Dedicated Simmunition Building

[Ifightcrime]

Our agency is looking to build a dedicated Simunition building for training. We have an old pole barn built by the deputies which we have used for years. We are looking for policies and SOP for such buildings. As typical those making the decisions are not Simunition Instructors but have the money.

If you have information PM me and I give you my agency email.

Stay Sharp & Stay Safe!

[JM Campbell]

I'd reach out to SouthNarc, he does an excellent course called AMIS and might just have some excellent insight to help your dept. get up and running.

[Chuck Haggard]

Before we had the facility we have now we were researching a Sim house. We had plans to built a Morton building and have it wide open, We could then move walls around for different floors plans as needed.

Sioux City IA PD has a really decent Sim house, built to be a rather large two story home type building. It also has a movable walls. I'd contact them and see if they can get you pics.

[czech6]

Safety and reduced liability (liability being the key word with the bean counters). With a dedicated building you have much better access control and physical security. That gives some turd fewer opportunities to bring a live weapon into a training environment and screw things up. We currently use a part of our police academy, for simunitions and it's a safety nightmare, there are just too many ways in and out.

If I could design my own building it would have a hallway at the entrance of the building with keyed lock boxes for weapons (and cigarettes), at the end of the hallway have a small room for searching officers head to toe for weapons. Outside of that room is the training area. There would be chain link fence/gates across any exterior doors to keep searched officers in and unsearched officers out and a fence around the building to do the same. At the end of the day there would be the safety debrief that training is over, officer would go through the hallway, get their weapons, exit and be completely out of the training environment.

[abu fitna]

A few considerations off the top of my head from experience. Some of these issues may be less applicable to domestic LE or others in less austere environments, but one never knows. And many of these don't tend to show up in any policy manuals, but are the kinds of things that lead to standing SOPs after learning the hard way.

* Props - There are typically two distinct variants on the use of props. Junk yard / bin picking with anything thrown around for that unique crack house vibe, or constructed for specific learning or modeling objectives. It tends to be much easier to have custom (but cheaply) built movable prop structures - typically plywood shapes of various dimensions, or the combatives foam shapes. These can be helpful for a range of purposes, such as modifying square room structures into more complex architectures. However, they lack visual complexity of a typical problem - and much of what one needs to learn to improve room clearing skillsets in particular is rapid assimilation and reaction to visual information. Junkyard props are helpful for the latter, but require some serious evaluation from a safety perspective. Exposed metal, breakable glass (TV screens or monitors, for example), balance vs weight of object, etc. can all be concerns. If it can get misused to hurt someone, it will if there are enough FoF evos with enough folks. For example - a bank of lockers in a hallway that seemed to be well placed and immobile due to weight, wound up pulled down from an angled hit at full run by one officer, and dropped on a second participant, pinning them until several other folks could sort it out.

This doesnt have to be either or - a mix of both approaches helps. But typically, most training environments skimp on the prop elements, or go with simple cartoonish or maybe 2D photo prints. Not nearly as useful from a training perspective.

Of course, all of these considerations can be evaluated in temporary training structures, and can be used to argue for dedicated facility. Then of course, the variety question comes up, depending on the number of rotations a typical participant will experience at the same facility.

* Facility environment - We used to run a series of exercises for some folks at a facility that once upon a time was a housing area, involving several streets of multiple detached two story units. The structures were not entirely suitable from a modeling perspective for our purposes in that they represented an older style of domestic life different from that encountered elsewhere in the world. But one works with what one has especially in the years when just about any facility that could be used was booked solid. However, the area required increasing amounts of prep as maintenance decayed. Several injuries occurred from broken window glass, even in areas where the glass was thought to be sufficiently out of bounds to not have been a problem. Breaching damage rendered parts of certain structures unusable for subsequent evos. (And to be fair, it was not believed that the facility would be in use for as long as it turned out to be needed, or host as many training cycles...). Area restrictions meant that usual aspects of certain problems sets - trash fires, etc. could not be appropriately simulated due to hazard of fire spread and lack of ready fire suppression options. Repainting was also needed in some cases (and often not done) following some classes of users at the facility employing structure marking symbology in WMD consequence management scenarios. (Lesson learned, add removable wall sections for commonly marked areas).

A typical training area is usually dirty and expected to be so. This is something we all tend to ignore. However, mold issues can present a real problem, and would up creating enough health issues that several structures had to be abandoned. Routine bleach runs over time are going to be important depending on climate, etc.

* Climbing issues: Some participants will do the damnedest things, no matter how well scripted. Moveable walls that do not reach the ceiling can encourage players to use props for quick peeks "over the top". This can be useful if set up to simulate vents or other industrial facility features, but otherwise invest in tarps or similar visual barriers that extend walls to the overhead. While many purpose built kill houses simulate exterior problems such as building approach within an overall enclosing warehouse or other space, one can often run into weather considerations depending on the age and condition of the original superstructure. This can create slip and fall problems for "rooftops" and "balconies" of the interior building structures. Some of the same issues come up with stairs and ladders from exterior entry. This needs to be policed - and may even call for selective addition of nonskid (although this can create training scar issues as repeat participants may get inattentive to footing if it is too easy.)

* Monitoring and recording: Camera set ups are increasingly popular, but if they are simply retrofitted without concealment tend to create a visual element that gets ignored when elsewhere it very much needs not be ignored. This training scar may not apply to all types of users, but even domestic warrant service needs to be particularly concerned about observation if such lens under control of the opposition. Different POV heights, angles, and purposes are also important - there is too often a tendency to set up lens to simulate the instructor's catwalk rather than play with some of the things one can really learn from watching a stack or especially a singleton executing entry and interior movement. Some folks try to skimp on camera units, especially low light setups, but if you are using any sort of NVGs this can really be a problem.

* Admin areas - Earlier folks mentioned need for search control, which is a definite must as we all recognize. If possible, an internal admin area is also quite useful past the search point, for food and or down time breaks that don't require frequent crossing of the line. This reduces the number of searches, but also the chance that searches get sloppy and something is missed. Having gear tables and other niceties also helps avoid folks fumbling in packs for admin purposes, allowing additional controls such as mandatory gear layouts for inspection.

Hope this goes well for you. Love to hear more about your experiences as time goes on, or your prior experiences that led you to seek a dedicated kill house for sim.

[Mike Honcho]

Several years ago I sketched out a target stand that would have a removable sheet of plexiglass over the paper target. This would in theory allow the sims hits to be wiped off between runs and extend the lives if the targets as well as decreasing the reset time.

I never got around to building one to try out but I'd be curious to know if it would have worked or not.

[Chuck Haggard]

It works, but use Lexan, plexiglass will eventually break much more quickly from repeated hits

[JohnO]

Local to me an Army SF guy rented an old shuttered industrial facility and built a simunition shoot ho use inside.

http://king33training.com

[secondstoryguy]

I've trained at the ALERRT training facility in Texas and they have a huge purpose built 3 story shoothouse build specifically for sims and not live ammo. It has moveable walls, adjustable lighting, smoke generators, cameras and classrooms that also serve as a safety area for live weapons. I forget the company that built it but the staff their is tip top and would probably help you out.

[psalms144.1]

We were lucky enough on my last team that our Senior Enlisted Advisor, before he became a SEAL, was a SeaBee, and a heck of a talented carpenter. He found us a concrete slab pad from an abandoned building on base, and talked our Boss into funding a dedicated SIM house. Because it was in Hurricane Alley, everything had to be "temporary."

What we did was frame out wall sections and our SEALBee worked a system of hinges that allowed us to put join the sections together in nearly infinite configurations. We had sections with doors, sections with "window" cut outs, and blank wall sections (not many of those). Because everything was modular, we could switch configurations with minimal effort, so outward opening doors could be switched to inward opening doors, doors that led to hallways in one run led to other rooms on the next, etc. Combine that with a minimal amount of "found on roadside" furniture and some completely mobile wall sections made out of plywood (so he could chop a big room into smaller partitions in a hurry), and we really had a pretty darned good set up.

We emphasized force-on-force in the house usually, but, when we ran out of meat puppets or wanted to do larger exercises, we used moveable target stands with "photo realistic" paper targets on them. When we found ourselves outrunning our "speed limit" on moving and shooting, we'd switch to IDPA cardboards - and used a variety of different ways to differentiate (hopefully) shoot from no-shoot targets.

For safety purposes, we had a "staging area" about 100 yards away from the house with parking and a "shakedown" tent where we would search each other, then the primary instructor for the day would use a handheld magnetometer as a "double check" insurance search. All live weapons and ammunition (along with knives and other assorted nastiness) were locked in a single vehicle, and the primary instructor for the day maintained the key to that vehicle. No one got their live gun back until they were leaving the site for the day, period.

We TRIED to hit the shoot house twice per month, but probably ended up only averaging once per month, with operational requirements for travel and other training. If you asked me the relative value of the investment in time and money, I would have given up EVERY other training event we did, including some of our live fire range days, before I gave up the shoot house - especially the force-on-force training we could do there.

Regards,

Kevin