During a conversation with a fellow small arms and tactics instructor recently, we were discussing a week-long training program in which my friend took part as a trainer. The event was a multi-discipline venture where students were taught to use handguns, carbines and shotguns in a martial fashion. The title of the event was aptly, No Games.
What was unique about the training, in addition to including three types of firearms, was that the instructors — six in total — didn’t work directly for the host school and weren’t teaching from a single curriculum approved by the school. That’s rare in that it can be quite a risk to do so given the historically massive egos of those who call themselves firearms instructors and the variance in teaching styles and techniques. However, in this case, that risk was mitigated as the instructors weren’t only friends, but had worked together previously over the years.
“I’d say that all of us (the instructors) were in agreement about ninety-five percent. We all had the same goal in mind,” my friend stated. And that, having the same goal in mind, is truly what all those who claim to teach “tactical” or “defensive” shooting should embrace. Nonetheless, we’d be quite naive to believe that such is the case universally.
This led to a further discussion about what I termed a “super lab” from martial firearms training of which I was a part during the early to mid timeframe of the Global War on Terror. But it makes sense to consider some of the history of modern firearms training before we get into the specifics of the modern super lab.
Before Cooper, there was Fairbairn and Sykes
We’ve previously discussed the contributions to the firearms training world from Col. Jeff Cooper and they’re many. Nonetheless, before Col. Cooper ever strapped on a 1911, William E. Fairbairn and his partner, Eric Sykes, were engaged in their own “super lab” in Shanghai, China before WWII.
Fairbairn was a former Royal Marine and he and his eventual partner were both members of the Shanghai Municipal Police. While the numbers aren’t exact, Fairbairn bore the scars of well over one hundred fights, many of them requiring lethal force on his part to save his life.
The experiences of Fairbairn and Sykes weren’t anecdotal or theoretical. In the hyper-dangerous world of Shanghai in the 20s and 30s, if you made one too many mistakes, you ended up dead. Their ability to survive and win deadly force encounters inspired both men to write down their experiences and their methodology. “All-In Fighting” is considered the seminal work by W.E. Fairbairn. When WWII came to Europe, Fairbairn and Sykes were tasked with training British commandos in down-and-dirty lethal fighting techniques.
A fiery young American officer, Rex Applegate, of the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) became a dedicated disciple of Fairbairn and Sykes and learned what they had to teach so as to train OSS agents and American commandos. Applegate’s most famous book is “Kill Or Get Killed.” However, as devastatingly effective as their knife and gunfighting training was, it was considered to be “unconventional.” It might have been necessary for commandos and special operators, but it was never widely adopted for conventional military troops.
That was the position that Jeff Cooper found himself in when he left the Marine Corps, that of terribly outdated handgun training that was built on bullseye competition shooting. The situation led Cooper to develop what’s called the “modern technique” of tactical firearm training.
Initially, Cooper’s Super Lab consisted of the “Leather Slap” shooting competitions where shooters actually had to start with a holstered gun. Keep in mind that military training at that time never allowed the troops to draw a loaded gun from a holster. That was considered too risky and dangerous by the higher-ups. All the way into the 1980s, troops were forbidden to carry an M1911A1 pistol with a round chambered, even while on duty.
You might have put together the fact that the Super Labs of Fairbairn and Sykes and Col. Cooper were not conducted under the official umbrella of either the British or American militaries. There’s a very good reason for that and it can be summed up in two words: institutionalized stupidity.
Institutionalized stupidity might seem pejorative, but it’s also a brutally honest summation of the situation that conventional military troops find themselves in. Naturally, military organizations require structure and discipline. That’s how they maintain order and standards, and that’s not a bad thing. Regardless, there’s also a very real disconnect between what works in actual combat and what those who inhabit air-conditioned offices believe is the best way.
Whether Army or Marine Corps, college-educated officers are considered the de facto smartest people in the room and the “uneducated” enlisted men are there to simply carry out the orders of those who are better educated. Also, there’s a very real issue of officers wishing to put the phantom notion of safety ahead of the critical factor of success on the battlefield and in real-world deadly encounters. That was readily apparent in the mandated retardation of forcing troops to carry half-loaded guns, even when put into real world, dangerous situations.
Having been there, done that, and gotten the t-shirt, I can testify to having listened to a career military “firearms instructor” saying to the gathered troops, “What is the most important thing on range?” To which the troops were dutifully required to answer back in unison, “Safety, sir!”
Going back to the brutal honesty part, if the phantom notion of complete safety were truly the most important thing, then the troops would never be issued live ammunition. Every time you have troops with guns and ammo, there’s a non-zero level of danger present. Of course, our goal when training troops should be to make them dangerous on demand.
So afraid are the officers of allowing troops to have live ammo and guns at the same time, I was told by one veteran who was active during GWoT that in basic training, they only used M4s and M9 pistols in the FATS (firearms training simulator) having been told by their instructors that it was “the same thing as live fire.”
Yes, that happened. While FATS is a useful tool, it’s by no means a substitute for live fire.
The Current Gun Space
I have been accused of having rather rigid beliefs and a stubborn adherence to what I believe is the correct way to teach the martial application of firearms. Like everyone else in the world, I’m a product of the training and teaching that I have undergone over the last forty years or so.
When we’re neophytes and beginners, the best way to learn is to close the hole under your nose and keep both of your ears open. Consider that when students enter medical school, their professors have no desire to hear the thoughts and opinions of those with little to no experience or education on the subject. Regardless of the field of endeavor, in order to be elevated to a position where you’re teaching others, it requires many years — decades even — of practical experience.
A glaring exception to this seems to be the world of firearms training. What we now witness daily is people who were beginners last year who have now taken a 2-day class, or worse…an online course, and are granted a piece of paper that says “Instructor” on it. Their ability to memorize and regurgitate facts has become the standard for elevation to a teaching position. Can you imagine a doctor who has just graduated from medical school being given the position of “professor” and allowed to teach medical students? That would seem to be the height of negligence, but in the gun space it happens every day.
The Modern Super Lab
In 2007 I had two honorable discharges under my belt, numerous firearms training schools to include the police academy and had been through a handful of instructor training courses when I was hired as a military contractor to be a member of a team teaching a four week pre-deployment combat skills work-up course for the Department of Defense (now Dept of War). Our students were troops preparing for overseas deployment to combat zones.
The training program curriculum that the cadre of combat vets were handed was assembled by one or two men seated behind desks in those aforementioned air-conditioned offices. When we set about fleshing it out, it became clear athat those who wrote the course had never taught anything like that on a live-fire shooting range.
As a brand new school we had the latitude to submit written changes to fix the curriculum as long as the students got realistic combat training. For the first several months, the other experienced instructors and I put in innumerable hours writing up detailed critiques and solutions for the problems we encountered. In the conventional military world that kind of thing was highly unique.
In all honesty, the only reason why the officers in their comfortable swivel chairs were willing to accept suggestions from a bunch of enlisted barbarians like us was due to the fact that American troops were at that moment being killed by IEDs, in ambushes, and other insurgent attacks. There was a serious push to reduce casualties through better training. Getting the “killed in action” numbers down was a major priority.
For three years, I worked with a team teaching troops full time the essential combat skills needed to survive in a hostile combat area. The first few iterations of the curriculum weren’t perfect. We would conduct training and observe the behavior of the students. If one student made a mistake, that might have just been that individual not understanding or misapplying the training. However, if multiple students, class after class, were making the same mistakes, we needed to look at the curriculum and how it was being taught.
Was there a better way to teach the skills? Were we confusing new students with conflicting information?
Each month we had two 100-student classes cycling in two weeks apart, for an average of 2000-plus students per year (we took the Christmas/New Year break off). Our students ranged from 18- and 19-year-old junior enlisted to senior NCO’s with more than a decade in service as well as junior and mid-ranking officers. Approximately ten percent of the students were women.
During that time period we observed students who fired what must have been in excess of a million rounds of 5.56mm and 9mm NATO ammunition. We conducted daytime training as well as during the hours of darkness.
During that time we learned numerous lessons about what worked and what didn’t. Where were improvements in the way we taught needed? How could we better serve the students and make the most of the time that we had to train them?
With the Global War on Terror now history, my great fear is that many of the lessons we learned will be unlearned as the veterans with experience age out and leave the service and the officers who have “good ideas” or who believe that the most important thing in training is safety take over.
Such is the way of the world. All that we who took part in the Super Labs can do is continue to teach and record what we learned via the written word for our posterity to either acknowledge or ignore.
Paul G. Markel is a combat decorated United States Marine veteran. He is also the founder of Student the Gun University and has been teaching Small Arms & Tactics to military personnel, police officers, and citizens for over three decades.