I don't know the guy, and he not be a douche, but his stunt in the video is douche-ish.Originally Posted by Mitchell, Esq.
It is also a scenario safety problem. I can think of a couple of alternate ways that stunt ends with severe head trauma instead of a cool guy "gotcha" moment.
I strongly agree with Sean M's assessment.
FOF is about testing tactics and about testing decision-making under stress.
So the first question you must ask whenever watching a FOF scenario is simple: what is being tested?
It is a hallmark of proper FOF training that you only test what has been taught. In other words, full-fledged FOFs scenarios are not the way you introduce a subject. "Bad guys may hide spider-like above a door" is fair game if previous lessons, lectures, and dry run exercises have covered it. But if you spend hours or days telling guys to enter a room and perform tasks A, B, and C it's -- to stick with the thread's favorite term -- douchey to throw problem D into the mix and essentially punish the students for doing exactly what you taught them.
Back on the old Tactics-L list in the 90's there was a guy who, in addition to being a self-declared world class gunsmith and claiming to have arrested over 10,000 people as a bounty hunter also fancied himself an all around studly firearms instructor. He did a lot of FOF training. One of his favorite scenarios took place in a barn he had access to. Lone students were told they had to clear the barn. They'd open the barn door, step inside, and Dane would open up on them with an MP-5 from the rafters. The only lesson anyone learns from that is don't open the barn door.
It doesn't take a good FOF instructor or role players to create an assassination scenario. "You're standing in line at the grocery store buying your **BAM** shot in the back of the head. You're dead. You suck. Pay me for more classes to learn how to avoid this problem."
In this case, as Sean points out, it seems that the instructor specifically and purposely took advantage of a known weak point in the students' tactics that is incredibly situational. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps for all we know he and the students had just been discussing their 3-man room approach. The instructor said "That can be really dangerous," the students said, "No way man it's the boss," and the instructor said, "OK, let me show you what I'm talking about."
The problem with setting up a BG/RP in some kind of bizarre location is that you're skewing students' tactics towards the highly unlikely instead of the likely. There are a bunch of places a person could hide in most offices, classrooms, etc. It's not as easy as walking through the door and scanning along an arc. The time you take to look up and behind you for Spider-Man could be the time it takes someone hiding behind a file cabinet to step out and open fire. Think about it this way: You can only be looking in one direction at a time. Should you attention be on likely danger points, or far-fetched danger points? Sure, you might have bad luck and find yourself up against the guy who crawls along ceilings. That would suck. It's almost enough to make you think room clearing can be dangerous, I guess.
I'm also not really crazy about YouTube videos demonstrating how to overcome standard police active shooter tactics.
Lol... I vaguely recall that discussion, and many more like it.
Vertical techniques have value. Like you all note though, must be taught, realistic, and be an appropriate exercise for the instructional point. I wonder how many of those guys will now be inclined to look up and behind them as they move into rooms rather than into their area of responsibility.
Which, if everyone's interpretation of the video clip is correct, is the bigger issue.
C Class shooter.
You've trained those three guys to look up and high on entry instead of clearing there areas of responsibility. I'd like to see how that works when a LSDD goes off underneath you and you catch the focus of it.
Whatever credibility he had with those three guys is done. If he does that to the whole class than they'll remember that more than what he was supposed to be teaching.
It looked like they were running three man cells and it looks like the third man watches the rear as the first two clear. You just taught him to do door checks instead of keeping an eye down the hall.
It's been my experience Dbags who consistently do "gotcha" events tend to catch a lot of sim rounds. Sometimes concentrated volleys of sim rounds...
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Just a dog chauffeur that used to hold the dumb end of the leash.
I'd just like to point out (again) that we don't know the exact context of the exercise.
There is video of me floating around somewhere shooting a gun bent over backwards, between my legs. I'm sure there is video or photos of me shooting a gun holding it upside down. Out of context, they're farcical. At the time, with proper explanation, they were making a point.
If this was simply run as a regular FOF exercise, I agree with the criticisms and voiced many of them myself earlier.
But just to spitball a possible chain of events that led to this as a reasonable demonstration:
Cop in class says, "We have top secret active shooter tactics."
Instructor says, "You think Chris Dorner new those secret tactics?"
Cop says, "Sure, but what could he really do even if he knows our tactics. Our 3-man room clearing system is foolproof."
Instructor says, "O RLY?"
Sean -- agreed 100%!
This was also the point of my first post. This could definitely be a light bulb moment, but for the wrong people. I know the flood may already be out there but I am still not a fan of these types of video's for public consumption. Especially when put out by a company / organization training the good guys.
I was a role player in local active shooter training that devolved to the kind of mud suck Sean alludes to.
After the basics of room clearing were explained and hallway advancing was demonstrated a supervisor (not the lead instructor - a problem in it's own right) began trying to trip up the cops. He'd have some of us role players lay on the floor as if we were unconscious then shoot at the cops as they came in hoping to trick them.
At one point a deputy did everything right headshooting a bad guy who was holding a hostage as soon as he had a clear shot and was rebuked because the hostage might have been the real bad guy forcing a real hostage to use an empty gun and act like a bad guy as a diversion.
When it was all over I felt for the cops who were really trying to improve.
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