WARRIOR TALK NEWS

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 .

AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting - After Action Report

Over Memorial Day weekend I attended Randy Harris' AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting class. This will be is a bit different from my usual after action reviews. I was not actually a student in this class. Instead, Randy was nice enough to let me sit in as an 'Assistant Instructor', which essentially meant that I watched Randy teach the class, helped run the firing line, demoed stuff, and offered the occasional comment from the peanut gallery.

Why spend a weekend over in Chattanooga doing this? Well, back in February I taught a Fighting Rifle Skills class and one of the students brought an AR. I'm mainly an AK guy, but I'd prepared for this eventuality: I watched the AR-15 Rifle Gunfighting DVD, read up on SI doctrine for running the AR, etc. I think I did a pretty good job telling the student how to run his rifle, but I could have done better, particularly when it came to demonstrating some of the AR specific manipulations. The best way I can describe it is that I knew this stuff in my head, but not in my hands. 

The first step in improving my ability to do this was to get myself an AR, so I could get some hands on experience. I got the gun put together about a month ago, did dry work with it, and shot it for about half the exercises in Roger Phillips' Long Gun Point Shooting Progressions class the previous weekend. 

This hands on experience has certainly helped (and I'll continue to get more of it as time goes on). As I was putting the finishing touches on my new rifle, I noticed Randy's class on the SI schedule. He knows a lot more about the AR than I do (he bought an M16 before he bought his first car), and I figured seeing how he taught students to use it would be quite helpful. 

I brought my new AR, a BCM upper with a lightweight barrel and midlength gas system on a Palmetto State Armory lower with a Sully stock. It's got Magpul handguards, a Daniel Defense fixed rear sight, and an EOTech on a LaRue mount. The latest additions have been a flashlight mount for a Surefire G2 on the front sight post and a set of nice Suarez International logo decals. I am really happy with how this gun turned out. I’m still and AK guy, but this rifle is tempting. The gun was fed with PMAGs. I brought my Sneakybag, but ended up just using one of Dale Fricke's kydex mag carriers and a belt mounted dump pouch (either EMDOM or Maxpedition Rolly Polly).

On the pistol end of things, I brought my Glock 17 with a new RMR on it. This is actually the first time I've used the RMRed pistol as a carry gun. It rides (very nicely, I might add) in a Dale Fricke Seraphim holster.

This was a fairly big class. There were twelve students, all told. They all brought ARs. One was in 7.62x39mm, but all the others were in 5.56mm. The majority was using iron sights, but there was a strong minority of red dots (Aimpoint and EOTech) and one magnified optic. Some rifles started out with a lot of stuff bolted to them. One began the first day with a flashlight, green laser, bipod, and a vertical fore grip (after the first round of dry drills, these accessories started disappearing).

There was quite a bit of variety in support gear. We had sneakybags, chest rigs, tactical vests, a plate carrier (sans plates), belt rigs, and one student who just fed his AR out of the pockets of his jeans.

Glock was the most common pistol, with a smattering of XDs and 1911s. Most folks ran with a pistol on the belt, but there were a few with thigh holsters. Several people had some rather unusual pistol carry methods, including a cross draw holster on a vest, and two who carried their pistols inside their shoulder bags.

Saturday

The class started off with the usual safety briefing. Randy explained the four rules and how we would run the range. He went over the medical plan and what to do in the event someone got shot. 

With that out of the way, we began with a lecture on the history of the AR platform. This sort of thing could be a little boring, but Randy was able to provide lots of visual (and tactile) aids from his extensive AR collection. There were also a couple of students with some old school rifles that helped illustrate the early years of AR design. One had a three prong flash hider (pre-birdcage) and both lacked the forward assist and had slab sided magwell (without any ridge around the mag release button). From this starting point he used his extensive knowledge of the AR's history and various examples to take us through the development of the gun to the modern day. 

The AR does have something of a mixed reputation, and we talked about some of these alleged issues. During recent conflicts, the AR has acquired a reputation for poor terminal performance. Randy pointed out that the two primary culprits in this: the adoption of the 62 grain green tip round and the widespread issue of shorter barreled guns took place during a time period (the '80s and '90s) where we weren't shooting a lot of people. As citizens we can choose more effective ammo, we are generally forced to use somewhat longer barrels, and we don't tend to be taking real long shots. 

The other issue ARs often get knocked on is reliability. A lot of this is operator induced, usually either insufficient (or no) lubrication. An AR will not run bone dry, and it needs to be cleaned occasionally. On a well lubed and reasonably clean rifle, the usual mechanical culprits are a bad extractor spring or bad magazines. The extractor issue can be mitigated with newer, more powerful extractor spring with a D-ring around it. With mags, you can either buy newer mags, or replace the followers on old mags with newer, better ones. Randy demonstrated this by replacing a black follower in an old mag with the anti-tilt green one during the lecture. The other thing you can do with mags is to identify and get rid of your bad magazines. If you keep your gun well lubed and relatively clean, have a good extractor setup and good mags, it will run much more reliably than many people will believe.

We talked about the AR's different controls: the sights, trigger, safety, mag release, charging handle, and bolt release (we pretty much ignored the forward assist). Some of these are pretty self-explanatory (sights, trigger) but others require some education. One of the things that makes running an AR different is that there are two different controls for manipulating the bolt: the charging handle and the bolt release. On an AK (or most other military rifles for that matter) you do all the bolt manipulation using the charging handle. On the AR, you need to know when to use the charging handle and when to use the bolt release. Basically the charging handle is for loading and malfunction clearance, while the bolt release is for reloads. Using the charging handle for everything is slower, less reliable, and risks damage to a somewhat fragile part. 

The other point about the ARs controls is that they aren't ambidextrous (at least not in the stock configuration). SI places great stock in being able to run the rifle on either side, so you need to be able to operate all of these with either hand. Right handed, the mag release is run with your index finger. With the rifle on the left side, you use your thumb of your right hand as you grab the mag out of the rifle. On the right side, the left thumb hits the bolt release. On the left, if your fingers are long enough you can hit the bolt release paddle with your index finger. If they're shorter, you can 'choke the chicken' and reach around the front of the magwell and slap the bolt release with your fingers. Right handed, you can operate the charging handle by hooking it with your left index finger. On the left side, you can reach under and hook it with your right thumb. In either case, just hooking the left side of the charging handle (where the latch is) is faster than taking the stock off your shoulder and grabbing both sides of the t-handle.

Randy had the students empty their rifles and divest themselves of any loaded magazines. Thus denuded of any live ammunition, we started with some dry practice. First up was simply mounting the rifle to the shoulder with the sights in line with your eye and pressing the trigger to the rear. We moved on to the reload, and had the students change empty magazines in their rifles. Then, in their first taste of SI doctrine, Randy had the students switch to their support side and do the reload with the gun on that hand. It was immediately obvious that many people's support gear was not really set up for support side reloads. Many also had difficulty with a lack of a good place to put 'expended' magazines in either the primary or support sides. SI is not a fan of dropping expended mags as a default. 

Moving on to some position work, Randy had me demonstrate kneeling and prone, and had the host of this class, who has taken lots of Randy's rifle classes, show SBU, urban, and modified (Spetsnaz) prone. Then Randy had the students practice tracking him while prone and seeing how they had to shift positions to address potential threats in different directions.

Randy continued the dry work by doing mag changes on the move. Everyone lined up abreast and moved down the road, doing three mag changes. They did this at a walk a few times, then stepped it up to a jog. The first few times there were a lot of dropped mags, but these diminished as students got more experience. Then, of course, we switched shoulders and did the same from the support side.

Next up was the slalom drill. The students lined up about three yards apart, and one at a time they slalomed down the line, treating each student as either a right or left handed corner, switching shoulders each time. 

While this dry work was just the first part of the first day, it really encapsulated the SI philosophy: everything we do we want to be able to do ambidextrously and on the move.

After lunch, we moved out to the range and worked on zeroing everyone's rifles. We shot prone from 50 yards. Most folks were either right on or pretty close, but there were some exceptions. One student had a brand new EOTech that he'd never sighted in, and it was shooting way low. We had to dial it up around 65 clicks to get it on target. Another students iron sights were so far off he was off the paper entirely. Randy took his rifle while I ran the line and spotted and we got it dialed in after some major adjustments. While he was doing this, he doubled a couple of times. He eventually concluded that if you didn't fly your finger off the trigger with each shot and instead tried to properly reset it, the rifle would double more often than not. 

Once all the rifles were pretty well zeroed, we moved on to some snap shooting. Shoulder the rifle, make any small sight adjustments you need to get the sights lined up and on target, and press the trigger. The better your mount is, the fewer adjustments you need and the quicker you can press the shot, so a solid mount is an important skill. At reasonable ranges with the right skills, you can press the trigger as soon as the rifle hits the shoulder. After doing this from low ready, Randy had me demonstrate the SI ready positions (contact ready, close contact ready, Sul, patrol ready, port arms, and high noon ready) then proceeded to practice mounting the gun and making snap shots from all of them.

Next up Randy introduced the "caveman EOTech". This is a method of point shooting the rifle, similar to the metal on meat method for pistols. You basically look over the rear sight, put the front sight tower of the rifle on the target, and press the trigger. If the target appears larger than the sight tower, you're probably going to hit. For the portion of the class with optics, we talked about looking over the optic and using the top of the sight housing for your caveman EOTech. We did a fair bit of shooting like this to get people used to the concept. 

Randy also talked about mechanical sight offset. The AR's sights are 2.5 inches above the bore, so at close range the bullet will hit low. If you're trying to shoot a guy in the chest, it’s not really an issue. If you're trying to shoot him in the eye, and your daughter’s head is right under that eye, you need to take this into consideration. Randy had the students shoot at a small dot on the target's head and see how low their bullets hit, then had them compensate for this and try to put the rounds right through the dot. There are two methods. One is simply to aim about two inches high. The other is to get an alternate sight picture with your irons, with the front post up above the rear aperture. With a little practice, everyone was able to get very precise hits on the dot. 

Continuing our emphasis on ambidextrous shooting, we did some more shoulder transfer drills, this time shooting it live. Fire two shots from the strong side, do a partial transfer (move the butt of the rifle to the other shoulder but keep the primary hand on the firing grip and the support hand on the magwell) and fire two shots, switch the hands and fire two shots, do a partial transfer back to the primary shoulder and fire two shots, then switch the hands and fire two more.

Our last major drill of the day was to practice against multiple adversaries. We split the class in two and I ran one line while Randy ran the other. Each line had three targets and one student at a time would engage them. We started with firing at each target three times each, then switched to shooting them once each, then twice each. This got students used to transitioning from target to target and taught them that shooting them once each is going to be faster than hosing each target down with a burst. 

To wrap things up, Randy talked about malfunctions. Because of its design, the AR is subject to some rather . . . interesting . . . malfunctions. Cartridges or empty cases can end up in odd places (like between the bolt and the charging handle) where they are rather hard to get out. Given the variety of problems that can crop up, many people like to do diagnostic malfunction clearance: figure out what's wrong and perform some remedial action specifically designed to remedy that problem. We're not really a fan of that at SI, regardless of the platform. It's quicker and easier to deep the diagnosis to a minimum and apply a general solution that will fix a broad range of problems. We can't quite get to completely non-diagnostic malfunction clearance the way we do on an AK (if it stops working, reload it). However, we can keep diagnosis to a minimum. We divide malfunctions, and our actions to clear them into two categories: dead trigger and mush trigger. The dead trigger goes click, and you get nothing. The mush trigger doesn't even go click. The difference between the two is if the gun goes click (the hammer falling) you know that must be in battery. If the hammer won't even fall, the bolt is probably not all the way forward. 

If you get a click, it means that you either have a dud round, or there's nothing in the chamber. The most common reason there's nothing in the chamber is a failure to seat the mag completely. If the magazine is not all the way in the magwell, the bolt won't be able to strip the top round and drive it into the chamber. To fix either of these problems, we do the same as we do on a pistol: tap the bottom of the magazine and cycle the action. This insures the magazine is seated, gets a dud round in the chamber out (if there is one) and chambers a new round. Gun should be ready to go.

If you don't get a click and the trigger is just mushy, it means you have a failure to extract (the previous round is still in the chamber and the rifle is trying to drive another round in behind it), a failure to eject (commonly referred to as a stovepipe), a true double feed (two rounds trying to get in the chamber at the same time) or one of the AR's more complex malfunctions (most of which can be described as rounds somewhere in the mechanism where they shouldn't be). For all of these problems, step one is to get the mag out of the magwell. Depending on how stuck it is, you may be able to just rip it out, or you may have to lock the bolt back first to relive some pressure. Once the mag is out, the rounds causing the problem may fall out on their own, or you may have to coax them out by cycling the bolt or by hand. Once the gun is completely empty, insert a new magazine and cycle the bolt. If this is one of the more complex malfunctions, you may have to do some diagnosis at this point (and perhaps use your multitool to help get cases or cartridges out). 

Randy had demonstrated one other malfunction clearance technique earlier in the day (when we had an actual need for it). During the procedures above, you may run into a situation where a shell is stuck in the chamber so tight you can't even move the charging handle. This can often be solved by 'mortaring' the gun, though sometimes it will require a range rod to clear. If you have a collapsible stock, collapse it (otherwise you may break the pin that holds it in position). Then, while pulling the charging handle to the rear, drive the gun butt first into the ground (angled downrange, please). The sudden stop when it hits the ground should allow the inertia of the bolt to yank the stuck case out of the chamber and clear the malfunction. If it doesn't, you may need to bang it out with a range rod.

As it was getting a bit late, we held off on practical application of these procedures until tomorrow. Randy, several students, and I adjourned to a steakhouse for dinner and some excellent fellowship before turning in for the evening.

Sunday

We started out the day with a review of the material we covered yesterday, which evolved into a discussion of the context for civilian use of the AR. Unlike a pistol, we're probably not going to carry a rifle on our person all the time. A rifle lives in the closet or the trunk until a situation where you need it. Those situations are probably limited to home defense and SHTF scenarios. While Katrina is the default example for a SHTF situation these days, the tornados that hit the area where we were training about a month prior (much damage was visible on our drive to the range each day) provided a more immediate real world example. In these sorts of situations you might be glad to have something with a bit more reach than a pistol. Randy had a personal example of this. After the tornadoes, he some trouble getting home from work that day because the police closed off the road due to downed limbs and powerlines ahead. He was on the verge of walking the last half-mile into his subdivision when they opened up the roadblock. Now, he wouldn't have had to fight his way through half a mile of zombie cannibal looters, but I'm sure having a get-home bag, which included a rifle, probably made him feel a little better.

We moved out to the range and Randy started the students off with some dry practice in the various shooting positions. The first live drill exercised the different shooting positions from both shoulders. From 50 yards, the students shot five shots standing from their strong side, five shots kneeling, did a mag change, then did five shots prone. Then they switched to the support side shoulder and did five prone, another mag change, five kneeling, and five standing. Positions shooting from the support side shoulder and reloading while prone were clearly new to a lot of folks. I suggested that the students running shoulder bags swing their bag out in front of them when shooting prone. This makes mags a lot more accessible and even offers the possibility of using the bag to shoot off of (it's probably too low to put the forend on, but you can plunk the mag down on it for a bit more height).

After giving everyone some experience on the support side, Randy concentrated on strong side position shooting for the next few drills. They worked shooting standing from 50 yards, then kneeling, then prone. The shoulder bag users really liked swinging the bag up for the prone work.

One of the things that really differentiates SI is our emphasis on dynamic movement. We had been putting together the building blocks for this on the first day with the caveman EOTech and shoulder transfers. Now it was time to pull it all together and shoot on the move. As with most things, the first step is to do it dry: take three steps to the right, turn and transfer to the left shoulder, then take three steps to the left, turn and transfer to the right shoulder. Once everyone had it down (and everyone was doing it pretty much in unison so we didn’t have shooters bumping into each other) we did it live. Three shots as you take three steps to the right, then three shots as you take three steps to the left. As Randy emphasized, this is just a drill. You’re not going to pace back and forth in front of an adversary while shooting on the move. This is just a way of practicing shooting on the move and transferring the gun from shoulder to shoulder during movement. 

A more realistic application for these skills is shooting while getting off the X (GOTX). The “X” is where you were standing at the start of the fight, where the attacker expects you to be, and where all of the death and destruction he can muster is bearing down on. Standing there and shooting it out with him is like playing rock-em sock-em robots with guns. It’s not going to end well for you. It might not end well for him either, but which is more important to you: shooting the bad guy, or not getting shot yourself?

The way to avoid this is not to be standing on that X. We need to move, and move far enough and fast enough to change what the attacker sees so that he has to reorient himself and reacquire you as a target. In the meantime, we put a bunch of rounds into him so that he never gets that chance. The key here is to use the caveman EOTech skills we introduced on Saturday. These let you move much faster than you can if you’re intent on maintaining a traditional sight picture, yet they’re sufficiently accurate for shooting at the ranges where getting off the X is an appropriate response. 

This is all pretty easy if you’re going towards your strong side. Unfortunately, that won’t always be an option. If there’s a wall to your right when your fight comes, you better know how to get off the X to your left. This is where the shoulder transition comes in. You can do the partial transfer (moving the stock but not switching your hands) and get the first shot off almost as quickly as you can going to the right. After taking more than one or two steps, this is going to get more and more awkward, so it’s usually best to swap hands after the first shot. We ran this several times getting off the X to the right (our dominant side for all but one student) then did it several more times going to the left. After giving everyone their first taste of getting off the X, we broke for lunch. 

After lunch, Randy talked about the after action assessment. Plenty of people have gotten killed because they shoot the bad guy they see, then relax before the fight is really over. The guy you just shot may get back up or he may have friends. We need to remain aware, check for additional threats, and keep an eye on the guy(s) we just shot. Randy teaches this using the F.A.S.T. acronym (also known as the Wyatt protocol). This stands for Fight, Assess, Scan, and Take cover, Top off, Treat injuries, Talk to anyone who needs to be talked to. The Fight part of this is what we’d been working on the entire class so far. Assess means check out any attackers you shot at. Ask yourself “Did I hit him? Did it work?” Scan for any additional threats. Look left and right, moving your muzzle and eyes together in the contact ready position. There’s no sense looking with just your eyes and having to drive the gun to the target if you spot an additional attacker. Real life is not a square range where there are only targets in one direction, so you need to check behind you as well. This is where the Sul position comes in. Drop the muzzle down and you can turn around and safely look for threats behind you. The key here is to step forward when you turn, rather than pivoting in place or stepping backward. This will give you a little extra space between you and any potential adversary behind you. The various ‘T’s might not always be applicable to a situation, and the order they are performed in may vary. We want to get to a better position and Take cover if possible. Top off by performing a proactive reload to get your gun ready in case additional threats show up. Check yourself and your friends or loved ones for any injuries and Treat them if necessary (we do not advocate treating the attacker, he can fend for himself). By Talk to anyone who needs to be talked to, we mean calling 911, talking to witnesses, responding police officers, etc.

We ran the GOTX some more (just to the strong side this time) following it up with an after action assessment. One of the traps it’s easy to fall into is turning the scan a ‘tactical pirouette’. You swing from side to side then turn around, but you aren’t really looking, just going through the motions. To drive this point home, I made some silly faces or held up my knife during some of the scans, then asked folks what they saw.

Next up was transitioning to pistol. Transitioning to a pistol is much faster and simpler than reloading a rifle or clearing a malfunction. Most civilian rifle work is going to occur well within pistol range, and civilians generally can make the choice to carry a pistol in any circumstance when they’ve got a rifle on them, so this makes sense as a default when your gun doesn’t work. SI recommends a simple two-point sling and for most folks we recommend not tying yourself to your rifle. You may have to drop the rifle quickly when responding police officers show up, lest you get shot by the cops, and you may need to employ the rifle for home defense in situations where you don’t have time to climb into your nifty tactical sling. There are circumstances where being tied to your rifle makes sense, particularly if you may get blown up by a roadside bomb. It’s nice to have your rifle close at hand when you regain consciousness and the post-IED ambush starts. For those of us not operating in areas with an IED threat, not being tied to our rifle is generally the better choice.

One fellow in the class was running a one point sling that tied him to the gun, so all he had to do to transition is drop the rifle. If you’re not tied to the rifle, you’re going to have to do something with it when you transition. The method we teach is to bring the rifle up over your head and drop it so it hangs diagonally across your back. This gets the rifle out of your way, gives you two hands to access your pistol, and is reliable even at a dead run. For this to work properly, you need a long enough sling. Most folks showed up with their slings adjusted on the short side (especially folks who were used to using the sling as a shooting aid) but we were able to get everyone adjusted out long enough (though some were pretty marginal). 

We ran through this dry a bunch of times, until everyone was able to do it safely, without muzzle sweeping the next guy in line. Then we went live with it. Now some folks run transition drills with full magazines and have the student put the safety on before transitioning. There are two problems with this. First, if you are doing anything dynamic, there’s a good chance the safety could get knocked off on some piece of gear. Second, you’re building in a training scar. For any malfunction on an AR where you get a click instead of a bang, you won’t be able to engage the safety. You don’t want to be standing there in the middle of a gunfight with your transition disrupted because you can’t get the safety on like you do in training. Train like you fight. The way we do this is to have each student load a mag with two rounds. They chamber the first one so they’ve got one in the chamber and one in the mag. Randy emphasized that he wanted students to try to fire a burst of at least four shots. This fires the two rounds in the rifle and makes absolutely sure it was empty. It’s important to be absolutely sure you’ve shot the rifle dry and it’s safe to transition. This also simulates a real gunfight, where it will probably take several failed trigger presses before you realize the gun doesn’t work.

The first time we did this live, one student found his pistol wouldn’t shoot. I examined it and it turned out the bump pad on a new 1911 mag was preventing the magazine from going all the way in. Luckily he had several mags with a different bump pad on them that worked. 

A fair number of the people in this class were wearing thigh holsters. Many of them were adjusted way too low, closer to the knee than the hip. These shooters really had to stretch to reach their pistols. Thigh holsters should be run high enough that you can easily grasp the pistol’s grip. Closer to the hip is better. I could also tell which student had put a lot of time in practicing with his thigh rig and which students were new to this carry position. I think this is a pretty good argument for keeping the position of your pistol on your tactical rig as close as possible to your CCW rig. It’s one of the reasons I like running a shoulder bag so I can wear my actual EDC holster. I’m planning to go with a war belt for my more ‘tactical’ use rather than a chest rig for similar reasons. 

We’d talked about malfunctions on Saturday, now it was time to give students some hands on experience with them. We divided the students up into groups and set out four rifles. While the student faced uprange, the instructors would set up four different malfunctions (an empty chamber, unseated magazine, stovepipe, and a failure to eject). The student had to turn around and fix each rifle in turn. Everyone managed to fix all the malfunctions and get the rifles going, but several people went to removing the magazine and reloading the rifle on malfunctions that could have been fixed with a simple tap-rack. Another problem occurred when a student clearing a double feed locked the bolt back to make it easier to get the mag out. He didn’t send the bolt forward until after he inserted a new mag, so it just rammed the top round from the mag into the back of the round that was still in the chamber. You’ve got to make sure to cycle the bolt and get everything out of the gun on these kinds of malfunctions.

The last drill of the day was the combat rundown. We ran this drill one student at a time. They started at 100 yards with 25 rounds in their rifle. First, they dropped prone for their first shot. They moved up to 75 and shot from sitting behind a barrel, then to 50 and shot kneeling from behind a tree, then standing at 25 yards from behind a barricade, then moved out from cover, fired their last five shots on the move, then transitioned to pistol and put five more in the target from about five yards. As Randy pointed out, this is just a drill. Assaulting over open ground like this by yourself would be suicide. It gives you a chance to practice moving with the rifle and getting in and out of different positions. It’s also a big, fun drill to cap things off with. Visually impressive too; I had several students ask me to take pictures while they ran it. Hopefully some of them will be willing to post some of them in this thread.

We finished up by presenting the certificates and asking what the students thought of the class. Everyone seemed pretty happy with it. The number one request was for cooler weather.

Conclusions

The AR often gets knocked for its reliability, but I was favorably impressed with how well most of these rifles ran. There were only two that gave significant problems. One was the AR in 7.62x39mm. This gun had some major magazine issues. When you turn a mag over, you shouldn’t have four or five rounds pour out. The problem was the follower was getting hung up on the transition between the curved portion and the straight portion of the magazine. The AR just wasn’t designed for such a tapered cartridge. The 7.62x39mm wants to feed through nice, curved magazines like the AK uses. When you try to run it through a mag that has a straight section to fit in the AR magwell, it’s going to cause issues. This gun also suffered quite a few stuck cases, some of which had to be beaten out with a range rod. During the transition drills, the student with this rifle finally got so frustrated with it he gave up and switched to his AK. That, I think, is the ideal solution. If you want to shoot 7.62x39mm, use a rifle designed for it.

The other troublesome rifle was one shooting Tula ammo. Hearing this, one might immediately jump on the “don’t shoot steel case in your AR” bandwagon, but none of the problems he had were extraction or chambering related issues you would expect if the case material was the problem. Instead, he was getting failures to fire. The firing pin strikes in the primers were nice and deep, so this was probably just a bad batch of primers. This gun also had a hammer pin start to walk out during the second day. Randy hammered it back in.

Other than these two guns, almost all the malfunctions we saw were operator induced. Failing to fully seat the magazine was the most common. We even had a discussion of whether not having a magazine in the gun when you started the drill counted as a malfunction (consensus was no).

Aside from the fact that some calibers don’t work in ARs, the most obvious learning point from the class was some of the gear issues. This is not intended as a criticisim of any of the students. Part of the reason to come to this class is to test how well your gear works. I’m not trying to knock anyone here, just to draw out some lessons for future students.

Suarez International is not gear focused. Yes, SI sells gear though One Source Tactical, but we aren’t going to tell you, “you must have this doohickey on your rifle or you will die!” We won’t look at you askance if your dump pouch isn’t the brand that OST sells. While we don’t care what brand of gear you bring, over the years we’ve found some setups work better than others.

Most folks brought rifles that worked pretty well. The biggest problem was having too much stuff bolted to your gun, but that’s easy to fix at the class with a screwdriver or hex wrench. A sling is pretty much mandatory, an optic is a nice addition, and maybe a flashlight if this is a home-defense gun. That’s about it.

The most common piece of additional equipment on the rifles in this class was the vertical foregrip. At SI we’re big advocates of the floating support hand. Basically, your support hand moves in and out depending on what you’re doing at the time. A VFG (or the MagPul AFG) tends to inhibit this. While there’s a bit of physical aspect to this, preventing you from sliding your hand easily forward and back, it seems to be as much mental as physical. A VFG tends to glue the support hand in one particular spot, even if that’s not the best spot for that hand at the time. Where this is really evident is during shoulder transfers. Hands stay on the VFG even if it’s a really long stretch, when it would be much easier to just grab the magwell instead.

The most troublesome accessory was a magnified optic with a very small field of view mounted on top of a carry handle. For what we’re doing, iron sights or a red dot are really much more useful than a magnified optic, especially one over four power. The top of the carry handle is a pretty lousy place to mount any sort of optic, as its way too high for any sort of reasonable cheek weld. 

Another issue we ran into on some rifles was the stock length. The A2 stock, in particular, is really too long for the kind of shooting and manipulations we do. The A1 stock is workable, and a collapsible stock not extended all the way is pretty good. I got some interest on the Sully stock on my AR, which (in the configuration I have) is just about the right length.

I discussed slings earlier. There’s really no need to go for anything fancy here, as long as it’s long enough. Something like the Saiga sling OST sells, which is basically six feet of webbing and a couple of buckles works fine. A good test to see if your sling is long enough is to loop it behind your neck and hold the rifle horizontally across your chest. If the gun hangs at around belly button level the sling is about right

As far as support gear goes, the key is to have mags available to both hands, for doing reloads on the support side shoulder. A shoulder bag works for this because you can swing it around and access mags with your strong hand. Chest rigs place the mags where they’re easily accessible to both hands. On a belt rig, put one mag carrier on the strong side for support shoulder reloads. You also need a way to stow expended mags. Putting them back into mag pouches is far from ideal, both because it’s generally difficult, and because of the danger of grabbing an expended mag when you wanted a new one. If you’re using a shoulder bag, it works pretty well as a dump pouch (again, swing it around for the support side reload. With chest or belt rigs, a dump pouch of some sort is best. One solution to the ambidexterity problem is to put the dump pouch in the 6 o’clock position, accessible to both hands. Another solution with a chest rig is to tuck the expended mag behind the chest panel until you have a chance to move it to the dump pouch.

I certainly got a lot out of helping Randy teach the class. It was great to see how someone who really knows the platform taught it. Just as important, I got to see how a fairly big, diverse group of students responded to that instruction. What worked well, what things tripped them up, etc. I hope they learned half as much from me as I did from them. I'd like to thank Randy for letting me sit in on this excellent class. I'd highly recommend AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting and anything else Randy teaches.

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

 

Suarez International's CQB Class - After Action

By Chris Upchurch - Suarez International Staff Instructor

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

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

Friday Evening

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Playing With Skorpions - Czech Skorpions That Is

While in Czech Republic we had an opportunity to play with several Czech weapons from SMGs to full-size Machineguns.  Very cool what you can really do at a former "secret soviet base" in a former communist nation that is now free.
 
The first submachinegun we worked with in Czech Republic was the infamous Skorpion VZ-61 SMG.  "Infamous" due to its use by several terrorist groups around the world. Carlos The Jackal was quite fond of it as I recall. This due to its concealability (no bigger than the typical IPSC game gun), and its controllability.  Take a close look at the photo.  You will see six shots being fired on full automatic.  The brass cases are in the air or being extracted.  Notice also the total lack of any muzzle rise at all.
 
The VZ-61 is an interesting little weapon and a bit hard to classify - is it a machine pistol (a full-auto handgun) or a submachine gun (a full-auto shoulder fired weapon). Its was first seen in late 1950s and intended to provide various non-infantry units with lightweight PDW that was more effective than a pistol, but is no more difficult to carry.

Another application for the Skorpion was for use by various Special Operations people because the 7.65x17 Browning / .32 ACP can be very easily silenced.

First prototypes were built in 1959, and officially adopted in 1961, as "Samopal Vzor 1961" (submachine gun model of 1961), or SA VZ-61. The weapon was issued to various units in the Czechoslovak army, and also licensed in Yugoslavia.

Later versions were also produced in 9x18 (9mm Makarov) and 9x17 (380 ACP) as the SA VZ-82. Designated as VZ-91 or SA 391, the last versions of the Skorpion family were produced during early 1990s, and  chambered for 9x19 Parabellum ammunition.

The Skorpion is a blowback operated weapon and has a rate-reducing mechanism housed in the pistol grip. This produces enough delay to slow down the cyclic rate of fire to a, still chainsaw-like, but controllable, 800-900 rounds per minute.

The VZ-61 we worked with is a 32 ACP caliber weapon that gets sneers of derision by many gun trainers in the USA as a result of our national "big caliber - little *****" syndrome. While it would be more desirable in 9mm, the 32 ACP is nothing to ignore and I doubt any of the people currently calling the weapon "anemic" would care to take a 20 round burst of its ammo in the face.
 
The VZ-61 is not, and was not, conceived as a general purpose SMG.  And it cannot be compared to an UZI or an MP5 for general use.  But for the situations where a great deal of volume of fire is needed and concealability essential, such as in certain executive proetction details, certain police functions, and yes - in what might be termed as insurgency/counter-insurgency operations, the sting of the Skorpion is a force to be respected.
 
Like the AK, even those who dislike it, or who would never select it as a primary weapon, should familiarize themselves with it since it is highly prevalent around the world on both sides. Maybe in the future, vis-a-vis our connections, we might be able to hold a ComBloc SMG class so more of our readers can play with Skorpions.

Kalashnikov School After Action Report

   

By Chris Upchurch - Suarez International Staff Instructor

Last June I attended the Advanced Kalashnikov Rifle Gunfighting class in Prescott, taught by Gabe Suarez. He was assisted by SI Staff Instructors Doug Little and Dale (infidelprodigy). On the second day they were joined by Uli Gebhard. This was the second of three AK classes, following Kalashnikov Rifle Marksmanship and followed by Kalashnikov Rifle Force on Force.

I shot the class using my Arsenal SLR-107F in 7.62x39mm. Everyone in the class was using an AK pattern rifle, with a mix of Arsenals, nice Fuller builds, and various other rifles. 7.62 rifles were the most common, with a minority in 5.45mm. My rifle was set up with a forward mounted Aimpoint Micro on an Ultimak rail. There were lots of other folks in the class with optics, with Ultimak mounted Aimpoints being the most common. One fellow had a Russian optic, while another brought out a rifle with a scout scope on it later in the day. While there were a lot of optics, many rifles had only iron sights. I fed my rifle out of a sneaky bag, as did many in the class. The majority of shooters were using more tactical gear of some sort or another, including plate carriers, tactical vests, chest rigs, and other similar equipment. This class included some work with pistol transitions. I recently bought a Glock 17 and I figured this would be a good opportunity to put some more rounds through it, so I carried it instead of my usual Glock 21. Glocks of various types were by far the most common pistol, with a substantial number of XDs and a few other models.

Day 1

The class began with some dry drills. Gabe had us all get in a big circle around him and practice reloading. We began by working it stationary, both right and left handed. Then we started walking in a circle and reloading on the move, then did the same at a light jog. We combined reloading with a get off the X drill. We walked in a circle until Gabe signaled a threat by lighting off a round into the berm. At that moment, we had to get off the X and move to cover or drop prone while performing a reload.

Next, Gabe demonstrated 360 degree position shooting. Almost everyone is familiar with the standard rifle shooting positions: kneeling, squatting, sittingand prone. While these positions are more stable and offer a somewhat lower profile, they limit your mobility. It's important to be able to address threats to your sides or rear from these positions. It's also important to be able to do so without standing up to face your adversary. There's probably a reason you dropped down to a lower position, and it likely involved incoming fire. Raising your profile could be hazardous to your health. From the kneeling position, this involved turning to your right and left, with the occasional shoulder transfer or Spetsnaz prone thrown in. From squatting, you either go to kneeling, or spin around into a seated position. Sitting, you either twist left or right, or come up to kneeling. From prone, you have to roll over onto your back and address targets to your sides or rear from there.

After static dry practice, we put these skills to practice by going back into the circle drill. When Gabe shot into the berm, we immediately dropped to a lower position, then kept our rifles trained on him as he walked around. Then Doug or Dale would put one into the berm and we had to reorient on the new threat.

We had a brief discussion on why you would want to get off the X and the dynamics of the OODA loop, then broke for lunch.

Gabe announced that we would be going live after lunch, so during the break I went to load up my Glock. I inserted the mag and went to rack the slide only to find it quite immobile. After I dumped the mag and applied a bit more force, I managed to get it loose, but it was very gritty. I disassembled the gun and poured out about a teaspoon of dirt and sand from the frame and slide. Because we were working dry, I had been rolling around in the dirt without a magazine in the gun. This provided an entry point for all kinds of crap. What I should have done was empty out a mag and used it to plug the magwell, rather than leaving it open.

After lunch we loaded up our rifles and went hot. We started out working the 'Caveman EOTech'. This is the rifle equivalent of metal on meat point shooting. You look over the rear sights and put the front sight assembly on the target. As long as the target is bigger than the front sight tower, you're probably going to hit. This isn't a precision shot, but it will put bullets pretty much where you want them at CQB distances. For those of us with red dot scopes, Gabe asked us to turn the dots off and just shoot through the tube (at least with my setup, you can actually do both: put the front sight tower in the center of the Aimpoint tube.

With the caveman EOTech down, we moved on to position shooting. We started working with contact ready, with the rifle in the shoulder and just lowered an inch or so until we can see the target's hands over the gun. This gives us a good view and lets us pop the rifle up to a shooting position very quickly. For closer quarters, close contact ready places the butt stock in the armpit, rather than on the shoulder, but serves the same purpose. We fired several bursts starting in each position using the caveman EOTech.

Next were the movement readies. Sul is perhaps better known as a pistol ready position, but it was originally developed for long guns. It's quite good for moving through confined spaces or crowds of noncombatants. For moving quickly, Gabe showed port arms and the high noon ready (a much more dignified sounding term than the 'rifle Sabrina'). This is also useful for rapid movement. The vertical orientation makes it less likely that you will cover anyone and leaves one hand free for other purposes (to catch yourself if you trip and fall flat on your face, for instance).

After a few bursts from those positions, we moved on to the last ready position. Patrol ready, sometimes known as Rhodesian ready (though Gabe confided that when he taught in South Africa he met several Rhodesians and they had no idea what heck he was talking about when he mentioned the Rhodesian ready). This is an important one just because if you spend any substantial amount of time with a rifle in your hands, either on the march or just standing around, you're eventually going to end up in a relaxed ready position about like this. We let loose a few bursts starting in patrol ready to finish up the ready position section.

The next subject was shoulder transfers. One of the big emphases of the SI rifle program is being able to run the gun ambidextrously. Effective use of movement and cover really requires the ability to shoot from both shoulders. A vital part of this skill set is the ability to move the gun from one shoulder to the other. Gabe teaches the ability to shoot from the partial transfer: moving the buttstock to the other shoulder but keeping your primary hand on the pistol grip and your support hand on the forearm or magazine. From there, you can switch hand positions and shoot from a mirror image of your standard shooting position. For right handers, one thing to remember when shooting an AK is the charging handle. Taking the reciprocating charging handle on the thumb hurts (I can say this from painful previous experience). On stamped receiver AKs, there is a pair of rivets right there that make a good index point. Milled receiver guns have a depression cut into the receiver there that can serve the same purpose. We shot a transfer drill that involves firing one shot from the primary shoulder, transferring the support side shoulder and firing a shot, swapping hand positions and firing a shot, transferring back to the primary shoulder and firing again, then switching the hands and repeating from the beginning. This isn't something you'd do in a fight, of course, but it really isolates the shoulder transfer skills and lets you work them intensively (it also looks really bitchin' on the DVD trailer).

To apply these shoulder transfer skills, we worked the pacing drill. You basically walk three steps to the left, then three steps to the right, transferring the gun to shoot from the shoulder in the direction you're going. This gets you used to doing the transfers on the move.

To finish up the day, Gabe provided an application for these skills. He went through the theory of how, why, and in what direction to get off the X. Then we went back out to the range and practiced getting off the X to the 1 o'clock and 11 o'clock directions, shooting on the move and doing shoulder transfers as appropriate.

At this point, class was finished for the day, but the fun was not. One of the students in the class (gunplumber) brought out his pair of PKM machineguns and offered the rest of us a chance to shoot them if we paid for the ammo. I happily ponied up and ran a 100 round belt through the gun. Mounted on the tripod, I found it very easy to control. It was quite accurate, and easy to get short, controlled bursts. I was even able to get down to single shots if I was quick in manipulating the trigger. I've shot full auto before, but never a belt fed gun. It was a real blast. I want to thank gunplumber for giving us the opportunity.

 

Day 2

Gabe opened up the second day with some discussion of various AK accessories and modifications. He showed his 'pimp daddy AK', equipped with a front sight gas block, flash suppressor/muzzle brake, and full Ultimak handguard system. We talked about various optic and stock options, and what modifications were useful in what context. He also teased us about all the cool stuff that was coming from U.S. Palm that he couldn't tell us about because he had signed a NDA.

As an introduction to the day's first drills, he recapped the get off the X discussion and talked about the various lines. He demonstrated how to get off the X to the rear obliques, the 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock directions. These angles make it difficult to keep the gun in a conventional shoulder mount or achieve a traditional cheekweld as you torque yourself around to shoot to the rear. It may be necessary to angle the gun either inboard or outboard, or even float the butt off the shoulder entirely.

We ran the 1 and 11 o'clock lines again, repeating yesterday's last drill, then moved on to the 3 and 9 o'clock directions. As promised, the 5 and 7 o'clock lines came with some more issues. I tried canting the gun both inboard and outboard. I'm running a Surefire G2 in a VLTOR mount on my Ultimak gas tube, which puts the light above and to the left of my handguard. I found that when I canted the gun outboard on my right shoulder, I could use the caveman EOTech technique with the flashlight instead of the front sight tower. On the left shoulder, it seemed easier to cant the gun outboard and just point shoot along the barrel.

We moved on to after action drills. Just because you shot, or even hit, an assailant doesn't mean the fight is over. Your hits on the target may not have had the desired effect, or he may have friends around. The after action procedure is a structured way to deal with such possibilities. The sequence goes like this:

Did I hit him? Did it work? (drop the rifle to contact ready and take a good look at the guy you just shot to make sure he isn't a threat any longer)

Does he have any friends? (scan to the right and left looking for additional threats)

Does he have any friends behind me? (do a Sul scan to the rear to make sure there isn't anyone sneaking up on you)

How is my gun? (reload if appropriate)

How am I? (look down and check yourself for injuries).

In between each of these steps, you return your attention to the target to make sure that his status hasn't changed. We went through the drill dry a couple of times, then did it live, getting off the X to the 3 and 9 o'clock and running through the full after action checklist.

The next subject was transitions to pistol. Gabe talked about when and why you would want to transition to pistol instead of reloading or clearing a malfunction. He went through various alternatives, including keeping the rifle in hand and running a sling that attaches you to the rifle. He made the case for his favored transition, which involves shoving your support side arm though the sling, raising the rifle over your head, and dropping it so it hangs diagonally across your back. When you get good at this, it becomes more of a 'toss the rifle over your head' movement rather than specific steps. As your hands leave the rifle, they drop into a normal draw stroke and produce the pistol.

We worked transitions dry first, starting slowly and increasing the speed. After several repetitions, we went live. Gabe had us insert a single round in the rifle magazine and chamber it. He asked us to pull the trigger three times. The first time would fire the round, the second would get a click as the hammer fell on an empty chamber, and the third would be a dead trigger. Under the stress of a fight, this is probably what you will end up doing, rather than immediately recognizing the click. Upon feeling the dead trigger, we performed the transition and put a burst into the target.

At this point we broke for lunch. After lunch, we did the transition drill on the move. We loaded 3-7 rounds in our rifles and started out down on one end of the line of targets. As we ran down the line we put a round or two into each one until we got a click, then transitioned to our pistols on the move. While everyone had done pretty well on the static transition drills, doing it on the move messed a lot of people up. One AK ended up in the dirt, and a lot ended up hanging either around the neck or on one arm, rather than diagonally across the back, which inhibited both movement and the use of the pistol. Some pistols clearly weren't in a good position to draw on the move, mainly on guys who were carrying in more tactical rigs like thigh holsters or vests, rather than CCW type belt rigs.

We ran the drill twice moving from left to right (putting the targets on our left side), meaning right handers could shoot the rifle on their strong side and the pistol two handed. Then we did it once moving from across the range from right to left (putting the targets on our right side), forcing most students to shoot their rifle on the support side and their pistol one handed. The weak side transition is a bit more complicated than the strong side one and even more students had trouble with it. I bobbled it a little bit, but at least I managed to get the rifle hanging crosswise on my back. You could tell that some students probably hadn't taken any of the SI Close Range Gunfighting classes, because when they transitioned with the targets to their right (for right handed shooters) they still tried to shoot two handed. This generally resulted in them ending up sidestepping or walking backwards, rather than keeping their toes pointed in the direction they were going. Guys with SI pistol experience just shot one-handed.

Gabe gave a brief explanation of the basics of fire and movement, where two guys work as a team and one lays down suppressive fire while the other moves up. He illustrated this using some empty shell casings on the ground. Given that this was an AK class, the good guys were a pair of 7.62x39mm casings while the bad guy was a .223.

Before we tried any of the team tactics stuff, Gabe had us do a muzzle aversion drill. We lined up and pointed our rifles towards the targets, then had to either drop them to Sul or pop them up to high noon ready when one of the instructors or a fellow student walked in front of us. Confident that we could keep from muzzling anyone, we lined up into parallel lines, perpendicular to the targets. The front person of each line fired a burst at the target in front of them, the raised their rifle to high noon ready and peeled off to the left or right to file to the back of the line. Everyone had a chance to go through the line and shoot a couple of times, and everyone kept their muzzles pointed safely towards the sky, even when reloading.

These exercises led up to the two-man team drill. We paired up and each pair started down at one end of the line of targets. One shooter would put rounds into the target, while the other moved behind him and took aim at the next target in line. We leapfrogged down the firing line this way until we reached the end.

The shooting part of this really isn't very challenging. The challenge is to communicate with your partner to make sure at least one of you is putting fire on the targets at all times. You call out "Moving!" to indicate you're ready to move up. The partner calls out "Covering!" to indicate that he has responsibility to maintain fire while the other moves. The first shooter moves up to the next position (perhaps reloading on the way). When he reaches the firing point, he resumes shooting and calls out "Set!" The process then repeats with the roles reversed. If it's your responsibility to provide fire and you run out of ammo, you yell out "Checking!" indicating that you're unable to provide continuing fire and that your partner needs to take up the slack (without explicitly saying that you're out of ammo).

This seemingly simple procedure proved surprisingly difficult for many of us to execute in practice. Shooters often forgot to yell commands when it was their turn, ran out of ammo, fumbled reloads, etc. My partner and I managed to run out of ammo at the same time, but probably had a smoother run than some other folks. Doing this sort of thing well clearly takes a lot of practice.

 

Our last exercise was the Columbian Special Forces drill. There were five steel plates set up down at the bottom of the 100 yard range. You started out at the 100 yard line and dropped prone, firing on one of the plates until you got four hits. From there you moved to each of four barrels representing pieces of cover from about the 75 to 25 yard lines, dropping prone and firing until you hit four times form each of these positions. The magazine in your rifle was loaded with just 24 rounds, meaning that if you missed more than four times, you would have to do a reload. Dale set up the cover so that you could only see some of the plates from each position. Dealing with these micro-terrain obstacles and figuring out which plates to shoot from each position was really half the battle. I helped him position the barrels, and made my own subtle contribution by positioning the barrels on the right hand side of the range so it would be more difficult to shoot around the right side of the cover so that students would be encouraged to shoot from both shoulders. It seemed fitting, given SI's embrace of ambidextrous use of the rifle.

Only two students managed to get through the course without any misses. Some had a lot more. I went towards the end of the class. Many of the previous students ended up leaving pieces of gear, especially magazines, on the range as they went down to or got up from prone. I wanted to avoid this, so I snapped the flap of my sneaky bag shut. This made it less likely that I would leave gear strewn all over the range, but it meant a reload would be a long and painful process. I gambled on my ability to shoot accurately. I was doing quite well at first, making eight straight hits at the first two firing positions. At the third position, however, I missed three times in a row. This is usually the way these things go. You miss once, and you get flustered, causing you to miss again, making you even more frustrated and degrading your performance even more. After the third miss, I told myself to calm down, took a deep breath, reestablished my sight picture and made the hit. After that I went through the rest of the course without another miss, leaving one round left in the gun. Made it through with no reload!

Final Thoughts

This was a great class. Gabe did a great job teaching, ably assisted by Dale, Doug, and Uli. We had a very squared away group of students. In particular, I want to call out the performance of gunplumber's fourteen year old daughter, who did a great job in the class. Everyone had solid, safe gunhandling skills and was able to deal with the physical demands of the class. Gabe says that the rifle is a physical weapon. It's much bigger and heavier than a pistol and if you want to use it to it's maximum potential you have to master getting into and out of shooting positions. This is Arizona, and it was dry, on the warm side (though not as hot as it could have been) and at an altitude of about 5000 feet. These can combine to really kick your butt physically but everyone handled it well. I would highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to learn how to use the AK to it's maximum potential or who wants an excellent education in the combat use of the rifle.

Day Three

 

Next was a Kalashnikov Rifle Force on Force class taught by Gabe Suarez. He was assisted by a bevy of SI staff instructors, including Dale Hunter, Uli Gebhard, and Doug Little. Doug left after the first day, but we were joined by Richard Coplin. His wife, Corinna was teaching a Ladies Pistol Gunfighting class over on the next range. This class was the capstone of five days of AK classes, following Kalashnikov Rifle Marksmanship and Advanced Kalashnikov Rifle Gunfighting. All the students in the class were at the Advanced AK class the previous two days, so everyone was well versed in how to run the AK.

This class is run with a mixture of dry rifles and pistols, and airsoft guns. Airsoft AKs are expensive and (as we found out) fragile, so Gabe didn't expect everyone to bring one. Usually, in a Force on Force class the rule is no live weapons on the range. In this case, because we were working with empty rifles, the rule was no live ammo or any weapons other than firearms. We divested ourselves of all knives, blunt weapons, and ammunition and had a partner search us to ensure that nothing dangerous would be introduced into the FoF environment.

We started out doing some stretching. FoF classes are very physical and we don't want anyone getting hurt. After everyone was loosened up, Gabe had us form two lines, about with about two arm widths between each student. The front student in each line would turn around and slalom through the line, treating each student in line as a corner he has to maneuver around. When he gets to the end of the line, he takes his place there and the next student moves back through the line. Since this is SI class, you are expected to switch shoulders with every corner, always keeping the gun on the outside of the corner you're working. In the beginning, a lot of people were very tense and hesitant in their movements, but after a couple of runs, they smoothed out quite a bit.

Once we were comfortable running the slalom with rifles, Gabe started out calling for a transition to pistol. Some interior spaces are tight enough that you may be better off negotiating them with a pistol than a rifle. Unlike the reactive transitions we were working on in the Advanced AK class, where you ran out of ammo and needed to get the pistol out as quickly as possible, this was a proactive transition. The number one difference is that for a proactive transition, rather than an inoperative (empty or jammed) rifle, you would have a live round in the chamber, making it necessary to engage the safety before transitioning. Also, rather than the priority being to get the pistol out as quickly as possible, the priority is to have a weapon up and ready to fire at all times. Rather than throwing the gun on your back and drawing your pistol, draw the pistol then sling the rifle. Conversely, when going from pistol back to rifle, get the rifle out, then holster the pistol. Slinging and unslinging the rifle one-handed isn't something I've really practiced, and it showed. This is definitely going to get added to my dry practice regimen.

When we had pistol transitions under control, we added knives to the mix. Gabe illustrated how to use a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other to increase retention when working in close quarters. You hold the gun in a standard retention position and the knife in a reverse grip in your support hand at about neck level. If anyone comes around the corner you're working and try to grab for your gun, he gets the knife first, then you shoot him off your knife with the pistol. We ran the slalom drill switching between rifle, pistol and both pistol and knife a couple of times.

At this point, there was a discussion of hitting people with guns, including a rather vivid discussion of an occasion when Gabe dealt with a hostage holding bad guy using the muzzle of his pistol. We also talked a bit about contact shots as well.

Back to the slalom drill, we introduced vertical displacements. Most folks tend to see things about eye level, not paying much attention to what's above or below. Gabe hasn't quite worked out that combat levitation thing, but getting below eye level is pretty easy. We did the drill again, crouching down or going to Spetsnaz prone as we worked the corners. This finished up the slalom drill.

 

 
Gabe discussed the basics of the Pekiti takeoff: unweighting your feet, orienting the feet and hips, loading up the drive leg, and ducking the shoulder. This process helps you get off the X much quicker than simply stepping stepping off. In addition, dropping as you unweight the feet and ducking the shoulder provides vertical displacement, which gets you out of the opponent's sights faster. Especially against a rifle, you literally drop out of the sight picture in an instant. Though he didn't refer to it as such, the takeoff that Gabe taught was what those of us who have been around a while know as the enhanced Pekiti, rather than the classic Pekiti that we've been doing for the past couple of years. I talked with Gabe after class and he said that he feels the enhanced Pekiti is superior enough that he's moved to teaching it as the default.

We worked the Pekiti takeoff against the rifle, first with empty hands, then drawing the pistol as we stepped off. We were training for the absolute worst case scenario, being held at gunpoint with the finger on the tripper. The student doing the takeoff initiated the drill while his partner holding him at gunpoint tried to shoot as soon as he saw movement. Generally, the fellow doing the takeoff could get out of the way before the guy with the rifle could drop the hammer. After running the takeoff for a while we broke for lunch.

  After lunch, Dale showed how to disarm someone holding a rifle. You grab the gun at the forend and stock and twist the rifle around, either pushing (if you're on his primary side) or pulling (if you're on his support side). The comb of the stock gets driven into his neck and he's either going to let go of the rifle, end up on the ground, or get choked out by the pressure of the stock against the arteries in his neck. There are some tricks to getting the leverage right, but the technique is simple, effective, and usable by a smaller person against a larger one.

He also went through a method for using the AK as an impact weapon. The normal firing grip on a rifle isn't very natural for using it as an impact weapon. You certainly wouldn't try to work with a Kali stick that way, for example. From the normal firing grip, you rotate your hands so that the primary hand is grasping the stock from below, just behind the receiver and your support hand is grasping the forend from below. The rifle is held at about shoulder height, muzzle forward.

To employ the rifle as an impact weapon, you follow a simple sequence Dale calls 'paddling'. Jab the opponent with the muzzle, swing the rifle down and bash him with the stock, jab him with the butt, then swing the rifle up and slash him with the front sight tower. Repeat as necessary. To integrate the footwork with it, you shuffle forward on the jabs and take a step forward on the swings. The overall motion ends up being a lot like paddling a canoe.

Gabe pointed out that when attached to the rifle, a ComBloc bayonet has the sharp edge on the upper edge of the blade. This sort of attack illustrates why. When you do the second swing with a bayonet attached, rather than hitting them with the sight tower, you're performing a slashing attack with the bayonet. When Gabe started talking about the bayonet, he asked if anyone in the class had one with them. One student, named Ivan, went to get one from his car. On the way back, rather than walking around the long way, he came over the berm. Only at an SI AK class do you really have Ivan coming over the berm with a bayonet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We talked a bit about what to do if someone tries to disarm you, using either this or some other technique. The standard solution is to let go of the rifle and shoot them with your pistol. You should be able to draw and shoot them long before they get the rifle turned around to shoot you. The flip side of this is that if you disarm someone of their rifle it's important to immediately turn it into an impact weapon, rather than trying to shoot them with it right away.

One of the things we discovered working the disarms is that if they manage to get the stock out of the shoulder, it becomes much more difficult to get the rifle away from them. Instead, Gabe recommend immediately giving up on the disarm, stepping behind them, and going for the choke. One student pointed out that from the support side you could actually us the rifle to choke them out, turning their efforts to hang on to the rifle against them.

 

Gabe brought out the airsoft rifles and we resumed work on the Pekiti takeoff and getting off the X. Since we only had three airsoft guns, we split up into three groups. One student in each group tried to get off the X and get his dry rifle on target while another pointed in with the airsoft gun launched a round at the spot where he was standing as soon as he saw movement. I found myself getting hit quite a bit on this drill, much more than I had in previous pistol focused FoF classes. I couldn't figure this out until Dale pointed out that I was telegraphing the takeoff by dipping my shoulder before I started my drop. I'm used to the regular Pekiti, so when I was trying to do the enhanced Pekiti, I was thinking about the shoulder drop to the point that I started it before the rest of the move. After he pointed this out I had somewhat more success, but I definitely need to practice the enhanced Pekiti, preferably on video or in front of a mirror so I can see if I'm telegraphing.

As we were doing this, it started raining pretty hard. After running the drill a few times, Gabe had us start tracking the student getting off the X and trying to hit him with follow up shots, rather than just launching one round at the X. This emphasized the need for continued movement, and gave students an idea of how long the takeoff gave them to get rounds on target before the opponent's muzzle will catch up with them.

Around the time the rain let up, we began our last drill of the day. This time both students involved were armed both students with airsoft rifles. Rather than holding the other at gunpoint, the bad guy student initiated the drill by coming up from low ready while the good guy tried to get off the X and shoot the bad guy before he got shot himself. Several students fell, one of them on the stock of one of the airsoft rifles, snapping it. Dale managed to get it back up using copious quantities of duct tape, but the airsoft AKs definitely aren't as durable as the real thing. We ran through the once each, then wrapped up for the day.

That evening, we were all invited for dinner together at SI headquarters. This was an excellent chance to talk with other students, SI instructors, and staff (including Gabe's junior staff). It was also a chance to go through the One Source Tactical warehouse and buy stuff directly. They probably more than covered the cost of the food with the profit from the stuff that students bought. I saw lots of AK accessories go out the door.

Day Four

In a surprising move for a rifle class, we began the second day with some kettlebell exercises. As Gabe said many times during the class, the rifle is a physical weapon. Compared to a pistol where you usually stand there and shoot (or move and shoot if you're in an SI class), with a rifle you're getting down into lower, more stable positions and getting back up, moving around hefting a heavy, somewhat awkward object, and even hitting people with it. All this requires a certain level of physical fitness if you want to get the most out of the weapon. Gabe really likes the kettlebell as an exercise tool, and many kettlebell exercises work muscles that are useful in combat rifle shooting. He and Dale demonstrated kettlebell swings, D.A.R.C. swings, the sumo lift, the high pull, snatches and the Turkish getup. Everyone had an opportunity to try each exercise. I've got a kettle bell, and I've done some training with it. I was really glad of the opportunity to do some of these exercises with some experienced guidance. Some kettlebell exercises, like the snatch, really rely on good form and if you do them incorrectly, you can seriously mess yourself up. Gabe also talked about integrating the kettlebell into rifle training, doing a set of snatches, then working with the rifle in dry fire. Or you can take the kettlebell out to the range and see how your live fire skills hold up after some vigorous exercise.

Getting back to firearms, we looked at options for being held at rifle point. When we worked rifle disarms yesterday, it was in the context of moving in from 5-10 feet away. Today, we started out at contact distance, with the rifle armed individual jabbing you in the back with his muzzle. Generally, you want to turn away from the muzzle and get yourself out of the line of fire as quickly as possible, then turn into the opponent and go for the disarm (if the muzzle is in the middle of the back, just pick a direction). If the fellow with the rifle is pushing or pulling you with his hand in addition to jabbing you in the back with the rifle, go with the direction of the push or pull. The hardest situation is when the muzzle is up against the back of your head. Gabe suggests flinching down and to the side to get out of the way of the barrel, then completing your turn and going after the gun.

While this wasn't a pistol class, we also worked some pistol disarms, in part to illustrate how some of the same concepts work across categories. Pistols can be harder to disarm than a rifle, because they offer far less to grab on to. On the other hand, handguns expose much more of their operating mechanism, and by grabbing them in the right places you can either prevent them from firing (by preventing the cylinder of a revolver from rotating, preventing the hammer from going back on a double action gun or going forward on a single action gun) or make sure they only fire once (prevent the slide from cycling on a semi-auto). Gabe demonstrated a couple of simple disarms and had us work them a few times.

Our next subject was the AK versus contact weapons. We did most of this versus sticks, but it could apply to an opponent armed with a machete, tomahawk, knife, club, or even using his rifle as an impact weapon. The method we studied was to catch the incoming weapon in the crook between the magazine and the forend. For those who have seen the Die Less Often DVDs, this is like a premade dogcatcher, with the advantage that since it's not made of your arms, you can catch blades in it as well. If you work it right, you can actually use the crook to strip the other guy's weapon. This worked particularly well against the tomahawk, but if you twisted the rifle the right way, it also worked against the stick.

After a short lunch break, we did some AK versus knife work. This time, rather than starting at contact distances like we did with the stick, we gave the AK guy some standoff distance. We started out a 7 yards, representing the standard "21 foot rule". With the rifle in patrol ready and getting off the X promptly, this was ridiculously easy, so we moved it in to 5, 4, and then 3 yards. As the distance closed, it became harder, and you needed to get a good takeoff to avoid the guy with the knife. In particular, the ability to move to the 5 and 7 o'clock lines while still getting the rifle on target becomes quite important. Guys who could do that well had a big advantage.

Gabe broke out the airsoft and we practiced versus the knife. Again, if you got off the X promptly and used the rear oblique lines the guy with the AK could get a few hits on the one with the knife before the blade got within range.

We switched back to airsoft AK versus airsoft AK and did a bit more GOTX practice. After duplicating what we'd done yesterday a couple of times each, Gabe talked about taking corners with a rifle. I'd learned the classic way of dealing with corners: pie the corner until you see your opponent, then roll out and shoot him. Gabe pointed out that if you can get a good, solid center of mass shot on the target, he can probably see you. Alternatively, if you work the corner well, you can get a look at his elbow or knee before he can see you and shoot him peripherally. This may be a good strategy if the corner you're working is cover rather than concealment. If the corner is just concealment, the target's reaction to being shot in the foot may be to empty his magazine into the wall where you're hiding, which would really ruin your day.

Instead, Gabe suggested applying the same basic principles of getting off the X to working a corner. Pie the corner until you see some sign of the opponent, but he can't see you. That's the line of decision. Rather than peering gingerly across it, move explosively across that line and shoot the target on the move. When we ran this with airsoft the guy who was set up watching the corner almost always shot behind the guy who came around it.

As we were talking about corners, Gabe talked a bit about the basic principles of room clearing and how to handle it with one or two people. This was a bit of the preview of the CQB class coming up in August, and it has me looking forward to it even more.

We wrapped up the class with some discussion of the things we'd learned, not just in this class, but the previous five days. We talked about the need to shoot ambidextrously, getting off the X, point shooting the rifle, and the need to be physically fit to take full advantage of the rifle.

Final Thoughts

This was a really great class. It flowed well from the Advanced AK class we did the previous two days, but it pushed things much further. I was really glad to get some zero to five foot stuff with the rifle. The rifle disarms and using it as an impact weapons are things that many people don't pay enough attention to. I've been exposed to the get off the X stuff and the Pekiti takeoff before, but it's always good to get it again. In particular, it was good to learn I was telegraphing the shoulder dip on the Enhanced Pekiti. The stuff on how to work a corner was really great, and has me chomping at the bit for the CQB class in August.

Kalashnikov Rifle Force on Force is an excellent class. It's really the capstone of the Suarez International AK curriculum.

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To Attend A Suarez Kalashnikov Class - Check Our Schedule

2011 Training With Gabe Suarez

Folks - My 2011 schedule is up and operational today. As you see, I have curtailed my travel dramatically and I am only doing 10 classes in the USA next year.

We have one additional session pending approval in Orange, Texas, but as of now, all else is up and I do not anticipate adding any more dates.

Hopefully we will be doing a few sessions in Europe as well but those will be announced later.

I am offering a 25% discount on all of my 2011 USA classes beginning today and extending until the end of July, 2010. To look at what I have planned or to enroll, check this link

GABE SUAREZ 2011 TRAINING SPECIAL

I look forward to training with you guys next year.

Force On Force- Controversy?

By: Randy Harris - Suarez International Staff Instructor The subject of Force on Force training is one that we should all consider. After all, what are we actually training for? Do we train to avoid getting mugged by a flat piece of cardboard that does not think move or try to hurt you or are we training to deal with living breathing thinking adversaries? The obvious answer is live adversaries. So if your training regimen does not or has never included any Force on Force component then how do you know whether what you are practicing REALLY works or not? Maybe you train with some "guru" who has been in many fights and never lost. All that really tells you is HE has a grasp of his material and was successful. It does not tell you how well you would fair using that in a real confrontation. So how do we know? We have to test it. Some may say "well what I do works in my IDPA matches". Great. You are thoroughly ready to proactively  face a 3 foot tall piece unarmed of cardboard after being told to get ready in advance . Again, not terribly realistic. There really is no reason to not avail oneself of FOF training today. Years ago it was only really available to military and police. But now however , with the wide availability of non lethal airsoft guns. The technology is there so that the average guy can spend $150 or so and be equipped to take a force on force class. Of course there are also Simunitions guns if you prefer to use marking cartridges, but the availability and price of the guns and ammo is somewhat prohibitive. This brings us to our first controversy. Is the Airsoft gun really adequate for FOF training? There are some that make the argument that there needs to be a "pain penalty" for screwing up in FOF scenarios. I agree. What we are really doing is to some degree hardwiring the ability to make good decisions at a very fast subconscious level. In a real encounter we will not have long to make a decision. If we just stand and dither over whether it is "really happening to me?" or "what do I do now?" then we will likely have waited to long to do anything useful. Getting shot with non lethal yet painful projectiles reinforces that if we do not be decisive and act quickly then bad things will happen. This is where our subconscious starts compiling data for positive vs negative outcomes where action is concerned. Now, do Sims rounds hurt more than airsoft? Absolutely. And we need that pain to get the message across to our  brain that we are doing things that are giving an adverse outcome to what we would like. So in that respect airsoft is not as good for FOF as simunitions. But part of the problem is that students often show up for FOF classes looking like they are armored up for medieval combat. If you are so padded up that you cannot feel the BBs then you are really not getting the most out of the exercises. This is why I recommend that during scenario work you wear virtually no protective gear at all. Just head protection and maybe gloves. Taking rounds in the hands , especially the knuckles, almost always causes bleeding. This way you know where you got hit, but still protect hands and face.I have seen people hit in the hands with airsoft pellets drop their pistols. I have also debriefed many participants and most all agree that it feels like a bee sting when hit. I'd have to agree. And depending on the distance, it sometimes hurts worse than other times. So yes if we limit the amount of padding we wear then Airsoft is perfectly adequate. In drill work I recommend a LITTLE more padding, maybe a long sleeve shirt, because when you are getting in maybe 50 fights or more per day there is only so much impact you are going to take before you get tired and sore and lose concentration. So for the drills I say pad up a little but run the scenarios with as little  as possible.  The next controversy is whether you are better doing scenario work or drills. I mentioned scenario work earlier. That is full blown scenarios with role players who stick to a script of what they are going to do if the student does certain things. Often the instructions might be " Go panhandle the student, ask for money. You are not robbing him, just asking, but if he insults you or gets physical then you amp up the situation and get in his face, but if he just tells you he can't help you , then  let him pass unmolested " . The point is that the scenario is not just wide open, the role players are playing a realistic defined part, not just running wild. The scenario based FOF is more in line with real world situations sometimes involving witnesses , maybe even the Police. It is essentially a test of your ability to negotiate whatever the situation is and successfully "survive" the encounter. Often -just like in real life- this can be done without getting into a fight at all. The other type of FOF work is FOF drills. Gabe Suarez refers to the drill work as light sparring with a partner.The drills are little fights. There is no real decision making left on pre fight matters. In the drill the fight is unavoidable and usually begins with the bad guy initiating some sort of attack.The purpose is to give the students a lot of repetitions on the core skills need in a real confrontation. Those are seeing and reacting to the attack, get off the X if possible, access your weapon if you are armed , deploy that weapon from concealment and if it is a pistol, get hits on the target. These may sound simple, but many students who have never really ingrained these skills often have trouble at first doing all of these things at the same time under stress. After all some ranges do not even allow drawing a loaded pistol from a holster. So unless the student takes the time to work that skill on their own they likely will be a little behind the curve if we just drop them into scenario work from the start. And I really do not understand why some people have such an issue with drills. We do drills in every other athletic endeavor we might pursue. I played basketball in high school and you'd better believe we did more than just scrimmage. We did drills every practice to build skill. The drills build the skills that you will then employ in the game. The same is true in unarmed  self defense. I doubt many martial arts or combative instructors just have the students spar without first building the individual offensive and defensive skills through skill building drills. Even in IDPA and IPSC shooting , no one just practices by only shooting matches. They build their shooting, reloading and malfunction clearing  ability through drills set up to build repetition in those areas. The match is then a validation (or invalidation) of their training regimen. So for me the answer is simply this. Self defense, be it with empty hands or armed is an athletic endeavor. It does not mean you have to be an Olympian to survive. It simply means that the more athletic you are the more you will be able to do. There really is no way around that. Many of the skills that might be required in a violent encounter are able to be performed by everyday folks- IF they have been exposed to those skills. The problem is the majority of people have never found themselves in a violent confrontation, much less enough of them to draw any real statistical data from. Hence the need for FOF drills. The drills build the skills and allow you to use them in real time against an uncooperative real life opponent, not just a stationary human shaped form. It allows you to get many repetitions in being the victim of an assault and get a better perspective of just how little time there is to act and how much time and distance effect the dynamics of the confrontation. Now just like in basketball or boxing or whatever, the drills will only take you so far. There comes a time to spar or scrimmage. That is where the skills we built in the drills is tested in the mock game. We wouldn't just work drills and then schedule a real boxing match. Just like no sane coach would keep his team from scrimmaging leading up to a game. To have a real idea of how everyone moves and acts and reacts you have to have the scenario work too. The scenario work is where you are able to work the whole package of skills from avoidance and deescalation to getting off the X, accessing pistol, marksmanship, 360 degree scan and even preparing witnesses and talking to the police. The first time you ever do these things does not need to be at 3 AM on a cold rainy night when it is for real! Now a couple of other minor controversies. Some argue that FOF is not real because there is no ballistic effect- especially with airsoft. I agree . No one said it was REAL. But it is about as close as we can get without having a serious reworking of the liability waiver and a trauma unit on standby. That is why I recommend the least clothing you can  get by with for the FOF iterations.In fact at the National Tactical Invitational I wore cargo shorts a T shirt and a light summer weight button down shirt as a cover garment. No padding or layers other than the  face mask and neck protection they issued. And NTI uses Sims in their FOF! Another controversy is that the shooting while moving we teach leads to wild errant shooting and will get bystanders killed. Therefore we should stand still to shoot. I'm Ok with standing still as long as you are behind cover or you are farther than 10 yards distant form your pistol armed adversary. The problem is that if you are in a true initiative deficient situation where your first clue that the fight was on was seeing the guy reach in his waistband, then standing there trying to out draw him is not likely to have a long future to it. We really need to look at the context of the common criminal assault. It will likely be so close that you simply cannot make enough distance to keep from getting shot. This is one of those things that we find out rather quickly in those drills. If you cannot back up fast enough to avoid getting punched then how do you honestly expect to back up far enough, fast enough to keep from being shot? This is where guys that have only worked against motionless targets that do not shoot back (or shoot first) have an unrealistic view of the dynamics involved. So if we concede that we cannot always make enough space quickly enough to just "make space and shoot" , then we will likely be in very close proximity to the target/bad guy when we shoot. Logical? So when we are shooting and moving this is often done at less than 3 yards. I submit that most anyone with skill at acquiring their pistol with good grip and a modicum of trigger control can make rapid multiple hits on targets at that distance. We are not talking about firing haphazardly over our shoulder as we sprint 20 yards away from the target. We are talking about drawing quickly as we explode laterally off the X and firing a burst at the target often with the muzzle 20 INCHES from the target. Not exactly haphazard reckless shooting by a long shot. Also what are we looking to learn in drills? The point of the drills are to see what gets you shot less and gets the bad guy shot more. Not who can hit whom the most or who can run the farthest. The drill realistically is only useful for the first 3 to 5 seconds- the time frame of most actual fights. Anything past that is superfluous. And that 5 second and after time frame is where all the misses happen. The drills typically go like this. The bad guy attacks, the good guy gets off the X, shots are exchanged  and they move farther apart. As they move apart they keep shooting and that is where the missing begins. But again, we are not looking at the last 3 seconds for data we are looking at the first 3 seconds. In fact I limit them to 3 to 5 rounds per fight when the drills are 1 on 1. This keeps the students focused on getting accurate hits not on hosing down the other guy as you run as fast as he can in the other direction. That is little more than a playground water gun fight. The last controversy is how is your FOF class set up. Again, there are those who argue that only scenario work is realistic and that is all that should be done. Ok , fine. That is an opinion, but I do not agree. I have had students come through my FOF class (Suarez International's Interactive Gunfighting FOF) who had been to other schools that offered Force on Force classes. The other schools had done ONLY scenarios. The students said that they felt they got a better understanding of the dynamics of the confrontation and were now better prepared by doing the drills too. Now when they got into fights in the scenarios they were able to access the "solutions" they had been working all weekend and run those skill sets and prevail, whereas before they had a lot of decision making to do armed with only the skill sets they already had before they showed up.  Now, let me repeat scenario work is crucial too.You need to test your total package of skills. And not only that, but scenario work that tests decision making, not just draw speed and marksmanship. A FOF scenario that is a glorified "shoot house burglar hunt" is frankly of little value.   The students need to be confronted with real life moral dilemmas and have to decide in real time what to do. There needs to be a lot of interaction verbally between the students and role players and there needs to be a level of multi tasking going on. That is why I like to use scenarios that have the student going through everyday life errands like going to the convenience store carrying bags or coming out of the mall talking on the cell phone and things like that where the student is engaged in more than just waiting to draw their gun. But again, I believe best results in the scenarios are obtained by those who have drilled the fundamentals to the point that their "fight skills" run on auto pilot and because of that they are freed up mentally to make decisions without worrying about what to do if the fight is on. So whether you are an experienced gunman or a novice there is only one training environment that tests your total skill package and that is Force on Force.

Spetsnaz Combat Week AAR May 13-16 2010

I learned early on that the process of learning must continue until the day the Lord calls you home. "Sometimes a teacher, but always a student", goes our saying.  To that end Suarez International has dabbled in various fighting concepts from various Filipino Martial Arts, to some Jujitsu, as well as studying the use of our common weapons - rifles and pistols - from the perspectives of others.  It was that quest that had us cross paths with Sonny Puzikas.  We brought out Sonny to co-teach our first Kalashnikov Rifle Course back in 2005.  In Sonny I not only found a good friend, but a fellow traveller in the study of violence. Every time I train with Sonny I am both humbled as well as enlightened with some of those "Aha!" moments instructors sometimes get. This last week we had Sonny out for four days of training. While I could go on abouit the training, I will let one of the attendees, Brian King, describe it for you.  

Gabe Suarez

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Spetsnaz Combat Week ‘Red Storm’ AAR

May 13-16 2010

Hosted by Gabe Suarez & taught by Sonny Puzikas

Never having been to Northern Arizona before I was happily surprised at the great weather and wide open rolling landscape that offered so much exploration to the seminar, Prescott is located in a beautiful area of our country. To be honest never having been to a Suarez training event before I was not sure of what to expect from the participants, would they be the typical ‘gun guys’ who seem to enjoy arguing the most trivial points while remaining in a fearful super tense state, would it be a bunch of internet knowledge filled ‘experts’, perhaps a bunch of gung ho meat heads looking to stroke their egos? Wow, turned out to be a great bunch of guys all looking to test, explore and improve their understanding of the fight and just as important to help their partners also test, explore and improve. I enjoyed working with and learning from each participant.





Right away in day one we learned what type of seminar it was going to be. It was going to be honest, testing all information and opinions for ourselves, LOL starting with every participant being choked out by another. Many had never been choked out before and many of the others that had been had years between the experiences. It was a great introduction into the choking and escaping section of the seminar but even more important I think is that it actively physically demonstrated to each student the seriousness of the material we would be spending days exploring and the trust needed between students when working on often brutal dangerous material. It is one thing talking about the seriousness of combat but quite another to go lights out in the first few minutes of the seminar.

 

 
 
Taking a couple of days to think and absorb the material and experiences I guess the biggest lesson that I learned was the method of ‘mad scientist’ that Sonny and Gabe use to test and explore the fight. The constant looking at, breaking down and testing of all the material, taking nothing as truth or fact until it had been worked on and not just once or a hundred times but actually taking the time to learn the material first, then brutally test it, then form an opinion about it. We were exposed over and over again to this method in action as Sonny would have us dissecting and exploring our work no matter if it was pistol, AK, hand to hand, blade, choking, kicking. Whatever the work or tool the process of exploration that Sonny demonstrated over and over was the same, that mad scientist reverse engineering exploration and testing process.



The most humbling section of this humbling seminar for me was probably the gauntlet training, demonstrating that I require much more work on left hand pistol manipulations and much more work needed on AK manipulations while under pressure.

The most amusing was probably the disclosure of the “big tennis match” preparation to the curious local.

Thank you Gabe, for hosting this seminar, demonstrating the honesty of an instructor willing to get dirty and risk ‘losing’ with their students and going above and beyond in picking out the different training locations each of which had their own unique challenges and benefits. Not many instructors are so willing to do so and your example is appreciated.

Thank you Sonny, for the humbling lessons you generously give that so often lead to more and more questions yet always deepen my understanding on many different levels. Thanks also for your patience and willingness to work with both myself and Rob, I am sure that both of our work will change for the better from this seminars experiences.

Thank you for all those that trained and worked with me, a great group of guys all with many lessons to teach and share and I look forward to training with you all in the future.

Thanks Chris for the unexpected generosity, the t-shirts look great!


Warmest regards
Brian King

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