Big New Year For Me.

Last year I taught and assisted with the training of around 300 people, both youth and adults, in firearms safety and use. I learned a lot from my mentor about firearms instruction and how to motivate change in complacent skills. He is a retired special forces team sargent so he's very familiar with teaching people how to fight when he doesn't even peak the same language. This skill has taken me by surprise due to the ease at which I was able to emulate his teaching style and interpret some of the military skills he teaches to civilians. It's so much different than the NRA instructor course I took 2 years ago. Blending the two has seen a marked improvement in skill dissemination and retention in the students we taught last year.

This year we will be teaching far more classes and in a few extra disciplines than we had taught prior. My partner was on a code word anti terrorist team and he was able to learn some skills very few outside of delta and the seals get to practice. After the military, he took some executive protection courses by a well know school in Cali, then came here to work for the local big town sheriff as their building security expert and for protection of foreign dignitaries. He got bored and tired of politics so he quit that gig. Those skills he was taught are very sought after, even though he's pushing the age to be able to display the athleticism,  he can still perform the necessary drills. This has allowed me to pick up on some very interesting and tactically sound skills.

The biggest shock to me was that trigger pullers are a dime a dozen. They have their place in the field and are indispensable for violence of action needs, but the real difference is made in the intelligence and communications field. Those two disciplines are responsible for the victory when things go right. Choosing your battles and fighting where you choose to is far more valuable that I had ever considered. Drop 50 of the best troops in an open field and a group of 5 moderately talented snipers can decimate them and make their unit non functional in minutes. It's all about applying force in the right manner and at the right time.

Intelligence can be little items as much as large caches of info. Noticing that the man that take interest in you has baggy pants or crappy shoes that he can't run in will determine your fight or flight response to an attack. Which hand they wear their watch on determines their dominant hand and you can watch it more closely if you feel a threat escalation is coming.

Communications is critical in a force on force engagement. Combine that communication with intelligence during a fight and you can become almost prescient while deploying your violence of action. That keeps you from just reacting and fighting your opponents battle, not yours. Communication can be as simple as hand signals and verbal interaction, or as complex as electronic burst transmission, but it's all critical when you don't have it.