Monday, November 30, 2020

The perfect class?!

Simple Marksmanship


I was asked over the weekend if I believed that Dynamic Carbine is the perfect rifle class.

"Nope" 

Neither you nor I have the time and/or money to take the perfect rifle class. I might not be the guy to detail out the perfect rifle class, but I can get the outline down rather well. Classes are always based on trying to get the best bang for the buck. Developing curriculum has a number of issues that need to be weighed, but time is always the most demanding need. There are X number of training hours and Y number of lessons. In case you were wondering Y is always larger than X by an order of magnitude. The perfect class would have boundless training hours.

The perfect rifle class wouldn't likely even involve rifles for more than a week. Students might not shoot a live round until the second month of training. If we had all the time and money available, each block of instruction would be validated with Force on Force directly after each block was finished. If we start a class with marksmanship and then pressure test it, no matter how accurate the student can shoot, they will fail at lightspeed with a 100% rate of failure. But it always starts there. Why?  Not because it is the basic building block, but because it's the easiest to teach. 

What if the class started with how to use Cover and Concealment and then transitioned onto Movement? We could pressure test and validate each block as we went. We could teach people how to survive even if they weren't armed. I could spend days teaching nothing but how to use a single piece of cover. There are nuances that can be explored near infinitely. And right away, that first block of instruction makes you harder to kill. I'd love to hear the rationalization of how marksmanship makes someone harder to kill anytime they are in danger from a ranged weapon.(Hint: it only applies if you have a gun in your hands)

What if we explored all the techniques that could be used on different types of cover? I've had people ask me "What do you mean different types of cover? Do you mean Cover and Concealment?" That tells me a lot about their level of understanding. It's like the old joke "I like both kinds of music, Rock AND Roll, har, har, har". <Insert Djent vs Thrash joke here> 

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Outside Knee up or Knee down?



I've never made a complete list of the different types of cover but I can tell you that there are at least 6 different qualities we can measure, with dozens of answer ranges for each quality, and we multiply those to get data on one single piece of cover that is being analyzed. This is without regard to that piece of cover's orientation to any additional pieces of cover. This can not be taught in a 15-minute block of instruction. Nor even in a single training day. But it would be the absolute basic foundation to not dying while facing lethal projectiles. Newsflash, if you are dead, you will never get a chance to think about how awesome your marksmanship is, let alone use it. Why is this never taught first?

I can tell you why. It takes a lot of time. It can't be done with 20 students on a firing line. The investment is high. And that instructor still has his logistics to contend with. He has costs associated with range rental/upkeep, Insurance, business licensing, consumables, payroll, all the backend costs of running a website or storefront, and oh yeah, he'd like his business to be profitable as well. All of those things are making the tuition go up, and when we cut down the number of students because we're can't run 3 relays or have 40 students at once, that makes the individual cost climb wildly. In a perfect world, we'd validate each block with Force on Force, easily doubling the cost of running the class.

Now that the altruistic reasons are out of the way, there's another seedy reason. Lots of instructors simply don't know what to teach in that regard. They know marksmanship, so they claim it's the #1 building block. If they would just bill their class as a Marksmanship class, an enlightened student would know that's a class to take, albeit later along the path than the first step.

I've seen combat vets teach the thing that worked once for themselves. And on the surface, I am probably like everybody else, I say "aha! Validated".  But it's been validated a small number of times (often only a single time) in one specific circumstance with one very specific set of variables. Then I come back down to earth and start to dig into the details. Pressure testing anything should involve a countless number of repetitions with small changes to the variables. The reality is, combat does not offer this opportunity. Exploration of the variables needs to include failure points. Each variable needs tested to the point where there will be guaranteed failure. Doing this against an armed enemy would result in everybody being dead just trying to explore a particular technique or skill. It needs to be explored with Force On Force.

This drill was repeated dozens 
of times changing one 
variable at a time.



When I see schools do Force On Force, I get excited. Then I see their entire Force on Force course catalog is based on scenarios where the focus is on making decisions under stress. Sure, something a student did in their one run through the decision-making scenario might be great, or it might have luckily worked one time. With no opportunity to spar, over and over, there is little learning going on. The exercise is simply to test a student's decision making. While that is important, testing a student's ability to choose between different techniques when he hasn't tested any techniques is quite literally putting the cart before the horse.

My personal view on looking for any type of training is to find an instructor who is constantly taking quality, civilian-run courses and then continuously develops their curriculum as the pressure testing continues. For each hour of instruction, the instructor should have 100 hours of pressure testing the topic. I'm not talking 100:1 training hours, I'm talking 100:1 pressure testing hours. People learn at different rates,  so I'm not suggesting that it takes an instructor 100 hours of being a student to teach for an hour. I'm saying that the guy writing the instruction needs to have pressure tested that hour of instruction for many hours against a resisting opponent for it to have any validity at all.

If I am learning about entering a corner fed room for CQB, I don't care how many hours of training my instructor has, I don't care how many live-fire reps he has. What I want to know is how many hours he has spent developing the techniques against a resisting opponent. And development isn't "It worked once, next" It's a thorough debrief after every single run with multiple attempts and then repeated while changing a single variable. And that needs to be done for every conceivable variable. That's how a technique is validated. 

So back to that perfect rifle class. Marksmanship is remarkably simple. If a student is expected to live long enough to execute it, there's a boatload of other skills and techniques that take precedence. Teaching those to students first will absolutely get the best results, but the danger is making it work logistically. It takes 10 times the output from a school to teach the non-marksmanship skills and techniques. It's easier on both the school and the student to teach a large group simple marksmanship training and then offering the more time and labor-consuming training to the smaller group that wants to go further down the path than it would to offer a class based on working cover to 5-6 students, getting 1 that will want to go further and doing that 20 consecutive times to be able to fill a marksmanship class. It just makes more sense to run those 20+ folks through an assembly line of marksmanship training and then taking the 5 that want to go further from that group and working on the more important tasks. 

Given the current cost of ammunition, it seems like a great time to work on those more important skills and techniques that wouldn't be simple range masturbation of shooting groups. But for some reason, I still see 3-day/1400 round live-fire classes quickly filling up and Force on Force classes being canceled for lack of signups. I couldn't use my own data in this observation as all of my 2020 classes were sold out, both live fire and FoF. But I have spoken with a number of my peers and that was a trend. I said trend, not a hard and fast rule, calm down Nancy.

That perfect rifle class would start with the most important stuff first and constantly validate it against resisting opponents before progressing to the next topic. Instead, because of time and money, it's done backward. It's wrong, but it appears sustainable. 





Dynamic Carbine? I'll sneak in as many of those important skills and techniques as I can while still getting some marksmanship in. Then I invite all of my students at the conclusion to attend Study Groups where we hammer that important stuff. The ones who take me up on that offer invariably become harder to kill than the average student.  





Wednesday, July 22, 2020

The R.O.P.E. Bag*




I have a pair of married students who have been gracious enough to give me a Yule gift every year for the last few years. Last year there was this squat little sling bag in the box. I kept it in my office for a while trying to figure out what to do with it.


I normally keep a Deadpool-inspired duffel bag full of magazines handy for range trips. It will hold more than I want to carry. I took a few mags out one day to lighten my load and set them beside that slingbag inadvertently. When I came home and started refilling my empty mags I had a " You got chocolate in my peanut butter" moment.  I might as well throw some mags in there.


Since I already had a bag with mags in it, I still needed a purpose. So I added a few more things and designated it as a kit for my friends, teammates, training partners, students etc. At a Study Group, we brainstormed an acronym.

R.O.P.E. - Replenishing Other Peoples Equipment.


The bag fits 7 AR mags in the main compartment. That was a pretty good start. I didn't want to go buy stuff to fill this bag, I just wanted to refill a buddy for stuff out of a single package. So I looked around my shelves and closets to see what I had extras of that dudes might need.

I settled on a Patriot Smoke in the top, and a couple of Road Flares and some 123 batteries in the bottom. This isn't a bag of "You may need this" which is why there is no medical gear in it. It's a bag of "since you used yours up, here's some more" If a dude used all his med gear up, we need to be taking him, not giving him more bandages.
As I was going through my stuff, I found a couple of old AK mags full of Tula. I don't own a 7.62 AK any longer so they got shuffled behind some stuff for a long time. I put those in there too. We still get some die-hards for metric guns, so I can show them some love too. (I'm just funning with the AK dudes, relax).



I didn't put pistol mags in there for a couple of reasons. Since the most usable mag would be a G17 mag. It's the most popular caliber for the most popular brand that fits some of the most popular models. Problem One: the bag only has so much space  and if a dude has gone through his pistol mags too, for sure he wants some more rifle mags. Problem Two: I only own a small handful of G17 mags, I didn't really have "extra" to stow in the ROPE bag.
So there you have it. A nifty little Yule gift that got turned into something pretty handy to have around. The ROPE bag.




* No actual rope is stowed in this bag.



Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Twilight of the Red Dot? All hail the LPVO?

Are we in the era where the Red Dot Optic is falling out of serious use on a rifle?

There was a time, not too long ago that folks went to combat, en masse, with just iron sights. The Global War on Terror help usher in a change of optics on rifles across the board.  Aimpoint Comp Series and EoTechs were mounted on top of shiploads of rifles headed to the Middle East. The venerable ACOG from Trijicon saw a lot of work as well with it's fixed low powered magnification as well. As if the brass finally made a decision to make America's Warfighter MORE lethal instead of the "business as usual" model of leadership.

This proliferation of Red Dot Optic (RDO) use helped us in the civilian world as well. Manufacturers started putting more into their R&D because there were large numbers being bought by the Military and that certainly trickled right over to the civilian market as well. Smaller players might not be able to get that elusive Military contract, but now we were seeing civilian contracts at the Department and Agency level sweeping into the market as well. Let's not discount the massive buying power of the average American gun owner. Quality AR15's were coming down in price which put a lot of rifles out there ready to accept the miracle of an RDO. With all of this, the RDO manufacturers were now competing with each other, not just on price, but quality and features as well. As a consumer, all of this is good news for us. The golden era of RDOs was here. We now have a plethora of RDO's to choose from. Along with the aforementioned brands, Trijicon knocked it out of the park with the MRO. Primary Arms, Vortex, Sig all make good and affordable RDOs and Holosun found a way to bridge the quality of the big names with the cost of the new school brands. The ones mentioned are just a sliver of the brand options available.



I remember reading about the Smidth and Bender Short Dot over on lightfighter before I had ever met somebody who had actually seen one. It sounded pretty cool, giving the user essentially an RDO and an ACOG all in one. at 1.1x it acted a lot like a typical RDO and it could sweep up to 4X and use a BDC for longer distances. It had some downsides. It was neither light nor small like an RDO, and it wasn' what you could call wallet-friendly. But like the RDO market, the concept was solid and soon there would be competition.

Right now there are almost as many companies in the Low Power Variable Optic (LPVO) market as there are in the RDO market. And like before, that is good news for us consumers. As models began flooding in, the prices came down and I decided to dip a little into the LPVO world and see what it was about. I liked what I saw. I got a great deal on a Trijicon Accupower 1-4 so that's what I started with. I really liked the optic. 4X made seeing things a LOT easier. It just so happened that it made shooting easier too. Most folks jump right to the assistance in making hits at longer distances. And while that is certainly true, I think the biggest advantage is being able to see things more clearly and further away. I found that most of my shooting was still done at the ranges that I typically use an RDO. I found it easier to be more precise with that 4X. Of course, I also managed to stretch out ranges to make longer hits. That particular LPVO had a BDC for 55grain 5.56 out of a 16" barrel. It was set up to go all the way out to 800 yards. I did not think that combo with me behind the trigger was going to work. I was proven wrong. I had a former Scout Sniper scoff at my doubts and he had me go prone and use a pack to rest the gun on. He read the wind and gave me where to hold laterally and I made that first round hit on an 18"x24" plate at 800 yards. I flipped the safety on, stood up and slung the rifle. I'm keeping that 100% hit rate.

A good friend of mine asked me about my thoughts on a 1-8X LPVO. I told him that while I had tried a few out on student's guns but I hadn't spent a lot of time as I didn't own one. So, he gave me a Primary Arms 1-8. I swapped that with the Trijicon and have been running it. It has the much-touted ACSS reticle. Let me tell you, I am impressed. The optic has not been babied as you can imagine with any gear I own. All of my optics are mounted in the Midwest Industries mounts and there has been no movement from mount to gun nor mount to the optic. The reticle is everything I hoped it would be and more. Now the glass isn't as clear as the Trijicon that it replaced, but it also has an MSRP of less than half of the price, so I knew there would be areas where the Trijicon comes out on top. I have been running that optic a fair amount and I like its efficacy at all the ranges I've been using it at. Including ones further away than I normally do. At any rate, all of this is the backstory to the real meat here.

Yesterday I was trying out a Weaver Laser Range Finder in my home town. In case you are wondering, it worked well and when I used google earth to get some verification, it seemed spot on. I spent most of the day walking around my town, ranging everything in sight. A little background on my town. It is solid suburbs. There is no urban core (thankfully) and no rural areas. We're sandwiched between a river, some creeks, and a highway. There are rural areas outside the water/highway quarantine. Farmers fields and swaths of forest in all directions, but not areas where one could just inadvertently stroll into. One would have to swim or cross the second-longest interstate highway to reach these, so it's usually an obvious choice to go there. All the spaces in between have been filled up with a typical small town. In fact, we are the only town in Pennsylvania. Sure we have some business, and little manufacturing, and a college. Downtown is lined with multi-story buildings, but we're talking about 3-4 floors. Up on the hill is the college, and it has the typical layout of a college. Everything else is just small-town neighborhoods. Technically they aren't separated so the entire town is like one small-town neighborhood.

With that little description, let me tell you what I found. Inside houses, obviously, we're looking at the typical CQB distances that are so popular to show on Instagram. I get it though, filming something that's watchable has a number of limitations. I make videos, I understand. However, with the hordes of short-range shooting on the interwebs, there are a lot of gun-owners that focus everything they do on replicating those videos both in their training/practice regimen and their gear purchases. I walked into many random yards, front yards, back yards, side yards. Yep, there are those CQB distances we see all over the gram. You know what else is there? A dozen available shots in the 200-400 yard ranges. In between every house, or garage or shed were a larger number of potential mid-range engagement distances than CQB distances. Given our town's lack of high buildings, we don't have those long narrow open areas one would find in an urban area. There were few areas to remain obscured like in the shadow of a skyscraper. In fact, the vast majority of places I hade my feet on terra-firma there were roughly 300 degrees of visibility to those low, multi-story homes and buildings. Those were mostly 3-600 yards away as shown on the range finder.

I started looking for longer and longer distances. From the high school to the airport I was getting 1100 yards with the town park, town pool and town skatepark in between them. So there certainly are those areas where a larger caliber gun with a higher power optic would be the ticket. But what I didn't find, was a plethora of those. Given the topography and the typical small-town road layout, I didn't find enough long streets that I would be thinking that a heavier 308 would be a better choice. I own an MI10 with a 4-14 on top of it. If I were heading out of town where there are crop fields galore, that might be the primary choice, but not here in town.

Typically, my go-to rifle has been a 10.3" suppressed AR with an RDO on top. It shines indoors. The terminal ballistics from the velocities of an SBR aren't a concern at these distances. The volume of the gun becomes a concern that's been alleviated as well. The RDO is fast and forgiving at these ranges. At further ranges, I would just press it into doing what I need. The terminal ballistics change drastically but the real concern was simply seeing targets that far away. Now if we add in ID'ing that target we compound it further. So for me personally, it would seem my go-to rifle should be the rifle set up for these intermediate ranges and if need be, I can press it into urban/CQB ranges as well as reach out better if I need to press it into those longer/rural ranges.

Over in my alumni+ Facebook group, I posted this last night and it led to some great dialog. A few of my closer pals started texting me about it and I talked to a few friends who ran an LPVO deployed last year and buddies in the industry. It looks like we are past the "trend" of moving to LPVOs and we might be in a full-fledged movement. With a cursory search, I found LPVOs from known manufacturers from under 200 dollars up to 2K+. But the price range that got my attention are the choices between 300-500 dollars. This is the price point that has been dominated by the big name RDOs for quite some time. If I can get a quality LPVO in the same price range as a quality RDO, I'm hard-pressed to give the nod to the RDO. It marginally does better in the close ranges, has some drawbacks at those intermediate ranges and struggles at the longer ranges, if just from finding and ID'ing the target. At class, it used to be the outlier to have an LPVO, then we started seeing them regularly but no in the same numbers as an RDO. Many classes currently have been similar numbers between the two options. Everything from PA, Vortex, Burris, Sig, Trijicon, Kahles, Steiner, Leupold, EoTech, S&B, Nightforce have shown up in students' hands in front of me in the last year. Hell, there may have been others that I didn't either notice or am forgetting.

Are we seeing the LPVO become the choice for the common man? At the prices I am seeing, I expect to see more and more LPVOs and fewer RDOs. They certainly fill the role of a "does most things pretty well" optic better than an RDO or a higher power magnified optic. I have a 3-10 scope here that I put on an AR once in a while for a few specific reasons. I use it to fill a niche. Most folks reading this wouldn't hesitate to say that that magnification range is meant for a specific purpose and it limited when pressed into other services. With the LPVO becoming so prolific are we seeing or going to see them push the RDO into niche service as well? We will see soon enough, but for this guys' needs, it sure looks like it might.