Malfunction drill issues

[mikew]

I think I learn more than my students when we do a RBT session. A scenario last week was a knife attack where the student would have to shoot. Everyone had a good reactionary distance to begin, recognized the threat, drew the handgun, began moving and shooting the approaching threat.

We also incorporated a handgun malfunction by making a "dummy" NLTA cartridge from a fired case. This we placed at either shot two or three in the magazine, with about 4 or 5 live ones following. Students had a magazine to reload if needed.

We issue dummy rounds at most live fire trainings, and everyone's immediate action drills appear smooth and fast. We also shoot to slidelock often so everyone's good with those. I anticipated no real problems, just wanted to put the square range drill into context and ensure everyone could do it in a "real" situation.

We were surprised when, out of 10 students, only two handled the failure to fire remotely well; even they didn't "tap", just ran the slide. Most clicked the DA trigger 6 or more times before doing something, and that often appeared as if they took each step of a FTF drill and a slidelock reload drill, wrote them on bits of paper and drew them randomly from a hat: drop mag, rack slide, insert new mag, click, drop mag, oh crap, no more mags; or rack slide, drop mag, reload, rack slide again, shoot. Most appeared to want to reload rather than clear a FTF. We had a few near meltdowns.

We remediated and nobody left without doing it properly.

We clearly overloaded them by adding the FTF to the mix, but I don't think that's bad because we learned of a disconnect between what we know and do on the square range and a stressful scenario.

We discussed whether some of what we saw was due to the low noise and recoil of the NLTA, as at least one student insisted he fired unitil he got a FTF and then he cleared it; he clicked it at least three times before clearing. Maybe a bit of auditory exclusion is preventing them from realizing they have a FTF? Would/has that happened with live ammo? Should we even do this with NLTA?

I have read some trainers advocate one malfunction drill when the gun won't fire: reload. I've had issues with that, but it appears that was what my folks WANTED to do. I haven't completely thought that issue through yet.

My plan is to incorporate this again in other "shoot" scenarios. I was looking for feedback if anyone else had experienced this, or if I completely blew it and scarred my folks, or any other suggestions anyone may have. Thanks and sorry for the length of this.

[justken2u]

Excellent post. This is the very thing that continues to validate my position that range training isn't gunfighting. There are some odd things that go on during a gunfight such as auditory occlusion and perceptual distortion. For an excellent treatise on this, read Dr. Alexis Artwohl's material (http://alexisartwohl.com/). I think that you're perfectly fine doing the drills you did with NLTA. The big reason is that in the vast majority of gunfights, participants will not feel recoil nor process report. There might be a far away sense of "pop, pop, pop" but it seems surreal. Your drills provide the mind with some very valuable learning opportunities in that the mind becomes less confused the less that it has to cope with broken expectations. Your folks have, at some level of cognition, an "expectation" that there should be a loud bang. When they find they are in lockback or any other version of FTF, they become confused when using NLTA and will often blame their failings on the technology. This is common and very natural. Keep on doing what you are doing. Ensuring that they leave having completed the drill successfully. This lays the foundation for altered expectations from the subconscious mind in the future. Far too much of our training conditions people what to do rather than conditioning them how to think their way through dynamically changing situations. If your people are starting to melt down, press the "pause button" ... use a tactical time out. Give them their Matrix Moment to allow them to step out of themselves and the situation, figure out the fix, then go back into the action. Once they have had the ability to process this situation in this manner, ensure they run it again - identically - but the next time their reactions will be better. After such a successful run, it's time to go home, go to sleep, and process the learning.

Keep up the awesome work!

Ken

[mikew]

Ken:

Thanks for the encouragement. We did do several "time outs" during the malfunction drills to get folks realizing, yes, they DO know how to fix what has gone wrong. Interestingly, most insisted they had run out of ammo and wouldn't believe otherwise until we pointed out their slide was forward and/or the mags they dumped were full. I do plan on continuing the malfunctions in the future, as well as ensuring they have to reload during an incident.

What worries me is what else is lurking out there that I believe everyone is competent in doing (from range training) that we totally blow under stress?

Ken, from your experience, do you have a "top ten" or whatever of skills you see fouled up the most in scenarios? That would certainly be useful in designing our trainings. I believe that in the 'crawl, walk, run' progression of scenario training we are high in 'crawl' and my scenarios so far are basically experience fragments with no elaborate storylines. Of course I want to move on to more complex ones, but not before I am confident I'm not setting folks up to fail.

I also recall during your class you mentioned an upcoming book containing just such simple, skill building scenarios that had been used and proven to work well. Any progress on that or direction on where to obtain some?

Mike

[justken2u]

Hey Mike:

I'm not traveling until May, so hopefully I'll be able to make more of a dent on the upcoming books! The Top Ten is more of a discussion than an email.

Chat soon

Ken

[Mully]

Mike W


How did you rig up that "dummy round" for the NLTA.

[justken2u]

One way is to fire an FX cartridge, squeeze it closed again with pliers or in a vise, then take a projectile off an unfired cartridge and press it onto the fired cartridge. You might need to glue it in.

[jpaynter]

Gentlemen,

I thought incorporating the FTF in the scenario was an excellent idea. We have seen numerous issues in scenarios with student officers unable to clear malfunctions, looping, etc. and that was without forcing the malfunction! I really liked the idea of focusing on the malfunctions in order to ingraine those skills under stress. Nice!

We ran some drills from Don Gulla's Arrestling combatives that including striking while holding the malfunctioned weapon, then running the malfunction clearance. (Done in the gym with FX blanks and dummies, safety protocols etc.). We took the spent Secureblank cartridges from the drills and tapped them back into the casings with a hammer, then marked them as dummies. Now we have a couple of hundred dummies to run the drills with. Just another thought on creation of the dummy round.

Thanks for the interesting post & look forward to more.

[mikew]

That was just how we did our dummy rounds. We didn't have pliers, but found putting the fired round upright on the floor and pressing it closed with a foot worked. Pull a "bullet" from an unfired cartridge and press it in. I feared some issues with the bullet sticking in the chamber when the slide was pulled back, but it never happened. I think we will take Ken's advice and glue some in, just to be sure.