. We need some communications.

The first level of communication happens long before the fight: the SOP. Having a set of standard operating procedures, preplanned and practiced responses for different situations, is far more effective than trying to work everything out in the moment. A really well trained and practiced team can work through even very complex problems without any verbal communications or even hand signals, just based on SOPs and keying off what their teammates are doing. Conversely a scratch team that’s never worked together before, even if the individual operators are very skilled, is going to require a lot more on the spot communication to keep everyone coordinated.

On a verbal level, we have a very simple set of commands that covers the most common eventualities in a team tactics setting. First, what if one team member runs out of ammo or encounters a malfunction? It’s very important to let your teammate know this, so they don’t do anything expecting you will be supplying covering fire. If we yell “I’m out of ammo” or “reloading” or anything similar, we may clue in our enemy that now would be a good time to make their move, since one of our guns is down. Instead, we use “Checking!” to indicate that we’ve got a problem and can’t supply covering fire at the moment. In response, our teammate yells “Covering!” indicating that they’re providing covering fire while we fix our problem.

Everybody paired up and we did some dry reloading drills, yelling “Checking!” and “Covering!” as appropriate.

One of the big advantages to having more than one guy in a gunfight is that one can provide covering fire to the other, particularly when moving. In order to do this effectively, the team members have to coordinate their fire and movement. The team member who wants to move yells, “Moving!” Importantly, he doesn’t just immediately set out; he waits for a response from his teammate. The teammate yells back “Covering!”, indicating that he’s ready to provide covering fire. Why “Moving!” and “Covering!” rather than “Moving!” and “Move!”, as you might have seen on some DVDs from a competing training organization? “Moving” and “Move” sound too similar, especially on a battlefield where part of the word may be obliterated by the sound of gunfire.

The moving team member gets up and begins to move. This should not be a long trip: generally 3–5 steps, or to the next good piece of cover in about that distance. The longer you’re up the more time the enemy has to get a bead on you and the more ammo your buddy has to expend covering you. When he gets there, the teammate yells, “Set!”, indicating that he’s in position. Generally, the sequence then repeats itself with the other teammate moving while the first provides covering fire.

Each pair of students did the bounding drill dry moving up the range, then moving back down. Since we had not just the range, but also a pretty wide swath of desert on either side, Gabe had the students head off into the weeds and do a bounding drill through some more realistic terrain.

After lunch, we worked the bounding drill live. The range was big enough (and we had enough instructors) to run two pairs of students at a time. Gabe would start the drill by popping off a few rounds from his FS2000 to signify enemy contact. The pair of students would split, to establish a bit of separation, and start putting fire on the enemy. One would call out “Moving!” When the second replied “Covering!” the first would move up about 5 yards. Then they reversed roles and the second student bounded forward. We did about 50 yards of this, then called it to a halt.

One of the big keys to this is to pace your cadence of fire. If you empty your magazine in the first ten seconds, there’s no way you ammo load is going to last even 50 yards, much less some of the longer distances we’d be doing later. The object here is to keep the enemy’s head down. One round every couple of seconds is going to do a pretty good job discouraging him from putting his head up.

After everyone had a chance to do the drill, we ran it again, this time moving up 100 yards instead of just 50. One of the questions that came up was when to reload. We’d like to avoid having to do an emergency reload because our gun went dry, especially because it could happen at a time when our buddy is relying on us to provide covering fire. You’re not going to be able to count rounds in the middle of a fight, but you should be able to figure out whether you’re in the top or bottom half of the magazine. If you’re in the bottom half, think about reloading at the next opportunity. When we’re moving forward, we’d rather not reload on the move, because we’re moving into unknown territory we may discover another enemy at close range that needs to be dealt with immediately. So it’s better to reload before advancing. When moving to the rear, we’re moving away from the enemy and less likely to suddenly encounter an threat, so reloading on the move is less of an issue. The increased movement speed it gives us is also more valuable, since we’re probably withdrawing for a reason.

After everyone had a chance to work the drill while moving up 100 yards, we did it again, this time moving up 100 yards and then moving back to the starting point, keeping fire on the target the whole way. As I mentioned, we had quite a few students with ARs, and during these drills we had a couple them malfunction. The students had some difficulty clearing these, which is a problem, since every second you spend fixing your rifle costs your buddy ammo. Dale’s an AR guy, so he did a lecture on how to deal with AR malfunctions.

We ran the 100 yard drill up and back again, and by this point everything was going pretty smoothly. There was a lot of improvement in communication from the first drills we ran this morning. We had a really good batch of students and the ability to run two pairs at once meant we were working well ahead of schedule.

Everyone had demonstrated a pretty good grasp on the basic concepts in the two-man bounding drill, so we moved up to doing this with teams bounding past each other. We put together three man teams and paired the teams up to do a bounding drill with a total of six guys.

With this many guys on the range at once, communication becomes paramount. You can’t just have everybody out there talking to everybody. We assigned a team leader for each team, so they had a team leader and two shooters. For this drill, the team leader’s only job was to coordinate within their team and between teams. Their rifle was to remain slung the whole time. Perhaps the most difficult part of their job, after doing the two-man drills, was to distinguish their communication between with he other team leader from their communication with the members of their teams.

We ran the six-man team bounding drill a couple of times. As the students did it more we got the kinks worked out and by the end of the day they were doing it like pros. This was a good place to wrap things up for the day.

Saturday

We started off the second day with some hand signals. Thus far we’d been relying primarily on verbal communication, backed up by seeing (and in the case of gunfire, hearing) that your team member was doing what he was supposed to. Hand signals can be very useful when you want to be sneaky and quiet. They can also come in quite handy as an adjunct to verbal communication once the fight starts and gunfire is drowning out anything anyone says.

For a permanent team that trains a lot, you can set up all sorts of complicated hand signals, but for a scratch team like we were working with in this class, simpler is better. Point at a guy and then point to a spot and it’s pretty clear the team leader wants him there. Thumbs up means you’re good. Point to your eyes and point to a spot and you want team members to direct their attention (and rifles) to that spot. We leavened these with a smattering of more specialized signals for halt, freeze, rally point, and enemy.

To go with the hand signals, we talked a bit about patrolling formations. You aren’t going to go bound a couple of miles without any enemy in sight, but you need some sort of structured formation that you can move. For confined liner spaces (streets, roads, etc.) a column works best. Rather than having everyone directly in line, it’s better to stagger then a yard or so to the right or left.

For wider areas, the wedge works well and allows you to bring a lot more firepower forward quickly. The diamond is a bit more compact and controllable, and works really well with four or five guys. Since we’d be operating in four or five man teams for most of the rest of class, this was by far the most common formation.

We also talked about sectors of responsibility when moving in a formation. The point man actually has the smallest sector of responsibility, just what is directly ahead of the team, but he the greatest number of responsibilities. He ‘drives’ the team (in response to orders from the team leader), designates rally points as he passes, calls a halts or freeze in response for what he sees, etc. Other team members are assigned sectors depending on where they are in the formation: right, left, or rear.

 

 

We grouped the students into 4–5 man teams and sent them out to patrol both on and off the range. They got some practice moving in the different formations an using the various hand signals.

When they got back, we talked a bit about camouflage. The students had a variety of camo patterns on so Gabe had some examples to work with. Rather than camoflage, several students were wearing shirts and pants in browns, tans, and greens. These aren’t quite as good as camo patterns at hiding you out in the weeds, but they can be surprisingly close. Where they really shine is that you can dump your rifle and LBE and walk into a hotel or nice restaurant and not get a second look. In the insurgent fighter context, this can be as useful as being able to go unseen out in the wilderness. Gabe coined the acronym HEAT camoflage (Hippy EArth Tone) to describe this kind of setup.

Gabe sent a few downrange: one in Woodland MARPAT, one in Multicam, and two in HEAT camo. Even out at 300 yards, when they were standing up or walking along the bare dirt of the range, they were pretty obvious. When they kneeled or went prone, even on the bare range, it was a lot harder. Coming back they moved off to the right or left of the range, into some vegetation (sparse brush from hip to shoulder height). There they were still visible when moving, and fairly evident when standing, but everyone practically disappeared when they dropped down.

The MARPAT woodland was a bit dark for the environment. Some parts of the background it blended pretty well, but on others it was fairly obvious. The Multicam was probably the best overall. The two guys in HEAT camo did almost as well as the multicam, save for one guy’s very light colored (slightly off white) hat. Faces and hands could be quite visible, as where shadows on the front of their body when they leaned over while kneeling.

After lunch, we brought the patrolling formations together with some of the more tactical movement we’d been doing the previous day. If you’re in a diamond or wedge and you spot an enemy (for the moment we’ll assume that you spotted them before they spotted you), and you intended to shoot them and take their stuff, you need to get your more of your firepower up front where it can be deployed against the enemy. Gabe showed how to go from a diamond formation to a line, bringing everybody up to be ready to shoot. After you’re done sending lead downrange, you don’t just want to run away in one big confused gaggle, so he talked about how to peel guys off from the line one at a time to head for the rally point.

We had the teams students work these drills dry quite a bit. Once they had it down, we got ready to go live. Before we went live Gabe talked a bit about synchronizing team members’ fire. We want everyone’s initial rounds to arrive as close to simultaneously as possible. In the Guerrilla Sniper class we have some methods involving a countdown that (with a good team) can get multiple rifles so closely synchronized it sounds like a single shot. That’s probably overkill for this sort of situation, but we’d still like everyone’s shots to arrive in, say, half a second. The easiest way to do this is to make sure everybody’s on target and on trigger, then have the team leader fire the first shot, with everyone else firing as soon as he does. Done well, this results in the team leader’s initial shot, followed about a quarter second later by everyone else’s.

With these principles explained, we ran the movement to a hasty ambush drill live fire a couple of times for each team. Most of the teams were really hitting on all cylinders at this point and by the second time through they were all executing it really well.

Up until this point we were assuming that we saw the enemy first, but that’s not always going to be the case. Sometimes he’s going to spot you first, or you’ll both spot each other at the same time. We ran the drill again, reacting to an unexpected contact without time to set up even a hasty ambush. In this scenario, rather than synchronized fire, guys start shooting as soon as they’re up on the line parallel with the other team members. So initially you have the point man shooting and he’s joined by other team members as they move up parallel to him.

We also added a bit to the drill after the withdrawal. Rather than just heading back to the rally point, they buttonhooked around and got ready to ambush their pursuers. We ran this live a couple of times.

Getting everyone on line works pretty well in an open area from something like the diamond or wedge formations. From a column, particularly in the confined space like an alley or road, it can be difficult to get your guys up on line to shoot. An alternative in this situation is the Australian Peel or the center peel. You encounter an unexpected and superior force while traveling in a staggered column. Everyone gets off the X a bit further in whatever direction they were staggered, so you now have two files of people with an open corridor down the center. The point man opens up and shoots (usually a mag dump), then when he’s empty, he turns and runs down the center between the two files and takes position at the back of one of the files. The next guy in line (say, the front guy on the right file) opens up and empties his magazine at the enemy. He turns and runs down the center and the guy at the front of the left file starts shooting. When he’s done, he runs down the center of the file and the next guy on the right file opens up, etc. You can keep this going for several iterations (as long as you have ammo) withdrawing while using fire to discourage pursuit).

We ran the peel drill dry several times, then did it live at half speed. That wrapped things up for the day. We adjourned to our hotel rooms, then rendezvoused for a group dinner at a local Chili’s. As usual, the fellowship with like-minded individuals was the highlight of the class.

Sunday

Sunday morning we started off with the peel drill again. We ran it dry a couple of times to ensure that everyone remembered what we’d been doing yesterday, then ran it live at full speed.

After finishing up with the peel, Gabe talked for a bit about ambushes. The simplest is the linear ambush. You line your guys up alongside of the enemy’s intended route of travel and, when the adversary is in position, you let him have it. The L-shaped ambush is a bit more sophisticated. It includes putting part of your force astride the enemy’s line of travel as a blocking force (the short leg of the L) with the rest of your unit spread out parallel to the enemy’s line of travel (the long leg of the L). This requires a much higher degree of coordination, in order to ensure that the folks on the short and long legs of the L aren’t shooting at each other. To keep things simpler and safer in this class, we’d stick with liner ambushes.

The students ran through some movement to linear ambush drills live on the range. This was fairly similar to some of the stuff we were doing yesterday, but we wanted to make sure everyone had it down before moving on to the next, even more challenging, exercise.

Gabe picked out two targets: a white rock just to the left of the berm at the end of the range, and a lone Yucca tree off about a 45 degree angle from the range. These were widely separated enough that we could have two teams running at the same time. The mission was to move off the range into the desert, patrol a few hundred yards closer to the target, mount a hasty linear ambush and pour a bunch of fire onto the target, then withdraw and patrol back to the starting point.

Each team had a chance to run on one of the objectives before lunch. After lunch, they ran it again on the other objective.

For our final exercise, we split up one of the teams, bringing us up to three teams of six or seven guys each. Because of the larger team we ran these one at a time. The first twist on the exercise, compared to what they’d done before was that instead of mounting a hasty ambush, they would unexpectedly encounter an enemy (signified by a few shots from Gabe’s pistol) and have to react to the contact. Once they’d poured some fire into the target, they would bound back a few hundred yards, keeping the fire up the whole way. The second twist was that Gabe would designate one student as a casualty and the remaining members of the team would have to help him back to the starting point during the exercise.

 

 

We ran this once for each team, and frankly there were some pretty impressive performances during this drill. This was our last exercise and the class really ended on a high note.

Final Thoughts

This was a really great class. We had a very squared away set of students. Combined with the enormous range facility we were really able to blow through the curriculum and do a lot of reps of the more advanced stuff.

The folks with military and LE experience contributed a lot to the class. These were a very sharp group of guys and several of them would make good instructors in their own right.

Gabe did an excellent job adapting the stock curriculum to the great facility and the fairly advanced students that we had in the class. His teaching was top notch, as usual.

This is the second time I’ve been through this class and I am more and more impressed with the curriculum. The Team Tactics class does a great job of taking guys without any previous experience in light infantry small unit tactics and gets them up to a very high level very quickly. I would highly recommend it!

Hippy Earth Tones Camouflage (H.E.A.T. Camo)

Catchy name don't you think? No, TSD is not going to make or sell clothing. Tried that when we sold Woolrich and 5.11 and it is too much drama for what it is worth. The matter at hand arose this last weekend when we held the Small Unit Tactics class in Kingman, AZ.

We had twenty guys attending. Some wore the very popular and effective Multicam camouflage. A couple of guys wore some derivatives of MARPAT, ACU, and various other "Green" camo. And we had several that were wearing civilian outdoor clothing, but in what I would term "muted earth tones". These were various shades of drab green, gray, brown and tan. Nothing blue or red - nothing white or black. And the tans were more brown than sand...so they were not "light".

This is not Urban camo to blend into groups. The objective is to sport a drab colored image based on shades of grey, brown, green, tan. Nothing blue...nothing red...nor any derivatives such as bluish grey or pinkish salmon. The idea is that the clothes blend into the woods/weeds, yet can go into the city as well. The wood/weeds takes precedence over the city in terms of colors.

Patterns would also be contraindicated unless there are plaid plants or stripped trees in your AO.


In any case we had students do a walk back from 100 to 350 yards as the other students watched them for contrast, effectiveness in blending with the area, and how easy it was to see them. Not scientific I suppose, but good enough for what our purposes where.

Anything moving is easy to see as nothing moves like a man. As well, a human head is distinctive and different from anything in nature. But aside from that what the class saw was that the Hippy Earthtones difused light and allowed the wearers to be nearly as "camouflaged" as the multicam wearing guys. Don't believe me? Ask they guys in class that saw what I am writing about.

The advantage of the Hippy Earthtones over the Multicam is this. If it is probable that one may need to go from rural weeds to city streets and back, the multicam would be contraindicated as while it would camouflage well in one zone, it would call attention to the wearer in another. The Hippy Earthtones would work well in both.

Point Shooting Progressions - Gunfighter Week in Phoenix

Last weekend I attended Roger Phillips’ Point Shooting Progressions class in Phoenix. This PSP class was part of ‘Gunfighter Week’: a four day event that included Close Range Gunfighting taught by Doug Little on Thursday and Friday, followed by PSP on Saturday and Sunday. Almost everyone in the class had taken CRG the previous two days, so they were coming off a class that introduced the fundamental concepts we’d be building on in PSP and provided some material on gunhandling, after action drills, and other concepts that Roger doesn’t really cover in PSP.

While I didn’t plan to shoot a lot, I brought a pair of Glock 17s, one with an RMR, the other with iron sights. They rode in an Archangel II and an Archangel. The vast majority of the class had Glocks, several of them equipped with RMRs. There was also one XD, one M&P, a 1911, and an FNX 9mm. The Glocks were mostly 17s and 19s, though there were a few .40 caliber guns as well.

Saturday

After the usual administrative stuff (waivers, etc.) Roger talked a bit about the background of the PSP class. He went through his 7 concepts: the reactionary curve, the takeoff continuum, the drawstroke continuum, the retention concept, the movement continuum, the sight continuum, and the grip and trigger continuum. He also talked a bit about the Modern Technique and PSP’s relationship to it.

With the background material out of the way, we headed downrange to shoot. We started out with a bit of sighted shooting: the one hole drill. This drill is exactly what it says on the tin, you try to put five shots into a single hole from about five yards. If your marksmanship’s up to it, this means you’re a pretty good shot. This gets everybody warmed up and starts people off with something that they’re comfortable with. Some folks shot a little better than others. Roger had everyone do some dry fire trigger presses, then shot another one-hole drill. There were some noticeable improvements.

Now that we had our one bit of sighted fire for the class out of the way, Roger began moving down the sighting continuum from more precise methods to coarser sighting methods. First up was flash sight picture: focusing on the front sight and getting a real brief sight picture as you break the shot. This is about as far towards point shooting as classical Modern Technique gets (aside from retention). For this drill, Roger also introduced the drawstroke. Since everyone had just been through CRG, they all had a good grounding in the draw and he didn’t have to spend a whole lot of time on that.

Moving into point shooting proper, Roger covered ‘Type II focus’. This has the same basic sight picture as sighted fire, but your focus is on the target, rather than on the front sight. So instead of a sharp front sight and a fuzzy, out of focus target, you have a fuzzy front sight and a sharp target.

Next up, Roger talked about aiming down the top of the slide. This is probably one of the most versatile point shooting techniques. It provides better situational awareness than sighted shooting and is good out to 7–10 yards for most people.

For somewhat closer distances, you can just bring the gun up to your line of sight and surround it with the target, what we call metal on meat. This works out to about 5 yards.

Finally, the coarsest method for point shooting is to simply drive the gun to the focal point, without paying any attention to visual feedback from the gun. This is only good to a limited distance, generally 3 yards or so, but it’s very quick and works well even in darkness, when you may not be able to get any visual feedback because you can’t see the gun.

Everyone had a chance to shoot each of the techniques several times. Roger noticed one student as suffering from some rather severe muzzle flip. Part of this was because he as shooting a .40, but a bigger part was because his grip on the gun had some issues. Roger and I showed him how to really bring that second hand into play and encouraged him to grip the gun much harder (part of the grip continuum) and this improved matters considerably.

Roger doesn’t just teach a big heap of sighting methods, he wants students to understand how these different techniques relate to the situation, particularly time and distance, so they’ll instinctively select the best method depending on the situation. To help ingrain this he had everyone start out at 3 yards driving the gun to the focal point. After each string of fire he had everyone take a big step back and shoot again. Very quickly, driving the gun to the focal point gave way to metal on meat. A few yards later we transitioned to shooting over the top of the slide. Out at 10 or 11 yards everyone switched to type II focus, and then a flash sight picture. This drill really helps put everything into context.

During lunch, I brought out my SIG 556R and FS2000. Unfortunately, do to the range rules we couldn’t shoot these on the range that we were on, but people got a chance to handle them. Doug Little was very impressed by the trigger on the SIG.

After lunch, we worked on the retention concept. As the phrase indicates, Roger sees retention as a fluid concept rather than a fixed position. As the opponent closes in, you want to start pulling the gun further and further back to protect it from a gun grab. This is a gradual process as the distance closes rather than just a switch from one position to another.

To start training the concept, Roger had everyone shoot from the midpoint of the drawstroke. This is anywhere from when your elbows left your sides but before you reach full extension. This both brings the gun closer to you and drops it down below your line of sight, decreasing the amount of visual input you have on the gun.

The next step is to bring your elbows all the way in until they touch the sides of your ribcage. This is the part of the drawstroke where your hands come together on the gun. This provides a much more stable firing platform than having your elbows floating out in space, but you get even less visual input on the gun. Roger had everyone do some focal point transition drills, shooting with their elbows on their sides and shifting their point of aim vertically between two different points on the target.

With the skill of adjusting the focal point on the target established, Roger moved on to the drawstroke zipper. As you move through the second half of the drawstroke, from where you hands come together out to full extension, you move your focal point up the midline of the body shooting a vertical string of shots from belly button to neck, capping it off with a headshot.

Our last major subject for the day was some one-handed shooting. Roger started out by explaining the context of the combat crouch, and how it related to the movement skill sets we’d be learning tomorrow.

Moving on to the shooting part, we started with some point shoulder. This is a full extension one-handed point shooting position. The biggest difference between this and one handed sighted fire is that with point shooting it’s often easier to allow the gun to cant inboard about 30–45 degrees. This is what we call the ‘half homie’. This is really a much more natural and relaxed one-handed shooting position than holding the gun vertically. With a Glock or other gun with a square slide profile, you can use the edge of the slide as an aiming rail, using the same skills we used to shoot over the top of the gun.

From here, we followed a similar path as the two-handed retention shooting, bringing the gun in to the 3/4 hip position with the elbow unlocked, but not in contact with your body.

After shooting from 3/4, we moved on to 1/2 hip. The half hip position places your elbow against your body, with the forearm and gun held horizontal. This is analogous to shooting just as your hands come together in a two-handed grip. You can adjust how far out the gun projects depending on whether you place the elbow in front of the hip, on the hip, or behind the hip.

Our last drill of the day involved drawing and shooting while facing somewhat uprange. This leads in to some of the shooting and moving stuff we’d be doing tomorrow. We started off facing the 8 o’clock direction, so the target is off everyone’s right shoulder, drawing, and firing, all without moving the feet. Obviously, it’s very important to have good muzzle discipline, keeping it pointed down until the pistol is oriented downrange.

The counterpart to this is starting off facing the 4 o’clock and drawing and shooting. This is a bit harder for a right handed shooter, since you have to go cross body. The safe way to do this is to draw to Sul, rotate the upper body a bit, and point downrange.

This wrapped up an excellent day of training.

Sunday

The second day of PSP really emphasizes movement. You take all the point shooting skills you learned on Day 1 and apply them to shooting during dynamic movement. Roger started out the day with a lecture on movement, talking about the difference between controlled, dynamic, and get out of dodge movement, why we don’t like backpedaling or sidestepping, etc.

We ran a few dry movement drills to demonstrate a few of the aspects that Roger had covered in the discussion. In particular, he had students run the drill two handed, then one handed, in order to show that running one handed can actually reduce the amount of bouncing the gun does because you have only one arm transmitting shocks to the gun instead of two.

Next up was the takeoff, some special footwork to help your initial movement off the X. The ‘takeoff continuum’ is the newest addition to Roger’s seven concepts. At SI, we’ve been teaching the takeoff for quite a while and Roger has really been instrumental in pushing it forward with the enhanced takeoff and the two-footed takeoff. The two-footed takeoff in particular was developed to allow the takeoff on surfaces that don’t provide good traction. The range we were on was essentially a layer of hard dirt, topped my small marble sized gravel and increasingly large numbers of spent cases. Traction was about as bad as you could get without introducing water or ice, so the two-footed takeoff was the order of the day. Everyone worked the takeoff dry, starting with the forward oblique angles, then continuing to the rearward obliques.

Going live, we did what Roger calls the first shot drill. You get off the X and, as the name implies, fire a single shot on the target. When getting off the X there’s a great temptation to just drive the gun out there and pop off that first shot without much in the way of visual verification. By limiting you to only one shot, this drill is designed to get you to have a slight pause to verify that it’s going to go where you want it to. We worked this to both of the forward oblique angles. Rather than doing this in a big line, Roger ran most of the movement drills we did today in pairs. A student on the right end of the range would get off the X to the 11 o’clock, so he’s shooting to his right, while a student on the left side of the range gets off the X to the 1 o’clock, shooting to his left. While this slows down the pace, it allows the students to get much more dynamic and unrestrained in their movement.

The next drill was going straight in. Generally, SI isn’t real big on charging right in on an adversary, since it doesn’t force the opponent to change his point of aim or track you. Nevertheless, there are some circumstances where you need to close very quickly with the adversary.

A variant on going straight in is parallel tracking. It involves taking a step to the side during the takeoff, then closing in parallel to the initial line of force. This has many of the advantages of going straight in, but it does force the opponent to track you. It also puts you in a position to flank the adversary, rather than taking you right into a hand to hand problem.

We moved on to the forward obliques. If the circumstances allow, this is generally our preferred direction to get off the X against a gun armed opponent. One thing that’s a bit different about the way Roger teaches this in the PSP class is that he has everyone start from 10–12 yards. This is farther than you’d really want to use this technique in real life (it’s more of a 7 yards an in skill set). Starting at the greater distance can help refine the skill set, after all if you can do this at 12 yards, you are going to absolutely own it at 6. It also gives students a bit more time to practice point shooting on the move. If you bust off the X at 5 yards, you’ve only got about a second of useful shooting time.

After lunch we picked up with the rearward oblique angles. These are a bit more complicated than the forward angles, just because there’s such a great angle between your direction of travel and the direction that you’re shooting. This is particularly hard when the target is over your support side shoulder (taking the 5 o’clock line for a right handed shooter). If you insist on having the full, normal two-handed grip on the gun, you’re going to get yourself all torqued up and not be able to move effectively.

Roger started by demonstrating the modified grip. Essentially, you allow your support hand grip to slide around the gun. As the angle becomes more extreme, eventually the support hand is gripping the gun from the side or even the front. Combined with the ‘half homie’ and aiming down the corner of the slide you can shoot and get hits even at some fairly extreme angles.

We did some drawing and shooting form this position while stationary first, to get everyone used to shooting this way. Then we did it on the move. We also practiced getting off the X to the other rear oblique (the 7 o’clock line), which is considerably easier since you can just go one-handed.

We can exploit this ability to go one handed further by ‘turning the 5 into the 7’ using the In Quartata. You get off the X by stepping to the side and throwing your support side shoulder back, then take off in the 5 o’clock direction while shooting one-handed. Because this is a technique that’s really only useful for getting off the X to your strong side (there’s not really any reason for a right-handed shooter to turn a 7 o’clock into the 5), so Roger set up a different drill for the shooter on the right side of the range.

The hallway drill involves using the in quartata to get off the X, but we’re assuming you’re in a somewhat confined space (a hotel hallway, or supermarket aisle, for instance) you can only go a few steps. You reverse directions and go back across the hallway, then to one more reverse and cross the hallway a third time. Ideally you should do this with no break or let-up in your cadence of fire.

The in quartata also has a role when fighting in a confined space, such as between two cars in the parking lot. In such a small space we can’t really use our normal GOTX skill set, but the in quartata allows us to quickly get as far off the X as the terrain allows. From here, we can shoot the adversary. In ACRG, we normally teach using this position to shoot from point shoulder, but since this was PSP, Roger had everyone shoot it from more of a sideways half-hip.

We’d done the drawstroke zipper two-handed yesterday. Roger had everyone do it one-handed.

For a final exercise, Roger had everyone do some GOTX drills to the forward obliques from five yards. This is a more realistic distance for this skill set than what Roger had been using earlier, and at this point the students had moved from learning these skills to putting them into practice. Roger intended for the students to get one go in each direction, but the students liked it so much they kept circling back and lining up to do it again, so Roger let them run it a couple of times each.

 

Final Thoughts

This was an excellent class. Roger did an great job, as usual. I first took Point Shooting Progressions two and a half years ago, and he’s definitely evolved the class since then. We had a great group of students with the solid gun safety skills you need to make this class a success.

Gunfighter Week was definitely a great success. I wasn’t able to be there for Doug Little’s Close Range Gunfighting class on Thursday and Friday, but all the students spoke very highly of it (as I would expect from an instructor like Doug). They said he did a great job laying out the basics and teaching CRG in a way that led right into Point Shooting Progressions.

Given the great turnout and how well the students liked the class, Roger and Doug are already talking about doing this again next year. I’d highly recommend it. This was a great pair of classes that will turn anyone into a better gunfighter. This year’s event sold out two months in advance, so if you see it on the schedule, sign up right away.

Red Dot Combat Pistol School with Roger Phillips

This weekend I attended the Red Dot Combat Pistol School in Las Vegas, Nevada taught by Roger Phillips. Suarez International actually had three of these classes going on simultaneously this weekend. In addition to the one in Vegas we also had one in Winchester, Virginia taught by Jack Rumbaugh and one in Liberty Hill, Texas with John Chambers.

I brought my TSD Glock 17, with a Trijicon RMR mounted on a OEM Glock slide that we had milled. I also brought along an iron sighted Glock 17. The RMRed Glock rode in a BladeTech Archangel II holster, while I carried the standard G17 in a left-handed Dale Fricke Archangel.

All of the students in the class brought Glocks, including three G19s, one G17, a G35, and a Glock 17L. All of these had red dot sights, of course. All but one were TSD guns (about a 50/50 mix between OEM slides that we’d milled and TSD slides) with RMRs. One student brought a gun with a Burris FastFire in a dovetail mount that replaced the rear sight. I noticed that he tended to spend some time hunting for the dot, since unlike the TSD guns he didn’t have any iron sights to guide him to the dot.

The students themselves ran the gamut, from very little formal handgun training to a couple of Roger’s regular students.

Saturday

We started out with the usual administrative stuff: signing waivers, promising on video not to sue, etc. Roger gave a brief overview of what we’d be doing in the class, then launched into his usual very thorough safety briefing. With the admin out of the way we headed downrange to the targets to have everyone shoot an initial group. The walk was rather long since Roger had reserved a 100 yard range (and tomorrow we’d be using every bit of it).

Roger had the students shoot the one-hole drill to establish an initial baseline for everybody’s skill level. This drill is simply shooting a five round slow-fire group from about five yards. As the name implies, the goal is to put all the rounds into a single hole. From the group it was clear that we had some folks in the class who were already very good sighted fire shooters. We also had some who could stand some improvement (but that is, after all, what everyone was here for).

With the initial baseline established, Roger went through the fundamentals of pistol marksmanship. This sort of extensive lecture on the fundamentals is something we usually do in our basic classes, not so much in a more advanced class like this. However, the goal of this class is to teach students how to take advantage of the full capabilities of a red dot pistol, including maximizing its long range potential. If you want to shoot a red dot pistol at 100 yards and beyond your fundamentals have to be absolutely perfect.

Roger went through each of the fundamentals in detail, starting with stance and grip. Red dot sights tremendously simplify sight alignment and sight picture, but we still have to execute the perfect trigger press and avoid recoil anticipation. Finish everything up with a good follow through and proper trigger reset.

We returned to the range and practiced the fundamentals dry, particularly concentrating on the trigger press. In order to give students a chance to practice their follow through and trigger reset, Roger had them pair up with one student doing their dry practice while the other worked the slide after each shot. After plenty of dry practice, Roger had the students shoot another one-hole drill to check on everyone’s progress.

We had a couple of students with recoil anticipation issues, so Roger set up a quick ball and dummy drill. Rather than dig out the dummy rounds, he just had the students hand him their gun and turn and face away while he messed with it. When he handed it back, they didn’t know if there was a round in the chamber or not. Sure enough, several folks displayed the classic muzzle dip of recoil anticipation.

After a short break, Roger went through the drawstroke. We did a couple of draw and shoot drills, concentrating on combining the draw with a very accurate shot. Next up were some multiple shot drills, starting with controlled pairs. These are not ‘double taps’ ‘hammers’ or ‘two round bursts’, they are two individually aimed shots, with a sight picture and follow through for each shot. Once the students had the pairs down, Roger had everyone draw and shoot a string of 5 shots in the same manner.

Over lunch, I showed off my FN FS2000. A few of the students shot it and Roger walked downrange and did some CQB drills with it. The bullpup’s short OAL and balance really open up some options when it comes to gunhandling. It really complements the SI approach to CQB perfectly.

After lunch we picked up with some point shooting. While the selling point of the red dot is it’s ability to take long range or very precise shots, we need to be able to cover the entire spectrum of possibilities. Up close, this means being able to point shoot. Having the RMR sitting on top of the slide does change some things as far as point shooting is concerned, but the basic principles remain the same.

Roger went through several different reference points you can use when point shooting an RMRed pistol. The first was shooting through the ‘saddle’ at the top of the RMR. This is analogous to looking over the top of the slide when shooting a non-RMRed gun. To aid in alignment, you can center the front sight in the window of the RMR.

After everyone shot from the saddle, Roger described using the upper corner of the RMR as a visual reference. Like shooting off the corner of the slide using a non-RMRed pistol, this works very well when going one-handed in the ‘half homie’.

Roger really preaches ‘parallel to the ground’ when teaching point shooting. It works well as an introductory level point shooting technique (with angling the gun up or down to get the desired elevation on the target as a more advanced application). Problem is, this doesn’t really work when you’re a foot or more taller than the target (not an issue that Roger usually encounters). One of the students in the class was about my height, so he encountered this issue and ended up putting some of his shots over the target. I showed him how to angle his arm downward to direct fire into the target’s center of mass.

While the corner of the RMR is the most obvious feature to use when you’ve got the gun rolled over into the half-homie, it’s only a single point, rather than a linear feature, so there are limits to how much visual assistance this gives you in pointing the gun. You can also use the corner of the slide (just as we do with a non-RMRed pistol. The RMR obstructs this a bit, but the technique is still usable, particularly with longer barreled pistols.

You can also use our standard point shooting technique of shooting over the top of the slide with an RMRed Glock. The trick is that you don’t want to be looking through the window of the RMR, since the lens of the RMR will distort your perspective a bit if you look through it at an angle. Instead, we look over the top of the RMR at the front of the slide and aim that big flat aircraft carrier at the target. This means we have to hold the gun a bit lower, about chin level rather than nose level.

Finally, Roger went through the TV Screen of Death technique. This is basically metal on meat for an RMRed Glock. You look through the RMR, but instead of looking for the dot, if the target fills the window, you’re good to go.

It may seem odd to dedicate this much time to point shooting in a class dedicated to the red dot, but the goal here is to show how an RMRed Glock can handle the full spectrum of possible threats. The dot is a great tool, but it’s not appropriate in every circumstance.

Moving back to some precision shooting with the dot, Roger lined up everyone at ten yards and had them shoot some headshots. Once everyone had done four shots, we stepped back about two yards and did it again. We moved all the way back to 20 yards this way. A 20 yard headshot is a pretty impressive feat, but most of the students were able to keep their shots in the target’s head. All the practice they’d been doing since this morning was really paying off.

Sunday

We began on Sunday with some movement drills. Suarez International is known for our dynamic movement, exploding off the X, etc. What Roger was teaching this morning was controlled movement. The main difference is that in dynamic movement you’re moving too fast to use the sights effectively. This requires you to point shoot, which in turn limits the range at which you can use the technique to around 7–10 yards. Controlled movement is slower and places more emphasis on a solid shooting platform, allowing you to use your sights (or red dot in this case). It tilts the balance of ‘to hit or not to get hit’ much more towards hitting the adversary. While this is not a technique we emphasize in most of our classes, there is a place for it.

Roger talked about the principles of controlled movement and demonstrated the ‘Groucho’: moving while crouched down, knees bent, short steps, all intended to minimize disruption to the shooting platform. We did some dry drills involving moving downrange from 30 yards to 10 yards, trying to keep the dot on target. The red dot system is actually very well suited to this kind of dry practice, since the dot instantly lets you know how much disruption your movement is causing to your shooting platform.

Going live, we did some side to side movement, going across the range while delivering accurate fire on your target from about 10 yards. Going to the right, this can be done two-handed, going to the left, in order to to totally screw up your movement platform, it’s much easier to just go one-handed. It can actually be easier to keep the gun steady while moving when going one-handed, since the gun is only receiving movement related shocks from one arm rather than two.

We moved on to some forward movement, closing with the target on a slightly oblique angle. This is a bit easier than side to side since you don’t have to turn your shooting platform so far from your direction of movement. We followed this up with a much more difficult movement to the rear obliques. Roger emphasized that you need to learn to control your cadence. As you get closer to the target you can (and should) speed up your rate of fire as the shots get easier.

Next we moved up closer to the targets and kicked up the speed a notch. At these distances and this speed, we’re into the realm of dynamic movement rather than the controlled movement we’d been doing earlier. We worked some dynamic movement drills, practicing getting off the X to the 3 and 9 o’clock directions.

After that it was back to precision shooting. After a warm up with the one-hole drill, Roger started extending the range. Beginning at 20 yards, we moved back in 10 yard increments, eventually all the way to 100.

At 20 and 30 yards everyone shot from offhand. Moving back to 40, Roger started demonstrating a series of supported shooting positions. At 40 he demonstrated the kneeling position. This provides a bit more support and the added steadiness makes the long shots easier.

At this point Roger also introduced the Suarez International after-action drill. This basically involves making sure the current fight is over, getting ready for the next one, and checking to see if you need to administer any treatment for a gunshot wound.

As we moved back further, Roger showed the rollover prone position. This is a great position as far as steadiness and reducing your profile to incoming fire. The disadvantage is that it can only be used on a very flat surface. Vegetation or even very small micro-terrain variations can block visibility to your target.

Even further out, Roger went through the tactical Creedmoor position. This position may look funky, but it provides a lot of stability and a bit more elevation than rollover prone.

Around this time the wind kicked up. I took a couple of offhand shots from some of the longer ranges and found that the gusts of wind were blowing me off target. I never expected wind to be this much of a factor in pistol shooting.

We got back out to 100 and everyone managed to get hits on the steel at each distance.

The range had a small ramada at around 110 yards to protect the shooting benches. Roger demonstrated some techniques for shooting with external support, including using your buddy as a backrest, and using a stool for support. I showed a method for using a vertical support, like the corner of a wall (or in this case the columns supporting the ramada) to help steady your shot. By this time the wind had really kicked up and the gusts were making the ramada vibrate, making it a less than perfect shooting support.

For our penultimate drill, Roger had the students shoot the Columbian Special Forces drill with pistols. This is usually something we do with rifles, but using the skills developed in this class, you can do it with a pistol as well. You start at 100 yard, drop into rollover prone and fire five shots. Move up to 75 yards and assume the tactical Creedmoor position and fire another five shots. Moving up to 50, it’s five shots from kneeling. At 25, you switch from the steel target to a paper target and fire five shots from standing, then reload and move up to the target shooting on the move.

After everyone had a chance to shoot the Columbian SF drill, we shifted gears back to one more bit of running and gunning. We did a set of GOTX drills to the 3 and 9 o’clock directions up at close range, moving dynamically and point shooting. Combined with the Columbian SF drill this really showcases the TSD Glock’s capability across the full range of circumstances.

Final Thoughts

This was an excellent class.  It really teaches you how to use your red dot pistol over the full spectrum of possible engagements, from long range precision shots to close range bust off the X situations.  It draws from many different SI classes and melds them into a coherent whole focused on the red dot pistol.  If you have a TSD red dot pistol, this is the class you really need to maximize you capability with the gun.

We had a good group of students for this class.  Everyone was squared away and came ready to learn. I'm quite sure that all the students left considerably more dangerous than when they arrived.

Roger Phillips is known primarily as 'the point shooting guy' but he has an excellent set of sighted fire skills and a deep understanding of how to convey these skills to students.   Despite being a different curriculum that I usually see him teach he did an excellent job.  I would not hesitate to recommend any of his classes, whether focused on point shooting or sighted fire.

The TSD Red Dot pistols are truly state of the art in combat handguns and the TSD Red Dot Combat Pistol School is state of the art in combat handgun training.

Guerrilla Sniper II

Last weekend I attended the inaugural Guerrilla Sniper II class.  I first took the original GS class from Eric Pfleger in Ohio over Fourth of July weekend in 2011.  Last December I sat in on it again from Scott Vandiver in Georgia.  This is an area where I'm just a beginner and I'm really eager to expand my skills.  When Gabe announced Guerrilla Sniper II, I signed up immediately.

Gear

As always, GS is a relatively gear intensive class.  My setup hasn't changed much since the GS class in Georgia last year.  I brought my Savage Model 10FP in .308.  I've replaced the standard stock with a nice aftermarket one from Bell and Carlson.  It's topped by a Leupold 3.5-10 scope with the TMR reticle and mil adjustments.  This is a great scope and it's easily the best gear investment I've made.  I'm feeding it Hornady 168 grain A-MAX ammo, though I also brought along some Hornady 178 grain Superperformance, specifically for long range shooting (between the higher initial velocity and the heavier bullet I figure it should be bringing substantially more velocity at 1000 yards).  I also brought along some of my leftover 175 grain Prvi match ammo to shoot at closer distances where the extra accuracy of the A-MAX is superfluous. 

To support the rifle, I brought along a couple of Versa-pod bipods: one short one that I usually use with this rifle, a slightly longer one (sized for use with semi-auto rifles with 30 round mags), and a sitting height bipod.  For the rear of the gun I had a couple of TAB Gear rear bags.  I also brought a sitting height tripod that can accept either my spotting scope or a Precision Rifle Solutions rest.  Speaking of my spotting scope, my other big investment since the GS class was a Leupold Mark 4 12-40 with the Horus reticle.  As with the scope I am very pleased.  A Leica rangefinder and a Kestrel wind meter rounded out my instrumentation.  

To carry all this stuff, I used an Eagle Industries pack.  To aid in using the ruck as a rest I've put an SO Tech rifle saddle on it.  The pack also carried water (this is Arizona) and miscellaneous gear like sniper veils, a shooting mat, etc.

This class had a surplus of SI Staff Instructors.  In addition to myself (and far more knowledgeable than me about long range shooting) we had Eric Pfleger, Scott Vandiver and Dave Sauer.  I teamed up with Scott for my shooting partner, which was a pretty good deal for me given his skill and level of knowledge.  We were also joined by Dr. Keith Seto, one of the instructors for our medical classes.  With the instructors we had a total of eighteen guys, which was a pretty good group.  All the students were veterans of one (or more) Guerrilla Sniper classes.  The class was fairly heavy on the AR-10s and Remington 700s.  There were a smattering of M1As, a LWRC REPR, a VEPR .308, an Accuracy International, and a few others.  Interestingly, we had three folks in the class shooting suppressed rifles.

Saturday

After the usual admin stuff and a safety briefing that emphasized the dangers of heatstroke and dehydration (it was forecast to hit 95 degrees today) we drove out to the 100 yard line.  Here we checked the zero on our rifles (everyone brought a well zeroed rifle thankfully).  This represented a majority of our shooting from the traditional prone position for the day.  From here on out Gabe really emphasized the higher, less stable positions: sitting, kneeling, and standing.  

We teach these positions in the GS1 class, but unless terrain or vegetation forces a higher position, most students stick with prone as much as they can.  Prone is certainly easiest, but outside of a nice flat groomed range, it's not always available.  Micro terrain and vegetation often prevent you from getting a good view of the target.  Gabe and I actually had just experienced this: we were out shooting a video on the SIG 556R at long distances.  Thanks to the very wet July and August we'd had in Prescott, the grass out where we were shooting was all about 2 feet tall.  Gabe did most of his shooting from seated, and standing - supported by the spare tire of his jeep and a tree branch.  We had a nice flat range here, so today it was the instructor forcing you to get up out of prone to shoot rather than the environment.

Just because you can't shoot prone doesn't mean your limited to the standard competitive rifle positions where you support the rifle entirely with your body and the sling.  Use anything you can for support: trees, vehicles, structures, rucksacks, tripods, your spotter's rifle, your spotter, whatever you can use to get more stable.  Scott Vandiver showed us a neat trick for this: most people only think about supporting the front of their rifle, which is a good first step.  If you can, support the rear of the rifle as well.  A good way of doing this when sitting is to put your rucksack on your lap and use it as a really big rear bag.  When kneeling with a higher support, use the ruck between your knee and elbow.  Support that rifle as much as possible.

I've got a sitting height Versapod bipod that I can attach to my rifle.  Before this I hadn't played around with it much, so I brought it out and put it to use.  Unfortunately, this experience with it was pretty disappointing.  The bipod wasn't very stable.  The long legs made it flexible enough that you couldn't really load it up, so it didn't provide much front to back support.  The tripod with the shooting saddle on it was much better.  I used that for sitting and kneeling, then switched to Scott's tripod for the standing shot (his is a full height model, rather than my sitting height one).

After everybody shot from the various positions at 100 we moved back to 200 and then 300 and did the same.  As we moved back, standing became a lot less reliable for most shooters.  Kneeling and sitting were considerably better, particularly for those who were creative about finding support.

After everyone worked the positions at 300, we broke for lunch.  By this time it was getting pretty warm, so Gabe really emphasized drinking a lot of water.  He also suggested eating in the car with the AC on, advice that a lot of people took.

After lunch, Scott Vandiver gave a lecture on high angle shooting.  When you're shooting uphill or downhill, gravity doesn't have quite as much effect on the flight path of the bullet.  If you take a long shot at an extreme angle, you'll end up hitting high.  The way to compensate for this is by multiplying the range by the cosine of the angle from the horizontal (if they'd used examples like this in trigonometry class I would have been a lot more interested in the subject).  

You can find the angle in several ways: On the simple end, string, a small weigh, and a protractor (such as the one printed on the side of a mildot master).  There are angle indicators that attach to the side of your scope and read off the angle that you're holding the rifle at. Some ballistics apps you can download for your smartphone use the gyroscope and accelerometer built into the phone to calculate the angle.  Finally, many laser rangefinders will also give you the angle along with the distance.  Some of these methods give you the cosine directly, while others give you the angle in degrees and require you to consult the table or a calculator to get the cosine.

 

We drove over to the base of a small hill on the range.  Everybody geared up and we hiked hiked up to the top.  This elevated vantage point gave us the opportunity to do some high angle shooting.  Gabe had put out a couple of steels, one close to the base of the hill, the other a bit further out.  Using several of the methods described above, we established the range and angle to both targets.  Each student engaged them in turn.  

The terrain up here probably posed a bigger obstacle to our shooting than the angle.  This was not some nice grassy hill, it was a big chunk of eroded basalt.  Many students shot from a seated position, supporting the rifle on a rock or outcropping.  I ended up shooting from sort of a jackass prone, laying on my side (on a bunch of fairly pointy rocks) more perpendicular to my rifle than right behind it.  Field shooting definitely isn't like shooting from the bench or the nice flat range.  Nevertheless I was able to make the hits.  

After engaging the two targets at the base of the hill, Gabe had us take some shots at targets down at the 1000 yard line.  There wasn't really enough angle to worry about, but from our position it was around 730 yards away.  My first shot on this one missed (I didn't allow quite enough for wind) but I drilled it with the second.  Considering that at my first GS class fifteen months ago I couldn't even get a hit beyond 600 yards I'm pretty proud of this performance from a less than optimal position.  My shot was certainly not exceptional, however.  Some folks were able to peg the distant steel on the first shot, and just about everyone was able to get on target after a few rounds.

We hiked back down the hill and drove over to the 400 yard line and got back to work.  After a few minutes we noticed that most folks were down in prone, rather than practicing the different positions.  Gabe got everyone up off the ground and doing some work in kneeling or sitting.  At this distance, standing is going to be a little iffy for most folks, unless you're like Eric Pfleger excepted and have a lot of practice at this.  Sitting and kneeling are quite doable if you can find some support, however.

 

At each of the distances on the range Gabe had been doing a bit of shooting with the FS2000 he'd brought and equipped with a ACOG (one with a .308 reticle, which actually matches the heavy 75 grain 5.56mm ammunition he was shooting better than the .223 reticle does).  I'd put a few rounds through it at 200.  When we were at four, he took a few shots from the seated position with his back against the tire of his jeep.  He invited me to do the same.  The FS2000 is actually a very nice rifle to shoot from a seated position.  On most rifles your right hand is out near or just beyond the center of gravity when seated, meaning that hand takes all the weight.  With the FS2000 all the weight is back near your shoulder and all the support hand is doing is holding up the front end of the rifle.

At 500, Gabe brought out the FS2000 again.   Initially all his shots were going high, until he figured out that the proper hold put the ACOG reticle's 400 yard reticle at the bottom of the target.  The 75 grain Hornady Superperformance Match was actually shooting flatter at this range than the 147 grain .308 the BDC reticle in the ACOG was calibrated for.  He couldn't quite believe this, so he had me put a few rounds through it as well.  Getting hits at this range was rather challenging, as it was pushing the magnification of the ACOG and the wind kicked up a bit, which has a significant effect on the 5.56mm round, even the 75 grainers.  The distance was also challenging my ability to hold the rifle steady using just the magazine and my fist under the VFG.  However, if you put on a short QD bipod and add a rear bag and this would be one heck of a DMR.  Yet it's as compact as an SBR.  I am more and more impressed with this rifle.  500 yards with a bullpup!

Throughout the day Scott was having quite a few problems with blown primers.  He was shooting Hornady 168 grain A-MAX Superperformance Match and this load was either really hot or the primers weren't crimped in properly.  Finally I gave him some of my standard pressure A-MAX, which did much better.  The 178 grain Superperformance I brought for long range work and the 75 grain 5.56mm Superperforance Gabe was shooting both ran flawlessly, so I wonder if Scott just got a bad batch.

We finished up shooting at 500 and we wrapped up for the day.  After giving everyone a chance to shower and change into some clean clothes, we all met for dinner at a local restaurant.  As usual, the fellowship with like minded folks was one of the best parts of the class.  

Sunday

When we got out to the range Sunday morning, it was pretty breezy, so Eric Pfleger gave a great lecture on reading the wind to take advantage of the conditions.  This is one of the most difficult and vital parts of long range shooting, and Eric has a huge amount of real world experience.

As Eric was talking about the wind, Gabe had put up some target arrays using police sketches.  We split up into four teams and Gabe gave the team leader a copy of one (or more) of the sketches.  The team leader had to identify the correct picture on their target array, talk their team onto the correct target, and coordinate their team member's fire in a single (hopefully simultaneous) volley.  

We started out shooting this at 300 yards.  This is a bit beyond our Guerrilla Sniper minimum standard of 200 yard headshots, but it's a distance that all of our shooters in this class ought be able to handle given their skill and equipment.  Introducing the complications of target identification and  coordinated fire, however, and it gets difficult very quickly.   

This exercise really places a premium on the ability to communicate effectively with your team.  Some team leaders were very direct and to the point, calling out the target and the firing commands.  Others not so much, so after the first round of this Gabe called everyone together and talked a bit about the roles.  The individual shooters are there to follow the team leader's commands, not to have a conversation with the team leader.  The team leader is the guy on the spot and he needs to lead.  This is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship.  After this conversation, the quality of the team leader-shooter interaction generally improved.

The other thing this exercise placed a premium on is good optics.  Recognizing a specific face at 300 yards is no easy task.  It really separated the high-end spotting scopes from the also-rans.  Several teams had difficulty with target identification.  It's worth noting that three of the SI instructors in the class had brought the same spotting scope: the Leupold Mark 4 12-40x.  This is some excellent glass and having a mil reticle in the optic makes calling corrections easy (particularly if the shooter has a mil reticle and mil scope adjustments).

Gabe threw in some curveballs, giving team leaders faces that weren't on their target arrays.  After we moved up to 200, he started giving out multiple faces to each team, some or all of which might be on the target array.  This required even more coordination, assigning shooters to specific targets, etc.  This exercise really highlights how sniping is a much broader subject encompassing many more skills than mere 'precision rifle' or 'long range shooting'.

After the team exercise we broke for lunch.  A student had asked Eric what was in his rather large ruck, so he spent the lunch break going through his gear.  If you're interested, his Guerrilla Sniper gear is a subset of what you see in his article, Plus the Kitchen Sink on WT.  This discussion segued into a bit of talk about camouflage, particularly camouflaging optics.

After lunch we worked on some moving target drills.  The range is in the process of installing a butts system, so they have a wide trench deep enough to stand up in right before the 1000 yard berm.  We had one team of students in the trench, safely under cover, carrying the targets back and forth while another group engaged from 100 yards.  At 100 you don't really have to lead a walking target much, but you do have to successfully track them as they move.  Scott Vandiver demonstrated how to do this effectively.  He recommended that instead of shooting off your bipod, you shoot off your rucksack, with the bag as far back along the forend as you can get it.  This allows you to get the maximum amount of angular movement without shifting your body much.

Next up was our final exercise.  During lunch, Gabe put out half a dozen steel targets in the field next to the range.  We would climb the hill where we did the high angle shooting, locate the targets, and engage them with coordinated fire from the entire class.  

Gabe made this a very student led exercise: he briefed the leaders of the four teams, who chose an overall leader and planned the operation.  We drove the cars back to the 1000 yard line to get them out of the way and set off for the hill.  This is where some folks with really heavy rifles were feeling it a bit.  Gabe's mission brief said that there was the possibility of opposition en-route, but it's not easy to hold an 18 pound rifle in the ready position while walking a third of a mile and climbing a steep, rocky hill.  

Once everyone was in position the students started glassing the area in front of us for the targets.  Three were fairly easy to find and these got shot in short order.  One was a lot harder, and the students weren't able to locate it until Gabe talked then on to it.  The last one was so well hidden that even Gabe wasn't able to locate it at first, and he'd put it out there.  Eventually one of the students managed to locate it and they engaged that one as well.  

With all the targets thoroughly shot (including one that the students had literally shot to the ground by knocking it over) we headed down the hill and back to the vehicles.  There we wrapped up the class, handed out the certificates and went our separate ways.

Final Thoughts

As expected, this was a great class.  Gabe did a great job teaching it, ably assisted by major contributions from Eric Pfleger and Scott Vandiver.  It was great to see Scott and Eric again, and I really enjoyed meeting Keith Seto and Dave Sauer.  

We had a great group of students.  Every one of them was a GS graduate and every one had the fundamental skills and equipment.  Often, I can look at a class and pick out the students who really might have been better off taking a more basic class but there was no one like that here.

Guerrilla Sniper II is really all about field marksmanship.  This is the class that takes you off the range.  It takes the fundamental marksmanship skills you learned in the original Guerrilla Sniper course and applies them in more realistic conditions: positions beyond prone, shooting from the field rather than  the range, engaging moving targets, high angle targets, and targets out in the field conditions rather than up against the berm.

I was really happy with how my setup ran.  I've refined this over the course of a couple of classes and there's very little I'd change about it at this point.  The investment, particularly in good glass, was really worth it.  That said, I'm probably going to be running a very different rig next year.  While I love my Savage, I really want to see what a semi-auto GSR can do.  I've got a PTR91GI which is going out to Investment Grade Firearms to get a rail welded on the top cover.   With the appropriate optic, that should make a nice semi-auto GSR.

Guerrilla Sniper II is a great class, and I highly recommend it to any GS1 graduates who want to take their skills even further.  Gabe will be teaching it  in Kingman again next fall.  Eric Pfleger and Scott Vandiver have the go-ahead to teach this class themselves, so keep an eye out for it in other parts of the country in the future.

 

CQB with Roger Phillips

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Director of Marketing

Last weekend I headed over to Las Vegas to sit in on Roger Phillips’ CQB: Fighting in Structures class. This was my fourth time at an SI CQB class: I took the class from Gabe twice and taught it in South Carolina.

The class was held in a student’s house in Henderson, Nevada. The house is pretty typical of modern residential construction. The first floor has a circular floorplan (you can go from the living room, to the dining room, to the kitchen, to the family room, though a hallway and back to the living room). This makes it more difficult to clear because someone could circle around behind you, so you can’t regard an area you’ve already cleared as ‘safe’. An open staircase zigzagged up from the living room to a large landing on the second floor. Several bedrooms and a bathroom open up on to the landing, including the master bedroom. The master has it’s own bathroom and a very deep walk-in closet. Basically the entire place is a tactical nightmare, which in some ways makes it ideal for teaching this class.

This is not a very gear intensive class. I brought a couple of dummy Glocks and some training knives. I also brought a dummy AK and my Uzi (we removed the barrel to render it safe and reduce it to about the size of an SBR). Other folks used airsoft (no pellets) or real guns with Blackhawk training barrels inserted. Some folks brought long guns as well: a dummy AR and a couple of real ARs with the bolts removed.

One thing I would highly advise for anyone coming to this class is some notetaking equipment. The class is kind of like a fire hose and the ability to write down some of this stuff is invaluable.

We had quite a varied group of students for this class. One had extensive experience doing this sort of thing in a military context, including in Somalia and Iraq. His experience brought a lot to this class. Two were former Border Patrol agents, while the rest were your average citizens. Most were from the Vegas area but we had two, a pair of dedicated husband and wife students, who flew in from across the country to train with Roger.

Saturday

Roger began the class by pointing out that we were guests in someone’s house and its important for us to be considerate. So don’t break stuff, move furniture around, or go rifling through his possessions, etc.

After everybody had a chance to introduce themselves we went through the safety lecture. Being an entirely non-shooting class this was a bit different than in most of our classes. The primary danger is a live weapon making its way into the training environment. Police officers get shot on a regular basis because somebody gun up to leave the training area, then come back and don’t think to switch back to their dummy gun.

Roger began the class with some lecture material, talking about the different CQB missions a private citizen might find themselves needing to perform. Recognizing what your mission is is extremely important, because you really approach this in very different ways depending on what you need to accomplish.

If your alarm goes off in the middle of the night, you hear an intruder in your house, and you don’t have any loved ones elsewhere in the house to protect, the safest thing to do is to grab your home defense gun, hunker down in a good position, call 911 and wait. Essentially what you’re doing is setting up an ambush. Either the bad guy will leave, the cops will show up and catch him, or he’ll walk right in to your sights while you’re in a superior position.

While being able to ambush the bad guy is the most desirable mission, there are circumstances where it isn’t possible. One of these is when you lack certainty. Perhaps you heard a suspicious noise, or came home to find your door halfway open and can’t remember if you locked it this morning. These are potentially serious situations, but you just don’t know for sure. Are you really going to call the police for every suspicious noise? Grab your rifle and hunker down until dawn? Realistically, in a situation of uncertainty like this you’re going to go look around and see if there’s really anyone there. Here, you’re searching and clearing your house.

Going back to the first situation: you hear noises and are certain there’s an intruder in your house. In fact, the noises sound like they’re coming from your child’s room. Are you going to hunker down and wait for the police to show up? Slowly and carefully spend the next half hour searching your house? No. You know the threat they represent to a loved one and you’re going to go and protect them. You’re going to locate and kill the intruders. This is essentially the civilian version of a hostage rescue mission. The big difference between this and the search and clear is the tempo. Search and clear is slow and deliberate. Locate and kill is much faster and higher intensity because time is of the essence.

While the home is the most likely venue where we’ll need CQB skills, its not the only one. In the event of a mass shooting you may be using these skills in some public building. In this case its not necessarily our responsibility to clear the place, or to hunt down and kill the attackers. Particularly if you have loved ones with you, your job is to get them to safety. In terms of skills and tempo, this is a lot like the locate and kill mission, only in this case your objective is the exit, rather the bad guy. You’re trying to traverse and escape.

Next, Roger talked about the importance of keeping your mission in mind. For instance your objective in a search and clear or traverse and escape scenario isn’t necessarily to kill the bad guy. We don’t want to get fixated on the current problem. The goal is not just to clear this corner but to clear an entire room or structure. Clearing one corner should not only let us see what’s on the other side of the wall, it should also set us up for the next obstacle. We can do this with a thorough understanding of distance and angles. More distance is usually better in CQB, in large part because it helps us control the angles more precisely as we negotiate a corner.

CQB is inherently a risky business. You need to understand the liabilities and advantages of your tactics. Nothing is free. As Gabe says, “Risk is the currency of tactics.” If I want to clear this corner, I’m going to have to expose myself to a certain amount of risk in order to do so.

As we do all of this we want to focus on getting our eyes and muzzle on the target. Roger talked about the ‘third eye principle’: your eyes and the muzzle of your weapon move together. This way if you spot something, you’re already on target and ready to shoot. There are some exceptions to this (a quick glance into the other corner as you enter a room) but it makes a good default.

The fundamental building block of CQB skills is the corner. It’s the simplest architectural obstacle we can face, but even more complex obstacles are just combinations of corners. So we spent quite a bit of time mastering the corner in isolation. Roger diagramed out how we perform our angular search, carefully scanning each little bit of room for any sign of the adversary. The key in doing this is to expose as little of ourselves as possible. Ideally you want to lead with your muzzle and eyeball. This isn’t really possible, some of your other body parts will stick out a bit, but we want to get as close to it as we can.

 

One big key in doing this is our ambidexterous skill set. If you’re taking a left handed corner, you’ll expose a lot less of yourself if you have your gun in your left hand, and ideally use your left eye. There was a pretty wide variety of comfort levels in shooting with the support hand. Those who had trained with Roger before generally had experience shooting ambidextrously. Those who hadn’t trained with Roger or another S.I. instructor were initially a bit hesitant. However, the advantages of clearing this way are just too great to ignore.

At this point Roger broke up the lecture and had the students pair up and practice searching corners. This is a skill set that really depends on the proper execution of lots of little details: how you hold your head, where you put your elbow, how you move your feet, etc. We spent quite a bit of time practicing this with Roger and I giving pointers and making these little corrections.

 

If we detect an adversary, then it’s time to decide whether we really need to go around this corner or not. This goes back to keeping your mission in mind. If you’re doing a search and clear, maybe at this point you have enough information to withdraw and call 911.

In other circumstances, you may have to get around that corner to get to a loved one or an exit. At S.I. we recommend doing this using the same shooting on the move skillset we use when getting off the X. If you just peek out or charge in linearly, you’re probably going to end up in a straight up gunfight. If you make use of our angular, GOTX skillset you can disrupt his OODA loop and get rounds on him before he can get rounds on you in response. Roger demonstrated how this works and had the class break up into pairs and practice these skills on individual corners.

After everyone had gotten plenty of practice on this most fundamental of building blocks, we broke for lunch. After lunch we reconvened and Roger talked about T-intersections and doorways. Both of these are basically composed of two opposing corners that you have to work simultaneously. In a house like this we didn’t really have any examples of a pure T-intersection, so we jumped straight to doorways. These are a bit more difficult, both because they tend to be narrower, and because you may have to deal with the door itself.

Roger went through how to address the different types of door we might have to deal with: outward opening, inward opening, door handle on same or opposite side, self closing, etc. He also talked about how to take doors out of play, either by holding them closed with a wedge, or using an object of some sort to alert you when somebody opens them (this can be as simple as balancing a soda can on the handle).

After everyone had plenty of time to work on doors of various sorts we moved on to complex problems. Taking a single door or corner isn’t easy, but its fairly straightforward. Combine multiple doors, corners, furniture, and other obstacles that you’d find in a real house into a complex problem and things get a lot more difficult.

We started out with the master bedroom. Once you enter from the main door you’re faced with the bedroom to the left and an entrance to the master bathroom on the right. The bathroom in turn leads to a large walk-in closet. The way it’s set up really forces you to divide your attention between multiple danger areas. Roger had the students work this for quite a while, giving every student multiple chances to work their way through the problem and to see other people do so.

Next we moved on to the stairs. Stairs are nothing more than a series of horizontal and vertical corners. What made these particularly difficult is that the stairs are exposed to the living room and dining room, meaning there were many potential threat areas to address at once. Everyone worked the stairs from the top down, then we came back and worked them from the bottom up. These are a really complex problem and a big part of what makes this house such a tactical nightmare.

Roger trying to look in three direcitons at once.

After working the stairs we came back to the bedroom and did some work with long guns. Rifles are a lot more powerful than a pistol, but they are also larger and more unwieldy in tight quarters. Using them requires some extra attention to make sure you don’t extend the muzzle out beyond the cover you’re working. As with pistols, you can keep a lot more of yourself behind cover if you use them ambidextrously, switching shoulders as the situation demands.

With that, we quit for the day. Around half the class joined Roger, his family, and I for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in a nearby casino. As usual, this kind of fellowship with like minded folks is one of the best parts of a Suarez International class.

Sunday

On Sunday morning we began with some low light work. Going back to the missions, above, several of them a premised on some sort of bump in the night scenario. This means we need to be able to fight in low light.

That said, most of us do not search darkened warehouses for a living. Look around your house at night and see how much light there really is. Unless you live way out in the boonies, there’s probably some light streaming in from the streetlights outside, glowing digital clocks and LEDs on electronics, night lights, etc. What’s more, you can ‘prepare the battlefield’ by installing night lights, leaving certain lights on or off, etc.

Given the abundance of light sources in the typical home, you can probably conduct your search, at least up to the point of locating a potential intruder, without using a flashlight. We may even be able to identify the intruder based on size (this dude is six and a half feet and nobody in your house is over five foot eight) or behavior (people who live in your house are probably not carting off the TV at 3am). Finally, with a good point shooting skill set we ought to be able to shoot without having to illuminate our target. Why is this important? Flashlights are an enormous target indicator and they often end up being bullet magnets. If at all possible we want to avoid using the light.

Nevertheless, there may be times when we have to use a light to search. For this, Roger demonstrated some wanding and strobing techniques that can help mitigate the disadvantages of a flashlight. We had a couple of darkened areas for the students to use to get some experience with the low light stuff. In both of the cases we had available, the student clearing the room was coming from a brighter area into a darker one, which is the worst situation, since it leaves you silhouetted against a lighter background. In terms of preparing the battlefield, if at all possible set your house up so you’re going to be in a darker or equally lit area as you move through it.

Roger is teaching a low light Force on Force class in early August and Randy Harris has a couple of low light classes on the schedule as well. These obviously go into the low light stuff in much greater depth.

Once we were done with the low light stuff, Roger had everyone clear the entire second floor of the house. The students had cleared all of this area in sections on Saturday, so they were familiar with the layout. This time around, in addition to the complexities of setting yourself up to clear the next problem without exposing yourself to uncleared areas, Roger also emphasized the decision making process. Which of these areas am I going to clear and in what order? We made this a bit more complicated by leaving some doors open and closing others, forcing students to decide between temporarily bypassing closed doors versus searching them and potentially exposing yourself to the nearby open door.

Once everybody had a chance to clear the second floor, we moved on to team tactics. One of the biggest things that makes clearing a structure by yourself difficult is the need to divide your attention between different threat areas. Whether it’s having someone else watch the hallway while you perform your angular search on a door or having someone to enter a room with you so you can address both hard corners at once, having a second person is a huge advantage.

While having more than one person is beneficial, it does impose some overhead in the form of communications. The team members need to know what they’re supposed to be doing and what the other members of the team are going to do. In a team that works and trains together a lot, much of this can be done based on standard operating procedures: I know he’s going to do it this way because we always do it this way. In more ad-hoc teams or those that don’t train together alot, communication may have to me more explicit. We’d rather not give our presence away and announce to the world what our plans are so Roger taught some simple hand signals that can be used to coordinate between team members.

On the simplest level you can use a second person as sort of a human gun turret. They can address potential threat areas allowing you to direct your undivided attention towards a particular problem. In this kind of role the second person doesn’t necessarily need to be highly trained in CQB. As long as they know how to shoot and have the discipline to stay on their areas of responsibility.

If you have someone who is trained in CQB and who you’ve practiced this with, you can involve them more directly. One of the hardest problems in CQB is when clearing a room or T-intersection you have to address potential threat areas in two directions at once. A second person can make this a lot easier. In order to make this as effective as possible we want to get guns on both corners as close to simultaneously as possible. One way to do this is the criss-cross entry. Essentially, one person enters the room crouched down while the other goes high, almost diving over them as they go past. When done well this is very slick, getting guns on both corners almost simultaneously. Roger and I demonstrated this, then he set the students loose doing two-man entries on various rooms.

After lunch we moved on to complex problems with teams. Everybody got a chance to clear the entire upstairs and the entire downstairs as part of a two-man team. Since they’d worked in these areas by themselves yesterday, this really illustrates how much easier it can be with a second person.

Once everyone had a chance to do the upstairs and the downstairs separately, we did the stairs as teams, first bottom up, then top down. The stairs are a lot easier with two people, though there are still more danger areas than people, so both shooters have to divide their attention a bit.

Going up there were essentially two ways to address this. One is to put one team member out in the living room, covering things from a distance as the second team member climbs the stairs. This gives the team member in the living room the most commanding view, but their coverage on some areas is less than stellar given the angles. The other approach is to keep the two team members together and move up the stairs either in sync, or leapfrogging up to the landing. This sacrifices the overall coverage but allows closer coordination and means support is much closer at hand if this evolves into a gunfight.

At this point Roger had one student play the ‘bad guy’ while the other students tried to find him. Some students found some pretty ingenious hiding places.

We did a little bit with three man teams. This gives you even more eyes, and allows two people to address an architectural obstacle while the third team member covers additional threat areas. When moving this also allows you to have a dedicated ‘tailgunner’ who covers the rear while the rest of the team addresses the problem at hand. This was particularly useful given the circular design of the ground floor. Since a bad guy could always circle round behind, you always need to be covering the rear.

Roger also used this opportunity to demonstrate the high-low technique, a method for two shooters to clear a single corner. One kneels down and rolls out while the other busts off the X and takes the corner dynamically at an angle. If the roll out and the GOTX are simultaneous, the bad guy will almost always end up shooting between the two. This is another one that is incredibly slick if done well.

Thus far, most of the exercises had been done at the slow ‘search and clear’ pace. This is the pace that you want to learn at because if you can do it slowly and right, with practice you can speed it up. If you learn how to do it quickly and wrong, then you’re never going to learn how to do it correctly. Roger had the students do one drill at more of a ‘locate and kill’/’traverse and escape’ speed. The students had to move from the master bedroom to one of the other bedrooms (dealing with an open door to another room on the way), retrive a child (another student playing the role in this case) then make their way down the stairs and over to the front door to escape.

We did a little more high-low practice to finish things up. Roger handed out the certificates and everyone went their separate ways after an excellent weekend of training.

Final Thoughts

This was really a great class. The curriculum is really well designed, taking folks from the basics up to a fairly high level in just two days. It’s also very much directed towards the private citizen and doesn’t assume tactics that work for a team with flash-bangs, body armor, and fully automatic weapons will work for an individual with just a pistol. We’ve got several of these classes up on the schedule, as well as the CQB: Fighting in Structures DVD. I would highly recommend both.

We had a great group of students for this class, and that goes a long way to make it an enjoyable, and very educational experience. Having a student who has done lots of this in a military context really contributed to the learning experience and I’m very grateful to him for coming.

Roger did his usual excellent job teaching the class. He clearly understands the subject very well and how it fits into the rest of the S.I. skill set. I’d definitely recommend taking this class, or any of the other classes that he offers.

The Uzi and Point Shooting Progressions

John Chambers

Suarez International/TSD Combat Systems Instructor

 

Memorial Day weekend found me hosting and participating in Roger Phillip’s Long Gun Point Shooting Progressions class in Liberty Hill, TX. I cannot say enough about how this training should be a mandatory part of your development as a rifle gun fighter. When you find yourself deep in the “OH S@#T” of an unexpected engagement, the Point Shooting skill set allows you hit targets faster, and more importantly, not get shot while doing so!

While all the other participants used the normal mix of rifles (AKs and ARs) I used this as an opportunity to find out more about a weapon system that SI has been studying extensively for the last couple of years, the Uzi. I have owned an Uzi for close to twenty years and have been SI certified to instruct the weapon since 2009, but this was the first opportunity I have had to run it through the Point Shooting matrix and what I learned was very enlightening. There are many advantages to the Uzi in a reactive and aggressive scenario and VERY few disadvantages. We already know that the Uzi is simple and reliable, but I also believe that I learned some things that others have not discussed, nor experienced.

The first advantage is quite simple: it is a compact weapon, even if it is heavier than one would expect. The weight/center of gravity is near the hands and close to the body. This close to the body center of gravity allows extremely quick directional changes of the weapon with minimal movement of the hands. When working the “golf swing” and “over the top” engagements I was able to get the muzzle on the target and engage with accurate fire faster than those using conventional long guns.

Another advantage that we get from the close center of gravity is that the weapon excels in dynamic movement situations. The more aggressively we move with a conventional long gun the more we have to be concerned with overshooting the target with the muzzle or losing control of the muzzle while running. With the Uzi, you move your hands to the point your eyes are focused on and the muzzle sticks to that point. Watch a figure skater or diver and you will see that the closer the hands are to the body, the faster the body can turn. This simple fact of physics is evident when dynamically driving the Uzi in movement.

The weapon’s stock and grip geometry also leads to exceptional accuracy in unsighted or instinctive fire. Quite simply the stock angle is MADE for underarm assault and hip firing! With a rifle with a straight stock like the AR or an AK with a modern stock, when you pull the weapon into your armpit and engage, it is very common for the rounds to impact high on the target. Part of the learning curve is to learn the sweet spot of that weapon when training with your “point shooters follow through” that allows you to have the weapon parallel to the ground when firing. With the Uzi you simply lift the weapon until the butt is tucked under your arm and the angle of the stock and the angle of the pistol grip combine to place the weapon perfectly parallel to the ground and you can put very accurate fire on the target. Roger and I took the Uzi past 20 yards and were placing accurate bursts of fire into the center of the target at ranges that many would believe is impossible!

This also carried over to transitions and shoulder transfers. The standard\ SI over the shoulder transitions or the LGPSP Bayonet Thrust transfers/transitions were quicker than anyone expected. A comparatively small movement of the hands and the weapon had moved and the target was engaged. This was especially evident with the Bayonet Thrust methods!

Prior to this class, if you had asked me about the usefulness of the grip safety, I most likely would have discussed disabling it and simply using the thumb safety. Not any longer! The grip safety is a major advantage when using this weapon with the PSP methodologies! When maneuvering the weapon in the “Baton Twirling” drills, it is driven into everyone’s head that you do not make these manipulations near the trigger. With a conventional long gun, this is very easy since you have the forearm, trigger, and pistol grip separated by the magazine well. Your hands are separated by at least twelve inches in most cases. However, due to the overhung bolt design of the Uzi, the magazine well is the pistol grip and by necessity, your hands are only separated by the width of the trigger guard. The grip safety is VERY comforting when making transitions, transfers and aggressive directional changes of the weapon. In fact I now use the Uzi in a similar manner to a Glock or XD. When it is in my hands and I am expecting contact may occur, I take the thumb safety off and leave it off. I simply loosen my grip so the grip safety is engaged and when firing, I naturally grip the weapon tighter and that will disengage the grip safety. It is very intuitive!

The Uzi is not a rifle. Even with the legally mandated long barrel it is still very compact and this size and balance advantage allows for some things that cannot be done with an AR or AK. Especially in dynamic movements off of the X to the 7:00 and 5:00 positions on the clock. When moving reactively off of the X to the 7:00 position it was totally natural to assume the “Hebrew Homey” position (see pic) and I was able to put very accurate center hits on the target. I would then execute a dynamic directional change and mount the Uzi into my shoulder pocket and engage the target with accurate bursts to the head. It was a very natural movement matrix. When moving to the 5:00, Roger taught us pull the weapon up and over our firing side triceps (see pic). With the Uzi, you can pull the weapon into a superb retention shooting position. Add in a dynamic directional change and you can have half a magazine into the target before they have realized you have moved.

The Uzi is also effectively recoilless, let’s face it, it is a nine pound 9mm! But as the Hebrew Homey shows, it allows some short cuts. One of the coolest “aha” moments that I had was that I was able to “zipper through the mount” in a similar fashion to “shooting through the draw stroke” with the pistol. I would engage the target from the hip and while I was moving the stock to my shoulder, I could place rounds on target while moving the weapon. It was the logical progression of “not being a slave to your mount.” And it was VERY fast, talk about shooting them to the ground!

So what are the disadvantages to the Uzi? Well the first is pretty obvious: terminal ballistics when compared to a rifle. But, used in the proper circumstances, it is not a real handicap. Is a burst of three 9mm hollow points to the face any less effective than a single 5.56 round? No, especially since it is so much faster to engage targets in a dynamic setting with the compact weapon system. The other disadvantage was a total surprise to me. The placement of the forward sling swivel flat sucks when performing transfers. It seems to always put the sling in the way of the left side firing hand and trigger finger. If we can develop a good method of attaching the sling forward, say around the front sight housing, it would be an advantageous modification.

To conclude, we discovered and confirmed that the Uzi is incredibly capable in the reactive CQB environment and it possesses advantages that other weapon systems do not. More to the point, I have determined that it will be an excellent study to explore the use of this weapon system in ways and in environments that continue to push the envelope on capability and expectations.

Stay tuned, this is just the beginning!

Comments from others who attended:

From Roger Phillips:  For a person who is and will always be a very aggressive learner, watching you run that Uzi in the LGPSP was a thing of beauty.  Who would have thunk guys like us, with all of our experience and knowledge, to learn as much as we learned in those two short days.  It's another exciting chapter of the fascinating study inside of the PSP family of courses.

The Uzi just made the big time inside Suarez International and John Chambers just became "the man" when it comes to the Uzi.

I know we say it on very special instances and in this case it is very accurate......... "nothing will ever be the same!"

From WT member "Golucky:"  Thanks again John for letting me trying the Uzi at the LGPSP course. I am building the funds to acquire this bad boy! I was very much surprised about the weight distribution compared to my AK. Folks, it is indeed very fast! It was pointed out in class, how you can hear the rounds from the UZI was accurately on target first, then the barrage from the rest of the tribe with AK's & AR's.

Click Here to Train with John Chambers

Terrorist/Active Shooter Interdiction with Jack Rumbaugh

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Staff Instructor

Last weekend I took the Terrorist/Active Shooter Interdiction class from Jack Rumbaugh. This class is a bit different from the standard S.I. fare: rather than focusing on fighting with a particular weapons system, it examines a particular sort of situation in depth: someone with a gun whose goal is to kill as many people as possible. This is a class I've been wanting to take for quite a while. This was the first time it's been taught by anyone other than Gabe.

For the live fire portion of the class, I brought a pair of Glock 17s: one with an RMR and one with iron sights. The RMRed gun got the lion's share of the use, since these sorts of situations are an area where it's advantages really shine. I carried them in a pair of Dale Fricke holsters, one on each hip. Along with a large quantity of G17 mags I also brought one with an Arredondo magazine extension, which increases mag capacity by about five rounds. I got this recently and have been playing with it a bit and I have to say I'm pretty impressed.

Most of the other students in the class brought Glocks, though there were a few M&Ps, an XD, Ruger SR9, and a HK USP. Two of the other students' guns had RMRs on them as well.

On the Force on Force side, I brought a pair of KWA airsoft Glock, along with the usual safety gear. I also brought a couple of Nok trainers for knife work. 

With the semester over, I was able to take a leisurely drive up here on the Blue Ridge Parkway over four days and visit with a friend in Northern Virginia on Thursday night. It was nice to arrive for the class feeling rather refreshed rather than the usual butt-numbing single day drive.

Saturday Morning

The class had a total of fifteen students, including a pair of S.I. Staff Instructors, myself and our newest addition: Dan Choi. One of the students referred to the pairing of Jack and Dan as 'The Green Hornet and Kato'. There were quite a few folks I recognized from the Trauma Care for the CCW Operator class here back in March, and even a couple who had been down to South Carolina for a class with Alex and I. After everyone arrived we started out with the usual administrative stuff: waivers, promising on video not to sue, the safety lecture, etc.

With the admin stuff out of the way, Jack started with some lecture on the context of what we were going to be learning. He began by asking us to list mass shooting incidents. Off the top of our heads the class was able to come up with fourteen incidents. The well publicized incidents like Columbine or Mumbai are only the tip of the iceberg, however. Jack had a fourteen page list of incidents going back to the '40s. The first five pages were dedicated to just school shootings.

We talked about some of the differences between your average robbery and an active shooter. Fundamentally, the active shooter is there to shoot people. He's not using violence as a means to and end in the way that a robber is (the end being your money), the violence is an end in itself. He's also very likely to be suicidal, or at least willing, or planning, to die in the course of events. This means strategies that involve dissuading or deescalating the situation are unlikely to work and we're more likely to have to achieve physical incapacitation, rather than relying on pain or fear.

From our point of view, an active shooter situation is much more likely to be a proactive gunfight than a simple case of self-defense would be. We'll probably be intervening in an ongoing situation, giving us the chance to initiate our action against the active shooter rather than waiting for the bad guy to initiate an action against us (or at least make his intent unambiguous). This makes certain skills, such as sighted fire and using cover, much more important and likely to be used. We're also likely to be taking longer ranged shots or having to shoot very precisely at whatever bit of bad guy presents itself from behind cover or around a hostage. This is far from your 'average' gunfight!

We warmed up with some simple precision shooting drills on 2" dots. Most folks had their fundamentals down, though a few had an area or two they needed to work on and some had sight issues (if you're coming to this class, verify your sights beforehand!). Then we moved on to some precision shots at relatively close range, starting with eyeball shots from 2-8 yards (this was convenient since we were running in two relays, one could shoot the target in the left eye, the other in the right). Further out, we switched from the eye socket to headshots more generally. Still, we tried to keep our shooting on the low side, below the eyebrows. The forehead is the thickest and toughest bone in the body, it can actually deflect bullets, depending on the angle of impact. We kept this up out to 20 yards, and everyone did pretty well. 

After lunch, we did some work shooting from cover. When we teach how to use cover and take corners in a CQB environment, we teach staying as far back from the cover as practicable. This makes it easier to take small slices when doing an angular search, and diminishes the chances of giving away your position, or your gun, by extending the muzzle beyond the corner. In the active shooter context, things may be different. If we know the shooters location and are engaging him at long range, we're better off using the cover as a shooting support than staying back from it. Jack demonstrated this, and I contributed a bit as well on using the knuckles and thumb of your support hand against cove to provide support. 

We started out at ten yards doing headshots, then backed it up a bit. By the time we got to 20 yards, there wasn't much visual feedback on where you were hitting. Jack had us redirect our fire to some steel plates up on the berm. These were a bit bigger than head sized, about 12" by 12", but they were about 40-45 yards away, making them pretty challenging to hit. Nevertheless, with a bit of work everyone was able to get on target. We backed it up a bit more to around 50 yards. At these ranges we started to discover some deficiencies in some people's sights. 

Next up was the hostage rescue shot. Unlike a lot of hostage targets where the hostage taker's head is fully exposed, Jack set this up with less than have of the bad guys head visible. The aiming point was his right eye. We started at two yards. At this distance, if you've got your fundamentals down, it's not too difficult. Gradually, we moved back in 2 yard increments to ten yards, which was quite challenging. Nevertheless, we only had one hit on a hostage in the entire class (only a flesh wound). Some excellent shooting.

When teaching reactive gunfighting, we at S.I. generally don't put a whole lot of stock in the 12 o'clock line (moving directly towards the opponent). The proactive situations that we're talking about in this class are a different story. When you are ahead of the curve moving in aggressively and overwhelming the opponent with a high volume of accurate fire is a valid tactic. We practiced this, drawing and advancing while pouring on the headshots as we closed in. During one of these drills, I ran my primary dry and drew my second gun to pile on another four rounds.

While the 40 yard shots on steel we'd done earlier were impressive, that was just touching the surface of the long range shooting portion of this class. Before we started stepping back, however, Jack went through some supported positions that we could use at these distances. Some are adaptations of rifle shooting positions, like kneeling, sitting, squatting and prone. Others are unique to pistols, such as the Creedmore and Keith positions (or as well call it, the centerfold position). Some of these positions are not for everybody, we had some folks with bad knees and one fellow with his foot in a brace, and they sat out on some positions. We worked through these dry, then did some live fire.

With the fundamental skills in place, we started moving back to greater and greater distances. We started out with some 25 yard headshots. This was only a bit more challenging than some of the shooting we'd been doing earlier, but it helped get everyone dialed in. Jack had a J-frame and he took some shots with it at this distance. I popped off a couple as well, with a few hits. One fellow had a Kahr .380, which he was nice enough to let me fire. I managed a good hit, which would probably surprise some folks who don't think these sorts of keychain guns have that kind of range (it helped that the Kahr had better sights than a lot of these small .380s).

We stepped it back to about 60 yards and took some body shots. I shot offhand but at these distances some folks used some of the supported positions. Oddly enough, they usually got better results offhand than they did in the supported positions (probably because they have a lot more experience shooting offhand). More practice is clearly needed to really take advantage of some of these positions.

Finally we moved back to about 100 yards. At this distance, hitting a human sized target takes some skills. I managed 100% hits with my RMRed Glock. I pulled out my iron sighted gun and tried it as well, going 3 for 4. This is a lot better than I would have done before I got my RMRed Glock. As I've said before, an RMR really will make you a better shooter, even with an iron sighted gun. While it can be done with iron sights, you definitely have to work at it a lot more than with the RMR. The other folks in the class, most of whom had irons, all managed to get on target.

 

Jack broke out the J-frame again. He managed to ding the steel with his first shot. Not only is he a good shot, he also knows when to stop. He immediately offered it up for anyone else to try. I decided to take him up on the offer. At this distance, the J-frame's front sight appears considerably bigger than the target. There's some bullet drop involved too, so I held right at the bottom of the head. I held the gun as steady as I could, with the head poking up above the top of the front sight as I tried to roll that heavy double action trigger back as smoothly as possible. 'BANG! . . . ding!'. I decided to follow Jack's example and handed the gun off to the next shooter. 

After everyone had a chance to shoot with their guns I passed around my RMRed Glock to anyone who was interested. Everyone who tried it got some hits and most seemed favorably impressed (I really wish I got a commission on these).

With that we wrapped up, packed up, and headed out for a good nights' sleep, because we'd be back at this bright and early tomorrow morning.

Sunday

We reconvened on Sunday morning for another day of training. Once again, we started out with some lecture material. Jack talked a bit about the AK, including how to disable one if you have to. Basically you need to take or get rid of the bolt or bolt carrier, or to bend the barrel. I wouldn't have thought of the latter, but evidently it's doable if you have something solid to wedge it into and put some weight into it. Jack also talked about dealing with the police after an incident, which diverged into some of the moral aspects of intervening in these sorts of situations.

Moving on to the range, we did a drill comparing the time it takes to reload an AK to the time it takes for a shooter to draw and get on target. Essentially, what we're simulating is the bad guy running out of ammo, giving us the opportunity to pop up and hit him while he reloads. We had two shooters on the line, one with an AK and one with a pistol (in the holster, concealed). The AK shooter would fire a single shot at a steel target, then begin a reload. As soon as the AK shooter fires his first shot, the pistol shooter draws and engages a second steel target until the AK shooter finishes reloading and hits his target again. 

 

To demo it, Jack took the role of the rifle shooter while I had the pistol. At 50 yards I was able to get nine shots into the target before he finished his AK reload. At this distance almost everyone was able to get a hit on the target before the AK shooter completed the reload.

We stepped it back a bit to 100 yards. The drill was considerably more challenging at this distance. While everyone had managed to get hits at this distance yesterday, doing so on demand, and under time pressure, was more difficult. About half the class got at least one hit before the AK shooter reloaded. This is where the RMR really makes things faster, since there's much less need to refine the sight picture than with iron sights.

 

In a active shooter situation, if you decide to intervene one potential problem is that while you're heading towards the sound of guns, everybody else is heading the other way. We need to be able to move through a group of people headed in the opposite direction with our weapon at the ready. The latter can be accomplished using Sul, but it needs to be rock solid with the gun in a vertical position to avoid muzzling others in the crowd. To move through the crowd Jack taught using the support hand to thread our way through the crowd and move people out of the way. He likened this to a salmon swimming upstream. We did this dry first, to make sure everyone had their Sul down pat, then shot it live.

After lunch we started on some knife work. Unfortunately some places are NPEs where we really can't carry a gun. In many of these areas, however, we can get away with carrying a knife (or two). Jack taught some methods for this related to military sentry elimination techniques. Most of the were built around the same base: sneak up on the guy, stomp his knee, jam your fingers into his face and wrench his head around using his eyesockets or mouth like the finger holes and a bowling ball. This is accompanied by driving your knife into one or more of several targets, depending on what's handy depending on how you approach the shooter and what sort of grip your knife is in. For knife targets we talked about the kidney, neck, behind the jawbone, clavicular notch, sciatic nerve, bicep of his gun arm, belly, and under his chin (or as Jack called it, 'apple on a stick'), 

Of course, in some NPEs you might not even be able to have a knife with you. In these cases, you my have to acquire your weapons from the bad guy. We worked some basic pistol disarms. This wasn't as extensive as we do in 0-5, but it provided a quick overview of the basic concepts. Moving on to rifles, we practiced taking long guns away from people. Jack showed a couple of methods for doing this, but when he was using me as a demo dummy he had some trouble getting it away from a sasquatch sized guy like me. I was able to show him a technique I learned from Gabe where you drive the comb of the stock into the carotid artery. I don't care how big or strong he is, if you can jam the stock into his neck it's going to hurt.

We also worked on some empty hands versus knife drills. Going up against a knife armed adversary without any weapons is a pretty lousy situation, but there are things we can do that work better than curling up to die. Much like we do with knife versus knife disarms, we want to reduce the effectiveness of the adversary's knife arm. You do this by hitting it as you block, preferably in the soft spots where you can get muscles and tendons. Once the arm has been reduced then it's time to catch hold of it and get the knife loose. Jack showed several techniques for this, but given that I want to keep away from the blade if I can, I like the idea of yanking his knife arm to the ground and grinding it in.

Finally, we covered techniques for choking people out. Jack demonstrated the rear naked choke, as well as a variation that's slightly quicker to get into. We spent some time practicing these, *carefully*.

This finished up the technique training for the class. Jack capped things off with a series of scenarios. These scenarios represented a series of venues where active shooter or terrorist attacks might happen: a theater, bus, restaurant, mall, and parking lot. Jack picked one or two students to be the bad guys, and had them play through different possibilities: shooting randomly, kidnapping someone, taking hostages, etc. One or two students would be designated good guys who (unbeknownst to the bad guys) were armed. The rest of the class played sheep.

We ran these a bunch of times and I won't go though each of them in detail, but there were some interesting lessons. In one restaurant scenario, one of the good guys stood up while the other stayed seated. The good guy who stood up got shot quite a bit, the one who remained seated did not. Staying seated gives up some mobility, but it may also serve as a form of camouflage, at least for long enough to get some rounds on target. 

One scenario involved an aggressive panhandler who pulled out a gun and started shooting people. The student who was dealing with the panhandler let him get far too close and didn't keep his eyes on him, so we talked a bit about how to handle the initial stages of this. I demonstrated some of Randy's PESTS material, putting up 'the fence', saying, "I can't help you," moving off-line. When I kicked it up a notch and went to, "BACK OFF! GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!" the student quailed visibly. Jack turned this into a quick bit of lecture on command voice.

For the very last scenario Jack picked two bad guys and (unbeknownst to them) made everybody else armed good guys. They really got shot to hell.

With the scenarios done another great weekend of training was over. Jack handed out the certificates and everyone got packed up. 

Final Thoughts

This was really a great class. The material is top notch and Jack did a great job presenting it. Dan helped out ably and served as a demo dummy ('meat puppet, get over here') and I hope I contributed a bit as well. Much credit must also go to the students too. We had a very good group of folks for this class. Everyone was an experienced shooter with the shooting and gunhandling skills necessary for this class. It speaks well of Jack that he has such a dedicated, well trained student base to turn out for this class.

The curriculum was just fantastic. Gabe did a really great job laying this one out. It clearly distinguishes how and why active shooters and terrorist events are different from your average robbery and how these differences translate into different skills and different tactics. On Saturday we did a good job wringing out everybody's proactive, sighted-fire shooting skills. I think this shows that at S.I. we're not just radical point shooting people, it's all about the right technique for the context. Similarly the knife work we did on Sunday was somewhat different from the 'a guy pulls a blade on you on the street' sort of thing you get in an S.I. defensive knife class or an AMOK seminar. This is all about using a knife to ambush someone (or more frankly, assassinate them).

This is a class that really shows off the capability of the TSD RMRed Glocks. While it's possible to hit at 100 yards with iron sights (heck, Jack and I did it with a J-frame) the RMR makes it much easier. Importantly, it also makes it much faster, as the pistol vs. AK drill showed, since you don't have to spend time refining the iron sight picture. With the proper grasp of the fundamentals it's really possible to do some amazing things with these guns.

Jack Rumbaugh did an excellent job with this class. He had clearly mastered the material and could handle student questions and give more in-depth explanations of particular points with ease. He's got a great delivery and does a good job coaching students. This is the second class I've been involved in with him (after the TMCO class earlier this year) and I would not hesitate to take his classes or recommend them to anyone (and I'm not just saying that because he's my boss).

This is usually the part of the review where I tell everyone to take this class, but in this case I won't, because it's not really a class for everyone. If you really want to get the most out of this class (particularly the Saturday material) you need to have a real mastery of the fundamentals of pistol marksmanship. Hitting with pistols out to 100 yards is not some black art, all it requires is doing certain things in a certain order. The catch is you have to do those things nigh perfectly. Lots and lots of dry practice and a lot of live fire practice will help you refine these skills. If you can, come to one of our Advanced Combat Pistol Marksmanship classes, it would make excellent preparation for Terrorist/Active Shooter Interdiction (and Alex and Ihappen to be teaching one this Saturday. We had a very well prepared group of students in this class and I'd hope to see the same in future classes.

I would put Terrorist/Active Shooter Interdiction up there with other 'graduate' classes that S.I. teaches, along with the likes of Advanced Rifle Gunfighting, Advanced Point Shooting Progressions, AK Force on Force, and 0-5 feet. These are classes that really push the envelope. They take skilled students and give them the chance to exercise those skills at very high level. They're a reward for dedicated students (and great fun for the instructors). As with some of the other 'graduate' classes, this is not taught very often, so practice your marksmanship and be ready to jump on it next time it's offered.

Discuss this class on Warriortalk.

Class is over; now what?

By Don Robison,  Suarez International Tier 1 Instructor

So, it’s Monday morning and you’ve got your training class over the weekend fresh in your mind as you drink your morning cup of coffee and get ready for work.  All these questions keep running through your mind from Sunday night. I’ve got the training; now what do I do with it?  The instructor said I should dry practice and then verify my dry practice at the range.  My range will never let me draw from a holster or get off the X.  Since the last time I wrote about dry practice Suarez International has realized these questions as well and come up with some solutions for working on perfecting these skills, but more about that later. 

Let start with the dry practice and work on it.  Pick a skill and do it.  Practice it, don’t just go through the motions, but practice it as perfectly as you can. Watch yourself in a mirror or video tape it so you can review your tapes and pick your technique apart.  Video doesn’t lie; it also doesn’t make you look better than you are.  Be honest with your assessment of your skills and what you need to practice.  As Greg Nichols says; “Get it right and then get it fast.”  Don’t worry if you’re slow; everyone is slow with a new skill; it’s better to practice it slow and correct rather than fast and incorrect. 

The instructors and students you see who are correctly doing a skill fast and smooth didn’t get there by not practicing or by practicing the skill sloppily.  They got there by practicing hundreds sometimes thousands of repetitions correctly and then worked on getting the speed and fluidity. 

My range won’t let me get off the X or draw from a holster.  It would be easy to say “Find another range.”, but that is often easier said than done.  What skills can you verify at your range?  Obviously you can verify the fundamentals of marksmanship, but you can also do malfunctions drills at most ranges by having your training partner setup malfunctions for you.  You can also practice failure to stop drills at many ranges.  Some ranges also have “action ranges” or a range bay set aside that you can rent by the hour to draw from a holster and practice other skills associated with competition.  It may be more expensive than renting a single lane and may require some type of special “check out” from the range master, but nothing worthwhile is usually easy.  Check at your range or other ranges in the area to see what’s available.  I’ve also had some success in the past with range owners letting me practice skills they don’t normally allow like the draw stroke during their slow time of the week when the range is empty. Find out when that is and if it’s possible. 

Other possibilities are airsoft.  It’s not perfect, but a good airsoft gun will allow you to practice the mechanics of magazine changes, and the draw stroke.  Sometimes you just need to get creative.  As cliché’ as it sounds; there really is more than one way to skin a cat.

How has Suarez International taken the reins on refining the skills of our students?  We now have Suarez International Authorized Training Groups for SI class alumni for students to get additional coaching to perfect those skills they are learning in class.  These are training groups organized and led by the various Suarez International Instructors all over the country.  For example in August I led the first training group in my area.  We concentrated on the draw stroke to the first perfect shot and the fundamentals of pistol shooting.  Each alumnus who attended received four hours of individual coaching to perfect their draw stroke and fundamentals of shooting.  First we started with repetitions of dry practice.  Then we progressed with live fire.  We were able to break each skill down to individual parts and work on perfecting the individual pieces before tying them together.  The training groups are also a great way to get connected with other students in the area who you may not have met and who may need a training partner.  All of this for a nominal fee to cover range rental and supplies.  The only other requirement is that you have taken a class covering the skills being covered in the training group meeting i.e. if Close Range Gunfighting skills are being worked on you need to have attended the Close Range Gunfighting Class or if knife skills are being worked on you need to have attended the SI knife class.

Now get out there and find your nearest training group and take advantage of the opportunities they afford.

Don's class schedule in Florida

AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting in Iowa

Trauma Medicine for the CCW Operator

by Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Staff Instructor

The last weekend in October I took Suarez International’s Trauma Medicine for the CCW Operator. Medical knowledge is one of the biggest holes in people’s skill sets. Despite carrying and regularly practicing with firearms, preparing for the possibility that they may have to use a gun to defend themselves, many people never seriously consider that they or someone they love may be injured in the course of that gunfight. This class is for those who are willing to face that reality.

This class benefitted greatly from the exceedingly well qualified (if not overqualified) instructors. Dr. John Meade is Suarez International’s Director of Tactical Medicine, an emergency room physician and SWAT medic. He was ably assisted by Rick Klopp, a highly experienced S.I. Instructor and EMT. The third major instructor was a special operations medic who goes by the nom de guerre Sua Sponte. He’s got tons of experience patching up people with gunshot wounds overseas.

There were fourteen students in the class, including three Suarez International staff instructors (Alex Nieuwland, Scott Vaughn, and myself). We were also joined on the second day by C.R. Williams, who was shooting some video for promotional purposes. The other students were a varied lot. Some had a medical background, including several physicians and an EMT, while others came from a diverse array of backgrounds ranging from a farmer to a lawyer. I was particularly happy to see two of my former students in this class. I tend to harp on the need for some trauma care knowledge (see above for an example) and it’s nice to see that it seems to be having some effect.

This class was a bit different from most S.I. classes in that it was part of Warrior Skills Camp. This year WSC was a block of four classes held over a long weekend in Blairsville, GA. Rick Klopp taught a Force on Force class on Thursday and Friday. Alongside FoF and TMCO, Eric Pfleger, assisted by J.D. Lester, taught Rural Patrolling 1 and 2 in a big block running from Thursday to Sunday. The classes were held at Camp Jabez, a Christian camp north of Blairsville, with occasional excursions to a nearby range for the live fire portions. The camp provided food and bunkhouse style lodging. In addition to the classes, Rick organized a series of lectures in the evening from S.I. instructors and other volunteers. Having everyone staying in one place, taking their meals together really gives WSC a different feel than other S.I. courses.

This is actually my second experience taking a tactical medecine class at Camp Jabez. Two years ago I took S.I.’s previous medical class, Trauma Care for Shooters, from Karl Johnson at Camp Jabez. That was a really good class, so I came into this one with high expectations.

Friday Night

I traveled to Blairsville with Alex Nieuwland and another student from Columbia. The student was kind enough to volunteer his crew cab truck to carry us out there, since three people and all their gear (sleeping bags, clothes, force on force, and live fire gear) would have been far too much for the sedans that Alex and I drive. Even so, we managed to fill the bed of his truck and the half of the back seat that Alex wasn’t occupying pretty full.

Thankfully, everyone’s schedules allowed us to get an early afternoon start, so we could get there at a reasonable hour. The trip was fairly uneventful, though we had to stop and put some of the stuff in the back into plastic bags when it started sprinkling.

We got to Camp Jabez around 6:30. Most folks had finished eating already, but the kitchen had some food waiting for late arrivals. Walking into the dining hall was a bit like old home week for me. In addition to the various instructors (including Scott Vandiver, who was taking the Rural Patroling class) there were also quite a few folks who had either taken classes from me or been fellow students in classes I’d taken.

Once we were done eating there was an interesting lecture on OPSEC from Warriortalk member vlazlow. Afterwords Eric Pfleger and some other folks broke out the night vision devices. There was a range of generations (and costs) to play with and you could clearly see the difference in quality. My favorite was Eric’s PVS–7Bs (a Gen 3 single tube two-eye system). The quality was just amazing. Eric had an IR laser and flashlight on his rifle. That setup was pretty cool, definitely the way to go with a rifle. The goggles also worked well with the RMR on a TSD glock. The gun itself is too close to be in focus, it’s just a big blob, but the red dot shows up as a bright green point on your target. A set of these is definitely going on the to buy list. Eric has a way of getting me to spend unconscionable amounts of money.

Most folks headed off to bed (particularly those who Eric had been running ragged in Rural Patrolling). Eric, Alex, a student, and I hung out for about another hour, talking about hunting, shooting, and various other topics. Alex and I picked Eric’s brain about sniper rifles, since we’re both planning on going down to the Guerrilla Sniper class Scott Vandiver is teaching in Blakely, Georgia next March and I’m going to try to get out to Guerrilla Sniper 2 next fall.

Saturday Morning

After a nice breakfast on Saturday morning, we gathered and kicked things off. First up was the usual sort of admin stuff (fill out the liability waiver, promise on video not to sue anyone, etc.). With that out of the way John explained the goals of the class: to teach us to perform immediate first aid on gunshot wounds, as well as the gunhandling skills to stay in the fight even after being wounded. This class concentrates mostly on gunshot wounds, but the techniques cross over to other types of penetrating trauma.

To put things into context, John went through about some of the history of field medical treatment, explaining how civilian EMS grew out of and has been influenced by military battlefield medicine from WWII, to Korea, to Vietnam. The current framework for battlefield medicine is Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC), which has it’s genesis in the Battle of Mogadishu in the early ’90s (a.k.a. Black Hawk Down). TCCC is divided into three phases: care under fire, tactical field care, and evacuation/definitive care. The key is that the right intervention is done at the right time. A medically correct intervention performed at the tactically wrong time is the wrong intervention. Treatment that might be appropriate during tactical field care or definitive care may not be appropriate while you’re still getting shot at. This class concentrates mostly on the care under fire phase.

The military defines the goals of TCCC as: complete the mission, treat the casualty, and prevent additional casualties. For most of us in civilian life, “the mission” is to keep ourselves and our loved ones from getting shot, so we can restate these as: don’t get shot, shoot back, and treat injuries. If you get shot in the head while treating a loved one’s gushing wound, that’s not going to do either of you any good. Finish the fight, then get people treated. “Victory is the best medicine”.

Once we get to a point where treating injuries is appropriate, our priorities can be defined by the acronym M.A.R.C.H.: Massive hemorrhage, Airway, Respiration, Circulation, and Hypothermia/Head injury. This is basically the order in which these things will kill you. This class concentrated mostly on the M, though we got into some airway and respiration stuff on Sunday.

With the basic framework laid down, John had everyone split up into three groups with different instructors. Sua Sponte taught about tourniquets, Rick Klopp talked about direct pressure, and Alex Nieuwland and I were tapped to go through the basics of Force on Force. After about 40 minutes, the groups would rotate so everyone had a chance to cover all the bases.

The FoF introduction was necessary because John opted not to have a prerequisite when he designed this course. It’s open to anyone who’s interested, even if they haven’t had any S.I. pistol or FoF training. This means we have to take some time to get everyone up to speed, but it also means that we can get this critical lifesaving medical knowledge into the hands of as many people as possible.

Given the need to come up with an impromptu 40 minute Force on Force boot camp, Alex and I were really glad we’d just done Randy Harris’ FoF class two weeks earlier. We basically lifted a very compressed version of his curriculum. First, the students drew and shot each other from a stationary position. Unless someone completely flubbed their draw (which happened a few times) they got shot. We went through the basics of getting off the X and had students move out of the line of fire. One student played the bad guy and drew and shot at the position where the other student was standing. The other student played the good guy and his job was to get out of the way. Everyone was able to get off the line of force before the BG fired. Next up we introduced drawing as you move off the X so you’ve got a chance to shoot back at the adversary. After we’d run this in a couple of variations, it was time to rotate. I think by the time the third group came around Alex and I were pretty good at teaching this.

One of the nice things about it being a fairly cool morning was that it was actually relatively comfortable to wear a thick sweatshirt or a couple of layers of clothing so that the airsoft BBs didn’t hurt so much (unless you got hit in the hands, as you often do). The downside to this is that the cool air makes the airsoft guns, which rely on pressurized gas, less effective (curse you laws of physics!). Some of the issues we saw reinforce my belief that if you want to get the most out of a FoF class, you should really bring two airsoft guns, because that’s what it takes to keep one running most of the time.

After each group had rotated through all three blocks of instruction, we reconvened in the classroom. John and Sua Sponte went through some of the available gear, particularly tourniquets. John is quite emphatic that the SWAT and TK–4 tourniquets are basically useless. It’s difficult or impossible to get them tight enough to cut off blood flow to an extremity. The three tourniquets that he recommends are the Cav Arms tourniquet, the CAT, and the SOFT-T. Each has their advantages and disadvantages in terms of size, weight, bulk, cost, and complexity, but they all work After taking Karl’s class two years ago, I’d bought several CATs, but I am intrigued by the Cav Arms TQ. It’s actually small and light enough I could see sticking it in a cargo pocket and carrying it on a daily basis, something I’ve never done with the CAT.

Sua Sponte went through various hemostatic agents. He took some of the old first generation Quick Clot and added it to a water bottle to demonstrate how much heat it produces when activated. It actually partially melted the bottle. His current favorite is the ChitoGauze and Celox Gauze, both of which are gauzes impregnated with a hemostatic agent. If you’re applying direct pressure to a wound you need gauze anyway, and the gauze makes it easier to get the hemostatic material where you need it.

Saturday Afternoon

After lunch we reconvened and split into two groups. These groups rotated back and forth between John and Rick and Sua Sponte working together. Both sets of instructors had us practicing some integrated force on force and medical scenarios. Dividing up and rotating helped lessen the load on the instructor and gave the students a chance to see some different takes on the same material.

My group went with Rick and Sua Sponte first. We started out fairly simple, with one on one FoF gunfights and each participant administering a tourniquet to an injured limb after the initial exchange of airsoft BBs. After a few rounds of this, we started incorporating some twists, like two good guys withe one providing aid to the other, or moving to cover.

After about an hour of this, we switched over to John. He had us doing much the same thing, but with some twists. He really emphasized the after action assessment. We teach after action drills, which include a self-check to see if we’ve been injured, but generally don’t talk about what to do if it comes up positive. One thing John introduced that I hadn’t really seen before was the idea of squatting during your after action drill to perform a physical check of your lower extremities. This allows you to keep your head up rather than spending a lot of time looking down at your feet.

Switching back to Rick and Sua Sponte we practiced patient movement, dragging a weighted dummy to cover and treating it. Back to John again and we worked some with an improvised tourniquet made from a bandana or cravat, a keyring, and a climbing carabiner. While this isn’t nearly as quick as a premade TQ, it’s something you can make from materials at had, particularly if you have a handkerchief and clip your keyring to your belt with a carabiner (the carabiner also has lots of other uses).

We came back together in the classroom and went through some of the lessons learned from the FoF exercises. One that comes up in FoF a lot, but has special resonance in a medical class, was the prevalence of hand and arm hits. People tend to focus on the gun, resulting in them shooting at it. Even if they’re focusing on the chest rather than the gun, the gun arm is often still in the line of fire.

The frequency of hand and arm hits brings up several issues. Can you shoot ambidextrously? Do you have a gun accessible to both hands? Similarly, can you apply a tourniquet with either hand? Is the TQ accessible to either hand? During the scenarios some folks were gaming the tourniquet positions, putting it where it would be most advantageous before each drill. Moving your TQ around is a recipe for disaster, since it will leave you patting yourself down looking for it when you need it. Just like with your gun, always carry it in the same place. Moreover, if you’re part of a team, the team should have an assigned spot for their individual first-aid kit (IFAK), so that a rescuer will know exactly where to find this stuff.

Sua Sponte talked about the priority of items in a trauma kit. If you can only carry one piece of trauma care gear, he recommended a tourniquet. Interestingly, he gave duct tape second place, largely for it’s multipurpose nature (and yes, you can tape wounds shut if necessary). John emphasized the need to keep your booboo kit (band aids, aspirin, Sudafed, etc.) separate from your trauma kit. The trauma kit should be very focused, don’t dilute it or give yourself the temptation to draw down trauma supplies by mixing the two. Finally, they emphasized that the tourniquet (being the most important item in the kit) should be on top or most easily accessible.

Saturday Evening

After dinner we had a very interesting series of lectures from Rick Klopp, John Meade and Eric Pfleger. Rick talked about land navigation and in particular using a military protractor (a plastic square with markings for measuring coordinates, distances, and bearings on maps) and a topographic map to measure coordinates and azimuths.

John had an interesting lecture about bites with lots of graphic pictures. He covered spider bites, scorpion stings, and snake bites. As a wrap up he had a picture of a particularly nasty shark bite. The fellow was missing his hand and all the flesh in the lower half of his forearm was removed, leaving just the radius and ulna bones sticking up.

Eric wrapped things up with a lecture on mantracking and counter-tracking. I’d heard some of this stuff at the Guerrilla Sniper class, but this was a bit more detailed. I’m certainly not knowledgable enough to track anyone (or evade a tracker) just based on one lecture, but now I know a bit about the issues involved.

After the lectures Eric brought out his NVGs again. Unlike Friday night, tonight was clear, so we could use them to look at the stars. Thanks to the light intensification you can see a lot more stars than you can with the naked eye. About like looking through a good telescope, but with a wider field of view. To quote Dave Bowman in 2001, “My god, it’s full of stars!”

Sunday Morning

Sunday morning we started off with a bit more discussion of tourniquets, in response to some student questions.

John gave a lecture on the role (or rather, the lack therof) of CPR in trauma care. This is a subject he really seems to have a bee in his bonnet about. CPR was intended for people who had garden variety heart attacks, to keep the blood pumping until some other intervention could be applied. It was a way of buying time. The problem is if you’ve got a leak in the system, all pumping the heart does is pump more blood out. The focus needs to be on keeping as much blood as possible inside their system. There are some situations other than heart attacks where CPR is appropriate, like electrocution, hypothermia (after warming), and near drowning. However, none of these involve massive blood loss. The bottom line is if someone’s heart has stopped beating due to blood loss, they’re dead. Anything after that is molesting a corpse.

John also noted that many agencies and training classes rigidly mandate against moving anyone with a “trauma injury” unless they’ve had a cervical collar attached and they’ve been tied down to a backboard. That may be appropriate for somebody who’s been in a car crash, but for gunshot wounds it often makes no sense. That round through their leg did not magically cause a neck injury. Don’t be afraid to move someone (particularly to move them out of the line of fire or to cover) just because you heard somewhere that you shouldn’t move anyone with trauma injuries.

Once again we split up into two groups. One went with Rick Klopp and talked about splinting while Sua Sponte covered airway management.

Rick talked about the purpose of splinting broken bones, and emphasized the importance of not making someone’s injuries worse. You should check the limb’s nerve connections before and after splinting (ask them if they can wiggle their fingers or toes and feel you touching them), as well as the limb’s blood flow (check the capillary refill time by squeezing their finger at the nail and seeing how long it takes for the color to return to pink).

For the practical application, Rick had several Sam Splints (basically a thin layer of aluminum between sheets of foam). They can be bent and molded into whatever shape you need to support a limb. I’ve got one of these in my backpacking first aid kit. He also talked about improvised splints, and towards the woodpile for materials. We practiced splinting various injuries on arms and legs, and talked a bit about immobilizing back injuries.

We rotated over to Sua Sponte to talk about airway management. The primary problem here is that if someone looses muscle tone their tongue can fall backwards and block the passage of air. The basic way of remedying this is the “head tilt chin lift”, basically tilt their head back and open their mouth. The problem is that if you don’t keep holding their head in position, it may slip and they’ll loose their airway. Sitting there holding their head may not be a problem if all you’re doing is waiting for the ambulance to arrive, but if there’s still a fight on or more than one casualty you need to treat.

A solution to this conundrum is the nasopharyngeal airway or NPA. An NPA is basically a rubber tube that goes in through the nose to the top of the throat. It ensures that the tongue doesn’t block the airway and allows you to move on to other matters rather than keeping the patient’s head in position. Sua Sponte showed us how to insert one on a dummy head, then gave us the chance to practice on it.

NPAs are one of the things you often see in pre-packaged trauma kits, but I’d avoided adding one to mine since I didn’t feel like I know what to do with it. Now that I’ve gotten some professional instruction and some practice, I think I’ll probably be adding one to my kits.

While the NPA will protect the airway from the tongue, the patient can still end up drowning in their own blood or vomit. We can lessen the chances of this by repositioning the patient onto their side so that any fluids will drain out of their mouth. Sua Sponte showed us how to do this. It’s basically the same way you roll a drunk over to keep them from choking, but given the fact that our patient probably has some other injuries there are some special considerations about which side to roll them towards and how to stabilize them.

Next up we did some dry fire, working on one-handed gun manipulation. Half the group worked with John, Rick, and Alex and the other half came with Sua Sponte, CR Williams and I. As we saw in Force on Force, hits to the hand and arm are quite common. Thus far we’ve concentrated on tourniqueting an injured limb, but before we get to that point we have to finish the fight first.

We started with transferring the gun from one hand to another. The technique for doing this with a wounded arm is a bit different than our regular hand to hand transfers, since you can’t expect the hand you’re transferring from to do as much. It’s more like picking your gun up off the injured hand than passing the gun from one hand to another.

Next we worked some one-handed reloading and malfunction clearance drills. These involve putting the gun somewhere (either kneeling down and tucking it behind the knee or putting it back into the holster) swapping mags, and racking the pistol using the rear sight on any handy surface. After doing this with just the dominant hand we did the same thing just using the support hand.

While hand and arm hits were the most common, leg hits happen too (particularly against someone who has a bad trigger jerking problem). A leg hit may put you on the ground, as could being physically bowled over in a confrontation. Accordingly, we worked on some shooting from supine (lying down on your back) and prone.

Sunday Afternoon

After lunch we convoyed over to the range for the live fire portion of the class. We started out with some dry draws from the holster, then moved on to drawing and firing single, precise shots. These drills served mainly to make sure everyone was up to speed and could draw and fire safely, since the class has no prerequisites. Everybody seemed to have a fairly decent drawstroke, so we moved on to shooting in bursts.

Next we incorporated the after action assessment. Again, we did this dry first to make sure everyone had Sul down pat, then went live. Of course, the next logical step was to add discovering an injury during the after action assessment and apply a tourniquet. We ran through applying tourniquets in various places and making sure everyone got to use the different types of tourniquets.

The next batch of drills got quite a bit more dynamic. They incorporated shooting on the move, then moving to assist an injured friend (played by a dummy). Because these involved a lot of movement, John ran these two people at a time, on opposite sides of the range so they wouldn’t interfere with each other. This was the day before Halloween, so he broke out some zombie targets for us to shoot at. I saw quite a few body shots though; some people evidently missed the memo that you’re supposed to shoot zombies in the head!

Once everyone had rotated through the drill, we began repeating it with twists thrown in. You might have to reengage the threat when he pops back up (again, zombies need to be shot in the head), move the injured person to a safer location, deal with more than one injury, or multiple casualties, etc. This is where the whole class really comes together. You’re not just applying a tourniquet, you’re also moving, fighting, and making tactical and medical decisions. This wrapped up the shooting portion of the class.

Before handing out the certificates, John talked a bit about the more advanced medical classes S.I. is going to be offering. The second level class, Advanced Trauma Medicine will be offered for the first time next April in Orange, Texas. The third level class, Trauma Combat Casualty Medicine isn’t even on the schedule yet, but I’m sure it will be once ATM has been taught a couple of times. He went over the curriculum for these classes and they’re going to incorporate some pretty advanced stuff. I am really looking forward to the opportunity to take these classes.

With that, John passed out the certificates and we wrapped things up.

Final Thoughts

This class was truly outstanding. Even having taken a tactical trauma class before I learned a lot. Someone coming in with Red Cross or Boy Scout level first aid skills would certainly learn a tremendous amount. The medical knowledge conveyed was great, but what was truly outstanding was the way John has integrated the medical and fighting skills. This isn’t a class where you learn a bunch of medical stuff, then apply that to a fighting context at the end, the fight is integrated into the class from the very beginning. We started doing force on force less than an hour after the start of the class and were consistently doing either FoF, dry practice, or live fire all the way through.

In addition to the curriculum, a lot of credit has to go to the instructors. John did an excellent job teaching this class. He’s clearly got an enormous depth of medical knowledge in the area and he’s quite able to explain these issues in plain language. Rick Klopp did a great job as co-instructor. I’m sure he could have taught this class himself (and he will in Atlanta next May). Finally, I really have to give some special thanks to Sua Sponte. He’s got vast practical experience in these areas and it shows. As with John, he’s also got the teaching skills to convey his knowledge to others. His presence really elevated the class. While he’s great at the medical stuff, I would love to get into a class where he was teaching his other military specialty: sniping.

In addition to Rick’s great work as an instructor in this course, he also organized Warrior Skills Camp. While every S.I. class I’ve taken has been a good experience in terms of fellowship with the other students and instructors, WSC has a unique vibe. Having everyone bunking and eating in the same place provides a really great experience. Camp Jabez is an excellent facility for this sort of thing and they did a great job feeding us. I also need to thank vlazlow, John, Rick, and Eric for their lectures during the evenings. They were an informative bonus on top of all the class material. Hopefully Rick will organize Warrior Skills Camp 2012 next year. I would highly recommend the experience.

Taking this class has caused some changes in my own thinking, particularly about medical gear. After learning about the Cav Arms tourniquet and talking with Sua Sponte about some low-profile options for pressure dressings, I think I’m going to start carrying them on my person on a regular basis. I generally wear cargo pants but I hardly ever use the thigh pockets for anything, so I might as well carry some trauma gear in there. I’m also going to add some hemostatic gauze and a nasopharyngeal airway to the trauma kits in my range bag and bug-out bag. Now that I’ve been able to practice with the NPA I feel confident enough to include one in my kit. I think I’m going to upgrade my little wimpy keyring carabiner to a real climbing one. It’s just too useful, both for improvised tourniquets and other stuff.

The skills taught in Trauma Medicine for the CCW Operator are really vital for anyone who carries a gun or plans to defend themselves with a firearm. I think John made with right choice in not putting a prerequisite on this class, making it available to as many people as possible. However, as Alex suggested during the drive home, even though there’s no prerequisite in the course description, this class really has a mental prerequisite. Most CCW carriers would probably be mystified, if not horrified, by the stuff we’re learning in this class. They just haven’t even considered, or don’t want to consider, the possibility that they or a loved one might be injured in a gunfight. Getting to the point where you take a class like this is a mark of maturity and realism.

This was an excellent class, with excellent instructors. The medical skills are vital lifesaving knowledge for anyone who spends a lot of time around firearm and they’re integrated into the context of a fight from the very beginning of the class. I would highly recommend Trauma Medicine for the CCW Operator, as well as anything taught by John Meade or Rick Klopp.

Images courtesy of Dr. John Meade and Alex Nieuwland

Lessons from the Force-on-Force Gunfighting Course in Columbia, SC

By Alex Nieuwland, Suarez International Staff Instructor

This October, Suarez International Tier 1 Staff Instructor Randy Harris traveled from Tennessee to South Carolina to teach a Force-on-Force Gunfighting class. This course is a good demonstration of what makes the whole Suarez International handgun curriculum so advanced: it is based on the lessons from Force on Force training, and without learning those lessons your preparation to fight real gunfights is incomplete. Extrapolating from square range training to gunfight tactics, like so many other organizations do, is putting the cart before the horse.

The purpose of this post is to share some of the lessons learned from this FoF training course. Some of these lessons have to be experienced to be really believed, so find a FoF course near you and come experience them for yourselves.

Lesson #1: No prior experience is needed to benefit from FoF training.

Suarez International makes FoF training available to the general public, without requiring any prerequisites. This class demonstrated the wisdom of that policy. Students who were already skilled with live weapons had a chance to try those skills (with Airsoft guns) against live opponents. Students with minimal skills experienced the context of the skills taught in Suarez International handgun classes (DPS, PSG, CRG) for themselves. Many “gunfights” were lost by the more inexperienced shooters due to forgotten manual safeties, fumbled draws and having a poor grip on their guns. Taking the SI basic and intermediate classes and learning the skills taught in those classes will fix all of those issues.

Lesson #2: Be movement focused, not gun focused.

We started off with the “Matt Dillon drill” where the students try to outdraw each other without moving off the X. My training partner for this drill was one of our returning students from NC. Our two shots each were perfectly synchronized: 4 shots that sounded like 2 shots. Trading a shot for a shot is NOT a winning strategy for your gunfight.

During another drill, where we were supposed to get off the X when the bad guy student started his draw stroke, one of the more experienced students in the class was consistently getting shot before he had the chance to fire his first shot, because his primary focus was on drawing his own gun rather than on moving. When he changed his primary focus to getting off the X, he was able to draw his pistol and shoot the “bad guy” without getting shot first.

Lesson #3: Color outside the lines.

Gabe calls it “being offsides”. I call it “coloring outside the lines.” Either way, it gives you an advantage and I saw some good examples during this class.

In one case, where a lone good guy student was facing three bad guy students intent on delivering a casual beat down, the good guy student yelled (while looking in the distance beyond the threatening group): “Officer, officer! Over here!” The bad guy students instinctively looked over their shoulders, creating a gap for the good guy student to escape.
 
Faced with the same situation, I saw the knife displayed by one of the students while they were still a ways off, and took off running at the two o’clock direction, passing about 2 yards from the edge of the group, getting a grip on my right-side gun while moving. I kept running once I passed the group. The bad guy students just stood there, wondering what just happened. By not letting myself get trapped by them, I avoided having to shoot them. My intent was to go home unhurt, not to clean up the streets, so this outcome was good enough for me to put another one in my “win” column.

At the end of the class, we did three scenarios. In the fist scenario, Randy positioned Suarez International Staff Instructor Chris Upchurch as the bad guy intent on some aggressive panhandling as a precursor to a robbery on a narrow path flanked by a wooded area on both sides. Given Chris’ size, getting past him while staying on the path is not easy. All students who “colored outside the lines” and were willing to leave the path and step to 3 o’clock to “orbit” Chris like we recommend got away. Students who were unwilling to leave the path usually did not fare so well.

Lesson # 4: When faced with a close range threat, step to 3 or 9 o’clock instead of looking over your shoulder to check behind you.

During our classes, Chris and I have been teaching the PESTS EAT FAST protocol for dealing with unknown contacts, which we shamelessly copied from Randy Harris. During this class, Randy himself went through the whole PESTS EAT FAST protocol (a written version can be found here), and we ended the class with a validation of the second S in PESTS (Step to 3 or 9 o’clock to check behind you).

During the second scenario, Chris was positioned on the path, as before, but I was coming up behind the good guy student to spring the trap if they failed to get past Chris. All students following the PESTS protocol got away with no more than a harsh word from the panhandler. Students who got bogged down between the panhandler (Chris) and his accomplice (me) fared a LOT less well. To quote Chris’ point of view from his review of the class:

The way it usually unfolded was almost comical: the student heard Alex coming up behind him and looked over his shoulder, he looked back at me, then back at Alex, then when he looked back at me he found himself staring down the muzzle of my airsoft gun. I was able to pull this sort of thing off several times. 

Being trapped between two gun-wielding criminals is not a good place to be, no matter who you are. Decisive movement while following the PESTS EAT FAST protocol would have resulted in much better odds of a good outcome for the student.

Lesson #5: Having a gun doesn’t mean you won’t have to fight.

The tactics discussed in this class were primarily aimed at situations where you have realized there is a problem before the problem gets right on top of you: at least 2 arms lengths distance. Inside that 0-5 feet distance, however, you will need SOME hand-to-hand fighting skills to create the gap you need to bring your gun into play, or to disarm your opponent.

This became painfully obvious during the last scenario, where Chris or I attempted a car jacking. The students that checked around their car before getting in it, or got off the X as soon as they heard unexpected movement at the corner of their car fared well. The students that did not, would have ended up getting shot at close range while going for their guns.

Conclusion

This was undeniably a great class. It was very well structured, going from the Matt Dillon drill, to drills suggesting better solutions, to putting all of the skills taught in the course in a scenario setting. The skills taught in this class will definitely help the students keep themselves and their families safer.

Randy will be back in South Carolina in April of next year to teach the skill set needed for the 0-5 feet distance. You can enroll here, but please note that this class DOES have a prerequisite. Attending our Close Range Gunfighting class in December will satisfy that prerequisite.

Comments?

Feel free to comment on this article in this thread on Warror Talk.

Force on Force with Randy Harris

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Staff Instructor

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to assist with the Force on Force class that Randy Harris taught here in Columbia, SC. Force on Force was one of the very first S.I. classes I took back in 2007. While the fundamentals are still the same, the class has evolved quite a bit since then.

The other host for the class was fellow S.I instructor Alex Nieuwland. We were also joined by S.I. Staff Instructor J.D. Lester. Both of them took the course as students. There were nine other students, including some repeat customers from Alex and my previous courses in Columbia. Most were from South Carolina or neighboring states, but a few came from as far afield as Pennsylvania and Missouri.

I brought my usual FoF gear. I ran a pair of KWA airsoft Glock 17s in Archangel holsters. Not only does a class like this give a good chance to practice dual carry, I also find that it takes two airsoft guns to keep one running. They may look like Glocks, but they definitely don't have the Glock level of reliability. I also brought a couple of Nok trainers, for stabbing people with. This isn't a 0-5 class, but it's still an important part of the threat spectrum. My bag also held the usual complement of blue guns, since even when working with airsoft they're useful as demo tools. I brought an airsoft mask for when I was participating in scenarios, as well as some safety sunglasses, for eye protection when I was just observing. One thing I didn't bring was any airsoft armor (no sweatshirts or other padding). This is both because I wasn't planning to participate a lot and because I like to maintain some pain as a reminder that it's a good thing not to get shot. I brought a long sleeved cover shirt (though it got warm enough I kept the sleeves rolled up when I wasn't actively participating). 

Other folks brought a mixture of the traditional airsoft guns and the Umarex CO2 powered pistols. They also generally brought more airsoft armor (sweatshirts) than I did, though they were getting shot a lot more. One place a couple of people were caught short was headgear. If you get an airsoft BB in part of the head the mask doesn't cover it's going to sting quite a bit. Some kind of hat or a hood on your sweatshirt is very helpful (particularly for some of our follicly challenged students).

Saturday

Randy started the class off with a safety lecture. Interestingly for a class involving no live fire, he started by going through the 4 safety rules. He talked about how these applied in the airsoft environment. Even though we'll be pointing airsoft guns at each other, we still don't want to be careless with our muzzles. When we point a gun at someone in FoF, it's with the intention of destroying them (as thoroughly as they can be destroyed with airsoft BBs anyway). He also went through some airsoft specific safety precautions, concentrating on eye protection. This is the one place where airsoft BBs can really hurt you. As he put it, "It's all fun and games until someone looses an eye." Accordingly everyone participating in a drill needs to wear a paintball mask, and even if you're not actively participating everyone needs to wear eye protection.

To provide some context to the class, Randy talked about how S.I.'s FoF compares to other handgun training, using IDPA as an example. In an IDPA stage, the shooter faces static targets, in a known configuration. They aren't going to maneuver, or shoot back, or try to stab you. None of these things are true in a real fight.

Next, Randy went through his excellent PESTS lecture. Rather than recapitulating this, I'll just point you to his recent, epic post on the subject. 

After the lecture, Randy had the students put up their real guns, knives, etc. Alex and I patted everyone down to make sure they didn't have any live weapons on them. The first FoF drill was the Matt Dillon drill. Two students faced off at about four yards and on command they drew and shot the other guy. The most common result was simultaneous shots, with both students getting hit. We call this the suicide drill for a reason.

Randy asked the students what kind of sight picture they were getting. Nobody claimed to have had a perfect sight picture, and most admitted they weren't getting any sort of sight picture at all. Despite this, everyone was getting good hits. This developed into a short discussion of point shooting.

To put the Mat Dillon drill into context, Randy went through the basics of how pistol bullets stop people: fear, pain, lower the blood pressure to the brain, sever the spinal cord, and destroy critical parts of the brain. Of these the only ones that are both sure stoppers and instantaneous are the spinal cord and the brain. Any other hit may to take some time to take effect. Beating your opponent to the draw by a fraction of a second hardly guarantees victory. In fact it probably leaves him plenty of time to try to kill you before he expires.

The solution is to take advantage of the adversary's OODA loop, rather than trying to outdraw him. The OODA loop is a description of the human decision making process. We Observe a change in our environment, Orient by putting that change into the context of our knowledge and previous experience, Decide what we're going to do in response, then Act to carry out that decision. Running through this loop in personal combat takes 1.5 - 2 seconds. 

We can take advantage of the adversaries OODA loop by getting off the X: moving off our original position and forcing our opponent back to the beginning of the loop. While he goes through the OODA cycle, we can be drawing, maneuvering for a better position and getting shots on board.

Randy showed the Pekiti takeoff, some footwork that we've borrowed from Fillapino knife fighting that can help get us off the X quicker. This is one of those things that's difficult to describe in writing, but essentially you drop your body weight and use that drop to shift one foot back to drive off of. It allows for a very quick GOTX.

After the students practiced their takeoff for a bit, Randy discussed the merits of choosing different directions to get off the X in. Generally, versus an assailant armed with a firearm we prefer the forward oblique angles, since these provide the biggest change in angle, from the adversary's point of view.

To test how well people were getting off the X, the students went up against Randy. Randy has one of the fastest elbow-up elbow-down drawstrokes I've ever seen, but even against this students were able to get off the X before he could shoot when they executed everything correctly.

At this point we broke up into groups of two and practiced getting off the X. Initially, one student drew and fired at the spot where the other student was standing while he got off the X. Once they had this down, to make it a bit more challenging we started working GOTX against the drawn gun. This time the student playing the bad guy role could shoot as soon as he saw the other student move. Even with the gun already out, students could generally get out of the way before the shot.

Up until this point we'd been focusing on the good guy getting off the X. Now we added in some return fire. After moving off the X the good guy now drew and fired a single shot in return. This managed to mess some people up. As soon as you start thinking about drawing and firing, there's a tendency to prioritize this over movement. Ideally, moving and drawing should initiate at the same moment, but if one has to happen before the other, it should be movement.

After a late lunch, we resumed practicing getting off the X. To keep the student playing the bad guy from cheating, because he knows the student is going to get off the X, and can probably make a good guess about the direction, Randy had them draw and fire their first shot with their eyes closed. 

Since everyone seemed to have the basics down, Randy upped the ante a bit. Rather than just firing a single shot, the bad guy student fired one at the good guy's original position, then tracked began tracking them and firing a second shot. This simulates the assailant working through his OODA loop and adjusting to your movement. In return, we let the good guy fire a pair, rather than just a single shot. Once the students had worked this for a while, Randy allowed each student to fire multiple shots. 

We picked up some discussion of point shooting from earlier and talked about what kind of sight picture people got while getting off the X. The universal answer was that they weren't really using the sights, this was pure point shooting. 

To finish up the day, Randy had everyone work the GOTX drill without any sort of OODA lag on the adversary's part. They could draw and fire directly towards the good guy as he moved, without having to shoot at his original position.

With this, we wrapped things up for the day. Alex arranged for a neighborhood eatery to cater a nice spaghetti dinner for us. After we were done eating, Randy got things going on the Glock Armorer class.

Sunday

We picked up on Sunday morning with a few more GOTX drills similar to what we'd been doing at the end of the day on Saturday to get everybody warmed up. Then we moved on to dealing with opponents armed with contact weapons (knives, clubs, etc.). The nice thing about contact weapons is that if you can stay out of arms' reach, you're safe. The problem is that's easier said than done.

When confronted by a knife armed assailant, most peoples' instinct is to backpedal away. This is one of the worst ways to handle the situation. The assailant can probably run forwards faster than you can backpedal and backpedaling increases the risk that you'll trip on something and end up falling and bouncing the back of your head on the asphalt. That's a pretty good way to knock yourself out. Far better to point your toes and hips in the direction you want to go and run.

Which direction? Well, there are basically two options: increase distance or change the angle. If you are far enough and have enough speed, you can just turn tail and run. Then, as you're running, draw your gun and twist around to shoot. How well turning it into a footrace like this works is going to depend on how fast you are relative to the assailant and how much distance you start off with. The other option is to take a page from our pistol GOTX techniques and change the angle. This doesn't require as much speed and it works at shorter distances (provided you're outside of arms' reach to begin with).

Randy had everyone start out working this as a big group. One student was the good guy, another the bad guy and everyone else watched. After running it a couple of times the bad guy became the good guy and a new bad guy rotated in. This allowed everyone a chance to see what worked and what didn't and to get some feedback from Randy on what they were doing. One important element that became obvious pretty quick is that it works much better if you go to their non-weapon side. If you go towards the hand with the knife in it the slightest miscalculation means you'll end up running right into the knife. After everyone had a chance to go a couple of times, we broke up into pairs and worked on it some more. 

Next up: multiple adversaries. If you're the bad guy, working in a two-man team, from your perspective the best place for the victim is between you. If you're the good guy, the best place for the bad guys are lined up, so one bad guy is between you and the second bad guy (this is called "stacking"). Exactly how this unfolds in real life depends a lot on how each side maneuvers. To demonstrate the dynamics of this, we worked though it as a group, with two bad guys and one good guy, rotating through all the students. What generally worked best for the good guy was moving quickly and decisively. Trying to go between the bad guys generally didn't work out. The real killer, however, was waiting too long to move. When you're outnumbered you can't allow the enemy the initiative. By the time you see what he's committed to its probably too late. 

We broke for lunch, then returned and continued with multiple adversaries, this time three on one. The difficulty really ramps up here. This is one of the things I really love about Force on Force. Against static, paper targets, gunning down three in succession looks pretty cool. The three target array is a staple of many gun games and training courses. In reality, going up against three adversaries that actively maneuver and shoot back is extremely difficult. It's not impossible, but it's going to take a lot more than just a quick trigger finger and good target to target transitions. You need to be decisive, smart, and aggressive, and deploy good GOTX tactics to come out on top.

To finish up the class, we ran through some scenarios. We had the student's hang out in the garage and sent them down the driveway one at a time. I played the bad guy, allowing Randy to stand back and observe.

In the first scenario, I acted as an aggressive panhandler. Randy told me to turn it into a robbery if I really got them into an advantageous position, but none of the students let me get that close. I moved to intercept the student, block his progress down the driveway and insistently ask for money. If the student got around me, I let them go, and if they gave me a really strong verbal "back off" I did (though I didn't move out of their way). Other than that I was pretty insistent. 

The students' responses covered quite a wide range. Those who were quick, decisive, or willing to walk of the path often got by me. Those who were more tentative usually didn't. A few of them pulled guns on me, and one of them lit me up.

The next scenario was more of a straight up robbery. It also included Alex as a second opponent coming up behind the student. I stopped their forward progress and distracted them while Alex came up behind, then we proceeded with the robbery. 

Again, the students had a range of responses. One student managed to get in a gunfight with Alex before he ever got down to me. The quick, decisive ones managed to slip by me and avert the robbery altogether. This time, those who ended up stopping ended up in a real bad spot, trapped between me and Alex. The way it usually unfolded was almost comical: the student heard Alex coming up behind him and looked over his shoulder, he looked back at me, then back at Alex, then when he looked back at me he found himself staring down the muzzle of my airsoft gun. I was able to pull this sort of thing off several times. 

Our last scenario was a carjacking. The setup was that the students were coming out of the gym and getting in their car. J.D. Lester parked his car in the driveway. The students were given a duffel bag with their gym gear in it and they had to come out of the garage and get in the car. Alex or I were crouching down on the far side of the car and when the students were occupied with the car door we ran around the back and tried to jack them. Despite being hypervigilant in a way that only a scenario-based self-defense class can make you, most students didn't walk around and check for someone hiding behind the car. Most of them did manage to pick up on the BG before he got right up to them, but in a few cases the assailant got within arms' reach.

With this, we wrapped things up. Alex and I pitched our upcoming classes (including Randy's 0-5 class in Columbia next April) and Randy handed out the certificates. 

Conclusions

As usual, Randy ran a great class. The students were enthusiastic and eager to learn. IThe curriculum did a good job of getting the students to understand the usual S.I. fundamentals of getting off the X and point shooting. 

One of the big differences from the last time I took the full Force on Force class is the addition of the scenarios on Sunday afternoon. I think they did a real good job reinforcing Randy's PESTS lecture and emphasizing the need for quick, decisive movement. If you keep moving it's going to go a lot better for your than if you stand around dithering.

One thing several incidents during the class reinforced was that airsoft magazines are nowhere near as durable as the real thing. Students broke several mags, both from traditional airsoft guns and from the Umarexes. Generally the culprit was accidentally dropping the mag, usually during the draw. Another problem we saw a couple of times was difficulty with the safeties. In particular, the sliding safety on the Umarex guns sometimes gets engaged as you put it in the holster. Another reason to grind that thing down and perhaps glue it in the fire position.

In sum, I would highly recommend this class, along with anything else Randy Harris teaches.

Guerilla Sniper Kingman Oct 2011 - What Students Say

Wow! never did I imagine I could take a stock FAL throw on a $300 weaver 3-10 and make head shots at 600 and body shots out to 1000 (not without some work on the 1000 but none the less accomplished the task). 

If you ever wanted to push the limits of your platform and your abilities this class is for you! 

We had every kind of rifle imaginable at this class bolts to semi's .223 to 50cal (that was a treat from Gabe for fun) for the most part everyone was shooting .308 and hitting steel all day. Day one was spent from 100-500 getting things dialed in and getting our Dope the amount of useful info you get from this class about you and your weapons capabilities is priceless. 

Day 2 the wind picked up steadily blowing around 8-10 and gusting up to 15 at times being in a valley surrounded by peak added to the challenge of reading the wind properly but we all manged to get good hits out to 800-900 yards. I actually made a first round hit at 800 with the FAL and was able to get good hits at 900. 1000 became a challenge mostly because I was zeroed at 100 and ran out of mill hold over. 

Day 3 we were given scenarios and target identification drills these were a real eye opener to the limited window a sniper might have to acquire, identify and eliminate a target all after doing a 50-75 yard sprint.

Hasty hides were the next order of business major lesson taken away from this exercise - the world is not a prone place, if all your long distance training is done from prone you will be disappointed when you get into position and realize you have no shot from prone-practice alternate shooting positions as much as possible! seated, kneeling standing use your spotter for support all manor of improvised positions will be greatly beneficial.

 

I could keep going with all the great things you will take away from this course but I think everyone should find out for themselves just how much they can get out of it. Sign up get your gear and get ready to hear the magical sound of- "on scope, on trigger, send it- bang.... wait for it... wait for it... ting!!" you just made a 1000 yard shot at a torso size steel!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kingman Gurilla Sniper Class (Oct. 2011)... Another Point of View 

I had been searching for a "long range rifle class" for some time when I somehow ran across Suarez Int's. web site and found a class titled "Guerrilla Sniper". I had not even clicked the link to the course description yet but somehow I knew this would be the training I had been searching for. Any outfit with the balls big enough to name the class Guerrilla Sniper had my attention. 

My gut told me this wouldn't be like your mommas, run of the mill, milk toast, wussafide, treat you like a your no-nothing douche type of class. Reality confirmed my initial feelings.

There were a couple of things the course was NOT:  It was NOT the place for Government haters to gather and conspire or even swap theories on how to bring down the current regime. Gabe made that clear early on, “This is not the place to have those types of discussions, don't even go there.”  

It was NOT a Marine sniper course or any other branch of service’s course. Stalking or map and compass work was not included. Ghillie suit construction was not covered, nor should it have been.

 

I will say offer that for a 3 day course the principals of marksmanship were probably up to par with most of the training an aspiring sniper in the service of his Country will get. Gabe seems to have a way to cut right to the bone and strip away the nonsense and fluff.

 

It was NOT a “this is the kind of rifle you must obtain if you are to be a true sniper” course either. There was none of the holier than thou attitude that seems to be prevalent elsewhere. As it turns out that whatever you have you can pretty much make work. Learn what your rifle is capable of, know its limitations, know your limitations and train, train train. 

It was (for me) an eye opening study of violence. 

What has history shown us on the subject of Guerrilla Sniping? Well, when the question was asked it caused me to think about... the IRA and Kosovo or wars in the Balkans. Oh, and those nasty folks in the Southern Philippines, they seem to employ their own brand of Guerrilla sniper tactics. How about our own home grown D.C. sniper? Apparently they studied tactics that are used in the middle east even today.

 

So many examples in history and even current events show us the various ways this specialized violence has been employed. It was very interesting to think about. We were encouraged to Ignore the label of Good guys and Bad guys and just contemplating various tactics used through out time. 

The GS course taught me alot about my own equipment that I presently own and brought to light some shortcomings. Let me say that Muzzle suppression and better optics are in my future... 

My confidence at getting first round hits at distances heretofore thought not do-able has been greatly bolstered. Smacking steel at 600 yards with a cold bore shot? Me? Well, yes as a matter of fact, quite doable. Hitting steel from 1000 yards from a standing position? Me? No. Not even remotely close to that skill level BUT I have the tools and basic foundation to someday check it off my bucket list. 

Being physically fit and flexible is another little gem of truth that was made painfully clear to me. 

During the sitting shooting position training I got zero sympathy from anybody when I started to whine about my damaged hip and lack of flexibility. “Yeah, Gabe cracked several vertebrae in his back and look how flexible he is” offered Dale Hunter who was assisting Gabe during the course.

Coordinated fire, target recognition and clear concise communication were taught and experienced by each class member.

Have you every shot a rifle from a vehicle? Do you have any idea what it sounds like to have rounds coming at you? How about suppressed fire from a .308 or a .223 or a pistol? Ever heard of a “wet” suppressor? How far can you reliably shoot sub-sonic ammo?

The GS course answered those questions and much more.

 

I could go on an on but at the risk of sounding like a hyperventilating, cool-aid drinking, SI groupie, let me just say the Guerrilla Sniper course exceeded all of my personal expectations. A nice bonus were the considerate, well prepared (rifle zeroed and generally squared away attitude) class mates. 

The real world, no BS training and information from Gabe and Dale made my 3 days in the Arizona desert a great experience not to mention a mind expanding event that I will not only remember but apply in my life to further my quest to be an effective rifleman. 

Avery

When I signed up, I knew this would be an excellent class. It turned out to be epic. Many, many thanks to Gabe and Dale for teaching a fantastic class! Also, having seriously awesome classmates made it an even better learning experience. 

In all honesty, I showed up a tiny bit nervous about shooting a .223 AR when I was pretty sure everyone else would be shooting something more formidable. I had tried to make peace with my competitive perfectionista streak and accepted the possibility of facing some massively frustrating moments beyond 700. ...turns out that wasn't really necessary. Even with wind and rain complicating things, hitting body sized targets out to 1000 was actually a perfectly reasonable goal to try for beyond the class goal of heads at 200 and bodies at 600. And BTW, hitting the head at 700-800 can be done just fine. I didn't have time to try at 900, however, at 1000, with those conditions, getting the head got a little maddening and giving the target repeated "haircuts" produced my most expletive-filled couple of minutes in recent memory, but, you know what, I managed to, even with .223. All in all, I was very pleased with the results.

 

That said, if you can handle running around and shooting well with something larger, common sense dictates using that. It may very well be in store for me at a later date, but at this point, being relatively new to rifles, smaller than most and not being the strongest ox on the farm, it's what made sense for me. I wanted to use a weapon that was a realistic option for me right now and find out what my limitations are - whether gear-based or user-based. I absolutely did not want to use something that I would need to hire a freakin' team of sherpas to cart around for me, simply for the sake of doing well in a class -- talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face! I figure if you're going to have a moment of cold hard reckoning with the limitations of your gear and abilities, during a class with amazing instructors and terrific classmates is just about the only good time & place for that.

Rifle: AR w/ 16" barrel, 1:7 twist, a lovely Geissele trigger, and stock collapsed down to nothing for my T-Rex arms. The rifle itself did great. Misses & inaccuracies were on account of my shortcomings.

Learning to read the wind better, knowing/understanding my numbers, getting better at plain old running the rifle, etc are all on my skills-to-improve-upon list.

For what it's worth, I liked running the semi-auto. Granted, I haven't spent much time with bolt guns, so I am biased. Follow-up shots were stupidly easy and in changing wind conditions, being able to fire off another shot or two before it changed again was nice. The virtually non-existent recoil helped in that regard too, along with making it simple to spot your own shots. I'm sure the aforementioned would have been harder had I been shooting a semi-auto .308 that kicks like a PCP-addled mule with anger management issues. But perhaps someday I'll see fit to school that mule... 

Ammo: .223, 77 gr match ammo (So as to avoid Dale's wrath, I won't mention the manufacturer... ) 

Scope: Nikon 4-14X, mildots w/ MOA dials. I had mine cranked up to 14X for most everything beyond a few hundred yards. The ability to adjust the scope was key while I was sitting in the shrubs -- peering through a couple hundred yards worth of branches & leaves at 14X gets really stupid really quickly. The mildots worked nicely for me. I had to go on a few mad dialing sprees: at 700, 900 & 1000. However, with the numbers handy, it was easy. In fact, if I had to do it over again, I'd probably dial up even more since I had dialed in increments that gave me just enough to make hold overs work.

That said, I still owe Gabe 44 burpees on account of screwing up the redial back to my 200 yd zero after Day 2 and consequently, turfing my target acquisition drill shot on Day 3... Yeah, good gear will never fully compensate for end-user-idiocy. Lesson learned: if you messed with your gear, get it back to where it should be before you leave the range/while your head's still in it. DO NOT wait til you've got a big dinner & a couple of beers in your belly and are on the verge of falling asleep on your feet to start messing with numbers & dials... because that's when bad things happen. 

Ruck/bag: My bag was on the small side, so from prone, the adjustable bipod won out. But in the shrubs, I ended up needing the bag + my partner's ruck under my leg for a seated-ish shot. Given how well others did with it, I'll be playing with using a larger bag in lieu of the bipod though. 

Bipod: This was an immensely helpful tool to me when prone, especially when paired up with a sandbag under the butt. However, during the hides, I either didn't use it at all or didn't use it in its intended way, and then removed it entirely for the vehicle hide (hooray for quick release).

Small sandbag: for under your rifle's butt when prone and under your butt, or thereabouts, when not. It's worth its weight in... ummm, well, sand. 

Sling: Using the sling made a huge difference for one of my awkwardly seated shots from the shrubby hides and certainly helped for getting back on target quickly when we worked the sling/hand/wall supported position. I also realized that I had practiced shooting righty and lefty, but neglected ambidextrous practice for wrapping the sling... Lets just say that I had a TMCO tourniquet flashback during my initial attempt when I went lefty. Given the amount of time and attention it took (ie, perplexedly staring at my arm thinking "nope, that cannot possibly be right" and then fidgeting around, probably shaking the heck out of the shrub I was hiding behind), I will be working on making that skill second-nature, not second-look. That way, I can keep my eyes up instead. 

Suppressors: *sigh*sniff*sigh* went the Californian, with tears of envy staining the AZ dirt below. Silly whining aside, hearing the shots at different distances was quite educational. Ditto the compare/contrast session on subsonic ammo. On the opposite end of the scale, the crack-boom of a .50 cal is really just one of the most satisfying noises EVER.

 

Sniper veil: Pros - lightweight & compact, easy to quickly throw over yourself in any position, and it's a decent quick fix to better controlling where your brass goes - I figured that out after forgetting to clean up one of my hides and getting a friendly reminder from some classmates who found my brass on their way out. (Eagle-eyed classmates rock!) Cons - can get caught up in twigs at inopportune moments, flimsy & a bit fluttery in wind. Extra-Big-Con - if placed imperfectly, a strong gust, such as from a car window opening, can move it so that you can no longer see well. 

Fitness: As with all other combatives-related endeavors, being fit will only help you. A lack of fitness will hasten your early demise. Strength, flexibility, speed, endurance - everyone needs these. Even in this fairly sedentary class, the extra 10-12 lbs I've let creep on over the last 18 months got in the way.

Pink Gorilla suit: ESSENTIAL!!!!! 

I didn't have the following on me during class, but... rangefinder, wind meter & binos seemed like they were used to good effect by others & will be finding their way into my ever growing Pile O' Gear. When I upgrade to a smarter smartphone, one of those nifty apps will get added first thing. Uhhh, I'm allowed to have all of those in CA, right...?!? :P 

Also, I owe many thanks to SI Instructor Extraordinaire, Uli Gebhard, for getting me squared away on my rifle fundamentals earlier this year at Rifle Gunfighting and to my friend and classmate Chris for putting in a huge amount of time & effort over the last few months tinkering with the AR to get it "just right" for me and familiarizing me with all of the bells n' whistles on it/the optic. My only other rifle experience having been my Saiga w/ iron sights, the poor guy had to answer a lot of different iterations of: what the heck is this? and it does what? why? how? uhhm, did I just break it? 

So, in a nutshell: GS is an amazing class. To get the most out of it, use good gear, get it in order beforehand, make sure you've got your fundamental skills down pat and show up willing to tackle any and all challenges given to you in class.

***************************************

GUERRILLA SNIPER TWO IS IN THE PLANNING STAGES FOR FALL OF 2012

Stop Being Afraid of Your Gun

By: Greg Nichols, Suarez International Staff Instructor

The more I train people, and train with people, the more I notice how many are afraid of their own firearm.  I find I keep running into folks who coddle their gun like they think they are going to break it or handle it like it‘s going to bite them and I find it to be a strange phenomenon that inhibits positive control of the firearm.

I find this phenomenon to be more prevalent in regards to hand guns than in rifles or shotguns.  So the only causes I can figure are two, proximity to the muzzle and overall size of the firearm.  I see people cautious of over-hand racking of the slide, riding the slide, rapid fire, loading, reloading, malfunction drills, and draw stroke.  To me a firearm is no more dangerous than a blender, toaster or automobile and I find myself wondering at the caution used in its manipulation.  A firearm is a mechanical device with a predictable result and is no more dangerous than a blender.  As long as you are operating a blender as intended it won’t hurt you.  The same goes for a handgun. If you don’t put your hand inside a toaster it won’t burn you.  If you don’t put something you care about in front of a firearm, it won’t get hurt.

Firearms are made of highly durable metals and polymers that for all intents and purposes are designed to contain and direct an explosion.  The handgun is designed to take use, abuse, and manual manipulation that comes from decades of ownership.  Do you believe that you can do more damage in manipulation than from normal functioning?  Do you not swing a hammer for fear of dropping it?  Do you not use a blender for fear that you will put your hand inside at the same time you press the button?  The caution I see isn’t from the lack of manual dexterity or strength involved in properly functioning the handgun, it’s a mental block caused by years of conditioning making a gun seem evil or inherently dangerous.  If you buy into this mode of thinking you’ve allowed a two pound inanimate object make you its bitch, and you need to become more familiar with the use and operation of the proper tool for the job. 

So how do you get more familiar with the handgun?  Well lets look at the way you learned to move a 2500 pound hunk of steel without killing yourself or others. What are some of the things in the process of learning to drive that you went through?

1. Desire:  You had the desire for the final result of being fully functional behind the wheel

2. Observation:  You watched a qualified driver function the vehicle

3. Reading:  You educated yourself in the operation of the vehicle an the rules and laws governing its use

4. Introduction:  A family member took you out and let you handle their vehicle under their supervision.  

5. Instruction:  You took a drivers education class where you gained, under direct tutelage, the basic skills needed to function your vehicle without breaking the law, hurting yourself, or hurting someone else.  You also learned about common maintenance procedures to keep your vehicle running strong.

6. Testing:  You took written and physical testing so you could demonstrate that you had a practical, working knowledge of the functioning of that vehicle.

7. Practice:  You put in hours upon hours driving under supervision with a constant stream of input from your coach to fine tune your ability.

8. Exercise:  You took the keys from Pops and began driving on your own.  You developed from the point of 10 and 2 and consciously checking your gauges, mirrors and windows, to the point that you can drink your cup of coffee, change the radio station and talk on the cell phone all while operating the vehicle.  You have ingrained that the vehicle is under your control and will do what you want it too.

So rilddle me this Batman, why is working a gun treated so differently from working a car?  I will give you two reasons.

1. The car hasn’t been vilified to the public (aside from it’s evil carbon footprint).
2. When driving a car you have no ability to skip from step 4 to step 8. There is an established, accepted process.

When you learned to drive you spent countless hours over just a few months or years learning the process. It was compressed learning and immersion instruction that allowed you to retain the information and the constant application of that process on a daily or weekly basis allowed you to own it.  Now you’re an adult learning a new skill with no point of reference other than paint-ball or Playstation.  You have learned the fear of hand guns from the media and “Experts” who fear their own their guns so now what do you do? 

FOLLOW THE PROCESS!  Go sign up for some SI classes, and set aside the time and money to learn from those that aren’t afraid of their gun.  Go learn from those that don’t treat you like the lowest common denominator.  Go associate with those who are at the top of their game and want you to join them at whatever level of competence you wish to achieve.  Go participate in regional training groups to get coaching so you can improve on the content you’ve learned in the classes you have under your belt.  Finally go practice and make these skills your own and,


STOP BEING AFRAID OF YOUR GUN!

 

Advanced AR15/M4 Gunfighitng

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Staff Instructor

Recently I “assisted” Randy Harris with the Advanced AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting class. I put assisted in quotation marks because I didn’t do all that much. I was mainly the demo dummy and an extra set of eyes during some drills.

This class was part of Red, White and Blue September, a 4 day block of AR focused instruction. It also included the regular AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting on Thursdayand Friday class and the AR15/M4 Armorer class on Friday night. I couldn’t make it out to help with the Thursday-Friday class, but I did show up in time for the Armorer class (if you want to hear about AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting you can read my AAR of the class from last May). I believe this is the first time the advanced version of the AR class has been offered.

Much like with the AR class last May, I came out to this one as part of my quest to become more comfortable with the AR platform. I’m primarily an AK guy, but as an instructor I really need to be able to run both.

The AR I brought is a BCM upper with a 16" lightweight barrel and mid-length gas system on a Palmetto State Armory stripped lower I put together. It’s most unusual feature is probably the fixed Sully Stock, which I really like. It’s very solid and is the same length as my AKs. It’s also fitted with Magpul handguards, a US Palm battlegrip, a Surefire G2 flashlight, and an EOTech on a LaRue mount. I fed it with PMags carried either in a Dale Fricke kydex belt pouch or a Sneakybag. My pistol was my EDC gun: a Glock 17 with the slide worked over by TSD for an RMR in a Seraphim holster.

The rest of the class mostly shot 5.56mm ARs (including a very nice LaRue upper on a Spikes lower). One student had an Armalite AR–10 in .308. Support gear ranged from belt pouches, to a TIB, to a plate carrier (sans plates). There was one 1911, but the rest of the students carried Glocks.

Saturday Morning

Some of the students in the class were holdovers from the Thursday-Friday class, but not all, so after the safety brief Randy started out with some dry work to make sure everyone was on the same page.

We started with the standing position, mounting the gun from different ready positions and practicing reloads. Then Randy had folks switch over to the left shoulder (everyone in the class normally shot right-handed) and mount and reload the gun over there. Suarez International is big on ambidexterous shooting and Randy always emphasizes it right from the start in his rifle classes. As usual, this is where things start getting interesting for people who don’t have mags accessible to both hands.

We moved on to the kneeling position and worked reloads from both sides. It’s not enough to be able to shoot from various positions, you need to be able to run the gun from these positions as well. Rounding out the position shooting, we did some work in prone. Randy also went over Spetsnaz prone and had the students try it out.

Next up Randy had the students work on addressing targets in any direction. Kneeling and particularly prone limit your mobility and in real life you are not guaranteed that threats will only come from “downrange”. You need to be able to adapt the position to shoot in any direction in case someone pops out from beside or behind you. From kneeling this is mostly a matter of switching shoulders and twisting your torso, or perhaps dropping one knee and raising the other as you pivot. From prone you may have to roll over on your back and shoot from supine.

To further emphasize ambidexterity, Randy had us do the slalom drill. The students line up with 2–3 yards between each person slaloms through the line, treating each student as a corner to be pied, switching shoulders as they go.

Randy talked about some non-traditional sighting measures: the “Caveman EOTech” and shooting over the top of your optic. In the caveman EOTech you use the front sight tower, rather than the sight itself, as an aiming tool. At close ranges you can look over the rear sight and superimpose the front sight tower on the target and make good hits without taking the time to line up the sights. The equivalent for folks with optics is to look over the top of your optical sight and use the sight itself as a reference point just below your line of sight. He had the students try these out using a handy post.

These really come into play once you start moving. Randy went through the standard S.I. get off the X lecture, talking about why we need to move, and why we like to move to the forward oblique angles.

Finally, Randy had the students practice one-handed reloads. Rifles are fundamentally two-handed tools, but we need to be able to run them one handed in the event we get shot in the arm.

With this, we broke for lunch at a local Subway.

Saturday Afternoon

After lunch we moved out to the range and started by making sure everyone was sighted in. Those who had been in the Thursday-Friday class were pretty well dialed in, but the new students needed some work. I thought my EOTech was pretty well dialed in, but I popped off a few rounds at one of the targets’ heads to make sure.

After getting everyone’s sights dialed in we promptly moved up to a range where the sights were irrelevant. We did some snap shooting using the Caveman EOTech/aiming over the optic methods. Getting used to aiming over the optic took some work for some folks, but after a little while everyone was getting good hits.

We moved back to 25 yards and did some work from both standing and kneeling, then moved back to 50 and shot standing, kneeling and prone. Once everyone was comfortable in the three positions Randy had us moving between them, shooting a pair from standing followed by a pair from kneeling, or starting kneeling and going to prone. Eventually we worked up to shooting two from standing, two from kneeling, two from prone, doing a proactive reload, then shooting two from prone, two from kneeling and two from standing.

During these drills my EOTech started flaking out. It turned itself off several times and I had to turn it back on between drills. During the standing, kneeling, prone, reload, prone, kneeling, standing drill it started off fine but the dot disappeared during the reload. These problems did serve to reinforce my decision to used fixed back-up iron sights rather than flip up. I have them set up for a lower 1/3 co-witness so all I have to do when the dot isn’t there is drop my head about half an inch. The transition is very quick, much quicker than flipping up sights or using a QD mount. By this point, however, I had enough of the flaky optic and between drills I made use of the QD mount and took it off the rifle entirely.

Back up at 7 yards, we did some failure to stop drills, shooting the body than switching to the head. At this range the body is an easy shot with Caveman EOTech or shooting over the optic, but you need more precision for the headshot, so this drill also tested the ability to switch between sighting methods. During these drills I realized just how long it had been since I’d done much shooting with iron sights that have a rear aperture. I’m much more used to AK or pistol style sights with a rear notch. It took a bit of time to reaccustom myself to the aperture sights.

We worked on ambidextrous shooting, firing from the right shoulder, doing a partial transition (moving the buttstock to the other shoulder but keeping the hands in position) and firing. Then doing full transition (switching hands) and shooting, doing a partial transition back to the other shoulder and firing, then completing the full transition and firing the last shot. We worked this back and forth several times.

Next, we started moving and shooting. First we did the pacing drill, where you walk left and right in front of the target, switching shoulders as appropriate. After everyone had this down, we started getting off the X to the right (3-o’clock).

During some of these drills several times i managed to knock the safety of my rifle on as I swapped my hands during the shoulder transfer. I’m not used to having a safety over there on my AK. I guess I need to do some weapon-specific shoulder transfer practice.

During these drills, the student with the AR–10 suffered a badly stuck case. Initially the extractor slipped off the rim, so he tried to knock if out with another student’s range rod. He didn’t get it out, but in the process he got the extractor back over the case rim, so we were able to bang the stock on the ground and mortar it out.

We went back to getting off the X, to the left this time. Then Randy demonstrated the Pekiti takeoff footwork for getting off the X faster. We practiced this dry quite a bit, then went live with it to both the right and left. Randy also added in an after action drill, checking to see if the guy you just shot is really down, if he has friends (including looking behind you) if you need to reload, and if you have any injuries.

As we did this, the AR–10 suffered another problem: the hammer began sticking back and refused to drop after the first shot. After opening the gun up we figured out that it was hanging up on the disconnector hook, rather than dropping onto the sear when the trigger was reset. At this point the Armalite had suffered extraction problems during the Thursday-Friday class (bad enough that the student borrowed one of Randy’s rifles), the stuck case, and now this trigger group problem. The student just decided to give up on the AR–10 for this class and borrowed Randy’s rifle again.

We wrapped everything up and headed out. Most of the class headed down to a nice steakhouse in Fort Payne for dinner. There was good food, great fellowship, and lots of interesting discussion.

After dinner, I did something rather uncharacteristic of me: I cleaned a gun during a class. With Glocks and AKs I’ve never bothered, but I hadn’t really given this rifle a thorough cleaning since before the Long Gun Point Shooting Progressions last May. Since then it had probably had 800 rounds of Wolf through it. I’d wiped the internals off a bit with a rag on a few occasions (including during the Armorer class on Friday) but never gotten out the solvent and really scrubbed the thing. Clearly the AR does not have to be white-glove clean to run. However, I did have one non-operator induced malfunction during the day when the bolt hung up on the top round of the magazine, so I figured scrubbing it might slicking everything up a bit.

Sunday

We started out the day with some malfunction clearance. Everyone laid their rifles out on the ground pointing downrange and Randy and I set up various malfunctions: empty chamber, unseated magazine, failure to eject (aka: a stovepipe), failure to extract (aka: a double feed) and a spent case stuck between the charging handle and the bolt. The students had to pick up each rifle and fire it twice, clearing the malfunction in the process. The first three can be cleared fairly easily with a tap-rack. The failure to eject requires getting the magazine out, then reloading. The case stuck in the charging handle requires locking the bolt back and briskly closing the charging handle. It’s also a demonstration of why we don’t necessarily want to tap-rack every malfunction on an AR like we do with a pistol, since racking a weapon in this condition will just wedge the case in further. If you get a click but no bang, tap rack. If you just get a mushy trigger, rip the mag out and see what you’ve got.

Next up was transitions to pistol. If you’re carrying a pistol and are within effective pistol range (varies depending on how good a shooter you are) going to pistol is going to be faster than reloading and empty gun or fixing many malfunctions. Most of the guys in the class were running two point slings, but one was running a single point. For the two-point sling guys I demoed the standard S.I. over the head transition and the students practiced it dry until they had it down.

We loaded up a mags with two rounds and practiced shooting the rifle dry then transitioning. It’s very important to actually shoot the rifle dry for two reasons: first, it gives you the stimulus (the rifle not working) that we want you to react to with a transition. Second, it means we don’t have to apply the safety before transitioning. The safety on an AR will not engage when the hammer is forward. Where is the hammer going to be if your gun malfunctions? In a majority of cases its going to be forward. I don’t want anyone out there in a real gunfight standing there trying to engage a safety that’s not going to go on when they should be transitioning to pistol. Finally, in the even the student fails to engage the safety on a hot weapon before transitioning, there’s a chance some bit of gear is going to get inside the trigger guard and the gun will go off. One of our competitors recently had a student shoot themselves in just this way.

We moved on to using the gun as an impact weapon. This is one area where the AR class differs a bit form our AK classes. With an AK, using the buttstock is a major part of our impact weapon drills. In an AR, the stock contains a critical part of the gun’s operating system, so we don’t want to risk damaging it. With the AR we do a lot more work with the muzzle end of the gun. Randy showed us some simple strikes, including how to throw the buttstock and protect it by throwing and elbow along with the stock. After practicing these a bit, he had us work on some weapon retention techniques if someone grabs your gun by the muzzle. Lastly, we practiced blocking incoming contact weapon strikes and counterattacking with the muzzle.

We’d gotten off the X to the right and left (3 and 9 o’clock) yesterday. Today we added in the forward and rearward obliques. We worked our way around the clock face (the 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 o’clock directions) practicing moving off the X and shooting. The rearward angles add a bit of complication, but the basic principles were the same as what we did yesterday.

I had bought some new batteries and put them in my EOTech this morning. That got the scope working initially, but the reticule quickly dimmed and eventually I was taking more time trying to pick up the dim dot than I would have shooting with irons. I decided I was done with thins thing. I popped the sight off and went back to irons for the rest of the class.

Until now, we’d done all our engagements facing directly towards the adversary. In the real world, bad guys may pop up to the left, right, or rear as well. We practiced from a standing position with the targets off our left shoulder, behind us, and off our right shoulder. In standing we got off the X and shot on the move. We did the same thing from kneeling. Here, you lack the mobility you’ve got in standing so it’s just a matter of getting the gun on target as quickly as possible and shooting the threat.

We moved back to about 25 yards to shoot from prone (so we didn’t send rounds over the berm. For targets to the left and right we didn’t truly have the shooters turn 90 degrees, since that would be a safety hazard (unlike standing and kneeling you can’t really face someone and avert your muzzle in prone). Instead we had them pointing slightly forward of the line. For a target behind you when prone we did this one at a time, with all the spectators on the one side of the shooter so they could swing their rifle round safely and shoot from supine.

After spending most of the morning blasting away at close range targets, Randy wanted to exercise their accuracy shooting a bit, so we put up a set of three steel targets and moved out to 50 yards. Before the drill he was dinking around a bit with his pistol (an iron sighted Gen 4 G17) and asked if I had my RMRed Glock. I drew it and banged all three steel targets with one shot each (something I don’t think any of the students did with their rifles on the first try). RMRed pistols are just spectacular. After that bit of fun, Randy had the students shoot from standing, kneeling, and prone, and moving between them, much as we did yesterday.

At this point we ventured into the team portion of the program. We have entire classes dedicated to team tactics, but we like to throw a bit of this stuff into the intermediate and advanced rifle classes as well. This is not necessarily because we expect our students to form fire teams and fight as light infantry. It’s more a method of adding a additional elements they have to think about. Up to this point, the students have only had to think about running their rifles and moving. In the team drills you have to be aware of where you are in relation to your teammates, what they’re doing, what you should be doing, communicating, managing your ammo supply, etc. How well you’re able to run your rifle when you can dedicate your full attention to doing that isn’t really a very good test of how well you can run your rifle in a fight. Being able to run your rifle while you’ve got a bunch of other stuff to think about is.

We started off with a basic peel drill. The students lined up in a file facing one of the targets (a file runs up and down range, with each man behind the other, a line runs across the range, with each man beside the other). The first student fired four rounds at the target, brought his rifle up to high-noon ready, turned and walked to the back of the file. He taps the second man in the file on the shoulder as he goes by as a signal to start shooting. As each man moves to the back the entire file migrates up range. We shot this drill a couple of times, then moved on to a variation. Instead of going to the back of the file the students lined up across the range in prone and, once the last man was back at the line, everyone opened up on the targets. This sort of simulates breaking contact with a hostile force, then ambushing them.

For the next drill we had everyone line up shoulder to shoulder, facing downrange. Much like with the peel drill, the fellow on the left end of the line fired, then moved down to the right end of the line. The difference here is he was moving across the range, rather than down it. Once they had this down, we combined the two drills. They started out in a file, the first man shot and moved back to form the start of a line going across the range. As students shot they moved back from the file and took up a position on the right end of the line. Once the last man was in the line, the first one fired, then moved back to form a file behind the last guy. Keeping this up they moved back and to the right alternating between a file and a line.

Up until this point these had clearly been team drills, rather than actual team tactics. While they were modeled on tactics one might actually use (like the Australian peel) the spacing was way too close and things were very structured and staged. Now we moved on to somewhat more tactically realistic exercises.

First up was the Columbian special forces drill. The students started out at about 60 yards and fired a shot at a steel gong from prone. Once they hit it, they moved up to a piece of cover a bit further down range (the range outhouse) performed a proactive reload, and fired six shots at a paper target. They continued moving downrange to various pieces of cover, firing six shots from each. The magazine they loaded back at the outhouse had around 26 rounds in it, so they ran out while firing the six shots from the closest piece of cover and had to transition to pistol. When they fired their six shots from the closes piece of cover, they fire the pistol at the steel gong to end the drill. Then we counted the number of holes in the paper target. Everyone had at least 28 holes in the paper.

Back to the team drills, Randy had the students practice bounding and bumping. Both of these are ways that two elements (whether they be individuals or teams) can move forward with one always covering the other. In bounding, the shooters leapfrog past each other. So if there are two shooters and four pieces of cover (A, B, C, & D), the first shooter moves to A, then the second shooter moves to B while the first shooter covers him from A. The first shooter moves to A to C while the second covers him from B. The second shooter moves from B to D while the first shooter covers him from C, and so on. In bumping, the first shooter goes when the second shooter gets to his piece of cover. So, the first shooter would move to A and cover the second shooter while he moves up to A. When the second shooter gets there he provides cover fire from A while the first shooter moves to B. The first shooter provides cover fire from B while the second shooter moves up. When the second shooter gets to B he provides cover fire from there while the first shooter moves up to C, and so on.

Both of these require proper communication to make sure people are moving at the right times and there’s always at least one gun up and firing, even when someone needs to reload. To get everyone accustomed to this, we ran bumping and bounding drills just moving down the firing line about 7 yards from the target. One student would engage the first target while the second bounded past him to the second target. The other student would bound past him to the third target, and so on.

Once the students had been introduced to bumping and bounding, we went back and shot the Columbian SF drill in pairs. First the students bumped downrange, alternating pieces of cover (the cover was set up so there was no danger of anyone getting in their partner’s line of fire). Then they did the same thing bounding.

Finally, we moved back up to the targets and had the students work some one-handed reloads. This is awkward and slow and nobody is ever going to be quick and elegant with it. However, it’s important to have done it at least once, if only so you know it’s possible and won’t just give up if your arm is injured and your rifle stops working. For a bit of added torture, Randy also had them also do the one-handed reloads lying on their backs, as if whatever injured your arm also dropped you to the ground.

This finished up the class. Randy handed out the certificates and we went our separate ways.

Conclusion

As usual, Randy did a great job with this class. The advanced rifle classes really push the curriculum about as far as it can go, particularly when you’ve got a good group of students.

My rifle ran reliably, with only one non-operator induced malfunction. The other 5.56mm ARs did the same. The only troublesome one was the Armalite AR–10 in .308. It probably helped that most of these rifles got taken apart and lubed during the armorer course on Friday night.

Unfortunately, my optic was not as reliable as my rifle. I originally bought this EOTech about four years ago, but I only ran it for about a year before I swapped it out for an Aimpoint Micro. It’s been sitting on the shelf ever since. When I got this AR earlier this year I pulled it out and put it on the rifle. It’s given me nothing but trouble ever since. I’ll be calling EOTech customer service and seeing what they can do for me (at this point the optic is out of warranty). I guess this was a good chance to polish up my iron sighted shooting skills. As I mentioned earlier, the flaky optic did serve to confirm my preference for fixed, rather than flip-up, BUIS (at least on rifles with non-magnified optics where you can set it up for a lower 1/3 cowitness). The transition to irons when I realized I couldn’t see the dot was very quick.

Overall, this was a great course and Randy did a great job teaching it. While S.I. is best known for our AK stuff, we’ve also got a cadre of instructors who really know the AR well and a curriculum that teaches you to run the rifle and employ it to it’s fullest extent.

AR15/M4 Armorer - After Action Review

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Staff Instructor

I recently had a chance to attend S.I.'s AR15/M4 Armorer class, taught by Rycan Acuff.  The class was part of Red, White, and Blue September, which also included AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting on Thursday and Friday and Advanced AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighitng on Saturday and Sunday. 

I actually arrived just after they'd wrapped up for the day on the AR Gunfighting class.  Ryan was performing a bit of Armorer work on one of the students' rifles (a balky Armalite AR-10).  He replaced the extractor and some associated parts.  The rifle immediately began running considerably better.
We began with a safety brief, which obviously was rather different from a shooting class.  The fundamental rule was no live rifle ammo in the classroom.  

The demo gun Ryan used, and his reasons for choosing that gun, are kind of interesting.  He used a rather retro rifle, with a 20-inch barrel, A1 stock, fixed carry handle, a slick-sided upper receiver (no forward assist), and triangular handguards.  He said the reason he used this gun was because this was essentially the rifle as Eugene Stoner designed it.  Any time you change something from this configuration (and there are ARs out there that have changed almost everything) you're moving away from the original design and potentially impacting reliability.  Now, this doesn't mean we should all be using rifles that look like they came straight from 'Nam, but you should think about each modification you make and what it's impact (for good or ill) will be.

Ryan began by talking a bit about the custamizability of the AR.  As the poster says, it's basically Barbie for men.  This is a strong point for the system, but you don't want your rifle to look like it was dragged through the Cheaper than Dirt catalog.  Think about what this gun's mission is and have a good reason for anything you bolt to it.

We started with the muzzle device.  Ryan talked briefly about how they are installed, and what's involved in changing it out for a different one.  Unless you're changing it, there's no real reason to remove it.  Next up was the front sight base.  We discussed how the front sight base goes on and why you might (or might not) want to remove it.  Moving further back from the muzzle we talked about handguards and the gas tube. 

Shifting to the upper receiver, Ryan talked about the forward assist.  This is not a feature he had a whole lot of use for.  In Eugene Stoner's original AR design, the only "forward assist" was the scallop on the bolt carrier facing the ejection port.  The rifleman would place his finger into this depression and push forwards if the rifle needed a bit of help going into battery.  If the gun doesn't want to go into battery, using a lot of force to try to pound it into battery is probably not the best course.  Ryan has also seen messed up forward assists cause problems with the rifle.  You don't really need one, and if you have one you're better off ignoring it.

We also spent some time discussing sights, and in particular the differences between the A1 and A2 sights.  The A1 sights are a more rugged, less adjustable design, but you are limited to a small aperture.  The A2 sights have small and large aperatures and considerably more adjustment that can be performed at the rear sight, but they are easier to knock out of adjustment than the A1.  Perhaps the best of both worlds is an A1 sight with the A2 apertures, which is a fairly easy swap (my Daniel Defense rear iron sight came in this configuration).

One thing that came up during the discussion was the matter of roll pins.  The AR is almost entirely held together by roll pins.  There are very few screws on the design (one in the grip and two to hold on the butt plate, if I remember correctly).  Roll pins have the virtue of not unscrewing themselves under vibration or recoil.  They can be removed if you want to take something apart, but Ryan emphasized that you should never re-use a roll pin.  Just get a new one and use that.

We talked a bit about the charging handle.  This is one of the weak points of the original AR design, particularly when people run them in the modern style: running the charging handle using the support side hand to activate the latch and pull on just that side of the handle, rather than using the firing hand and putting a finger on each side.  BCM makes a considerably stronger version, which is less likely to bend.  There's also a trend towards oversized charging handle latches, like the Badger tac-latch or the version of the BCM handle with the large latch.  These are more likely to get caught on gear and to jab you in the back during a transition to pistol.  I've got the medium sized version of the BCM handle and even the small version would probably work just as well.

Next up was the dust cover (that little flip down thing on the ejection port).  Ryan did an interesting job of contrasting the design philosophies of the AK and AR on this point.  The AK is designe with big holes where stuff can get in, but it can also get out.  The AR is built around keeping stuff out, without a lot of big entry/exit points.  It tends to run best when you embrace this philosophy and keep the dust cover closed when not in use.  If you're not actively shooting, you should click it shut.
Ryan went on to briefly discuss the trigger guard, bolt release, and the pins that attach the upper to the lower.

Next he gave one of the clearest explanations I've heard or read about the different AR gas systems (rifle, carbine, and midlength), how they relate to "dwell time" and why certain systems are better/more reliable for certain barrel lengths.  For a 16" barrel he recommends a mid-length gas system.

With that we popped the guns open and field stripped them, pulling out the bolt and bolt carrier and setting them aside.  He had us pull out our buffers and action springs.  We talked about the difference between rifle and carbine buffers, and the various weights available for carbine buffers.  The carbine size buffers are available in standard, H1, H2, and H3 weights.  The heavier weights can increase reliability, particularly in SBRs and full auto  guns, but going with too heavy a buffer can cause problems.  If your gun's working fine with whatever buffer was in there when you got it (usually a carbine buffer on most guns without rifle-length stocks) Ryan recommended sticking with that, regardless of any of the purported advantages of heavier buffers.  He also showed us the procedure for removing a rifle buttstock and attaching a carbine-style stock.  

We talked about the different chambers available in the AR: 5.56mm, which is fairly loose for reliability; .223, which is tight for accuracy, and .223 Wylde, which is a compromise between the two.  On a serious fighting rifle 5.56mm is the way to go.  Unfortunately, some manufacturers will label their barrels as being 5.56mm even though they don't actually have a true 5.56mm chamber.  
We popped our bolts out of the bolt carriers and stripped them.  This involves a lot of really small, fiddly parts, but checking the extractor and extractor spring is important to keeping an AR running well (as the fellow with the AR-10 found out in class earlier that day).  We talked about the different springs, inserts, and rings available to keep the extractor going properly.  Given that these are critical to the functioning of the gun and do wear out, Ryan recommended keeping extra springs, inserts, o-rings, and an extractor on hand.  

Another part he recommends keeping around are some extra gas rings.  To test them, he had us put the bolt back in the carrier (without a cam pin or any other parts) and hold it bolt down.  If the bolt stays in the carrier, the gas rings are good to go.  If it falls out, it's time to replace.  We also discussed the one-piece McFarland gas ring as a substitute for the factory rings.

Next up we talked about cleaning and lubrication.  ARs are not as sensitive to carbon fouling as some would have you believe (though they certainly are more sensitive than Glocks or AKs).  However, they absolutely have to be well lubericated.  Ryan talked about where to lube your gun and how much.   His favorite lube is 30 weight Mobile 1 Synthetic, but a good gun oil or white lithium grease will also work perfectly well.  You don't have to hose them down with lube, but they aren't really hurt by excess lubrication (they'll just blast it out when you start shooting them).  Given how critical proper lubrication is, it's probably best to err on the side of more lube, rather than less. 

After we put our guns back together, Ryan brought out a trigger pull gauge and measured the trigger weight on everybody's gun.  Average was in the 7-8 pound range, which is typical for a fighting rifle.
This was a great class.  The AR is more maintenance sensitive than other guns, as well as being more modualr.  This need for owner-level maintenance and the possibility of owner-level modification means that there's really a need for AR shooters to know a bit more about their weapon.  This class does a great job of that.  In four hours we were able to go through all the main features of the system without it feeling rushed.  Ryan clearly knows the system very well and did a great job presenting the information.  He had answers for even the most obscure questions (and he got some obscure ones) and was always very clear in laying out how the system worked and what could (and should) be done to it.  I highly recommend the class for AR owners and I'd wouldn't hesitate to recommend taking it from Ryan.

Flashlight in the Hand

Avoiding  the Profile Individual/Deterring the Profile Individual/Dominating the Profile Individual by Roger Phillips, Suarez International Specialist and Tier One Instructor

This is basically the same lecture that I have been giving since 2005 inside of my low light courses. This lecture is a combination of Col. Cooper's lecture that I heard through a third party back in 1999, teachings from Gabe Suarez from 2002, and some very recent formatting tips from Randy Harris. This information has been around for a very long time, but I have never seen it combined with the "flashlight in the hand" philosophy.

 

"The flashlight in the hand" philosophy is the tactic of carrying a small, powerful, tactical flashlight  in your non-dominant hand whenever you are in a risky area after the sun has gone down. Whether you are walking the dog, exercising, or making a run down to the grocery store/Wal-Mart, if you are going to be in a public place after sundown, it is the tactic of always carrying your flashlight in your hand.

The main reason for you to do this is because the vast majority of the times that you may need your flashlight, in a self defense situation, if it is not already in your hand you will most likely never get it into your hand. The number one reason for carrying a flashlight is for making the identification (ID) of the hands and the waistbands for weapons, since our visual acuity is cut in half in low light.  It is the hands that kill and the waistband is where bad guys (BG) usually keep their weapons. The number two reason for carrying a flashlight is to disrupt the vision of the adversary. A bright light in the eyes not only disrupts the adversaries vision but it allows the good guy (GG) to work behind a wall of light. When the adversary can no longer see you, that causes doubt and uncertainty. This uncertainty may be all that you need to deter an attack.

 

A flashlight is not necessarily a fighting tool. I do not need the flashlight to make the hits. It is much more valuable as a physical deterrent (BG cannot see GG) and a visual disruptor (BG's vision is 5% of what it was just a second before.) If you need to fight with the light on you are creating a constant focal point to attack. If you can disrupt that adversaries vision, turn the light out and move, there is no focal point to follow, there is only blinded bewilderment! Even if they recover, you can take their vision again. We have all heard "A flashlight is a bullet magnet" but this does not have to be the case if you "see what you need to see" and "blind as you need to blind" then turn the flashlight  out. If you remove the constant focal point the liabilities of the bullet/knife/club magnet decrease. It is the lessons of when to use the flashlight and when not to use the flashlight that are the most valuable of the lessons. Being able to shoot with the flashlight in conjunction with the gun is mildly interesting, that is entry level knowledge. Knowing when to blind, when to turn the flashlight off, when and where to move, and when to turn the light back on is the advanced knowledge. This knowledge is not possible without thorough testing inside of low light FOF and from both sides of the coin. You have to be both the GG and the BG to learn the lessons as they need to be learned. The reality is that all of this knowledge is useless if your flashlight is at home, in your car, or even in your pocket. If it is not in your hand when you spot the profile individual, it will probably never make it into your hand.

The term "profile individual" (PI) speak for itself. This has nothing to do with race or sex. Trouble and danger comes in all races and in both sex. Trouble and danger has a very distinct look and feel, if you have been around the block a couple of times, you know what I am talking about. If you cannot recognize trouble and danger you may just need to be removed from the gene pool. Recognizing  trouble and danger starts with profiling. Forget about all of those politically correct idiots out there and let's get down to the bottom line. If you do not profile you are a fool! There is a very low danger level from a well groomed man in an expensive business suit or a elderly couple taking a walk in a park. But there is a higher danger level from groups of urban youths, especially in bad parts of town or where poverty is rampant. This is all just common sense here.

If you are out at night, doing whatever it is that you have to do, and you see a PI that is going to cross your path here is a very quick overview of how to handle the PI.

 

Profile; It always starts with profiling! We must profile who is in our general vicinity while we are out after sun down. BG use the cloak of darkness to hide themselves and to hide their intent. Without profiling everything else that follows is worthless. Making the ID on a PI is the first piece of your back story. Back story is very important stuff, nothing happens inside of a vacuum. Collecting and building good pieces of back story allows you to build the information to facilitate making  the decisions that you are going to have to make. The more pieces the better the back story, the better the back story the quicker you will be able to work through your OODA loop. If you make a PI and he has orientated to you, the next thing that you need to do is as follows.

Avoid; Make a directional change to your movement and begin looking for other players. Choose a direction that will require the PI to re-orientate to you. If there is no re-orientation, that is a good thing, but keep your eye out for any other players/accomplice's along with the original PI. If the PI re-orientates to you, you have just succeeded in forcing the BG to show you his hand. You have created the second piece of the back story to further facilitate your decision making process. You now know the BG is keying on you. There are not coincidences! In low light you cannot allow the BG to close ground on you. You must stop his ingress! Here are some basic concepts to help stop the BG from closing ground you. The next two thing listed may need to be put into action simultaneously, but they are set down in order of importance.

 

Command; With a commanding voice and in conjunction with a flashlight in the PI eye's order them to "Back off!" In low light, with a quality flashlight the PI will see nothing but the light. You will have disappeared to him and all he will see is the source of the light and you will be cloaked behind a wall of light. If the first "Back off!" and blinding does not work, that is the third and another huge piece of the back story. Give them one last chance (the fourth piece of the back story) and  get louder and more "street." Sometimes the street only understands "street"........."BACK THE F**K OFF! While the commands and flashlights are being used you will most likely want to doing two other things simultaneously.

Move/Monitor; It is my opinion that you should mitigate the urge to stop and square up to your adversary. I feel that you should keep moving in order to disrupt the adversaries ability to begin working through his OODA loop. By continuing to move you take away the adversaries ability to take a snap shot of the battlefield which is very important to developing a plan of attack. As you command/blind/move you should again monitor the area for any other accomplices. Since you are hidden behind a wall of light to your primary adversary, you should be able to look around quickly for other players, without the primary adversary even knowing that you have taken your eyes off of him. If the PI is still re-orientating to you, you probably have enough back story (fifth piece) to articulate reasonable fear. Some people feel that they need to ID the weapon, but FOF training has proven that action beats reaction. If you are unable to ID that something is very wrong, with all of the back story that has taken place, you may be deep into the very worse of positions.......denial! This is where all of your training comes to the forefront. This is where you find out if "your line in the sand" has been thought through well enough. This is where all of your "what if" mental preparation has really prepared you well enough. This is where you find out about the reliability of your gut feeling, and your ability to act on it. This is where it gets as personal as anything that you have ever dealt with.

If in your mind you can articulate that it is go time, then it is on.

If the threat or weapon has been identified that leads us to the next phase of the fight.

 

Access; When the line in the sand has been crossed, keep moving, access your weapon, and get to work. It is time to fight with everything you have. Accessing your weapon, from concealed carry, with a flashlight in your hand is a skill set that you must own. There are two methods that you need to know, the one hand draw stroke (circular flagged thumb) and the clearing of the garment with the flashlight hand (three digit crab claw.) Which one you use is situational and user dependent. This draw stoke from concealment is the most likely thing that you are going to blow, your "flashlight in the hand" draw stroke needs to be to the point that you have it down cold while moving. With these two draw stroke methods you have the option of keeping the flashlight in the eyes or turning if off. Either way, the adversaries vision is going to be extremely limited. If you keep the light on and draw, everything that you do is cloaked by the wall of light, but the direction and pace of your movement can be tracked through the visual connection to the light source. If you turn the light out, you cannot be tracked periodically, but the adversaries vision will eventually return. Of course you can always give him another blast of light and take it away again. Once you have accessed the weapon and driven it to the focal point it is time to take care of business.

Negate; Negate the threat with fast and accurate hits while either hiding behind the wall of light or under the cloak of blinded darkness. I cannot possibly express how important it is to have the "double edge sword" knowledge and experience of fighting from both sides of this confrontation. Without this firsthand knowledge and experience, you have no clue of the true dynamics of the fight and the power and the limitations of the "flashlight in the hand" philosophy. Experience leads to confidence, confidence leads to absolute knowledge, absolute knowledge leads to total domination. This is where you want to be, anything short of that means that you have not put in the work and you are not as ready as you think are. Fighting at night is a skill set that can only be obtained through proper preparation to prevent piss poor performance. If you have not put in the time......face that fact for the fact that it is. Reading this article is simply not going to get it done!

Once the  primary adversary has been negated and determined out of the fight it is time to move on to the next progression.

 

Scan; BG's tend to travel in packs. Just because you did not make any accomplices early on does not mean that there are none. You are going to need to scan 360 degrees to make sure that there are no other players that may need your attention. Scanning may  best be done while moving to a place of cover or tactical advantage. Whether you scan with your flashlight or not depends on the ambient light and the presence  of darkened areas. Remember the rule of thumb, "if you are in the dark, stay in the dark, if you are in the light, light up the dark." Once you have verified that there are not other players to engage and verified that the primary has not reanimated it is time to move onto the next step of the progression.

Reload; Now that there is a lull in the fight it is time to top off your gun. If we accept the fact that "if the flashlight is not in your hand at the start of the fight, it will not make it into the hand" philosophy then it would seem wise to be able to load your gun without stowing your flashlight. The "three digit crab claw" allows for a "reload with retention" all while keeping the flashlight in your hand. If you are concerned about the effects of the adrenaline dump, you can stow the flashlight for your reload. Either way, get that gun topped off.

Evaluate; The next step is a medical evaluation of yourself. Since the fight is still not guaranteed to be over I would try to mitigate lighting yourself up or putting away the flashlight. The "three digit crab claw" can still feel the body for wet spots. Another option is to shove the flashlight in between the pinkie and ring finger of the gun hand, bezel up (consistency across categories) A quick lighting of the ground for blood droplets may be acceptable. If you find a wet spot in the groin area, you are going to have to ID the color of the fluid. If you find yourself to be ok medically, it is time to proceed to the next step.

 

Proceed/Police; Due to the fact that there are some places that if you do not get the heck out of there immediately , you could be fighting the whole neighborhood. It is not always as clear as "call the police and wait for them." Sometimes you are going to have to get the heck out of there, then call the police and arrange to meet them somewhere. Unfortunately, it can be even worse than that. You may have to get out of there and never say a word to anyone. There are places in this great Country that do not allow good people to defend themselves or their loved ones from evil. In this case, since you primary mission is to get home and continue to take care of your loved ones you may just need to proceed on with your life without bringing the police in. It is a shame that there are places in America that are like this, but it is what it is! A good person needs to make it home to his/her family and not allow laws that are contrary to God's law from keeping you of fulfilling your primary mission in life.

 Like I said at the start of this article, much of this has been around for a very long time. I have just put my spin on it from within the "flashlight in the hand" philosophy. If we look at these ten things that we need to do to make it through dealing with a profile individual, it may look like it is next to impossible to remember. This is where Randy Harris suggests uses a mnemonic device to help aid this philosophy in being easy to remember. Most mnemonic devices are a little cheesy but easy to remember.....this one is not different.

PACMANSREP

Pacmans rep was if you were smart enough and fast enough you could succeed in life and avoid all of the goblins. From the very start of the encounter......and all the way through the encounter, If you can remember this cheesy little mnemonic device, you can avoid the profile individual, deter the profile individual, and dominate the profile individual.

See Roger's schedule here

Discuss this here

 

Guerrilla Sniper - After Action Report

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Staff Instructor

Over Fourth of July weekend I took the Guerilla Sniper class from Eric Pfleger.  This class is a bit of a departure for me. I've never done any precision rifle work, or even owned a gun with a magnified optic until a few months ago. This class was well outside my comfort zone, but if I don't leave the comfort zone I'm not gonna learn anything.

I shot the class using a Savage Model 10FP in .308. I mounted a Burris Fullfield II 3-9x40mm scope on it. This is a pretty basic bolt gun, but it's a very nice shooter; definitely more accurate than I am. The scope is far better than it's pricetag would indicate (Burris always seems to punch above its weight in optics). However, the best thing about this setup is that I got the rifle in trade for a HK pistol I don't even shoot anymore, so the only cash I've got in it is the optic.

The rifle was still flat black, which would stand out a bit during the stalking phase. When I mentioned painting it a few weeks ago Eric turned me on to a great product called CammoForm. It's cloth tape similar to the Ace bandages that stick to themselves, except it's camo rather than flesh toned. It sticks to itself rather than the rifle, so you can pull it off without leaving any residue. It works great to quickly camo up a rifle and you can remove it and get back to your original condition. I wouldn't mind painting this gun, but if you want to bring a gun you don't want to paint to a GS class (one with a nice wood stock, for instance) a roll or two of CammoForm would work great for temporarily camouflaging it. 

My ammo was all Prvi Partizan 175 grain FMJ Boat Tailed match ammo. It shot well in my gun and for 73 cents a round I didn't have to flinch from the price every time I pulled the trigger.

I also brought along my RMRed Glock 17, for transition drills and general self-defense use. 

The class had a slight majority of semi-auto rifles, but there were bolt guns in evidence as well. The bolt guns included a couple of savages and a Winchester, plus Eric's HS Precision Remmington 700. On the semi-auto side of things there were two FALs, one AR in .308 and one in 6.5 Grendel, and one M1A. Optics included a couple of Burrises, a Nikon, and one Counter-Sniper.

Of particular note is the rig that Alex Nieuwland was running. He wanted to come to this class, but didn't have a long range rifle yet. I mentioned this to Eric at the Applegate point shooting class two weeks ago, and Eric said he'd be happy to lend Alex a .30-06 deer rifle that he keeps at his Mom's house in Indiana in case he wants to go hunting out there. This is an off the rack Winchester from the '80s. It has a trigger that's reasonable, but not great. Alex described it as sending a telegram to the trigger and waiting until it fired. It's topped with a simple duplex scope (thin crosshairs in the middle, which turn to thicker posts further out). There are no field adjustment or drop markings on the reticule. This is the kind of gun that's in many closets across America and Alex did quite well with it. 

To round out my optics, I also brought a pair of Burris binoculars (came with the scope) and a Burris fixed power 20x50mm spotting scope. This little spotter is another gem. Very compact, inexpensive, and good quality. The magnification isn't super high, but 20x is quite sufficient for most purposes. Unfortunately, it's out of production, but you can pick them up on eBay for under $50. This only arrive the day before I left for the class and I didn't have a tripod yet, so Alex Nieuwland provided one.

I brought an Eagle Industries pack both to carry my gear and as a rest to shoot off of. To make it function a bit better in the latter role I attached a S.O.Tech forestock saddle rest, which helps grip the rifle and keep it from sliding around on the bag. I got a TAB Gear rear bag to support the stock, and a shooting mat. When I traded for it, the rifle came with a knockoff of the Harris bipod, so I brought that as well. I also picked up my first camo for the class, some old style woodland BDUs. Along with a sniper veil, I figured this should help cut down on my visibility.

Finally, since this is the middle of the summer, I brought a shemagh and broad brimmed hat to keep the sun off and lots of water and other cold drinks to keep hydrated.

Alex Nieuwland and I drove up to Cambridge, Ohio on Thursday. I'd taken almost the same drive two weeks ago for the Applegate Combat Point Shooting class in Athens, Ohio. It was nice to have someone to talk to and trade off on the driving. We met Eric for dinner Thursday night. He forewarned us that we'd be shooting from downrange, near the targets Friday morning, so we spent the evening making sure our rucks were loaded up and ready to go.

Friday

We got up early and convoyed out to the range. Once there, Eric figured out that while he'd requested an 8:00 start time for the class, on the S.I. website it said 9:00. So we had a bit of a wait until the last student showed up just before 9:00. 

The class had eight students, including three S.I. staff instructors (John McCreery, Alex Nieuwland, and myself). Some of the students had fairly extensive hunting experience but many, like me, had very little previous experience with scoped rifles.

This class was held at Thunder Valley Precision, a facility that can only be described as magnificent. The owner makes precision rifles and suppressors, and is a world record holder for the smallest group and best score at 1000 yards. The range is spread out over quite a spread of rolling, grassy hills. From where we were shooting, there were target stands at 600 and 1000 yards, steel targets about every hundred yards out to 1000, and a hill in the distance where you could shoot out to a mile. In addition, there's a short 100 yard range running from the right end of the firing line at a right angle to the main range. This proved very useful allowing Eric to pull off two-man teams for individual exercises while the rest of us kept banging steel out on the main range. The terrain is quite varied and includes some woodland, brush, and tall grass for stalking exercises. 

We started with the usual waivers, both on paper and on video. Then Eric described the context of the class. He called this a, "sloppy sniper" class. Everyone talks about the exploits of Carlos Hathcock and others like him, but they are famous because they're exceptional. Even in the military, the average shot is under 500 yards. In the police context, sniper shots rarely exceed 100. True partisan snipers rarely make very long shots either. The standard for the Guerilla Sniper class is to be able to make headshots at 200 and body shots out to 600. If you can go further, that's better, of course, but this class is not about super-long range shooting or extreme accuracy. We want to get a hit somewhere on the guy, we don't care which tear duct it goes through or whether or not you center-punched the third button on his shirt.

We went through a very thorough medical brief, appointing different students to various roles in the event of an accident. We also talked quite a bit about hydration. It was going to be a warm weekend and everyone has to stay hydrated. Finally, we went through the standard four rules of gun safety.

First topic was talking about sniper gear. Eric showed off a prototype of the TSD sniper bag. This was a pretty nice bag, with big pockets on either side to hold the rifle in place, rubberized material to keep it from sliding forward and back, and more rubber on the bottom to keep it from moving if you're shooting off a car hood or other slick surface. Eric was really big on having some sort of bag, both to carry your gear and to shoot off of. 

Next, he talked about gear to use to create sniper hides. In the wilderness this can include an entrenching tool, folding saw and a hatchet or tomahawk, pruning shears, and some sort of burlap or a sniper veil to obscure your outline, along with zip ties, duct tape or wire to attach camouflage. One thing I hadn't thought about was what you'd need in an urban area: some sort of breaching kit to be able to enter a structure and make loopholes if necessary with things like pry bars, etc. One tool Eric really likes for both roles is a tomahawk. He discussed using it to lop off tree limbs, chop through interior walls, jam it into a tree to make a shooting rest, and, of course, as a fighting tool.

We talked a bit about shooting pads. Eric is really a fan of using a 3/4 length Thermarest air mattress with some grommets added to the corners. He's really a fan of it's multirole nature, as it can be used for sleeping, to make a litter to carry a wounded man, as an air splint, for floating people or gear across water, and as a shooting mat.

Next we talked optics (other than the one attached to your rifle). First up and most important in Eric's estimation was a good pair of binoculars. He likes them somewhere in the 8 to 10 power range. His pair is actually a combination of binoculars and a laser rangefinder (one less piece of gear to carry). Binoculars are for scanning, locating targets, and general observation. They can cover more area than a spotting scope or rifle optic and are much less fatiguing to look through for long periods of time. He talked about techniques for scanning with binoculars, basically picking out an area that fits in the field of view, searching that by moving your eyeballs (not the binoculars) then moving on to the next field of view worth of area to scan. He also mentioned some techniques for stabilizing the binoculars by using your index and middle fingers to grasp your temples or the brim of your hat. 

He really likes laser rangefinders to make range estimation problems easier. They take a lot of the guesswork out of long range shooting. In fact, he likes them enough that he thinks in a two man sniper team both members should have a rangefinder, in order to compare numbers and provide a backup. 

Last in the optics department was a spotting scope. Eric regards this as secondary to the binoculars. They are for examining a target already located using the binoculars (or naked eye). In a two man team, he thinks one spotting scope is probably enough. For a variable he likes the 15-45 power models. Higher magnification (or even the high end of a 15-45) is often useless due to mirage. Another alternative is a fixed power scope of around 20x (like the one I brought). In addition to the standard tripod mount, he mentioned using a ruck to stabilize a pair of binoculars, much like you would a rifle. 

We talked a bit about camouflage. Eric showed off part of his ghillie suit, but he also talked about areas where a ghillie suit, or even BDUs, would be inappropriate. For instance in urban sniping, a ghillie suit would attract attention. The best camouflage is to look like everybody else in the city. One interesting option Eric mentioned was using a camouflage bug suit (a jacket and pants made out of netting to keep out insects) as a way to quickly go from urban camo to rural camo, for a hide site in a park in the middle of a city, for instance. One other interesting tidbit he mentioned from the rural patrolling classes he mentioned was that black boot soles really stand out. You want boots with some color other than solid black.

Next up we talked about guns. The big choice here is obviously bolt versus semi-automatic. Semis are more versatile, and easier to press into the fighting rifle role if necessary. Bolt guns are generally more accurate, though semis are getting awfully good these days. However, you're going to pay a lot more for equivalent accuracy in a semi-auto than in a bolt gun. If you're operating in a two-man team, a good alternative is to have one bolt gun as the main long range rifle and a semi to provide security and additional firepower to engage multiple targets.

On the optics front, Eric's rule of thumb is one power per hundred yards of intended shooting range. For semis, he likes 2-7x scopes, with 3-9x for bolt guns to take advantage of their better accuracy. Beyond power, the other big choice for a scope is the type of reticule. There are a lot of options from simple crosshairs to mil dot or ballistiplex reticules that help handle hold-overs and unders.

Eric went over the basics of ballistics, how the bullet starts out underneath the line of sight, climbs to intersect it, rises above it, then drops to intersect it again and falls below. We talked about different zeroing distances and their pros and cons. If your scope doesn't have a built in ballistic drop compensator or a ballistiplex reticule, Eric's a big advocate of zeroing the scope out further than 100 yards, allowing you to shoot further out without having to worry about hold-over. The gun he loaned Alex was zeroed at 250 yards. If you hold it dead on, it will shoot within four inches high or low out to 300 yards. This allows quick shots at torso sized targets. If you need a bit more accuracy, for a head shot for instance, you can look at the hold over/under chart (handily glued to the inside of the rear flip-up scope cover and hold over or under by a few inches.

There are essentially three ways of dealing with bullet drop at longer ranges. One is Kentucky holdover (the vertical cousin to Kentucky windage), just holding above the target as necessary. If your scope has only a simple crosshair and no field adjustments, this is all you've got. If you have a BDC, target turrets, or some other means of adjusting the scope easily in the field you can adjust for distance, which requires more time but allows you to hold directly on the target rather than holding over or under. Finally, if you have a ballistiplex or mil-dot reticule, you can hold at the appropriate line or dot for the hold over. On some scopes you can do all three, and Eric is an advocate of being able to do all of them. Hold overs for quick shots, use the reticule if you have a bit more time, or if you've got time, adjust the scope for the shot.

The nearest set of target stands at Thunder Valley is 600 yards from the bench. That's a bit far for our first shots, so we walked out to about the 575 yard line. Since it's a bit of a hike back to the bench, we hoofed out everything we needed (see, this is why you need a ruck). 

Eric went through the fundamentals of marksmanship with a scoped rifle (no need to teach sight alignment here). We talked about how to hold the rifle, pressing the trigger, breathing, etc. He also mentioned one element that I wasn't aware of, which is that you don't want any sort of shadow around the edges of the scope (caused by poor eye relief). You want to see a nice crisp view of the circle outline of the scope. If it's fuzzy or shadowed (particularly if on just one side) the bullet may not go where the crosshairs appear to be. I spent some time fighting with this, particularly in some of the sitting and kneeling positions where my body was close to parallel to the rifle and the stock way back behind my neck. 

He showed us prone, including unsupported, shooting off a ruck and shooting off a bipod. One element of this that was new to me is leaning forward into the bipod to help stabilize the rifle. He also showed SBU prone, rollover prone, and shooting with the stock on the ground and the forend held up by your fist.

After working the prone positions dry, Eric showed us sitting, both cross legged and open legs, as well as some odd adaptations like bringing one knee up and grabbing the rifle around it. One element I hadn't previously appreciated is how changing which crossed leg was on top can adjust elevation. We worked these dry, including climbing up onto the target berm and using them to shoot up and downhill. 

Next up were kneeling and standing. We worked these positions dry, then we moved on to live fire. Our first live string was at 25 yards from the sitting position, to make sure everyone's zero was reasonably good. Everybody brought a decently zeroed rifle, which is not always the case in these kinds of classes. 

We moved back to 50 and shot from sitting, kneeling, and standing. The area we were shooting from was unmowed grass up to about 2 feet tall, so prone was out of the question. Eric demonstrated using the sling as a shooting support (the hasty sling) and had us practice that as well.

We moved back to 100, which took us partway up a hill. The slope of the hill made prone a possibility, though you had blood rushing to your head a bit when shooting. At this distance we dropped standing, shooting from sitting and kneeling and prone. Prone was much more accurate, of course. I learned that I need to work on my sitting and kneeling positions, as my wobble zones were pretty big. 

Back at 200, the hill started to flatten out a bit, making prone difficult to use. We shot sitting and kneeling, but at this distance I think we were approaching (or exceeding) the limits of these positions for most of the class. Alex and I tried shooting off the tripod we brought for the spotting scope with a sandbag balanced on top of it, but this was just way too unstable. The best shooting position from this range was actually to have your partner sit in front of you and use his shoulder as a rifle rest. This worked pretty well if you could get your breathing in sync.

From the same position we shot at a 12x12 inch steel plate 100 yards beyond the berm, for a total of 300 yards. This was partway up the next hill, so prone was usable. Most folks were able to ring the gong this way. 

By this point, everyone's ass was really dragging. It was hot and humid enough to really suck the life out of you. Even slamming down water and gatorade I probably wasn't drinking as much as I should have.

With that we took the long hike back to the cars and called it a day. The entire class gathered for dinner at a restaurant next to the hotel. Alex and I made a Wal-Mart run afterwards. I'd been fighting some eye relief issues, especially in the sitting and kneeling positions, so I picked up a recoil pad to increase the length of pull a bit. While I was getting that, I saw they had a shooting stick. I'm a bit skeptical of a monopod as a support for the work we're doing, but the rifle rest at the top was attached by a standard camera tripod connection, so we could remove it and attach it to the tripod, where it hopefully would be a whole lot more stable than the precariously balanced sandbag.

Saturday

We'd said that we'd try to start at seven, rather than nine this morning to help escape the heat of the day. It was more like eight by the time everyone was at the range and ready to go. In any case we needn't have bothered as today was considerably cooler. It rained off and on, but frankly it was welcome compared to the heat of the day before. Most of us never even bothered to break out rain gear.


We started off with a close quarters module. A sniper rifle isn't the best weapon for shooting from 5 to 25 yards, but if it's what's in your hands when a threat appears, it will have to do. We began with some snap shooting. With a magnified optic (even on the lowest setting) at close range this consists of filling the optic with your target and pressing the trigger. We worked this at five, fifteen and twenty-five yards. 

Next up was some point shooting. Eric explained the basics and we shot from underarm assault at 5, shooting while looking over the scope at 10 (or canting the rifle for folks with very high mounted optics). At 25 it was a bit far for point shooting, so Eric had us take some snap headshots. 

The last part of the CQB module was transitioning to pistol. If you're using your sling as a shooting aid, it's going to be too short to do the standard over the head transition that S.I. teaches, so we practiced slinging the rifle on the support side, muzzle down (African carry) and drawing the pistol. We worked this with dry rifles first, then practiced firing one round from the rifle and going to pistol. This could simulate running out of ammo for the semi-autos, but is probably the best course of action for a bolt gun.

Once the CQB stuff was finished, Eric gave a lecture on range estimation and wind. As he mentioned during the gear discussion yesterday, he really likes laser rangefinders and considers them a crucial piece of kit. However, if your laser goes tits up or you don't have one, you can range in other ways. If you have a mildot scope, or simply know what angle different markings on your regular scope subtend, you can compare that to the size of known objects. If a particular piece of your scope covers three inches at 100 yards, and it covers half of something a foot across, that object is at around 200. Another method of finding ranges is to use a topographic map to locate yourself and the target. He passed around some examples of range data cards, which show different features and their ranges from a given shooting position. 

Eric talked about different features that can make something appear closer or further than it really is. Many of them seem to boil down to the fact that people judge distances based not on how big something appears, but on how much visible terrain there is between you and it. If you cannot see all the terrain between you and an object (due to a hidden depression) the object appears closer. If you can see more terrain between you and an object than the pure horizontal distance, a large visible valley, for instance, objects appear further away. We had examples of both of these conditions visible from right where we were sitting.

Next up we talked about wind. Eric talked about different wind directions and how much they contribute the effect on the bullet in flight. He also went through some basic methods of estimating wind speed, based on what you can see moving or blowing. Another, more advanced method is to use the mirage visible through high magnification spotting scopes to read wind speed. This requires a lot of practice to do well, however. Finally, we ha a few examples of hand held wind sensors, but these will only measure the wind at your location. It may be different at various points in the bullet's flight path.

We spent most of the rest of the day shooting at steel targets at various ranges. There were 12x12 steel plates set up from 135 out to 1000. We paired up in teams and each team picked out a target to shoot at, trading around after everyone was done with a given range. Alex and I started with a 300 yard target. I got first round hits on it from rucksack prone, the bipod and unsupported prone. It took two shots to get on target from sitting, but this was substantially better than I was doing yesterday. Still need more practice though.

As teams traded off targets, we moved out to 400, 450, 500, and 600, working mostly from prone. I found hits out to 500 were fairly easy. The ballistiplex reticule in my rifle worked fine. It might not be exactly calibrated to the load I was shooting, but any differences were small enough that I was usually able to hit plates on the first shot. Alex's rifle only had crosshairs, without any bullet drop markings or mildots. It was zeroed at 250, so he was able to hold right on the plate all the way out to 300. At 400 he had to start using Kentucky elevation, which was a bit more of a struggle. This was down in a valley and there was relatively little wind, so we never needed to do more than hold one side of the plate or the other at these ranges.

At 600, it got substantially more challenging for me, since I had to hold the bottom mark on my ballistiplex above the target to hit it. This was compounded by the fact that I didn't have a good drop table for the gun and the berm was wet enough that missed shots weren't kicking up enough dirt to see on the spotter. Alex was calling my shots way over to the left, but I didn't think there was that much wind and I really didn't have any idea where I was hitting. Eric came over and spotted for me. He explained that what Alex had been calling was actually a vapor trail left by my bullets in flight. Atmospheric conditions were just right (very moist) that the turbulence of the bullet caused momentary condensation. Very cool, and once we understood what it was, we could use them to help spot. I was eventually able to ding the steel, as was Alex, but it was a struggle. He had to hold well over the top of the berm to get a hit at this range.

A few students got out beyond the 600 yard plate to 750, but out there the wind started picking up a lot more out that far (a flag at 1000 was standing almost straight out some of the time). Now, compared to the 1000 yard hits seen at the Kingman guerilla sniper classes this may seem like a poor performance, but you have to remember that these plates are only 12 by 12 inches. At the Kingman classes they're shooting much larger steel, the size of an IDPA target, roughly 18 by 30 inches. Eric said that we could call any round that would have hit a man sized target at that range a hit, but all of us wanted to ring the steel. There's just something about that boom . . . ding of a long range hit on steel. It's almost like a drug: you want to do it again and again and do it at increasingly longer ranges.

At lunch, Eric talked about the odds of observing a standing man at different distances with the naked eye. According to a study by the Army during Project SALVO, the odds are 90% at 100 yards, but decline to just 30% at 200 yards, 15% at 300, 5% at 400, and drop to zero at 500%.

We went over some team shooting drills, with Eric calling out commands and everybody shooting in unison. Eight sniper rifles going off within a second is pretty impressive. 

The commands are:
On Rifle
On Glass
On Target
On Trigger
Sending
One 
Two
Bang!

Firing on bang, obviously. 

We worked this in our two-man teams, with one shooter giving commands and both firing. Giving commands has a tendency to screw up your shooting. It messes with your breathing and you're trying to concentrate on two things at once. 

We went back to shooting steel while Eric set up a drill off on the 100 yard range to the side (it's really nice having two separate ranges to do this stuff on, allowing him to split individual teams off for exercises while the reset of us could keep shooting. The first such drill involved simultaneous precision shooting on a 1.5 inch dot at 100, 75, and 50 yards. This was a change of pace from the long distance stuff we'd been doing (Alex had to remember to hold under rather than over at this range). It also showed how you could practice some of these skills even if you didn't have access to a one-mile or 1000 yard range.

For the next split off drill, Eric handed the team a piece of paper with pictures of the ten most wanted terrorists on it with two circled. He told us we had 90 seconds to get over to the other range and kill those two guys. You've got to grab your gear, get over there, ID the two guys and put rounds into them, preferably simultaneously. 

While trying out an unconventional shooting precision (holding the sling mount in your fist and using that as a rest and putting the bottom of the butt into the dirt, I got a bit too close to the scope and it recoiled into my forehead. It was only a small cut, but as usual with head cuts I bled like a stuck pig for a bit.

I also played with my TSD Glcok with the RMR on it a bit. Dinging a target at 150 yards was fairly easy.

Later that afternoon Eric brought out his HS Precision Remmington 700 and tested how much his dope had shifted with the change in altitude from Montana to Ohio. Once he got it figured out, he had a round left and offered me the chance to shoot it. I held exactly where he told me to and dinged the 600 yard plate on the first shot. It's definitely easier when you're not holding over using Kentucky elevation.

Alex put a few rounds through Eric's rifle as well.

To finish out the day, we did a version of the Columbian Special Forces Drill. In this drill, you run towards the target, stopping at regular distance intervals to shoot. Usually, it's done with AKs or ARs from 100 yards. We did it over 500 yards. None of the shots were that long (nothing over 200 yards), but had to fire between 100 yard dashes, which messes with your aim.

With that we wrapped up for the day. The owner of the range suggested a restaurant in town (The Forum) and it was a really good choice. Good food and fellowship were had by all.

Sunday

We rolled out early again for a 7:00 start time on Sunday. We started off with some more free shooting the various plates. I was able to bang plates at 300, 400, and 500 from prone with relative ease. This sort of thing gives me confidence in my ability to apply the skills we've been working on. One fellow in the class made a 700 yard cold bore first shot on a 12x12 inch steel. That is impressive.

Our first break out drill was a variation on the face hunting drill from yesterday. This time, Eric had us shoot from under a table, simulating a cramped, improvised urban hide. Given my six foot five frame, this was a particular challenge. I shot with my rifle resting on my arm on top of the seat of a chair, sort of half sitting half lying. A totally improvised shooting position. Alex, who's not quite as tall as I am was able to get a picture perfect seating position. To add a bit of stress, Eric was banging on top of the table, simulating a train going by. Like yesterday, we synchronized our shots, firing at the same time.

While the other teams shot the drill, we went back to shooting steel. On Saturday I'd found that the ballistiplex reticule works real well out to 500, which is the longest range marked on the scope. I had some real trouble at 600 using holdover. Last night I looked up some numbers on the Burris website and used a ballistics calculator and if I had my numbers right, turning the magnification from 9x down to 6x would increase the drop of the 500 yard mark on the scope to right about the drop for my cartridge at 600 yards. Now I wanted to see if I'd gotten the math right. I was able to get the first shot within minute of man and ding the plate with the second. This gave me confidence that I could use this rifle to meet the Guerilla Sniper standard of 200 yard headshots and 600 yard body shots.

After I was done doing some shooting, I went to deploy my bipod to ground my rifle and found that one of the springs had come off the bipod leg. Closer examination revealed that the spring had come loose because a nut holding the leg screw on had backed out, allowing the leg to come loose. I hadn't actually been shooting from the bipod very much, just using it to hold up my rifle when it was grounded, so I pulled the bipod off and went on without it. I didn't have much hope of finding it out in the field, but Alex located it on my shooting mat (yet another use for a mat, catching bits of your gear when it breaks). I got it threaded back on and think the bipod will probably be repairable.


Our next team drill had us shooting from behind a woodpile, and some piled up roof trusses, simulating a construction site or farmyard. This time, rather than simultaneous shots on two different targets we had to make simultaneous shots on one guy. Assigning two snipers to the target increases the odds of a hit.

By this point we were doing pretty good shooting 100 yard headshots on static paper targets. In the real world however, people tend to move around, especially the head. Eric talked a bit about ways to practice shooting moving targets. A simple method is to tape some balloons out there that can blow around a bit, or to hang a gallon jug with just a little bit of water in it and let it swing. If you want to get more complex, you can attach a target to a fiberglass pole atop an RC Car, or rig up a clothesline with the rope running from the pulley up range to a buddy.

Next up Eric brought out a truck windshield so we could test shooting through glass. We fired a variety of different .308 rounds through it, along with 6.5 Grendel, .22-250, .220 Swift, and 7.62x39. All of the rifle rounds busted through the glass, of course. The all produced a substantial amount of spalling. Auto windshields are made up of two layers of glass with a plastic laminate in between. When you shoot them, particularly with high velocity rifle rounds, the second layer of glass shatters in a 1.5-2 inch ring around the bullet hole and sends fragments and glass dust into the target. Some targets looked like they'd taken a load of birdshot to the face. Even if your round misses the target, the spalling may screw them up pretty bad. All of the rounds were deflected at least a little bit, but the direction might not be what you expect. When a round hits an angled piece of laminated glass like an auto windshield, it will be deflected down (when you are shooting into the car). The round bites into the glass and gets pushed downward. The .220 Swift round (at around 4000 feet per second) actually broke up going through the glass shedding jacket through one hole and lead hole through the other.

Although this was a sniper class, since we had the windshield out there we also shot some pistol rounds through it. First up was frangible .357 SIG, which basically vaporized on the glass. 9mm ball saw some major deflection (about five inches). The carry ammo did better, with Alex's Winchester Ranger showing little deflection and my DPX almost none.

The context of some of these more urban focused drills led to some discussion of the book Fry the Brain by John West. I had brought a copy to read on the drive up, so I brought it out and passed it around, along with copies of Guerilla Sniper and Guerilla Sniper 2. Eric mentioned that if he could make those required reading before anyone took this class, his lectures could be a lot shorter.

The wind was blowing a bit more at this point and Alex asked about what it was doing at the moment. Since there was more wind than yesterday when we had the wind lecture, Eric was able to talk about it a bit more with some actual examples of trees blowing around, etc.

We also talked a bit about internal ballistics and how free float or button floating barrels affects accuracy. When fired the barrel vibrates like a tuning fork. You want the barrel to vibrate the same way every time, so you get consistency. This vibration can change if your barrel isn't free floated and you are putting pressure on the fore end, or as the barrel heats up.

Eric gave an excellent lecture on camouflage. He went through the "S"s that you want to minimize to avoid detection:

Shape
Shadow
Shine
Silhouette
Spacing
Scent
Speed
Sound
Spoor

Shape is anything that is distinctive or not seen in nature. Rifles and the circular lenses of optics are very distinctive and unnatural. The human head and shoulders is instantly recognizable by another human being. You can hide these shapes by breaking up the outline, either through the object's color (camouflage patterns) or by physically altering the outlines with things like ghillie suits, sniper veils, attaching burlap to your rifle, or adding some local vegetation.

Shadows can give you away even when you are completely out of sight. Be aware of not just whether you are visible, but whether your shadow can be seen. Use shadows cast by other objects (trees or buildings, for example) to hide in.

Shiny objects are highly visible and rather rare in nature. We can try to avoid anything shiny by taking off your watch then stalking, but as long as we're dependent on optics we can't avoid them completely. A killflash filter or a long sunshade can minimize visible reflection on optics. Sunglasses are another source of shine. You can do without them and rely on the brim of a cap to shade your eyes, but I'll admit that doesn't seem very appealing to me after a discussion on eye protection during the glass shooting exercise earlier. Another option is sunglasses with a camo pattern printed on them.

Object that are silhouetted against the sky or a light background stand out far more than the same object against a neutral background. Avoid ridge lines and be aware of places when the sky might be behind you. 

Almost nothing in nature is regularly spaced. Humans, on the other hand, have a natural instinct for order. Regularly spaced objects are easy to recognize and we end up spacing things evenly even when we don't consciously attempt to (a line of men walking in a file, for instance). Avoid regularly spaced items on your gear and when working in a team don't space yourselves evenly. 

Scent is often overlooked, both as a detection tool and in being detected. Eric is a bow hunter so this is something he's very well versed in. One pitfall of a lot of students in this class, or the rural patrolling class he teaches is bringing a freshly painted rifle that still smells strongly. You can also give yourself away through scented soap or deodorant, strong scents like gasoline, or even eating distinctly scented food. On the other hand, you can use strong smelling locations to mask your own scent. If your hide is next to a feedlot, no one is going to smell you.

Nothing draws the human eye faster than rapid movement. We had actually seen a demonstration of this on Friday when a deer moved across the range. When it was still, it was almost invisible (despite not being colored particularly similar to the green background). When it bounded, however, it instantly drew the eye. The same thing applies to humans. As Eric put it, don't be in a hurry to get shot. Move slowly, not just your body, but also your head and hands. Eric mentioned seeing guys in the patrolling classes with everything covered in camo except their face and hands. What was moving the most? Their face and hands.

Noise can be a dead giveaway. As if to highlight this, during our discussion of sound one of the student's cellphones went off. Leave your phone off, leave the change at home, and tape down everything that jingles, rattles or squeaks. Eric also showed us some methods for moving quietly. I knew about rolling your feet from heel to toe to walk quietly on hard surfaces, but he showed us a new one for walking on things like gravel called pancake steps. Hold your foot level and lower it gently so that it all touches at once. This will keep the pieces of gravel from grinding against each other.

Last up was spoor. This can be literal spoor, as with animal droppings, or prints but it can also apply to any other trace you leave behind, like dropped gear or empty casings. 

Eric talked a bit about applying face paint. While we didn't do any practical work with it in this class, he said that you want to color depressions, like your eye sockets, a light color and paint protrusions, like the nose a darker color.

Next, Eric demonstrated how to apply some vertical displacement to your movement when stalking. The easiest, but most visible way to move is to simply stand and walk. You can lower your height a bit by bending over. This can be almost as quick as walking, but it can be very fatiguing. You can lower your profile further still by crouching down into kind of a duck walk. To get lower than this, you're going to have to go down on your knees, which is going to cut down on your speed by quite a bit. Next is getting down on hands and knees, followed by knees and elbows, forearms and thighs, and the sniper crawl, where you lay face down and propel yourself with just your toes and fingers. This only allows you to inch along, but it lowers your profile as much as it can be lowered. He gave us a chance to practice these various movement methods on the range.

Our next assignment was to get into a hide position somewhere on the hillside below the firing line. Some of the folks were able to get very well hidden, but Alex and I weren't really able to find a very thick bit of cover. It might have worked if Alex and been able to get down prone, but that would have meant occupying an ant pile. I made use of a sniper veil (camo netting) to break up my outline and cover up my bare, uncamouflaged arms. Eric said it did a pretty good job of hiding me and it was definitely a lot cooler than putting on my BDU shirt would have been. Eric observed our positions by sneaking downrange wearing his ghillie suit. This was in interesting application of some of the "S"s listed above. When he was still, with his silhouette broken up by the suit, he looked like a bush. As soon as he moved, he was immediately visible. When he broke out the binoculars to observe our positions, those two shiny circles stood out a huge amount. We finished up the exercise by having each team take coordinated shots from their hides.

 
We took a bit of a break as Tom, the owner of Thunder Valley Precision, brought out some of his rifles and suppressors for us to take a look at. He both sells other manufacturer's suppressors and makes his own (mostly for rifles, I believe). He brought out a Glock 17L with a titanium suppressor. Between the extended slide and the can it was quite long, but the can was so light it didn't impede shooting at all. With subsonic ammo it was exceedingly quiet. He also had a .22 can that he fired from a rifle and a Ruger .22 pistol. The real fun was with the rifle suppressors. There was one in .260 Ackely Improved, which sounded like a door slamming. The other big suppressed rifle was in .300 Hulk. This is Tom's own custom cartridge that he used to set a 1000 yard record. It launches a .30 caliber round out to distances of over a mile. He fired it all the way out to a mile, and several students who took up his offer of a chance to shoot it were easily able to ding the 600 yard steel. Next time anyone tells you that a suppressor will make your sniper rifle inaccurate, call their ignorant B.S.

After having fun with suppressors, we began our stalking exercise. The route Eric had us travel involved all of the different heights and movement methods that he'd talked about earlier, including a sniper craw across the road. I found that some of these low crawling movements can be very fatiguing, especially when you're pushing through heavy grass. Your gear catches on everything, hanging up your rifle, popping scope covers open, and tugging on you. I lost one of the adjustment knobs for my Peltor electronic ear protection sometime during the crawl. Moving like this through the thick grass also leaves a heck of a trail. About two feet wide of crushed grass after two shooters move through it. As I realized later, belly crawling is also a really good ab workout (man I was sore!)

Once we reached the top of the hill, he took one team at a time over to a pre-made sniper hide that's part of the facility and asked us to estimate the range to two different targets. We eyeballed it and I did some work using dimensions of different lines on my reticule. Despite this our guess was off by about 100 yards. We finished this off with simultaneous shots on the two targets.

Our last exercise was shooting from a vehicle hide. We'd pull a vehicle up to the firing line with one driver and one shooter, and let loose a round at a target 100 yards away, then immediately roll out of there. The best one was probably John McCreery and his teammate shooting out of the trunk of a Chevy Monte Carlo. The pulled up, popped the trunk open a little bit, took the shot, then drove right off. Alex and I were probably too tall to shoot from my trunk, so Alex and I shot from the rear passenger seat of my car, firing from the left shoulder, resting the gun on the front seat and firing out at a slight angle through the passenger side window. I shot first (since it was my car we were putting at risk of a bullet hole). Then we switched and I drove while Alex shot. The concussion of a .30-06 going off in the car, even with the passenger side window open, was like getting slapped in the face. I have to say that shooting from the vehicle hides was awesome, one of the highlights of the class.

This was our last exercise, but we had a chance to shoot around a bit more. Alex was doing some shooting and had trouble opening up the bolt after a shot. When he got the case out, we found that he'd shot one of my .308 rounds through his .30-06. The case was now fire-formed to be almost straight walled, but the bullet had left the barrel. The next round of .30-06 that he fired hit in almost the same spot, so the .308 was pretty accurate (at 200 yards, at least).

Conclusions

This was a phenomenal class. This is my 21st S.I. class and it was truly one of the best experiences I've had (and I've had some great ones). Eric is an excellent instructor and the facility was just top notch for what we were doing. If you get a chance to take a Guerilla Sniper class, particularly at Thunder Valley Precision in Kimbolton, OH, by all means take it!

Coming into the class with relatively little experience, as I did in this case, I learned a tremendous amount. Often with pistol or tactical rifle classes these days, much of what is covered in a given class is stuff I already know; I'm just looking to have a fun time, fine tune my skills, and pick up some tidbits (particularly on the instructional side). For this class, almost everything was new. I'm sure that if I go practice this stuff regularly for a year and took the exact same class again I would learn a tremendous amount just because my skill level would have risen enough to pick up all sorts of new stuff.

As Alex found using Eric's old deer rifle, you don't need a $1500 rifle and $2500 worth of glass to take this class. For what we're trying to teach (headshots at 200 yards, bodies at 600) almost any rifle will do if you will do. If you won't do, all the rifle in the world won't help. As Alex said afterwards, if you can't read the wind or estimate range, your sub-MOA rifle just allows you to miss more accurately. 

After taking this class I feel confident enough in my skill and with my rifle, that I can hit anything I am at out to 600 yards IF the wind isn't bad and I have a supported position. Reading the wind is something that requires a lot of experience going out and shooting in different wind conditions, not something that can be developed over a three day weekend. 

Shooting from supported prone, particularly off a pack, is just stupidly easy. You can take the shooter's unsteady muscles almost completely out of the equation. However, as we found out on the first day, in the field, prone is often completely useless. You need to be able to shoot from higher positions. I need to put in a lot more time practicing the sitting and kneeling positions (I sense a lot of dry practice in my future). 

The other thing I'll be pursing is methods for steadying the rifle in higher positions. Shootings sticks, tripods with cradles, using your partner or his rifle for stability, or shooting with the ruck on a chair, car, or somewhere else up off the ground. You also need to be able to shoot from improvised positions. There was no way for me to get into a conventional shooting position under that table, or in my car, but by adapting to the situation I was able to make the shots. You can't practice for every possible position, but you can work firing from both shoulders, and practice figuring out how to meet many different challenges. The bench rest guys my look at you funny at the range, but your practical rifle skills are far beyond what they're doing.

I was very pleased with how my rifle shot. The gun liked the Prvi ammo and was consistent even during strings involving many successive shots. Even with the improvements in my skills over the course of the class it's clearly more accurate than I am. It's also far more accurate than is necessary to meet the 200 yard headshot, 600 yard body shot standard of the class. However, it's also accurate enough that I know when the bullet doesn't hit the target, it was either my shooting or my judgement of the wind. I can eliminate the rifle as a factor.

Within its envelope, the Burris 3-9 with the Ballistiplex worked very well for me. All I have to do is call the range and put the appropriate hash mark on the target. Everything else is just a study hold and good trigger press. Beyond 500 yards, however, things got much more difficult. With no markings for holdover, it was hard to find the correct elevation. I was able to figure out the right math to shoot reliably at 600 by reducing the zoom, which meets the GS standard. Because I'm loosing magnification to get more drop, there's a point of diminishing returns here. I feel like the rifle (and the shooter, at least from a good supported position) could have gone out further with a different optic. So, I'm considering eventually replacing it with something with a mildot reticule and field adjustable turrets with nice, repeatable adjustments. The current scope will do the job, but something like the optic Eric has on his rifle might allow me to take it out even further, and give me a chance to master the mildot system and making scope adjustments.

The support gear I brought worked fairly well. The pack, forestock saddle rest and rear bag are a great system; when I could use them all I could be very confident in my accuracy. The shooting mat was a great addition. The TAB gear mat was small enough I could roll it up and put it in my pack, so I could take it out in the field, which wasn't true of the mats most people brought. I wasn't fighting the Arizona lawn, like the folks out in the Kingman class were, but it was useful on the wet grass and the rough hillside where we set up our hide. The sniper veil was also enormously useful in the hide. For a piece of kit I picked up for less than $15 on Amazon it was extremely cost-effective. I'm probably going to pick up another one or two of them (perhaps in different patterns for other environments). 

While the kit I brought worked fairly well, I've discovered there's a bunch more stuff that would be very useful. I've got two pages in the little notebook I use to take notes in class titled "Eric is Costing Me Money" filled with stuff I want to get. Some are inexpensive additions like camo duct tape (to cover up shiny bits of gear) and some earth toned socks (so my white ones don't show when my pants leg rides up). Others are expensive and will probably have to wait for a while, like a laser rangefinder. Lots of the other stuff on the list is either related to camouflage, like a killflash or a camo hat, or to tools for building hides, like a tomahawk and entrenching tool.

One small change of opinion this class has led me to is the Camelback water bladder. For a long time I've resisted and relied on water bottles and canteens for hydration, but the virtues of the Camelback in allowing you to subtly hydrate when you're stalking or in a hide are just too great to ignore. A couple of bladders and a carrier are definitely on the list. 

Another thing on the list is a new bipod. The cheap Harris knockoff that came with the rifle is probably repairable, but I'd like something better. I really like the versapod bipod that Eric had on his rifle. It seems like a quality piece of kit and its ability to easily attach and detach fits the way we use our rifles much better.

While I talked a little about it already, one subject that deserves some discussion is how this class differed from the GS class as taught in Kingman. I should preface this by saying that I haven't been to the Kingman class so most of this is based on conversations with Eric (who has helped Gabe teach this stuff in Kingman several times). The Kingman range is much flatter and more featureless. Since it doesn't have all the fixed steel gongs at various ranges, Gabe sets up all his targets at one range and everyone shoots at the same range and moves back together. As mentioned, the targets are bigger, IDPA size rather than 12"x12". It lacks the side range for team exercises while the rest of the class keeps shooting (something Eric was able to take advantage of since there were three other S.I. instructors in the class to keep an eye on the line while he ran the side range. 

The biggest difference may be the possibilities for stalking exercises. As mentioned, the Kingman range is pretty flat, and your choices for vegetation levels are basically crouched over in the brush, or down crawling in the cleared areas. The terrain here is much more varied with many different types of vegetation. We only took advantage of a small portion of it for our stalking exercises in this class. You could do a lot more with that aspect if you wanted to. The venue and what you can do here are different enough that I think a veteran of the Kingman class could probably come to a GS class out here and learn quite a bit.

This range gave the one in Kingman a run for its money in terms of heat. The absolute temperature may not have been as high, but the humidity made up for it. Particularly on Friday, it was just brutal. When you're happy getting doused with rain every half hour because it keeps the temperature down, that's hot. I would hope that the next class held in Kimbolton be in, say April or October, rather than July. 

Another feature of this range that the Kingman one probably doesn't have is ticks. I had to pry one of the little buggers out of me, and discovered two more on my clothing before they latched on. Eric, however, seems to attract them in far greater numbers. He found a dozen on his clothes just when he was getting ready to leave on Sunday. Eric is a real tick magnet.

If I could leave you with one message, it would be that you don't have to wait until you have a bunch of gear to take this class. I almost did and I would have missed out on a great experience. You don't need to bring a high dollar rifle. An average deer gun or a Wal-Mart special .308 will do just fine. You don't need a Nightforce scope either (though it will probably do you more good than the high end rifle). I did fine out to 600 with a Burris scope that's available for as low as $150. While I've talked a lot about useful support gear, you don't really need much. Grab a backpack or bookbag, stuff it with something (I used a pillow and some towels before I had enough gear to fill a ruck). Throw in some decent ammo (Prvi works great) and the usual eye and ear protection and you're ready to take this class. 

Before I end this I should make mention of my fellow students. There ware a variety of skill levels, from those with little precision shooting experience (like me) to folks with quite a bit of hunting and long range shooting experience under their belts. Everyone brought a good attitude and a zeroed rifle. They were truly a pleasure to train with. In particular I need to thank Alex Nieuwland, who served as my teammate for the class. He was a great spotter and fine shooting partner.

Thunder Valley Precision is a phenomenal venue for this sort of class. Tom's a nice guy (anyone who lets me shoot a suppressed weapon is a pretty good guy in my book) and the facility itself is just phenomenal. I look forward to seeing S.I. doing great things here in the future.

The Guerilla Sniper curriculum is really well done. I have to commend Gabe for how he set this up. It's a class focused on the shooter, rather than expensive gear. It emphasizes engagement ranges and accuracy standards that reflect the real world, rather than the exceptional Hathcockian shots. The material is laid out in a clear, logical fashion and takes relative novices like myself quickly to a very high skill level.

Eric was really a great instructor for this class. He clearly has an enormous amount of experience and ability when it comes to long range shooting and hunting (both animals and men). He's an excellent teacher as well, and was able to provide a huge amount of information about what we were studying. I get the feeling that in three days we only tapped a small fraction of what he has available to teach on the subject. I would highly recommend him as an instructor.

In case anyone is still in doubt at this point, let me say I really enjoyed this class!

 

Images courtesy of Eric Pfleger and Alex Nieuwland.

Read other students' reviews of this class on Warriortalk.

Sign up for future Guerrilla Sniper classes at suarezinternational.com

Warrior Children and the Defensive Blade

Written by John Chambers - Suarez International Tier One Instructor

During a recent Defensive Knife class, my 14 year old daughter joined the class as one of the participants.  Now as her father, I knew that she would be able to hold her own in the class as she has almost 10 years of experience in the martial arts and does not know the meaning of the word quit.  But as the instructor I was very pleased to see her not only do well, but to see concrete proof that the defensive blade is major force multiplier for a trained child.  My observations of this class and others have proven to me that the knife is the ideal defensive weapon to help “predator proof” our kids.

Advantages of the Defensive Knife for Children

Weapons are an equalizer, with proper training – For many years we have preached to any who would listen that a weapon helps even the odds for a woman who has to face a larger and stronger attacker.  Children are already at a size and strength disadvantage when compared to adults so the benefits that a weapon gives a child over a larger and stronger attacker are even more evident.  Since the knife has at most a simple manipulation to deploy a folding blade it is very well suited to smaller and weaker hands.   And when you consider this in the light of the trouble that some females have with running the slide on a semi-auto pistol and it is obvious that an easily accessed and deployed blades make a lot of sense for younger warriors. 

The knife does not require strength, power is in the edge and the point – This fact plays to the advantages outlined above.  Anyone who has taken a Defensive Knife class from Suarez International or Michael Janich is familiar with the “pork man” demonstration of a knife’s destructive capability.  The key take away for students from this demonstration is that it does not take a huge amount of muscle power to inflict devastating wounds to an opponent with a good blade.   Look at the gaping wounds inflicted on the “pork man” by my 14 year old daughter in a recent class.  She is a little taller than the average 14 year old, but she is in no way as strong as an average adult.  But with a blade and skill, she is able to inflict damage on an aggressor far out of proportion to her size.   Nobody will be dragging her into a van with his arm dissected and a four inch comma cut in his quadriceps!

The knife rewards speed and surprise – Have you ever spent time with a martial arts class of young teens who have been training for a few years?  I have been sitting in on my kids’ class on a weekly basis for a few years.  I am continually amazed at how these students are just plain FAST!  Most of them have at least two years worth of training behind them and they are quick and move extremely well.   Their reaction time and coordination is much better than the average large adult.  If a child combines these attributes with the unexpected deployment of a blade you have a very effective response that a child predator will NEVER forget.

Stealth – The knife is a very easy weapon to carry without detection and it excels in the Non Permissive Environments that all too often are the places that children tend to be gathered.  Unless there are metal detectors to be dealt with it takes no great effort to have an effective knife on your person at all times.   At the same time, even though the carry method is stealthy, with practice one can deploy the blade in a moment.  For example, appendix carry of a small folder is very low profile, but it allows quick access to the knife.  With proper practice it is just a fast to draw the blade from appendix carry as it is from the more commonly encountered pocket carry.  In conjunction with the practice of the “speed draw” there should be an equal amount of practice in the stealthy deployment of the knife.  It can be a very handy skill to have when you want to have the blade in your hand, but you do not wish to be noticed.

Legal to carry – Unlike a firearm there is little to no regulation about a minor carrying a knife, as long as it is within the weapon laws that cover knives.   Obviously, there a places that it may not be legal for a child to carry a blade, i.e. schools.  That being said, I personally see NOTHING wrong with training your children from a young age to ignore victim disarmament laws.  I carried a folding or fixed blade knife throughout my youth and learned about “concealed is concealed” before I could drive.

The Knife is Deniable and Disposable - There are times when it is of paramount importance that a specific weapon cannot be tied to the owner.   The “use it and lose it” methodology has been discussed and it is a valid option in some circumstances.  On the other hand, it can also be desirable to be able to dispose of, or hide a weapon in order to escape detection, or draw the unwanted attention of the “man.”  The knife is not only easier to ditch because of its smaller size compared a firearm, but the lack of serial numbers is not a hindrance either.   It is also easier to recover it if the opportunity or need to do so arises.  At the same time, if it needs to be left behind for any reason, it does not break the bank to replace it. 

Characteristics of “Defensive Knives for Kids”  -  There are many good choices but they all share similar features:

1.  The grip and the blade must be smaller in order to fit a smaller user.  The blade should also have a plain edge and a good point. 

2.  Easily concealed.   It can be either a folder or a fixed blade, with the folder being the more practical choice due to size constraints.  Good examples of acceptable folders are the Spyderco Delica, the Cold Steel Mini AK47, and the Blackhawk Be-Wharned.  Good fixed blade examples would be the Cold Steel Kiridashi or the Ontario RAT3.

3. The knife should be of good quality, but it should not break the bank.  Remember, it should be disposable if necessary.

 

To conclude, training to use the knife is something that parent and child can do together, at home and in class.  This is self explanatory if you think about it.  You don’t need a range or a lot of space.  You just need to be willing to get off the couch and work.  Partner drills?  No problem.  Flow drills?  Ditto!  Defensive knife is also the perfect class for a parent and child to attend together, not only to build skills but memories too.  Obviously, the parent needs to make a realistic assessment on whether their son or daughter is ready to participate in this type of training.  But if they are ready, there is NO reason that you cannot take the class together!

Applegate Combat Point Shooting System - After Action Report

By Chris Upchurch, Suarez International Staff Instructor

I recently finished the Applegate Combat Point Shooting System class taught by Steve Baron. This is a bit unique among Suarez International classes in that it was not developed within S.I. The curriculum was developed by Rex Applegate himself. Steve is one of three instructors certified by Applegate to teach the system.

I shot the class with my Glock 17 equipped with the RMR red dot sight. Of course, this being a point shooting class I didn't get much use out of the dot. I also brought along my iron sighted Glock 17 as a backup. The Glock rode in a Dale Fricke Seraphim and I carried my extra magazines in Dale Fricke kydex as well.

The most common pistol in the class was the Glock (including two with RMRs). Two students shot 1911s, and one carried the Taurus version of the Beretta 92 with a frame mounted decocker.

Saturday

The class had six students, many of whom were also instructors of one sort or another. There were three S.I. instructors (Eric Pfleger, Craig Flaherty, and myself), along with another student who was a police firearms instructor. One of the remaining students was a Marine back from two tours over in the sandbox and the other was a citizen whose only previous training was getting his CCW permit. 

The first day began in the classroom rather than on the range. After filling out the usual waivers and promising on video not to sue, Steve began by going through the history of point shooting. 

These sorts of discussions often start with Fairbairn and Sykes. While they were the first to codify and popularize point shooting, they were not the first to shoot without sights. Steve began with European coachmen (who, in addition to chauffeuring the aristocracy around were also the predecessors of modern executive protection), American frontiersmen, cavalry raiders in the Civil War, and old west gunfighters. Nothing resembling an instructional text in point shooting from this era survives today, but there are some clues we can infer from. For instance, Applegate located a letter Wild Bill Hickok had written, but never mailed. In response to an inquiry from an eastern newspaperman about his shooting technique, Hickok described raising the pistol to eye level, pointing it like a finger, pausing for a brief moment, then pressing the shot. A more concise description of the basics of point shooting would be hard to find. 

Several books written by veterans of World War I provide some more concrete and detailed examples of point shooting techniques. One I had heard of, but never read, is Herbert W. McBride's memoir A Rifleman Went to War. The Automatic Pistol by J.B.L. Noel is more explicitly a point shooting text, and is one I had not heard of before. Both of these are available today in reprints and I've already ordered both off them.

Steve continued by describing Fairbairn and Sykes' development of their point shooting system in Shanghai. The level of violence in Shaghai at the time was just phenomenal. Criminals were shooting it out with each other several times per day, and the Shanghai Municipal Police were involved in several shootouts per week. Unfortunately, they weren't always doing so well. The department lost nine officers in 1919, and an investigation was launched.

One of the repeating themes of this discussion was the constant tug-of-war between combat shooting and sport shooting. We see this today in the difference between the gamers (IDPA and IPSC shooters) and those like S.I. that are more fight focused, but this fundamental division goes back much further. In Shanghai, police training was heavily based on British Army bullseye competition, which was not realistically preparing officers for confrontations on the street. Fairbairn told the committee investigating the police death rate, "More attention is being paid to winning silver cups than in shooting to live."

Fairbairn had made a practice to responding to every incident where shots were fired, and used this experience to describe a typical gunfight: it would take place at less than four yards, with very little warning, both the criminal and officer would be running, the officer would be in a high state of excitement and firing as quickly as possible, and all of this would probably be happening in dim light. 

Fairbairn was given the go-ahead to revamp the S.M.P.'s training program. Together with Eric A. Sykes he refined his system and training methods during the 1920s and 30s. It was published asShooting to Live in 1942. 

By that time the outbreak of World War II had led Fairbairn and Sykes to return to the U.K. They were commissioned as Captains in the British Army and put to work training, first the Home Guard, then the Commandos. Sykes remained there to train agents of the Special Operations Executive, while Fairbairn traveled to Canada and eventually to the U.S. to train agents for the Office of Strategic Services.

At around the same time, Rex Applegate, then a 1st Lieutennant in the Army, was assigned to the OSS and ordered to, "learn all there is to know about close combat with and without weapons." Applegate trained with Fairbairn and traveled to England to train with Sykes and other organizations there. Upon his return, he helped Fairbairn set up a close combat training center for the OSS at a site in Maryland called Area B. Today it's known as Camp David. After the OSS program was up and running, Applegate returned to the Army and set up a similar program for Military Intelligence at Camp Ritchie. His unit trained more than 14,000 soldiers between 1942 and 1946.

After World War II, many of the hard won lessons, and the success of those trained by Fairbairn, Sykes, Applegate, and others using point shooting techniques was slowly forgotten. Cooper's Modern Technique, developed from shooting competitions rather than actual gunfights, became dominant. 

Steven laid out some statistics based on studies of actual gunfights (mostly involving police). 55% are within five feet, 75% within ten feet, and 90% within 20 feet. Most occur in dim light and they are over very quickly, after only a few seconds. This sounds an awful lot like what Fairbarin was telling the Shanghai Municipal Police over ninety years ago.

While the conditions of the average gunfight haven't changed much over the past 90 years, we now know quite a bit more about how the human body reacts to these conditions. Steve spent some time describing the effects of the Sympathetic Nervous System response, also known as the body alarm reaction or fight or flight response. These include visual changes, like tunnel vision, an inability to focus on close objects, and distorted perception of time and distance. The heart rate accelerates, causing fine and complex motor skills to deteriorate. The body drops naturally into a crouch and squares up to the threat. 

Fairbairn, Sykes, and Applegate didn't know about the SNS reaction when they were developing their point shooting systems; this research didn't come along until much later. Nevertheless, it's amazing how many of these reactions are incorporated into their point shooting doctrines. Squaring up to the target, crouching, focusing on the target, the convulsive grip are things that happen naturally. The research on the SNS reaction validates what Fairbairn and Sykes learned by observing countless gunfights on the streets of Shanghai.

At this point we broke for lunch. Steve put in a video of a WWII film taken at Area B, showing Fairbairn training a class of OSS agents, using a young Rex Applegate as a demo dummy, and showing the House of Horrors (a live fire shoot house intended to replicate the disorienting conditions of combat). One of the odd things about this film is that it was produced by John Ford, who in addition to being a noted director of Hollywood Westerns, was head of the OSS's photographic unit.

After lunch, we had the safety briefing. While it was mostly pretty standard, Steve included a poem by noted English poet W. E. Fairbairn:

When unloaded you think you be,
Please don't point your gun at me.
That it may unloaded be,
Matters not a damn to me.
So never, never, let your gun,
pointed be at anyone.
(unless justified!)

It was raining pretty good at the time, and we heard one lightning strike with no discernible interval between the flash and the thunderclap. Steve decided discretion was the better part of valor, so we did our initial dry fire practice indoors. We practiced starting standing in the low ready and dropping into the combat crouch. Initially we did this using he one handed point shoulder technique and later using two-handed isosceles. A significant amount of emphasis was placed on getting the crouch deep enough. A good rule of thumb is in a proper crouch, if you let your support arm dangle, the palm should be about level with your kneecap. If the heel of your back foot doesn't come up off the ground, you've either got a freakishly flexible ankle or you aren't dropping down low enough.

Steve also emphasized that this 'low ready' should be fairly high so the gun is visible in your peripheral vision. At close range it should be pointed at about belt level on the opponent. This makes it more akin to what we teach as contact ready than a traditional low ready.

One of the things I observed was that if you start in fairly high ready position and are dropping into a proper crouch, you're not really swinging the gun up. What you're really doing is dropping yourself down behind the gun. One of the reasons S.I. doesn't teach the traditional low ready is that if you're swinging the gun up, it has a tendency to overshoot. In the Applegate system, if you're doing it right that's not really a problem.

 

In addition to practicing the combat crouch, we also worked the body point position. This is actually a relatively new addition to the Applegate system, added around the time he wrote Bullseyes Don't Shoot Back with Janich and made the video "Shooting For Keeps". It's similar to the Fairbairn half hip position, except the elbow is braced in the front of the ribcage and the gun is on the body centerline. 

By this point the rain had slackened to a light drizzle, so we moved outside to do some live fire. We began with the same drill we had done in dry fire, dropping down into a combat crouch while raising the gun from the ready and firing one-handed. Steve emphasized the key points were a locked elbow, and flexing the wrist to the right (assuming you're right handed) to align the barrel with the target. We began doing this at six feet, firing single shots. 

In fairly short order, we proceeded to shooting pairs rather than singles, then started increasing the distances. We moved back all the way to 20 feet with this technique, shooting entirely without sights. Steve gave us lots of reps and included plenty of coaching.

Next we moved back up to six feet and did some single shots from the isosceles position (still in a nice deep crouch). Once everyone had the basics down we switched to doubles and started moving back. Steve threw in some triples as well, to test people's recoil control. You might be able to get away with some flaws in the technique with one or even two shots, but once you start increasing the number of shots, you really have to have everything right. The number one problem with multiple shots is not gripping the gun hard enough. If you've got a gun with some nice aggressive checkering, like a Glock, one proof of the proper grip is to see the imprint of the checkering on your hand after a drill. Again, we took the isosceles out to around 20 feet. 

With both eye level shooting techniques out of the way, we started working the body point position. This one we did from the holster rather than the ready. One question with this technique is what to do with the off hand. The important thing is not to let it get out in front of the muzzle. Steve favors loading it up for a hand to hand strike, because at the ranges where you'd use body point, going hand to hand is a real possibility. We shot this starting at about four feet and moved gradually back to around ten. 

The last drill of the day was not part of the Applegate curriculum (as Steve emphasized whenever he deviated from the original scrip) but it was fun nonetheless. The drill simulated opening the door to someone who turns out to be a home invader. You fire two shots from the body point position then raise the gun to eye level and fire two shots to the head. 

At this point the day was done and we wrapped things up.

 

Sunday

This morning we eschewed the classroom and began the day on the range. We started out with some review of the positions from the previous day. First was body point, worked at very close range. Next was shooting one handed from point shoulder, which we took back to fifteen feet. Then we did the same with isosceles. 

With everyone warmed up, Steve brought out the timer. This was another difference from most other S.I. classes. The idea was not so much to force people to meet a particular time standard, instead it was used to induce some stress into the drills. We ran most drills several times as a group, with the par time signaled by a beep or Steve calling out the time of the last shot. Then we ran it for a few reps one at a time, so we would each know our own time and feel the pressure of being on the clock. He also taped over our sights, to make sure we weren't falling back on them for any of the drills.

 

First up was drawing and shooting from body point. When you start with your hand on the gun (a typical police traffic stop situation) this is fast. Par time was 1.5 seconds, and everyone achieved that. I did it in 0.77, but Eric Pfleger had me beat by a hundredth of a second. He also had us run it once with our hands in a relaxed position (which in my case also meant from concealment). Even so, it was still quite speedy. 

Moving on, we did some work on the timer shooting from one-handed point shoulder. We started at five feet, then stepped back to ten, and fifteen. From the ready, we were doing single shots in half to three-quarters of a second. Next up were one-handed pairs at ten feet, which most folks were able to do in about 0.75 seconds. We saw some accuracy issues here, usually attributable either to not flexing the firing hand enough, or not locking the elbow. As Craig Flaherty put it, "When you actually use the technique, it works."

Our next drill involved addressing adversaries to the sides or rear. The Applegate solution to this is to turn the whole body and shoot with the gun on the centerline. Swinging the gun arm only makes it likely you'll either overshoot or undershoot your target under stress. Steve had us experience this by having us swing our arm and try to shoot under a very short par time.

Because this drill involved having us face someplace other than downrange with the gun in low ready, we started out with a lot of dry work using either an empty hand or a blue gun. The key is to turn to face the target (preferably by stepping towards it rather than pivoting without moving your feet) and bringing the gun up at the same time. One thing he pointed out about using this to address targets to your rear is that stepping also moves you to the side a bit, so if someone is pointed in at you (particularly at the back of your head) you're now out of their line of fire and in a position to shoot them. There were some houses a relatively short distance up range, so Steve didn't have us do the full 180 with live guns, but we did 90 degree turns live. 

At this point we broke for lunch. Steve arranged for his daughter to bring pizza and we watched "Shooting for Keeps", a point shooting video Applegate made in the early '90s.

After lunch, we moved back to the range. The only position we hadn't shot on the time yet was isosceles, so we did that from ten, fifteen, and twenty feet. Par time for a pair from the ready at all distances was one second.

For our next drill we started out at about twenty-five feet and moved in, shooting at twenty, fifteen, and ten. The hardest part of this drill for me was stopping to shoot. Applegate was not a fan of shooting on the move and this class remained true to that.

Next up was the body armor drill. This is another of the newer additions to the Applegate curriculum, as body armor was not that common (or effective) in the World War II era. Steve demonstrated three different methods for doing this. First up was the conventional body armor drill (also known as the Mozambique drill) of two to the body and one to the head. Next was two to the body and one to the groin area, beneath the vest. Third was the vertical track. You started at belt level in the ready position and worked your way up to the head, firing four or five shots along the way (basically what we call a zipper).

We shot this at around six feet. Steve had us shoot each method a couple times, then we shot it one at a time on the timer using whichever method we wanted. Most folks chose to do two to the body and one to the head. I did the vertical tracking, because I like the zipper and prefer being generous with my ammo. Interestingly, even though I was firing five shots and everyone else was doing three, I was in about the middle of the pack in terms of overall time (around 1.1 seconds). Besides the fact that I can run the trigger pretty fast, I think this shows how much time it takes to reposition the gun from the body to the head, versus just moving it smoothly up the torso, firing along the way.

We moved on to multiple adversaries. One of the perennial debates is whether you shoot each adversary multiple times, or if you give everyone one helping before giving anyone seconds. I get the feeling that Steve personally favors the latter, but in the Applegate system, the minimum number of bullets fired at each target is always two, so we shot pairs at each. We did this from around six feet, with two targets placed about two feet apart. We ran it from one-handed, isosceles, and body point. From each position we shot it left to right and right to left. What was interesting is that if you followed the Applegate method and reoriented the body by moving your feet, which direction was easier really depended on your footwork, rather than which hand you were shooting with.

Our next drill was shooting with obscured vision. This was included as a substitute for a low light section. Given that we were doing this on an outdoor range, and it doesn't get dark until after 9:00pm this time of year, we would have been out here really late if we wanted to shoot in low light. Instead, Steve had some clear shooting glasses that he'd taken steel wool to to scratch them up. This left the lenses translucent, rather than transparent. These simulate something like getting doused with O.C. (without the accompanying pain) or having your vision obscured in some other way. When you put these on, you could vaguely see that there was a target there, but you certainly wouldn't get any visual feedback from your gun. Nevertheless, if you were squared up with the target and performed the technique correctly, you got good hits.

The penultimate drill was one that goes all the way back to Fairbarin's days with the Shanghai Municipal Police. The marching drill involves moving back and forth in front of some targets at successively closer distances. On each pass, the instructor calls out the fire command and you stop, turn towards whatever target you happen to be in front of, and fire twice. From the twenty foot line, you use your sights. From fifteen, you point shoot from the isosceles position. From ten feet, you use one-handed point shooting, and from five you use the body point position. This was the first time in the entire class I got to use my fancy red dot sight.

The last drill was the serpentine. Steve put target sticks up at four, eight, twelve, sixteen and twenty feet, in a line between a pair of targets. We had to slalom between them, stopping next to each stick to fire at the target on that side, using whatever position we thought appropriate.

That wrapped up the live fire portion of the class. Steve had been saving all the cardboard targets from the class. He laid them out and asked us to count the number of holes on the cardboard outside the silhouette. There were 64 misses. Throw in a few more that missed the target entirely and it works out to better than 97% hits, all without using sights. Pretty impressive.

After policing up the brass, we adjourned to the classroom and wrapped things up. Steve had a feedback form for us to fill out. In addition to answering any remaining questions we had, he also gave out his phone number and email address to the students, in case we had any questions after we left. He gave Craig Flaherty, the local S.I. instructor, a chance to promote his classes. Steve's daughter had taken a class photo for us earlier, and had been taking some other pictures this afternoon. She made a run to Walmart to have some prints made and we all got a nice big version of the class photo and a chance to snag any of the action shots that showed us looking particularly cool. Steve passed out the certificates and with this, we were done. I have to say I was sorry to see the class end.

Conclusions

I was really happy with this class. Steve is definitely a top flight instructor and he clearly knows this material backwards and forwards. It was pretty cool to get the Applegate point shooting system directly from someone Rex Applegate certified to teach it.

Much like Roger's Point Shooting Progressions class, this is a point shooting marksmanship class, with relatively little emphasis on gunhandling or the context of the fight more broadly. While this class does a great job teaching shooting skills, I think it definitely needs to be accompanied by a more general gunfighting class like CRG that covers stuff like malfunction clearance and after action drills, and places more emphasis on drawing from the holster.

Speaking of PSP, I'm sure folks are wondering how this class compares to Roger's. Let me state up front that they're both great classes to take and very worthwhile. PSP is at a more advanced level, but in a lot of ways it's like drinking from a fire hose. This class, and the Applegate curriculum going all the way back to World War II was designed to start with inexperienced shooters and get them trained up. I think that if you took this class first, it would give you a really solid foundation for the stuff that Roger does.

Speaking of inexperienced shooters, one of the things that really impressed me was how well this curriculum works for getting people up to speed quickly. There was a pretty wide range of experience levels in the class. As I mentioned earlier, the only previous experience one of the students in this class had was the class to get his Ohio CCW permit. That he was able to keep up with shooters of considerably more experience is a credit both to him and to the curriculum. Steve mentioned that the average training time Applegate had to train an agent during World War II was only 16 hours, and in that time they had to cover the pistol, rifle, and submachine gun. If you need to get someone up to a functional level with a pistol very quickly, this sort of point shooting is the way to go.

This was a really great class. Steve has been teaching firearms for a long time and does an excellent job of it. In addition to the point shooting skills, I picked up some tips as an instructor that are going to be really useful in the future. I want to thank my fellow students, particularly Craig Flaherty and Eric Pfleger. Their camaraderie and fellowship helped make this a really fun experience. I also need to thank Steve's daughter for bringing lunch Sunday and some excellent photography. 

I would highly recommend this class, both as a solid introduction point shooting and as a historical link to those who have gone before us. It's not often you can train with someone with such a direct link to Applegate, and through him to Fairbarin and Sykes. I would highly recommend this class, and indeed anything Steve teaches.

Discuss the Applegate Combat Point Shooting System class on Warriortalk.

Photos by Eric Pfleger and Steve's daughter.

After Action Reports on Trauma Medicine for the CCW Operator (TMCO)

Dr John Meade

Director of Tactical Medicine

Suarez International

  June in Texas. 120 degrees in the sun.

A fine range facility, with shade, chairs, and even real restrooms.

A doctor with a passion to teach his unique take on combining state of the art techniques of gunfight and trauma first aid, in a way that will save even more lives.

A leader in the gun training industry, who believed in my passions so much, that he volunteered to lend me the market drawing power of his presence as a co-instructor, at the debut class.

25 agressively enthusiastic students, who yearned for the knowledge that currently only military and other "special" people get. Are these "average guys" not important? Do they not want the skills to save the lives of their wife and children? It was time to pull back the curtain, and let these average guys learn such forbidden things!

This class was a "SELL-OUT", with people being put on a waiting list. I don't think too many were disappointed with their experiences. Here are a variety of comments from the students, after the weekend of intense training was completed.

Imagine the combined talents of Gabe Suarez, Dr. John Meade, Jon Payne, Rick Klopp, Jeff Lipa, and Dale Hunter all in one place......it was great!

There was so much information that it's going to take some time to digest all of it, and it will take lots of practice for me. This was my first experience with handling my gun totally single handed with support hand....shooting on my back! Better yet, try putting a tourniquet of yourself while fending off a threat with live fire......a totally new experience indeed.

We were taught what trauma treatments to perform while under fire – stay in the fight and stop massive bleeding. After the fight is over, we were taught the logical progression of treatments. The key is to prioritize problems, then solve one problem at a time.

You very well may have saved some lives with both aspects of this training. As a former police officer and a former nationally registered paramedic, I attest that this training was superb - and it was FUN.

This was my second Suarez International class, but it will definitely not be the last. We had a great selection of instructors and a well planned curriculum. Some of the topics covered were things that my department has already covered during in-service training sessions, but the addition of high-adrenaline combat stress made applying a tourniquet even more of a challenge!

For those of you that have taken SI classes past the basic level, you learned to perform an after-action assessment. After you make sure the bad guy is down, have taken care of any of his friends and checked your ammo, you check yourself. TMCO picks up at this point. This class gives you the skills to provide self-help if you got hit in the fight. But it is also way more than that. We learned that in tactical medicine there are three phases: care under fire, tactical field care and evacuation to definitive care. This class covers the basics of the first two phases.

The next TMCO class will be held in the beautiful Las Vegas area, 17-18 September 2011. The class, at last count, was already half full. If you want in on this class, sign up NOW.

Already being scheduled is the next level in the series, Advanced Trauma Medicine. We will pick up where TMCO stops, and take you even closer to skill levels that generally require licensure!

Come train with me, and the rest of the Suarez International instructors. We have much to offer.

Dr. John Meade is Director of Tactical Medicine for Suarez International , and a board-certified Emergency Physician. He is a reserve police officer on a multi-jurisdictional SWAT team, an EMS medical director and an NRA certified instructor. He may be contacted on WarriorTalk, or his website at www.statdoc.com .

The Suarez Group Is Giving Away $25,000

 
The Suarez Group Is Giving Away $25,000

As a special "thank you" to our customers and students, and as a way to give something back to those who have helped us get where we are, beginning this week, and extending until the July 4th weekend, we are adding a special "thank you gift" to randomly selected outgoing orders at One Source Tactical.

That gift will be a 3x5 postcard voucher for either A FREE TWO DAY CLASS OF YOUR CHOICE, or various discounts to training courses ranging from 10% off to 50% off. Overall, over 150 of these gift vouchers will go out totalling over $25K worth of training.

Thank You For Your Business

Kalashnikovs In Houston - Student's After Action Reports

 
 
By "Golucky"

Folks what a weekend!

A very informational, functional, and enlightening course. Coming away, much appreciation for what Suarez has been offering; past, present, and the future. Yes, bring the "fitness" and coming mentally & physically prepared.

First day started off with the ever great Texas weather in the morning with light rain that was no where near of the predicted forecast. Gabe has the fine integration of combining the instructions, methods, and physical strength. This is demonstrated first hand with Saturday's morning "circle". Whenever there was an opportunity, Gabe and the staff took every opportunity. After a set of instructions, demonstration, then by the rest of the class; was followed by another learning opportunity where questions were raised, answered, and any feedback was welcome by Gabe and the staff. Many thanks to Jon and Ryan for their assistance in the class.

They pointed out many details to me that I wouldn't have noticed. Especially my "shakes". Not only did they identify them; they reinforce it with necessary modifications & corrections. Gotta love those "teaching moments". This class showed what works, doesn't work, transitioning, different positions, and so much more. I won't say how many AK push-ups I accomplished, but I did managed a few. But that 's one of the eye-openers of this class. It's brings forward what you're good at and what you need to improve upon (homework!). You gotta be Ambi-dex ! I truly have a higher appreciation for this system and my confidence for the AK is significantly at a higher level. The online description of this class doesn't serve it justice. This class severely exceeded my expectations.

Our AK's were hitting steel from 100, 200, and 300 yards. Some with optics and others with irons! For me, this was accomplished with my WASR-10! With Ryan's insight, it became apparent that my stock was lose from the 100 yard mark in the beginning of this exercise. I was still able to hit my mark on all three distances. Many will try to point out the accuracy theory of the AK, it's just that...a theory. Those who were there, like many before me; we know the truth!

Anyone who hasn't taken S.I. classes, its an opportunity you can't afford to miss. Do it as soon as you can; for yourself and your loved ones. Don't believe me, make the judgment yourself and try it!

P.S. Glad to have taken this class with a great bunch of folks. Part of the success of this class was the composition of the class, and how much we all learn from each other. If I missed anything, I apologize as there was so much and words don't fully express how much we accomplished this weekend.

 

by "PMhogdog"

This was a great class. Gabe once again demonstrated that he is a phenomenal instructor. He had us doing dynamic movement drills, both dry-fire and live-fire, that would have shocked many firearms instructors, yet he did so in ways that maintained a high level of safety. This is one of the things that I really appreciate about SI classes. You get training that is much more advanced and applicable to real-world situations than what most instructors offer, without safety being compromised. Gabe also took advantage of every "teachable moment" that arose, but he never belittled anyone. His criticism was always right on target and constructive. 

Ryan and Jon were very helpful to the class as well. They watched for flaws in what we were doing and provided good suggestions to help us improve. They also reinforced good performance. 

The class involved everything from using the AK as an impact weapon, to CQB work to shooting at 300 yards. Once again, the myth that AKs are inherently inaccurate was debunked. Given a good shooting position, hits were achieved fairly consistently at 300 yards. Some guys were even doing that from a standing position with stock AK iron sights despite a breeze. 

Gear was tested in the course as well. People learned about what works for them and what doesn't. It was a bit muddy on the first day, when we did most of the ground work, and that reinforced the importance of choosing equipment that can keep working when dirty. The range was rocky too, so gear (and joints) had to be durable. 

It was a pleasure to meet and train with a great bunch of guys. I highly recommend Advanced Kalashnikov Rifle Gunfighting to anyone looking for top quality training.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by "PMPGW"

I drove from Washington State with a friend and training partner to take all four days of AK training in Houston (basic and advanced). This was the first experience either of us had with Gabe and crew, although we've trained with some of the most recognized names in the industry. I won't list them here so that can of worms doesn't get opened, but it is a "who's who" list to be sure. I'm also in nuclear security, and get paid to carry a fighting rifle every day. There isn't much that surprises either of us anymore. We may see different variations of things we've seen before, and maybe new drills to incorporate into our training, but rarely anything truly new.

With Gabe, we both spent four days feeling like were were brand new to shooting. We were not the top of the class like we're used to. We certainly didn't embarrass ourselves, but we spent much of the four days outside our comfort zone and learning new things. It was a little uncomfortable at first, but was a very welcome surprise. 

Where most classes spend 80% of the time shooting from stationary positions, and much of that standing up, Gabe's classes reversed that. We did a little of that just to keep fresh in our minds what good marksmanship fundamentals are.

Other than that, it was gunfighting.

Gunfighting is moving.

Gunfighting is using whatever position is best for the cover available.

Gunfighting is a 360 degree environment.

Gunfighting is not being able to call a time out if you or your kit can't keep up with the pace.

Gunfighting is stuffing rounds in your mags and getting water down your throat whenever there is the slightest lull in the action.

Gunfighting is making sure your partners do the same. This was the training we got in Houston.

I've often heard instructors say that if you or your gear are not up to the challenges, you may have to sit out at times. I've very rarely seen an instructor follow through. Gabe and his crew did. I never felt held back by other classmates issues. Gabe pushed hard, and shooters who couldn't keep up needed to step out for short periods of the most extreme drills. That said, the members of the class almost universally impressed me. The older members were generally in good mental and physical condition. The less in shape shooters dealt with sore muscles and joints with a good sense of humor. The inexperienced members learned very quickly. The guys with lower budgets learned to make due with more simple kit. These were some of the best people I've taken a class with. We had a three generation group from Houston in the class. The grandfather and father were both seasoned shooters who did well, and the grandson was lightning fast with all of his weapons manipulations. He made some impressive hits with iron sights out to 300 yards. He has all the natural talent to be an armed professional or competitive shooter in a few more years, and a great work ethic also. Kudos to him, and to his father and grandfather who are clearly raising him right.

I also appreciated the assistant instructors. Both were well rounded in their skills and knowledge, but each had areas that they excelled in. I learned a lot from Jon's technical knowledge about the inner working of an AK, and Ryan's extensive LE training background and humble assertiveness was great when learning new movement and positional skills and drills.

There are two things that I think made the class a true bargain. One is that Gabe always explained why a particular technique or tactic was being used, and what real world events led to him adopting them. The second is that he always explained how it could be practiced on our own. This gave us a context for everything, so it could be applied to other situations in the future. It also gave us the ability to train on our own to develop the skills that were were shown in class. That's the sign of a true teacher, and I'm personally very grateful for the experience.

I'm not sure what my next Suarez class will be, but these will not be the last.

TO TRAIN IN THE SUAREZ INTERNATIONAL KALASHNIKOV SYSTEM