Category: Skills

By Larry Zabel Sgt. US Army Infantry (Ret)

This is my first article to MilSim Magazine and I just wanted to use this article to of introduce myself and who I am as a martial arts instructor/self defense teacher and where I’m at on my own martial arts journey. I took a moment to reflect on the long history of martial arts study I’ve taken (now 36 years +) and stopped to consider all the techniques taught to me by my teachers, taught to them and so on. What struck me is the universal notion that it all works.

In academic terms, yes it all works. In practical terms not so much, some things that might work for one person, may not work for someone else. Not everyone has the skill, coordination, body type, flexibility, dedication, ability or even interest in learning an entire curriculum. Even if a student spends years studying and learning an entire schools curriculum there are a certain set of techniques, concepts and principals that student and teacher will gravitate towards because of that person’s physical body makeup and natural tendencies. In other words Bruce Lee has been famously quoted, “Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own”. To that adage I add, “Know when to break the rules altogether!” That last part I added on my own and it has been my martial mantra for more than two decades.

I remember doing countless drills of kicks and punches in the air and for what? Muscle memory? Wrote learning? Historical preservation? Moving meditation? Perhaps. When I joined the Army and was an infantryman my martial arts philosophy permanently changed. Now, as a teacher I look at things differently. Curriculum, class structure, live action scenario training, interactive drills, coordination exercises, If they aren’t effective I don’t do it and I won’t teach it. Even terminology. I used to be pretty good at spiting out the names of techniques in a foreign language and the students looking at me funny. Not anymore, unless it’s is quick concept not easily explained in English.

Let’s take kicking for example. We can all agree that the artistry required to be effective at kicking is demanding, precise, powerful and lethal in the right circumstance and application. It takes years to develop the strength stamina and precision to be an effective kicking machine, so to speak. So, what about the ordinary person who works a 40 hour job, has a family and doesn’t dedicate his every waking breath to the study and preservation of martial knowledge?

Here is where we get to the nitty gritty of my premise “Know when to break the rules altogether” is applied. In America today we are flooded with images of exceptional martial athletes doing death defying stunts or competing in the MMA Arena. Neither is going to work for the average man or woman out there interested in self defense. I no longer teach every kicking technique because in practical terms there are only 3 that actually get the job done with minimal time invested, skill development and limited flexibility the average student can pull off if ever needed. Front kick, Cross Checking Kick, and Low to Mid Level Round Kicks. I do still teach crescent kicks, side kicks, hook kicks, spinning kicks and they’re variants but they require time and technique development outside of safe usage for a beginner. I personally no longer actively practice the “fancy” kicks because in a self defense scenario it just wouldn’t be practical. Is there a legitimate place for these techniques and preservation? Absolutely!

Back to my ongoing point. Once you analyze the motions you realize they are not overly complicated, require no extra special balancing, or even above average flexibility. However, each one can deliver powerful debilitating blows in a defensive posture or finishing techniques in an attacking mode. The point I’m making is that we as “Instructors” have to put ourselves into our students lives momentarily and understand the daily stresses they’re dealing with and deliver fast effective solutions to potential problems everyday life may throw at them. If you have a student whose main goal is to defend themselves and leave after six months (if that) then adjusting your teaching method to help that student could be a winning strategy.

There is also a different breed of student that this practical training philosophy I have applies. The “Tactical Professional” can ill-afford years of dedicated training nowadays with the amount of time away on deployment or in the streets on patrol. They need our deepest knowledge, best concepts, and training applications in a short amount of time. They need all of this in order to be well rounded, mission ready, and qualified for the battle on patrol, active watch, downrange or in the field.

These professionals have to understand what works quickly and effectively with minimal time invested. With limited time for skill development and minimal flexibility because of the time constraints, we need to prepare our students for mission readiness schedules, environmental variables, protective gear, movement in close quarters, mission essentials, and weapons carried. The curriculum must be simple, effective and lethal to the enemy. It should also be demoralizing to the suspect and debilitating for those captured for questioning or intelligence gathering. All must hasten the stop of the fight and mitigate injury to the professional user.

My point about kicking earlier in this article takes on a different premise here. In tactical situations with full kit, weapons, and restrictive/hostile environments being strong influencing variables, heavy adrenaline flow will be produced and the premise for kicking effectively will be limited to simple, effective, and fast (gross motor movement). The way the body moves in a combat situation with heavy gear is different than how the body moves unencumbered out on the streets. The overall premise still applies, but the reasons for it are different and the way it is trained changes as well. Understanding operational conditions impacts the training environment, what is trained, why and how training is conceived and implemented. Understanding and being able to deliver effectively takes on new purpose with lives at stake, so the responsibility as an instructor takes on new levels of meaning, purpose, and accountability.

There are always going to be the dedicated students that you throw all your knowledge, heart and soul into. For the students that don’t have that time, dedication, and drive, this might be a prudent way to teach those folks who need it quick and dirty without sacrificing knowledge, skill,  your integrity or their personal safety. For the tactical professional among your student base this training philosophy is especially critical for them because they are putting their life on the line with the knowledge you posses and disseminate.

These areas of tactical applications, principals, and concepts are what I will be focusing on here at MilSim Magazine. I hope you enjoy and learn from it. I know I will.

Train Right. Train Smart.

By Ash Hess

Running guns or gunfighting is about time and angles. One can time every aspect of a shot down to the millisecond.  Once this is done you can find ways to make up time. The round and the machine (rifle or pistol) take a certain amount of time to do their job. This includes time of flight for the bullet, the time it takes the bullet to accelerate down the barrel, the time it takes the machine to cycle and feed a new round and the time it takes to eject the spent round are all pretty much set by whoever designed and manufactured it.  This post is about finding time and making it work for you.

You have probably heard many instructors or trainers say the term “drive the gun” but rarely do they go into everything that this entails. What I want to do is lay some of that out. First I need to set conditions. To work this you need a shot timer, a plan and a weapon. I highly recommend starting with dry fire and then working into laser, milsim, Sims, and then live. Most drills look like this:

Standing low ready, 5 yards, 1 shot, 1 second

As an example, let’s run that drill with the rifle.

On the beep the average reaction time is 0.5 seconds. In Top Fuel drag racing a .5 is known as a hole shot. With that as a base line that leaves us .5 secs to get the rifle up, aim some way and press the trigger. Here is where we begin to have issues. If we are slow getting the rifle up, call it 0.25, we have less time to aim. With less time, the final 0.25 seconds, to aim we really can’t predict where the shot will land. Depending on the target this can be acceptable or a miss. If I give you a 20×40 target and you hit that then you succeeded. If I reduce that to a 3 inch circle you need more time on the sights. You find that time by driving the gun up harder. Simple math tells us that if I get the gun into position in 0.15 now I have 0.35 to aim and press the shot. I am still using the same 1 second to do the shot but my accuracy is going to increase with the extra time on the sights.

In the work up for this blog post I went to the live range and ran the above drill. The first few rounds I was barely making time with my required accuracy. As I drove the gun harder I was able to get the rifle up and fire 2 shots in the same 1 second with .2 splits. That being said, let me lay out the time from the shot timer data. This is still the same drill at five yards.

Beep

0 sec

0.64 first shot

0.87 second shot

Beep.

With my splits running about 0.2 my third shot was always just over time. I went back down to one shot on the beep and ran the drill five more times going for accuracy. My average time was 0.71 sec with a group size of about two inches. I was letting the aim settle for a tenth or so before the shot so I could have actually slowed down more and tightened the group up and still made time. So think about if I had 1.5 seconds to use. By driving the gun hard into the pocket I would have nearly a second to perfect aim and place the round exactly where I wanted it. In real life, we know that shot placement is king. This is even agreed upon in the great caliber wars. Therefore, if I can get a well-aimed shot placed, my odds of winning are significantly increased.

Another thing to take into account is velocity. I was using 5.56 rounds with a muzzle velocity of 3000 feet per second. Force on Force rules and safety have the muzzle velocity for paintball and milsim weapons at around the 350 feet per second range. This means it takes more time for my projectile to reach the target. If my target is only exposed for 1 sec driving the gun up and into the fight, it allows me time to aim and subsequently time for the projectile to reach the target.

Life is not just about the low ready. I did the same drill from the high ready (true High Ready as laid out in the US Army’s TC 3-22.9 May of 2016) I was unable, due to a lack of practice, to meet the time hack of 1 sec so I modified to 1.5 secs. As you can see in the pictures, the group was nearly the same but it took nearly .4 seconds longer to get the rifle into place. This is not to say the position is slower, but that I was slower. My average for the High ready was 1.3 seconds. I am sure by following the practice plan I laid out above, I could get the shot down below 1 sec.

To tie this all together, practice as well as train with a shot clock. You can do the same breakdown for transitioning between targets, turns, and even tactical movement. It hurts the ego, but from the ashes of failure comes true skill sets that can be applied to most things in this world, be it for live fire or Sims. As distance increases the times will be slower as we need to spend more time focusing on each step in the Shot Process in order to get a solid hit. A fist size (6 inches) is very easy at 10 yards but is extremely hard at 600 yards. Lastly, most of the time the slowest element is the shooter.

I have always had great respect for combat medics. They not only support the mission but also watch over their teammates and must remain steady and focused during the worst of times. A good medic, typically referred to as “Doc,” is protected better than all of the gold in Ft. Knox. And guys like Jason Cunningham are proof of the greatest sacrifice a medic can make.

Recently, I was invited to take a TCCC course with the guys at Tactical Medics Group (www.tacmedgroup.com). So my photographer and I decided to make the 19 hour drive to check it out. The journey itself was enough to write about. However, we managed to make it to the course on time. The course was held at the Brazoria County Fire Fighting Field so there were plenty of places to run scenarios. Of course, it isn’t a medical course unless you have some death by PowerPoint. However, the classrooms had plenty space and the instructors kept the interest up. It was really the first time I didn’t feel like falling into a PowerPoint coma.

Nate, the lead instructor had a strong presence and had no problems keeping the class engaged while keeping his Marine Corps non politically correct qualities at bay. That itself made for a great time. Then entered Jared, the Army’s contribution to our TCCC course, as a former medic with the 75th Ranger Regiment, he also brought a wealth of combat experience to the course. Kenny was the backbone of the course. Without his mad computer skills all could have been lost. There wasn’t too much sarcasm in that last statement was there? Kenny, also from the Army Special Operations world, was a wealth of knowledge as well and a good sport I might add. Shawn with his background in SWAT and a decked out police issue Charger and finally Andrew great sense of humor and background as an Army Combat Medic rounded out the group. I was impressed by how well such an extremely diverse group of alphas personalities could work so well together.

Not only does Tactical Medics Group teach courses but they also develop various IFAK kits available for purchase. They even have the Ambidextrous Tourniquet Attachment Kydex (ATAK), a great device for carrying a tourniquet on your gear. Every student was given one to use during the course. To be honest, I would have bet that it would have come out. But it never did. You can check them out here at www.AtakTQholder.com. I’m still not 100% convinced but I am impressed and appreciated the fact that they asked for honest feedback and ideas so that they can improve on it.

Tactical Medics Group was started in 2012 by Terry Moore, a veteran of the Australian military with backgrounds in tactical medicine and personal security details with a resume longer than this article. Although, he was overseas on a contract, we spent some time talking about the course. It was easy to tell that Terry has a strong focus on offering the best training possible to his students. And he takes it extremely personally if his instructors are not at the top of their game. To this end Terry will only hire good instructors with strong field experience, which is an extremely rare combination. We all know that there is always room for improvement and Terry doesn’t seem like one to ignore that fact. I was impressed that after seeing some of the pictures from the course he noticed areas that could use improvement.

So what is TCCC anyway?

In just the last decade new guidelines for combat casualty care have dramatically increased the survival rate of those injured and debunked decades of what was thought to be sound medicine.

Until 2005 when USSOCOM changed their approach to combat medicine, the military had not made any major changes to their approach to combat casualty care since WWI. These changes came about from a paper complied in 1996 and put to the test by Pararescue units in 1997. Soon after some heavy hitters like the American College of Surgeons (ACS), the Council of Trauma (COT), and the National Association of Emergency Medicine (NAEMT) indorsed the new guidelines that we now know as Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC).

Today TCCC has gained a lot of support state side and has given way to Tactical Emergency Casualty Care (TECC) for law enforcement and the EMS practitioner. Both courses have proven to be invaluable in high threat environments.

What’s different about TCCC?

In order to support the mission TCCC is broken up into three phases. These phases focus on offering the best medicine possible at the right time in a hostile environment. Timing is everything. Trying to start an IV while in the open under direct fire is pointless and suicidal at best. The best medicine at the wrong time will increase injuries and risk the success of the mission. So let’s take a look at the phases:

Care Under Fire – When a soldier is injured under fire, the focus and mission momentum must be maintained. This means that if possible the injured soldier must be able to provide some level of self-aid. So your kit needs to be where you can reach it from either hand. Self aid may include moving to better cover so that others can get to you to stop any major bleeding or being able to apply your own tourniquet. Massive bleeding is the main concern during the Care Under Fire phase.

Tactical Field Care – Once the soldier is out of direct fire then basic life support (BLS) begins. Once major bleeding is controlled then basic airway management takes over along with continued patient assessment including any other basic interventions. If evacuation is delayed then Advance Life Support (ALS) may begin. Keep in mind that the concept here is just because you have it doesn’t mean you have to use it. If you can maintain an open airway manually using a jaw thrust maneuver then do you really need to intubate? If evacuation is delayed you may want to consider moving to intubation if needed, but if evacuation is nearby then you may be able to wait. Just remember you have to carry it to use it. So how much do you really need to carry?

TACEVAC – This phase is more in line with EMS protocols for transporting to definitive care. ALS interventions can be preformed, drugs administered, chest tubes inserted, and wounds reassessed. All of the gadgets we get to play with on our bus. Of course in this case we are more likely to be in a bucket of bolts so ugly that the earth repels it. Others simply refer to it as a helicopter.

On the surface, is seems like common sense. However, under the stress of combat many mistakes have been made without this basic foundation. Now don’t get me wrong there is a lot more to it, and of course part of it was breaking the habits that I had already formed as an EMT. However, it seemed like the ALS students had a harder go of it since they are used to going straight to the ALS tool box.

What about using tourniquets?

Another returning star to the stage of combat medicine is the tourniquet. Tourniquets have been shunned for decades due to various misconceptions. The emerging procedure is doing what is takes to control massive bleeding. If that means you drop a knee on the femoral artery of a soldier with a massive leg wound while applying a tourniquet or two side by side then using direct pressure and a pressure dressing to control the bleeding then so be it. Tourniquets have proven to not only save lives but the limbs as well. Studies of combat medicine have shown that no one has died or lost a limb from a properly placed and monitored tourniquet.

How does the TCCC training bring everything together?

Scenarios, lots of scenarios. We spent well over half of the day running scenarios filled with smoke, blood, sirens, and screaming actors; including a patient who looked like he was a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys. Guess who ended up with him. Many of us realized very quickly that if we didn’t stay focused we fell right back into our bad habits.

As with most technology and emerging concepts over the course of history, the battle field has been the proving ground that has influenced much of what we do in civilian life. I have no doubt that more and more law enforcement agencies will continue to pick up this training through the TCCC’s counterpart TECC (Tactical Emergency Casualty Care). However, even more pressing is the importance of the first responder during active shootings, terrorist attacks, and high paced natural disasters to act in a similar manner so that more lives may be saved. This is where the TECC course shines. The TECC course takes all of the same concepts from the TCCC course but puts in a law enforcement/first responder environment.

Be sure to visit www.TacMedGroup.com for more information and while you’re at it sign up for a course already. Seriously stop reading this article and go…