AAR: 3 Rivers Tactical Training Solutions - Home Defense / CQB Nov 1st & 2nd, 2014

[John A Brown]

3 Rivers Tactical Training Solutions, Inc. conducted a Home Defense / CQB course on Saturday, November 1st and Sunday, November 2nd 2014.

This class was limited to 10 students, and was actually full less than 72 hours after it was announced. We had one student who had to cancel on the Thursday before the course for personal reasons. We tried to fill that spot but were unsuccessful, so we ended up with a total of 9 students in the class.

Ashton Ray taught this class with me. It always amazes me how sometimes an instructor can't get get the light bulb to go off in a students head, and then another instructor says the same thing a different way, and they get it. People learn differently, and it was great having Ashton there for this course.

While this class was very heavy on CQB tactics and techniques, it was completely designed around home defense. We were not trying to turn anyone into a SF soldier or SWAT officer. There were no team drills, we didn't get the students into a 4-man stack and make entry into rooms. All drills were 1-man drills.

We hammered home throughout the course that 1-man CQB is an extremely dangerous endeavor, and nobody should ever do it unless it is absolutely necessary. I have a very simple standard as to when someone should engage in 1-man CQB - human life above all else. If there human lives at stake - and since this was a Home Defense CQB course we are talking your wife, kids, etc. - well, you've go to do what you've got to do. Otherwise, let people steal your TV, jewelry, whatever. It's just stuff and stuff can always be replaced. Life can't.

We also hammered 100% threat identification and 100% accuracy. Do a simple Google search and there are plenty of incidents of people shooting folks in or around their home who they thought were threats. Unacceptable.

We started off in the classroom with Ashton and I giving the class our thoughts on various topics of Home Defense. Captain Obvious moment #1 - the time to develop a home defense plan is now - not while a situation is happening. And you have to make sure your family knows the plan and understands it. We briefly discussed establishing a safe room.

Another topic discussed was link-up procedures with arriving law enforcement personnel. The importance of this is obvious.

Day 1 was classroom instruction and drills inside two empty residential houses.

We started off day 1 covering the basics of CQB by discussing pie-ing corners or slicing the pie, threshold clearing, digging corners, "L" intersections, "T" intersections, stairwell movements, doorways and hallways, etc. I showed a CQB animation to the students of 2-man, 3-man, and 4-man stacks making entries into center fed and corner fed rooms. Not because the students were going to be doing this. They didn't. The point was to show them how things are done with a team, and how much harder it is to do as 1-man exercise.

For day 1 we had access to two empty single family residential houses. One was very large, the other still big but smaller. The smaller house had a 2nd floor that was the CQB floor from hell. The stairs emptied into a hallway with 5 bedrooms in a semi-circle, in addition to a bathroom and another stairwell to the attic. There was no easy way to do this as one person, which was part of the point - don't do this stuff unless absolutely necessary.

All drills done in the houses were done with red (training) guns.

The mantra of the weekend was to get the students to understand these 4 CQB fundamentals: 1) Never pass an unknown area, 2) Solve one problem at a time, 3) Search for people, and 4) Identify places where people could be hiding.

Doing those four things isn't as easy as it might seem.

Below is Tom Jr. about to make entry into a room. Good high ready position here.



Below is Tom Jr. again, making entry into the room. He is not standing still - you can see his image is slightly blurry. He is getting through the threshold, checking his immediate threat area, and beginning to dig a corner. Well done.



Below is Mark moving down a hallway and beginning to pic a corner. Getting as much information about a room before you enter it, as opposed to just bursting through the threshold (unless absolutely necessary) is a very good idea.

Note: Mark brought his own blue gun and had a light on it. Weapon mounted lights are worth their weight in gold during CQB.



Below is Phil moving down a hallway towards a bathroom. Note Phil's position in the hallway - towards but not touching the right side wall. This gives him a better view into the room. Well done Phil.



Below is Tom Sr. slicing the pie into the hallway leading to the bathroom. Tom is not standing still, as evidenced by his feet being blurry.



Day 2 was conducted at the range. We started off with a slow fire accuracy exercise. When doing CQB, the shooting should be the easy part, as your skills should be intuitive. When you are moving your feet and searching unknown areas, you'll have enough on your mind. To do this stuff well, your weapon skills need to be at a very high level. All students displayed solid accuracy during flat range drills. Accuracy diminished - from somewhat to significantly - during the range shoot house drills. More on this later.

After the pistol diagnostic drills Ashton and I constructed a shoot house on the range. The range consisted of two rooms with a hallway between them. Building the shoot house wasn't difficult, but the wind made it so. It wasn't particularly cold, but the wind was pretty tough at times.

Each student made two runs through the shoot house at the range - once with their pistol facing paper shoot / no shoot targets, the second time with airsoft weapons and a combination of role players and shoot / no shoot targets.

Below is Ryan using a threshold clearing technique before he makes entry into room 1. While it may look so, he is not standing still.



Below is Mark in room 1. He is clearing the hallway and what he can see of room 2 before moving down the hallway and making entry into room 2.



The final portion of the course was giving each student a run through the shoot house using airsoft weapons and having role players and shoot / no shoot targets in both rooms. Sometimes the role players were a threat, sometimes they were not. Generally, the role players did not shoot their air soft weapons at the students unless the student made a mistake.

These air soft weapons were not the $400+ air soft guns out there on the market. They were kids weapons and the air soft BB's did not travel very fast or hurt when they hit you. At all. They were nothing like simulation gun using paint marking rounds that can definitely hurt. But it was amazing to see the stress the use of the air soft guns induce in the students. Just the fact that someone could be shooting these slow moving BB's at them was enough cause some system overload issues.

The airsoft weapons were a mix of pistols, sub guns, and carbines. Because the pistols didn't hold very many rounds, the students used the carbines for their run though the house.

Below is Nick clearing room one and "getting what he can get" from outside the room before making entry.



Nick again below, encountering a role player and issuing verbal commands.

Note: A special thanks to Tony for being a role player for us during this drill.



Below is Doug beginning to move into room 1. Note his left foot is off the ground. He is not standing still.



Below is a pretty good picture. Tom Sr. is just about to enter room 2. He can't see Tony yet, or the woman in the pink jacket he has as a hostage. Tom entered and engaged Tony, as he was armed and had a hostage. Well done.




I can't say enough about the students in this class. They worked very hard to learn this stuff, and this course was an enormous data dump. Everyone in the class could shoot a pistol well when standing on the firing line doing doing flat range drills - every student in the class could hit a piece of Tac Strike steel out to 40 yards. We had some accuracy issues when the students had to move their feet and discriminate between shoot / no shoot targets - some of which were 5-7 yards away. We constantly reinforced the idea of solving one problem at a time. This simplifies things greatly - if you remember to do it.

A sincere thank you to the students, not only for attending the class but for the very hard work you put in to learn this craft. It isn't easy and it certainly can't be mastered in a weekend, but the attitude and effort put in by everyone was off the charts. Your attitude and hard work made this class a joy to teach. Thank you.

Another thank you to Ashton for a job very well done.

This AAR is a brief overview of the topics covered in this course. As mentioned earlier, this class was a huge data dump for the students. There is no way possible to detail every single aspect of this class in an AAR.

I welcome everyone's comments and input.

John
www.3riverstraining.com

[2k2wranglerx]

Data dump is right! I told John that I felt like he just poured a bucket of knowledge into a shotglass of a brain. man there's a lot to take in. I couldn't believe how task saturated I became and how quickly it happened! Tunnel vision is a very very real thing!

Had a great time. That said, was mentally and physically pretty beat by Sunday night. I look at that as a sign of a good class. We crammed as much as we could into 2 days for sure.

having 2 instructors there was nice too. Plenty of hands on, 1 on 1 instruction. I really liked that after you'd run the house john would stop you and take you step by step and process what you did, what you were thinking, etc.

Great class. I would recommend it to anyone.

[flipdisc]

This is the second class I have taken from 3 Rivers Tactical Training and it won't be the last. As a C. C. permit carrier I feel it is important to get as much "PROPER" traning as you can. As Citizens we have a false sence of reality due to what we see on movie and TV screens. Without training such as this class we will not remove those false ideals from our heads and when reality hits it's too late to think about it. I learned more in two days than I could have by watching 1000 hours of youtube videos(there are plenty of idiots who should not be giving advice on youtube). Instructors John & Ashton are very well trained instructors and have agreat way of knowing how to pound the important points home with each individual student. Signing up for this class was money and time well spent.

Doug Ries

[CountrySeer]

This was my second 3RT class. Bottom line up front, I think the easiest way to express my opinion of the class is to say that I will take it again the next time that it is offered. John provided a comprehensive overview of the curriculum, so I will just add a few thoughts. If you yearn for an opportunity to perform a solo clearing of your home to save the life of a loved one, this class should squelch that desire. You never want to be in a position where you must employ the skills covered in this class. It might happen, and you should be prepared if it does, but you should also put a good deal of effort into preventing such an event. This point was stressed and became more and more obvious as the class progressed.

The class was outstanding in that it checked all of the boxes for what I want from formal instruction.
1. It set performance standards and provided me with clear constructive feedback on my current capabilities and what I can to do to improve them.
2. It showed me the limits of my cold, on-demand performance. In particular, as John mentioned in the AAR, accuracy decayed substantially for me, even at close range, when movement and rapid target identification were required. I have fairly solid fundamentals, so this was unnerving.
3. It exposed some significant training scars and trained incapacities and provided sound alternatives to my flawed techniques.
4. It highlighted a few areas where I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I have run through similar drills / challenges in other classes, and the way that John and Ashton designed them, set the context, demonstrated them, and critiqued our performance was significantly better than what I have experienced previously.

As a final note, I would like to reiterate John’s point regarding the merit of multiple instructors conveying the same message to a student who is suffering from information overload. It was essential for this course. John is a superb instructor, but at some points, the light bulb simply would not go on for me. At such times, Ashton was invaluable in helping me to grasp key concepts that were elusive due to the volume of new and abstract information presented. I hope he remains part of the instructor cadre.

[John A Brown]

Thanks for all the kind words fellas.

I knew everyone was going to get to information overload in this class. I say that because I can remember back to my first CQB course.

The way all of the students worked their asses off to process information and learn is highly commendable. You have to come to a class like this truly dedicated to learning, check your ego at the door, and have thick skin.

Every single student in this class did all of those things.

John
www.3riverstraining.com

[John A Brown]

Below is Tony moving through a dog leg hallway in the big shoot house. Not an easy chore regardless of anyone's CQB experience, but Tony did a solid job, like everyone in the class.

On a side note, Tony is the most dedicated person I've met in a very long time when it comes to concealed carry. Tony carries two full size 1911's on his body, plus two spare 1911 magazines. One pistol on his strong side, one on his support side. All day, every day.

Carrying two handguns on your person isn't easy and it definitely isn't for everyone, but it works for Tony and he's highly dedicated to the craft.



John
www.3riverstraining.com

[eddodonnell]

Hot Damn!!!

Looks like a feature class in 2015.

Kinda crazy to not take it.

[Im not Batman]

That looks awesome. Great photo review. I know the air soft is a good training tool but what would the situation be if you STEP UP a notch and go to a paint marker?

With the right Safety gear ... I think the "hit" factor would add a new and important layer into the training.

I am not doubting your choice... I am just curious

I HAVE TO DO THIS....and I will. I like what I see here

[John A Brown]

Batman,

You're exactly right - the next step in the CQB progression is to use some type of paint marking munitions. That's where we are going with this training program, however, you can only do so much in a 2 day class. Pretty much all of the guys in this class had no formal CQB training prior to this past weekend. The only way to do this stuff is through the Crawl, Walk, Run progression. Going too far, too fast is a bad mistake.

Most - if not all - of the students were mentally exhausted at the end of day 2 of this past weekends course. I can very confidently say using paint marking guns would have been too much.

Ultimately the idea is to develop a CQB I and a CQB II course, with paint marking munitions being introduced in CQB II.

If you're interested in attending this course, we will be scheduling another one in the very near future.

Thank you for your input.

John
www.3riverstraining.com

[kradinsky]

This class looks badass and amazing. We're definitely in for it next year! Seems like you are breaking some cool new ground in training options in our area John.

Kelly