No No- win scenarios

[Glenn E. Meyer]

http://www.policeone.com/police-trai...r&nlid=7917889

So what do folks think of this? I am also curious if the same analysis would apply to the private citizen gun carrier? It would seem that the officer has a responsibility to be proactive at times in approaching dangerous situations. Thus confidence that you would and could win make some sense.

For a private citizen, discretion may be the better part of valor. Most of us have heard folks or read chatter that has someone saying - why then I will just clear my house! Or I will draw my roscoe, piece or gat and take the bad guy down.

In many of the private citizen training scenarios I've been in, the instructor had scenarios that you should have de-escalated or withdrawn. If not, you were probably killed. We did a burglar in the house one at KRtraining with a team of burglars and the new folks who wandered out of the bedroom to save the TV (Damn, I not letting a scumbag take MY stuff) were eliminated with various degrees of embarrassment. Those who hunkered down won.

Thus, is a no-win one a good lesson for other than officers? Or what do you think of the general idea for police also. The human factor data suggests that realistic FOF or simulations have great benefits. I don't think scenario type has been studied intensively.

[psalms144.1]

Glenn - I get where the author is coming from, and have seen some scenarios and OPFOR actions that were crushingly badly spun out. I think that, if possible, there should always be an option to "win." Having said that, I also believe that we have to train people to fight through adversity, and, frankly, sometimes that means making them "hurt" up front and watching their reaction. As an FI and UOF instructor, NOTHING gets my goat more than seeing a trainee who gets hit in a FOF scenario drop their hands and say "I'm dead."

There are plenty of ways to make this work out, and, having been through a LOT of "hooded box" drills over the years, some of them start out with pretty uncomfortable scenarios (hood comes off and a role player is 2' away, with a training knife in mid-stab about 1" from your chest - you're gonna get "cut" and it's going to hurt). And, the best trainers will craft scenarios where, sometimes, the only way to "win" is not to fight, or to haul kittens out of the area.

The biggest problem is this - successful training in FOF or simulations requires two things: (1) a good trainer and (2) great role players. A bad trainer will set things up so the "hit" is all the student feels, and doesn't force them to fight through it. Bad role players can take the best training and make it worthless, or worse, ingrain the WRONG lessons. There aren't that many combinations of good instructors with access to good role players out there.

Simulations are OK, but trying to "talk down" a video feels staged, and rarely, IMHO, accomplishes the goal.

To your thought - there need to be consequences to wrong decisions in training, or you don't learn the right lesson. I vividly remember the first time the hood went up, I was unarmed, and had about 12 LARGE dudes charging me, and decided to "go down swinging" when there was a safe escape route. I went down, and hard, and will NEVER forget that lesson. Was it a "loss?" Absolutely, but it taught me something I needed to know. The same should hold true for a civilian student in FOF who makes a bad tactical or technical move - as my Team NCOIC used to say when we'd stagger out of our shoot house - "Pain retains..."

As always, this is one man's opinion, and worth precisely what you paid for it.

Regards,

Kevin

[Hambo]

Random thoughts. First, training scenarios are not a competition with win-loss. The point is to learn there so you don't die for real. If the trainee makes a mistake and has some pain of pride or body, the idea is that they don't want to experience that or worse for real. I think a 'no way out' scenario might be useful to remind trainees to stay in the fight to the end. Instructors might also find that a trainee works their way out of what was thought to be an impossible situation. I've also seen people snatch defeat from what should have been an easy to survive scenario.

[Trooper224]

I get his point about avoiding the Kobayashi Maru scenario in training. Egos can run rampant in LEO training. You get a lot of types who get into it for an ego stroke and intentionally set their students up for failure just to have the opportunity to point it out. I suffered under a couple of these during my academy training and it wasn't pleasant. Consequently, when I got into training I made sure my mindset was far different. I taught traffic stop techniques and officer survival for several years, both with our recruit classes and outside agencies. (Try teaching feds how to perform a traffic stop, but that's another story) At the beginning of every training cycle I made the point of telling the students they would all fail, but not to take it personally. We had a set of scenarios we used and we, the instructors, also served as "violators" within the scenarios. Unfortunately, we learn the most by failing and in order to make the training point the student had to make mistakes. We'd done them all hundreds of times and knew exactly how to work a student around in order to get the desired result. On occasion you'd get someone who was naturally "switched on" even though we weren't all tacticool back them and didn't use that term. In those cases they refused to let us put them in a weak position and avoided failure, so it was possible to succeed even if unlikely. Sometimes it was even a raw recruit and that was pretty cool and we let them know it. So, by the very nature of the training negative feedback occurred, but it was counterbalanced by positive feedback during the debrief. To this day, years later, there are things I absolutely will not do on a traffic stop because of things that happened in that training and it wasn't because of the ones I won. So while failure is inherent in any kind of training, it's important to temper it with explanation as to why it's necessary. I find this especially true with the current up and coming generation. By and large they've been raised in the age of the participation medal where everyone gets a juice box for showing up. They haven't learned to deal with failure during their formative years and making a mistake in training can be crushing to them, whereas with my generation it was simply, "Note to self, don't ever do that again."

[ToddG]

The problem with no-win scenarios is that they teach little more than "you can die." There's not a lot of benefit in that. Most folks who do this kind of thing either as cops or private citizens have already figured that out, hopefully. The ones who believe they can never lose will usually make bad decisions in FOF because of it and learn the truth without you subjecting all the other students to ruin for no good benefit.

I took a class once where, admittedly due to a mistake on my part, I found myself outflanked by two role players. There was literally nowhere for me to go nor nothing for me to do without taking withering fire from one or both. The instructor didn't stop the scenario at that point so I drove on... and got shot a lot before the instructor finally did stop the scenario. I learned to be smarter about getting outflanked, but I figured that out before getting shot a whole lot. The rest was just a waste of Sim rounds.

One big time SF program at Ft. Bragg actually cut back their Sim training a number of years ago because they realized it was actually training their guys not to take necessary risks. They'd get so shot up during training that no one wanted to be point man anymore or the soldiers would spend so much time being cautious that they'd lose the objective.

I'm all for there being a pain penalty in training, and the stress/pain involved with FOF is very valuable. But it's supposed to be a penalty for making a mistake, not for being there in the first place under the instructor's directions. Simply assassinating students to prove you can come up with no-win situations is, in my mind, nothing more than instructor & role-player ego. I knew an instructor who, for example, used to hide in the rafters of a barn with an MP5 and hose students as soon as they came through the doorway. What did it teach students? Look into the ceiling before clearing your corners? Because that makes sense...

It's worth noting that Simunition, at least when I got certified years ago, specifically recommended against such scenarios.

Please don't mistake this as saying all scenarios should be easy or that students should never get shot. I'm particularly opposed to training that follows the "one hit and it's over" rule because I think that, too, instills bad mindset issues for students. I did a scenario in the late 90's at the Secret Service academy that involved me getting shot about twenty times in the chest by a guy carrying a full auto carbine. I got shot because I'd been utterly stupid and approached him without even drawing my gun. But the scenario was such that he went down when I finally did move to cover and return fire. Then four more armed bad guys showed up and I eventually ran out of ammo but that's another story...

[Trooper224]

One thing I found is that cops are the absolutely worst people to use as bad guys in scenario based training. Far too many of them look at it as a way to screw with other cops and tend to turn it into some kind of a competition of who can screw with each other more. Long ago, when I was on my agencies tactical team we were running room clearing and entry drills. This was before sims and we were using red guns. When I entered one room I encountered a bad guy, so I pointed my plastic Glock at his chest and yelled "bang, bang!" The *bad guy*, another team member, got a snide look on his face and didn't react, expect by replying, "well bang bang yourself." When I drove the muzzle end of plastic pistol into his sternum with considerable force he realized that wasn't the appropriate response.

[Lon]

One thing I found is that cops are the absolutely worst people to use as bad guys in scenario based training. Far too many of them look at it as a way to screw with other cops and tend to turn it into some kind of a competition of who can screw with each other more.

Truth. I have a short list of cops I'll use as role players. Most are fellow trainers who "get it". I've had good luck using our Academy cadets as role players and college kids from my alma mater's CJ program. I always meet with them before the training and carefully brief them on what the objectives of the training are and what I expect from them. I stress that their performance as a role player corresponds to the effectiveness of the training. So far Ive been very pleased with the results.

[ToddG]

Lon, I think that's the key. The RPs need to be vetted and taught that their role is trainer not adversary. That's why using students as RPs is often problematic. You cannot spend the better part of a weekend teaching people to fight & win at all costs and then expect them to be willing targets in a FOF scenario, especially if it's their first time doing FOF.

[JonnyVain]

I don't get "no win" scenarios in training. In the real world anything is possible. Assuming if someone shoots at you they automatically hit you? (my experience is with prop guns not simunition, should have read further before responding).

[Trooper224]

I've had good luck using our Academy cadets as role players.............

Several years back we were conducting riot training in our academy gymnasium during inservice. This was long past my days as an instructor so I was one of the crowd. Our defensive tactics instructors were working the recruits out in the gym next door and thought it might be good to use the recruits as "protestors". Well, apparently the recruits were feeling a little frisky and decided it was time to teach the old mossbacks a lesson. After a chipped tooth, a broken rib and a bruised sternum they decided otherwise. Our DT staff was then summoned into El Jefe's office where he voiced his displeasure rather coherently.

I agree, trainers need to be carefully chosen for their lack of ego and the ability to communicate.