Counter-Terrorism Tactics for Law Enforcement

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Columbine was a seminal event in law enforcement.  While there had been other mass-shootings in the country, the nature of the assault on the students and faculty at Columbine High School would force a change in the decision-making process of law enforcement officers.  It was no longer appropriate to contain a suspect, call a tactical team and wait.  What the shooters at Columbine (and other similar attacks) clearly demonstrated is that they would continue to kill until forced to stop.

A new wave of “Active Shooter” tactics and training were developed across the country.  The tactics would stress speed by first responders.  In some cases it required new equipment consisting of rifle or carbine, helmet, and ballistic vest.  In most cases it required a new skill set for the “average” patrol officer.  Patrol officers would likely be the first on the scene and most active shooter protocols would call for a hasty breach and assault.

Instead of waiting to have a completed and fully rehearsed assault plan, first responders would literally move to the sound of the guns in an attempt to halt or neutralize the threat as quickly as possible.  Victims would be by-passed in order to halt the shooter as quickly as possible.

The recent Fort Hood shooting depicts a successful application of modern active shooter protocol.  Officer Kimberly Munley and her partner responded to the incident within three minutes.  Witnesses report that Officer Munley moved aggressively toward the shooter and engaged him with her pistol.  The shooter turned to face her and began returning fire.  During the exchange, Munley was hit in both legs and the wrist but stayed in the fight, striking her assailant twice more in the upper torso bringing him down.  Without her swift interdiction, the shootings would certainly have continued for some time and the number of victims would have climbed.

As active shooter training continues to mature, more and more trainers are advocating single officer entry in order to halt the attack as quickly as possible.  Advocates for this technique site numerous past active shooter situations during which the attacker quickly surrendered or committed suicide when confronted by law enforcement.  While the data used is certainly correct, I disagree with the conclusions reached.  Developing tactics which rely on your assailant to quickly surrender are frighteningly incomplete.  There is an inherent flaw in developing highly refined and narrowed tactics which presupposes the will to fight of your enemy.

While the criminal profile of active shooters continues to be refined, the profile of terrorist attacks continues to expand.  The next evolution of terrorism took place in Mumbai in 2008.  The Jedburgh Research Initiative recently completed a comprehensive study of the incident and published a reconstruction of the attack, available for download here.  While the lessons learned from Mumbai are numerous and far reaching, there are obvious implications for active shooter protocol.

The Mumbai attack changed the profile of the active shooter.  These determined terrorists were not afraid to confront police, even well-trained and well-equipped national counter-terrorism forces.  Of the 104 killed in the Mumbai attack, 18 were police officers.  Would you ask the same “average” patrol officer to confront a pair of terrorists armed with military rifles, grenades and explosives?  Alone?

If not, what is the decision point to alter tactics from a “traditional” active shooter scenario to a “terrorist” active shooter situation?  Will you divide and diffuse limited training resources by conducting separate training sessions to deal with both possibilities?

What’s needed are fundamental principle-based tactics.  Don’t waste your time teaching someone what to think.  Focus instead on teaching how to think.  Patrol officers will be bombarded with conflicting pieces of information about the threat, location, and intentions.  Their senses will be assaulted by the sights, sounds, and smells of modern urban combat.  Tactics that are appropriate for Mumbai-style attackers will work for any active shooter situation.

The Jedburgh Advanced Urban Combat Course was developed in cooperation with a Federal law enforcement agency to teach initiative-based urban combat skills.  Graduates will have the necessary skills to confront and overcome a terrorist threat.  If your active shooter training assumes that the attacker is just waiting to quit, you need to re-evaluate the lessons learned from recent terrorist incidents.

Law enforcement officers will have to refine urban combat skills to deal with an ever-evolving terrorist threat.  Any two officers from any shift need the skills to assault any building, day or night.

Don’t train on what you want.  Train on what you need.  Jedburgh Corp has developed the most comprehensive firearms training available anywhere.  It was built on the vast personal combat experience of some of the most elite special operators in the country.  Contact us at info@Jedburgh-USA.com to provide feedback on the blog, or discuss your training needs.  Also, feel free to post your comments.

Skills Atrophy

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You train hard, perfect your skills and develop new ones.  You’re a modern day warrior poet, a gunfighter.  Always remember:

Is not life a fleeting existence in the present?
A split second separate the past from present,
The present from the future, now and unknown.
The past gone, the present now, future unknown.

Life is fleeting, and so are your skill at arms.  Without regular maintenance, how long until your hard-fought skills begin to atrophy?  Which skills will degrade first?

A Navy study on the degradation of skills of their Aviation Anti-Submarine Operators showed that the skills and knowledge had “degraded significantly” when tested after 29 days.  Interestingly, both the factual and computational portions of the test showed similar levels of atrophy while the classification portion of the test showed no loss.  Obviously, I’m not comparing being a pistolero to being a Navy geek but I’ve personally experienced a similar phenomenon.  If I’ve gone a month or more without training I can still classify different parts of the pistols and discuss fluently the fundamentals of pistol marksmanship.  The loss occurs on the line when I’m engaging “threats.”  Both accuracy and speed suffer from the time away from the range.

The Army conducted a similar study on Nurses in an attempt to understand the retention of both Basic Life Support (BLS) and Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS).  Following certification in both skills, the nurses in the study (133 nurses assigned to Fort Sam Houston) were retested 3, 6, 9, or 12 months later.  The findings show that while theoretical knowledge of both BLS and ACLS skills remained strong, performance skills suffered greatly.  The basic skills were retained at a higher rate and tended to atrophy at a slower rate.  63% of nurses retained BLS skills after 3 month and 58% after 12 months.  Only 30% of nurses passes ALCS after 3 months with just 14% after 12 months.  My takeaway is that your basic firearms skills will degrade more slowly than your advanced skills.  My guess is we tend to practice our basic skills more often.  Basic skills tend to be easier to train on at most ranges.  Many ranges specifically prohibit skills needed to maintain advanced weapons proficiency.  Drawing, rapid fire and shooting while moving can be difficult to train on because of range constraints.  The result is that we’re all better trained on basics than advanced skills.

There has also been several studies that discuss the general decline of “skilled work” in our industrialized and computerized society.  The craftsmen and artisans of 50 years ago are being replaced by technology, lasers, and robots.  Is it possible that it’s becoming more difficult to develop true skills in our modern society?  Not necessarily apropos for the current discussion, but still  fodder for discussion around the squad or team room.

So how do we develop a firearms training program that will maintain the highest level of proficiency?  It will obviously have to represent a realistic commitment.  We can’t spend all our time working to be good at our job.  Whether we like it or not, we actually have to leave the range from time to time in order to do our job.

Just like in other areas of our life, we have to prioritize and focus our efforts on our needs even at the expense of our wants. There’s a natural tendency to work on things that we like to do, and we tend to have better skills at the things we work on (because we like them).

We won’t be assaulted at the time or place, or in the manner of, our choosing.  In order to best prepare a solid foundation of basic skills needs to be developed.  Built on this foundation will be the advanced skills necessary to dominate and survive a violent encounter.  Shooting while moving, shooting from barricades, shooting at moving targets, shooting “disadvantaged” (i.e. shooting after being hit by your attacker), and shooting from alternate positions should all be the focus of your program.  The advanced skills will atrophy at a faster rate than basic skills.  To counter this trend, spend minimal time working on stationary targets from static positions.

Don’t train on what you want.  Train on what you need.  Jedburgh Corp has developed the most comprehensive firearms training available anywhere.  It was built on the vast personal combat experience of some of the most elite special operators in the country.  Contact us at info@Jedburgh-USA.com to provide feedback on the blog, or discuss your training needs.  Also, feel free to post your comments.

Stress of the Job

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There’s a cost to any business. For professional law enforcement officers, military personnel, or Federal agents the cost is wear on tear their body from the years of cumulative stress. There is a relatively recent hypothesis that asserts that there is physiological risk associated with exposure to psychosocial stressors over time. In lay speak, folks in high stress jobs will suffer physical ailments because of the pressures of the job.

The term for the chronic exposure to stress and its effect on the body is referred to as the allostatic load. This term was coined by McEwan and Stellar in their 1993 text entitled “Health Psychology” published by McGraw-Hill. Allostasis could be literally defined as “maintaining stability through change.” From an NIA Exploratory Workshop on Allostatic Load in 2007:

“Allostatic load refers to the cumulative biological wear and tear that can result from excessive cycles of response (i.e. too frequent and/or of inappropriate duration or scope) in these systems as they seek to maintain allostasis in the face of environmental challenge [someone assaulting you].  According to the theory, as these systems become taxed and dysregulated, they begin to exhibit imbalances in the primary neural mediators of the stress response…”

Stressful situations can limit brain functions to basic levels, the much discussed “fight or flight” response.  Allostatic load is impacted by repeated cycles of this response.  Over time the allostatic load can cause changes in the physiological response to stressors.  The police officer who once responded within a moral and ethical framework may begin responding with inappropriately high levels of anxiety and aggression.

Obviously, the implications for the theory is that there are long-term health consequences to having a job with an unusually high allostatic load. The stress of the job can kill you. It’s worth understanding the threat and how to mitigate it for the same reasons you practice with firearms. From a 2005 UCLA study:

“The body’s perception of stress leads to a significant load upon physiological regulation including circadian regulation, sleep and psycho neuroendocrine-immune [link between psychological factors and the nervous and immune systems] interaction.”

Besides a physical toll, there is a psychological toll to this phenomenon as well.  It is well documented phenomenon that acute stressors can cause PTSD in soldiers, law enforcement, or other victims of traumatic events.  The frontal executive areas of the brain are responsible for planning, decision making, and judgement.  This area is affected by the experiences that pass through it.  The frontal areas of the brain are constantly “tuned” by experience.  When two cells fire together, they are wired together.

In a recent FBI study entitled Brain Functioning as the Ground for Spiritual Experiences and Ethical Behavior a veteran law enforcement officer commented “Peace officers are exposed to the worst that life has to offer.  They see the denizens of society at their very worst – when they have just been victimized or when they have just victimized someone else.  Peace officers see the perpetrators of evil and the results of their evil deeds.  The constant contact with evil is corrosive, and those effects are cumulative.”

The author (Dr. Fred Travis) further writes that “Experiences change the brain.  This is inevitable.  The violence law enforcement officers see becomes part of the functioning or their brains and bodies.  Neural imaging assessed activation of the areas of the brain that stop wrong behavior, called orbitofrontal cortex, after individuals…” witness or experience violent, traumatic events.

Allostatic load can reduce connections with frontal executive areas of the brain and amplify stimulus-response circuits.  These changes, or structural remodeling, can impact memory and emotions and may increase anxiety and aggression.  Victims of these changes may become distant from spouses, children, or other friends because they are emotionally incapable of interacting or feel a sense of detachment.  Neural imaging of patients who experience high allostatic load reveal lesions on the frontal executive areas.  The brain is intact, but the brain matter is no longer involved in planning and decision making.

The impact on job performance can be devastating.  Extreme errors in judgement, non-ethical or immoral decision making, and dereliction of responsibilities can all result from years of high stress and allostatic overload.

How then, do we combat allostatic load?   There are, of course, many prescription drugs available that can help mitigate the effects of allostatic load.  Somewhat surprising, at least to me, is another non-pharmaceutical option.  The solution may well be spirituality.  Spirituality, loosely defined as a sense of wholeness, has been shown to engage the entire frontal executive area of the brain.

Spirituality can obviously be religious.  The research conducted by Dr. Travis, however, is more general.  Any experiences that are universal in nature, or ones that transcend our own sense of time, space, or individual body can be spiritual.  The effects of spirituality on the brain are widespread activation and higher brainwave coherence.  The measure of this phenomenon is known as Brain Integration Scale (BIS).

People who regularly practice spirituality have a correspondingly higher BIS.  They become more self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent, and take responsibility for their lives and performance.  BIS studies have shown a positive correlation between spirituality and emotional stability and moral reasoning, while showing a negative correlation with anxiety.  BIS is increased with regular spiritual experiences.

For professional soldiers and police, the conclusions are fairly straightforward.  Each of you will react differently to the stress of your jobs.  Over time, the cumulative stress may negatively impact your physical and/or psychological health.  An otherwise good, moral officer will make immoral choices and could become extremely anxious or aggressive.

For me, there is a certain elegance to the allostatic load theory.  Becoming involved in your local church and establishing a healthy relationship with God will help you reach your potential as a husband, a father, and law enforcement professional.  This foundational relationship will help you manage allostatic load and facilitate success both at home and at work.  It provides balance to your life and will allow you to formulate the best decisions, even when under extreme stress.

Jedburgh Corp has developed the most comprehensive firearms training available anywhere.  It was built on the vast personal combat experience of some of the most elite special operators in the country.  Contact us at info@Jedburgh-USA.com to provide feedback on the blog, or discuss your training needs.  Also, feel free to post your comments.