After seperating from the military, I started looking at firearms training that is available to civilians. I had taken a few classes prior to the military and truly believe that fighting skills are perishable, so getting my feet wet in commercial training seemed natural.

I have noticed interestingly the type of training that SEEMS to be popular is fairly hardcore military fighting tactics. This sort of seems to parallel the zombie preparedness stuff as well to some extent.

There are significant differences between the goals of 'military' type training and self defense oriented training. For the sake of discussion ill loosely define the goal of 'military' training as giving the ability to operate offensively or defensively against a well armed formidable foe, normally working as a team but possibly (worst case scenario) solo (perhaps in an escape and evade type situation), and covering subjects like room clearing, hostage rescue, flanking etc... And ill define the goal 'self defense' training to give the individual a set of tactics that are applicable in a 'civil' situation, like defending your self, property or family against looters for example, or defending from several aggressive but not necessarily well trained or armed adversaries.

That being said, many of the weapons manipulation techniques will be similar if not identical between the two types of training.

What interests me is the reasoning behind civilians seeking military type training. Is it to prepare for a true 'SHTF/Zombie' scenario? Is it for the the thrill of a true military style training experience? Do you just want the most complete training and plan to scale what you learn to different situations?

I am curious to see what kind of a market there is for different kinds of training and how it has changed over the past 5 years.