Pick187's Airsoft Drills - Ken Murray's commentary

[justken2u]

In one of his last posts, Pick187 indicated that he was going to add "bystanders" to increase stress. He also added that they would of course require protective gear. While there is some great merit to the drills he has posted and I applaud his desire to get some excellent training for his officers, I extend caution to those reading his ideas so that those without any experience in running Reality Based Training exercises don't think it is as simple as purchasing some Airsoft equipment and going to work with it.

First, I want to address the issue of the type of protective gear needed for these drills. My position on this is often at odds with some agencies and certainly with many of those who make a living selling Airsoft equipment. The sellers will extol the financial benefits of Airsoft by not only highlighting the substantial cost savings over cartridge based training munitions but will also play up their belief that you need much less protective gear. I couldn't disagree more.

It is my firm belief that if you are doing any type of projectile based, force-on-force training that you must wear high quality, purpose built protective gear that includes full face protection, throat protection, groin protection and hand protection along with covering up any exposed skin. Given the wide range of Airsoft equipment manufacturers and ever increasing velocities, Airsoft is fast becoming more dangerous that many of the cartridge based technologies. With the exception of UTM (which uses an aluminum based projectile) the marking projectiles dump most of their energy on impact with a target. What this means is that there is very little danger from injury from a ricochet - even at close distance, point blank, at a hard target. This is not the case with Airsoft where the solid BBs can bounce off of surfaces without losing very much energy. There is a substantial hazard, especially to eyes, with Airsoft BBs to the extent that all participants including observers should wear sealed eye protection (i.e. goggle style eye shields that have a seal around the eyes) when training in the presence of Airsoft. I have seen too many people simply wearing range-style eye protection or simply sunglasses or safety glasses when training with Airsoft. Make no mistake. These BBs will bounce off some hard surface, ricochet off the inside of your safety glasses and cause serious eye damage.

Officer safety doesn't come in a box, and far too many of those that make a buck or two off selling you Airsoft don't have a clue when it comes to the realities of this type of training. If you can't afford to get to a school on how to do any type of RBT safely and effectively, then please ... don't do this! The injuries you can cause or the training scars you might inflict will too often result as the Unintended Consequences of Well Intentioned Training.

Train hard,
Train safe.

[Pick187]

Ken,
Thanks for the great info as usual. Our plan at this time is to have officers bring thier patrol gloves. We have ordered simunition head and throat gear.

[Mully]

We have also went to using airsoft for some of our firearms training and all the officers love it and want more, however we ran into the problem with not covering all of the role players bodies. We run two officers at a time, one is suspect (i.e. target). Our suspects were suited with simunitions bobble head, neck guard, groin, simunition gloves, and force on force's top armor. We had a problem with a couple officers complaining about taking some of the airsoft rounds to the stomach area where the top armor doesn't protect. They obviously had clothing over their stomachs but a few complained about needing more protection. We used the bobble head face shields because the bb's would sometimes bounce of the neck guards and hit the role player in the chin if they were using a paintball mask. Any suggestions on waiste line protection would be helpful.

The only drill I would reconsider on would be the el presidente drill (or what Pincus calls the Irrevelente drill). The problem with this one is that it is designed for gamesmanship and not a defensive shooting drill. Your body is already anticipating what it needs to do so it might give a false sense of confidence because of the speed in which they can fire the drill, when in real life you'd first have to recognize a threat and then decide to fire (like the later drill where you have to fire at numbers and letters). The other way to look at it is, how many surveillance videos/dash cams can you find with the threats standing side by side holding hands offering good targets, probably never. We found this out with our airsoft training, we used to advocate firing 1 rd to first threat, 2 rds to second threat, and transition back to first and fire one more round. When the officer was faced with multiple targets, they told us they had a very hard time just firing one round at the first threat and transitioning to the second threat. They wanted to fire until the first one was done before moving on to the next, which is what you'll see when watching multiple threats in dash cam vids. Officer focusing on 1st threat and fires till no longer a threat, and then some stimulus whether a shot or movement gets the attention of the officer and he transitions to number 2. Pincus really opened up my eyes on this one because it really goes against the grain of what I've always been taught. All your other drills are great and the knife one we'll for sure use. My question is what type of airsoft weapons are you using where you can drop the mags, we use kwa and their mag's suck.

[Pick187]

Mully,

What problems have you had with the Mags? We got KWA (sig 229) and we got extra magazines. We are lucky to have a guy less then a 45 minute drive who has been dealing in the airsoft world for over 20 years. He has a house in Taiwan and here locally. He told us that the biggest problem with the mag is the plastic tip that feeds the BB. He told us that it is held in with a roller pin and that he would sell us the plastic tip to replace it with if and when we broke them. If I remember correctly he would get them to us for around $3.

Thanks for the input on the drills I appreciate it. Also what drills have you been running that you have success with?


Pick

[Mully]

We are using KWA's for Glock 17, and usually the lips that hold the bb's in will get bent if the mag is dropped. The BB's will no longer will feed into the glock, also the mag plates have been coming off. I met a guy who works for a WI training company and apparently there is a manufacturer who makes glock airsoft guns and mag's that are very robust, however I can't get a hold of him to pass the info along. He says he's able to drop the mag's everytime without any problems.

One of the drills that I feel is important would be our close quarters. Using a role player holding a training bag, officer physically strike the bag, get into a close quarter's shooting position and engage the target, we'll also be adding 3-d targets with the moving limbs with weapons attached to them to simulate a struggle and then firing. There are also some drills where blue guns are used to simulate a struggle over a weapon (based off Blauer's gunfight training). We used to do the "speed rock" if you want to call it that or hip shooting and also looked at the shove and shoot. Our training cadre came across Ralph Mroz's (www.posai.org) close quarters training and he shows us why the hip shooting or shove and shoot will probably not work against a determined 3%'er. Free training by a guy that questions everything that is taught out there. He's got some good information out there.

[LeblancC]

For an idea of how hard these things can hit, we've set up barricades using thick cardboard, and at ranges inside 10 yards the airsoft zipped right through it and still had enough juice to cause a good amount of pain and leave welts.

Some great training in terms of cover/concealment as well. Using cardboard for walls/doors/barricades and visqueen or plastic wrap for "windows" can offer some interesting scenarios.