As someone who regularly writes about real world tactical training, I can tell you that there is no end of nonsense in the tactical industry. In my opinion it’s too gear focused, and reliant on anecdotes, rather than data and logic. This leads many tactical professionals down the wrong path, ultimately sabotaging their professional development. In this article I’m going to highlight the most common errors, and cover how you can avoid them.
Long time readers of this website will find that many of these topics don’t come up often. I normally try to write more concretely useful articles, whether thats a fitness program, or shooting drills. I want you to get better.
At this point in my career I have a decent amount of tactical experience, starting in the Marine Corps, way back in 2008, all the way through my current positions which affords me a great deal of real world tactical training, and operational experience.
While I’m certainly no Jason Bourne, I feel I need to use my experience to offer some correction to folks who are going astray with their tactical training. You’ll find the 5 inconvenient facts about real world tactical training below.
5 Inconvenient Facts About Real World Tactical Training
- You can’t shoot well enough to argue about CQB tactics
- Most tactical operations require no shooting
- You’re neglecting large portions of fitness training
- Equipment won’t make up for lack of skill
- You Can’t Fight
My goal with this article is to give folks some guidance on more efficient tactical training. None of this is meant to belittle or minimize the work you are already doing. I simply want you to bypass some hurdles you don’t even know are coming.
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You Can’t Shoot Well Enough to Argue About CQB Tactics
Whenever I train with people from different tactical units, I can always tell a lot about their team by how well they shoot. Unfortunately, I find the level of shooting proficiency to be too low in almost all cases. Yes, this includes people from agencies we don’t talk about, and Tier 1 military units.
The sad fact is that many of these people have nearly unlimited access to training ammo, and ranges, but lack the time or will to dedicate themselves to actually increasing their shooting performance. This is compounded by the fact that most of them don’t actually understand how to train to shoot better.
It always astounds me how vehemently people will argue about which CQB tactics are best; fast, slow, limited penetration etc. My perspective is what does it even matter if you can’t out perform your adversary with your firearms once you get there?
In my opinion there is no substitute for competition training. Moreover, I believe that focusing on pistol training has a much larger carry over to rifle, where as rifle shooting has almost no benefit to pistol. That is why I highly recommend getting started in USPSA training, or going to a two gun PCSL match.
Tactical Shooting Standards for Real World Tactical Training
To put this into perspective, USPSA gives you a classification of your current skill level, based upon standard shooting stages called classifiers. There are dozens of these, with tens of thousands of scores, from terrible to mind bogglingly good.
Most full time tactical professionals, SWAT personnel, and Tier 1 Assaulters, will shoot B class, with a few getting into A class. This skill level is so low that I regularly see 70 year old shooters do better at local matches.
The problem with tactical shooting is that most “Operators” only shoot till they can pass their unit’s standards. More motivated shooters might work until they’re pretty good, compared to their peers. Unfortunately their peers just aren’t very good.
I include myself in this group as well. Even though I’m currently a master class shooter, it is galling to me that I haven’t already achieved grand master. My job requires extremely high competency in shooting, and I still have more work to go. Here’s an example of a great run on a classifier.
For full time tactical personnel, I think the minimum skill level is A class on any given classifier. Furthermore, this level of skill should be shot cold, on demand. For patrol officers, and part time SWAT teams, I think A class is where you want to be, but B class should be the standard. Now let’s get to the corollary to this harsh truth.
Most Tactical Operations Require No Shooting
The fact that most tactical operations require no shooting is indisputable. While you must always be able to deliver a high level of shooting skill, you’re true tactical performance is likely to depend on other skills. This is especially true at the team level.
If you’re on a tactical unit then you know that most operations require a sequence of discrete tasks to occur before anything exciting happens. Your point man must navigate the unit to your assault position. Your breacher must get the door open, and your snipers must move into their firing points without being compromised.
Even during the execution of the operation, your drone operators must be able to locate your target, and your vehicle teams have to be in position. All of these tasks require skills that do not relate to shooting, but are vital to the success of the mission.
Specializing for Tactical Operations
Most tactical units are actually teams of specialists. They have special skills like comms, medical, sniper, tech, breaching, etc. The success of the team is contingent upon their personal skill level within these tasks.
My personal recommendation is for every person on the team to be able to perform their specialty when it’s dark, cold, and raining. If you can do this with minimal degradation to your normal efficiency then you’re likely proficient enough in your skill.
If you find that it takes you significantly longer, or worse, that you’re unable to perform your job when enough friction is applied to the tactical scenario, you have work to do. Personally I find working on the areas that are weakest first to be most beneficial. Don’t spend time working on tasks you can already perform well. Shore up your weaknesses! Now lets talk about one of my favorite portions of real world tactical training.
You’re Neglecting Large Portions of Fitness Training
This is one area that I think is often over looked, but not quite as common as the two previous inconvenient facts. As a fitness coach for tactical populations, this is near and dear to my heart. By far the most common mistake is to misunderstand what you are actually training for.
I find that military teams tend to do a better job of this. I believe this is because those tactical units often require long foot movements towards their target. You simply can’t complete these movements without a decent level of fitness.
Law enforcement teams seem to struggle more with fitness. By and large the best teams have guys that are strong, and fairly muscular. However, they commonly have little to no metabolic conditioning, or true endurance. They also tend to carry a little more body fat as result of this imbalance.
Tactical Fitness Requirements
In my opinion tactical athletes are all hybrid athletes. They must be strong and muscular, and they must have a large aerobic capacity. Even urban SWAT teams that spend a large portion of their operational time in vehicles require great endurance.
Most domestic tactical operations don’t last long in the most physically active phases. For example, if you move dynamically through an average sized single family home, you’re looking at less than one minute of moderate physical activity.
However, if you’re tasked with a secondary clearance of a large commercial structure, you better have endurance! I once had to clear a 30 story building, and I can tell you that was some hard work! Granted that doesn’t happen often, but it does come up enough that you can’t gas out when you need to be working.
If you’re looking for a challenging hybrid program to build your strength and endurance, then check out my most popular plan for tactical athletes. You can also check out this 36 Week Hybrid Training Series.
Now let’s talk a bit about tactical equipment, including what it will, and won’t do for your real world tactical training.
Equipment Won’t Make Up for Lack of Skill
It may seem strange that someone who writes about, and tests equipment, is telling you that equipment doesn’t matter, but that’s the harsh reality. More precisely, you need equipment that is reliable, and reasonably well designed for your application. Anything more is marketing hype.
I recently attended a debrief where several police officers were shot and killed on a tactical operation. The team commander gave us a brief for 5-10 minutes just reviewing the type of gear the team used, from rifles, to lasers, vehicles, and NVGs. None of it was relevant to the event, and no equipment changes would have saved those officers.
Understand that I’m not down playing that team, or those officers who died. They were brave men, doing a hard job, under extreme stress. I simply point out that tactical pro’s often look for solutions in gear, when it is most often found in training and skill.
Skill Trumps Gear
Whenever I encounter a problem that I think might be solved with new gear, I first ask is there’s a better way to solve this by changing tactics. If this answer is yes, then you simply need to drill a new set of tactics, pressure testing them in a realistic opposed environment, to make sure they work.
If the answer is no, then you need to search for gear that might help the problem. An example of this is finding people. Anyone familiar with night vision devices knows that night vision goggles let you see at night, but they don’t allow you to see people very well, certainly not as well as thermals. There is no amount of NVG training that will allow you to find someone standing in a tree line under night vision.
Thermal optics can solve this problem. That is why they are rapidly becoming an add on to many tactical units night vision load out. Now let’s get to our last inconvenient fact.
You Can’t Fight
This one hits near and dear to me, as I was this guy for many years. I mistakenly assumed that the few years of college rugby and the scuffles I had on the street as a patrol officer, made me a competent person in a fight. You can’t believe how wrong I was.
I decided to try jiu jitsu, and quickly discovered that I was completely untrained and dangerously naive. I couldn’t do anything to anyone with more than a few months of jiu jitsu experience. Those guys with more than a few years of experience might as well have been using magic on me. Needless to say, I’ve been rapidly working to fix this problem.
Combatives for Tactical Populations
I think that anyone who needs to confront violent, unarmed people, needs realistic combatives. Most importantly, that training must involve realistic resistance, both standing and on the ground. This is where standard military and police combatives fail.
Commonly you’ll see a great deal of drilling in these systems, with almost no realistic resistance. You would never find this in an MMA, or jiu jitsu gym. Sure, you will spend time drilling, but then you test out those techniques on live opponents.
To be perfectly candid, I have comparatively little training experience with real combatives training. Based on my limited experience and my interactions with team mates who have significant combatives training, I think some form of grappling paired with basic striking is ideal for almost all people.
Grapplers need to be able to survive a stand up fight, and strikers need to have some basic defense if the fight goes to the ground. Lastly, I would recommend that you always ask yourself the applicability of this technique in your operational experience. Sure, a move might work well on the mats, but be completely impractical with body armor, and a gun belt on. Now let’s get to some final thoughts on real world tactical training.
Final Thoughts
It’s important to understand that the largest improvements in your tactical performance will only occur once you’ve correctly identified your biggest weakness. The best way I’ve found to do this is to think of your 2 or 3 worst performance categories.
Next, think of how common those issues occur on real operations. Lastly, consider the negative consequences of not being good at that tactical task. This makes the math simple. Work on the tactical task that has the largest consequence of failure, and is most likely to occur in your operations.
You should set realistic, time bound goals, that allow you to measure improvement. An example of this might be to work on your shooting skill, by participating in a monthly USPSA match. You goal might be to achieve a B classification after 6 months.
I’ll leave you with this thought. If you’ve ever seen a 90’s SWAT raid then you’ve no doubt had a good laugh. By modern standards they are ridiculous. Keep in mind that those guys thought that they were nailing it out there, and simply didn’t understand how much room for improvement there was.
You and I are in that same dilemma now. There is so much room for improved tactical performance, but we don’t know what changes to make. I do know this, we won’t find those improvements until we hammer on our current weaknesses. If you liked this article then feel free to share it with a team mate, and don’t forget to join the email list below.
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