I have noticed that when it comes to actual firearm training, they can split into two categories. Those trainers that actually have real world experience and those that don’t. I think these two articles describe both rather well. First I will start with the “no combat experience” argument.
IS COMBAT EXPERIENCE NECESSARY TO BE AN EFFECTIVE
FIREARMS INSTRUCTOR?
by Mike Baum
I am a military combat arms instructor with a little over 10 years of experience in
teaching the use of firearms to both military personnel and civilians. Recently, an issue developed that I do not see getting a lot of attention in the various publications available and I thought I would submit this to you and would greatly appreciate any response you have to this article.
I was a professional Combat Arms Instructor for the military (let’s leave it vague as to not offend the guilty parties) and recently I was asked to re-enlist with a unit as an instructor/gunsmith. With this new reserve assignment, I would have the pleasure of continuing my education at various training facilities to bring me up to speed on systems that were compatible with the unit’s specialized missions.
As my new boss and I discussed various schools and their merits, I suggested attend¬ing the classes offered by a very well known instructor whom I have never met but respect through his writings. The NCOIC immediately shot my suggestion down because the instructor in question was, “Just a reserve cop.” I thought about that for a minute and then, in my usual tactful way (which has caused members of the State Department to become nauseous in the past) informed my new boss as to why I thought he was wrong. He responded with a gesture that told me I “was #1” in his book and that the subject was closed for debate.
However, the point in question still bothered me for a number of reasons. First of all, I had no combat experience either. If I was not qualified, why was I there? Yes, I had convinced a couple of people that I could and would make them play catch with my ammo but they had surrendered before that unfortunate option became necessary.
Common sense can be a much more valuable commodity than limited experience. I have worked with SEAL Team members in the past who were very honest with me – they spent their entire time on the Teams running up and down a beach while singing cadence and deploying to “friendly” countries, teaching basic infantry tactics to local forces. I can assure you that some of them knew a lot less than I do about weapons but had the instant credibility because they were SEALs. *The instant credibility I do give them is their outstanding professionalism and unwillingness to quit.
The third problem is that you get guys who are great at their job but they could not teach it to save their lives. A good instructor is patient, approachable and respectful. That’s a tough combination and frankly, there have been days when I can not begin to master all of those skills before having my morning coffee. (OK, you can’t have an ego either.)
The fourth and final problem is this; combat is not the norm for most people. It drives me insane when someone puffs out their chest and says, “I was there, man.” Great, you may have been “there” but that doesn’t mean you played dodge ball with bullets. Less than 10% of the personnel who saw service in Vietnam were attached to combat units.
Even if you were lucky enough to survive, it doesn’t mean you learned anything from the experience. Some folks never learn, others take the incident to heart and analyze it to death. The latter have the potential of being great instructors in the footsteps of Bill Jordan.
Weapons skills are like any other skills, the deeper your theoretical knowledge, the more adaptable you are to the situation you find yourself in. I humbly submit that while no school of thought has all the answers, all have a piece of the puzzle. Good instructors should always be searching for the next piece of the puzzle. Spend less time worrying about how much time an instructor has spent polishing their resume and more time considering the wisdom of what they are offering their students.
Sound good doesn’t it? Is real world combat experience needed to train others, probably not but I think it would greatly aid someone in understanding what does and doesn’t work in real life. After all, would you take driving lessons from someone who has never driven a car? Would you take a martial arts class from someone who has never been in a fight or a competition? Probably not, so why then should firearms training be any different? Below is yet another view regarding firearms training that I tend to side with more heavily.
When Jeff Cooper founded the American Pistol Institute/Gunsite Training Center, he standardized a method for teaching the uninitiated the skills necessary to competently fight with a gun. Since then, the art and profession of firearms training has become a small industry. Hundreds have set forth to make their mark in the field, giving rise to economic pressure and competition for both institutional and individual customers. Advertising and self-promotion have been the result. Instructors used to claim they invented techniques; now they invent entire vocabularies.
All this hype leaves both providers and consumers of training services with a problem. How do we sort out which claims and selling points have substance, in an industry which is not yet sufficiently mature to have developed standards by which one might predict who will perform effectively as an instructor?
There has been a lot of discussion about standards in the past five years or so, but so far there has been very little progress in articulating measures by which one might evaluate the value of either an instructor or the instruction he provides. Trainers who work in the industry know the most about the subject, but all organized efforts to obtain consensus in the matter have failed for a number of reasons. Chief among these are: (1) “glass house” syndrome (an unwritten rule within the industry that no instructor will publicly criticize the methods, background or results obtained by another, lest they themselves become the target of criticism); (2) self interest (which destroys objectivity); (3) industry politics (“standards are necessary, so long as it is me or my organization setting them”); (4) agency politics (“since we are the best, the way we do things here is, by definition, the standard”); (5) enormous egos (“since I am the best, the way I was trained must be, by definition, the standard”); and, ultimately, (6) the lack of any empirical verification of any standard.
This is a problem for those who wish to obtain competent training for themselves or those in their charge, and get their money’s worth. It is a problem for those trainers who are experienced and competent, but who lack the time, money or stomach for relentless self-promotion. It is also a problem for those devoted to the art and profession of firearms training, who see the field being diminished by those who sell the sizzle because they have no steak, or, in fairness, because those to whom they are trying to sell prefer the sizzle and have never seen a steak.
I do not have a solution, but I may have a place to start. As with the definitions of art and pornography, the definition of good firearms instruction is hard to pin down. We might begin the search for those elusive criteria by cutting away everything that does not look like one, and then examine what we have left.
There are some generally agreed upon truths about what is not relevant in predicting the quality of instruction a particular instructor may provide. The uselessness of these indicators of competence is often discussed in private by those in the industry, but are not generally acknowledged in public. This is because one or more of these false criteria will serve as a useful marketing tool for just about everyone. With so many people invested selling themselves with one or more of these points, the worthlessness of these putative indicators of competence becomes the white elephant in the room that nobody wants to mention.
For this reason, I anticipate including any of these on my list of non-predictive information will be controversial with somebody. So be it. At least we will be talking about the elephant.
Police Experience.
The notion that police, as a group, know anything more about shooting, fighting, or shooting while in a fight, is a myth. My guess (and it is a guess) is that about the same percentage of sworn officers know how to shoot well as members of the general public, and for the same reason: they were interested as individuals, and on their own sought training and gained experience. Very, very little of what the vast majority of police do has anything to do with shooting, and the great majority of police firearms training is perfunctory.
Police Firearms Instruction Experience.
Whether this is a plus or a minus will depend entirely upon the particular department and what it considers “instruction.” “Instructor” slots in many departments are handed out as political favors, or are regarded as a place to put an officer who is physically disabled or so incompetent the administration is afraid to put them on the street. In many departments (probably most) the “instructors” are there to run people through annual courses of fire for purposes of qualification, with little or no actual instruction involved.
Programs of instruction in police departments are also prescribed, and instructors are usually directed by higher authority to rigidly follow the set regimen. At the end of five years an instructor in such a program may say he taught 250 classes, when in fact he taught the same class 250 times. The depth of experience is not what it might appear to be.
Obviously, there are exceptions, some of whom are quite notable. Large police departments are good places for one who has an interest and a talent for the craft to develop as an instructor. Police departments sometimes provide a trainer with range time, ammunition, a steady stream of subjects, and access to lots of incident reports. But this is not the rule.
It would be faster and easier for an average Joe who lives six states away from a prospective trainer’s former department to learn a detailed history of that individual trainer than to discover the particulars of the department’s training program.
Military Experience.
The military has lots of people that do lots of things, most of those things being completely immaterial to the individual use of small arms. Of those military activities that do involve the use of small arms, 99 % of them are nothing like police work or individual personal defense. Conversely, military experience is valuable if one is in the military, or training to perform military functions.
Further, the rigidity of military courses of instruction is legendary. They strive for uniformity, which means following a set program unless and until the manual is changed. The manual, in turn, is designed to “teach to the lowest common denominator.” As with police programs, these factors discourage individual approaches to individual students’ problems, and limit the depth of experience realized by the instructor. Perhaps this is why every significant innovation in shooting technique, equipment or teaching methods in the past thirty years has come from the private sector.
There are a few units within military branches where the use of small arms is emphasized. If there was a lot of use of small arms in the prospective instructor’s service, his experience with gun handling, marksmanship and related mind set should carry through. However, as with the police “firearms instructor,” one would have to know details about his specific program to evaluate the worth of his experience. That information rarely available or, if available, rarely verifiable.
There is a definite market selling military-style training to civilians. Many who never served, or who served in one of the majority of specialties that did not involve the use of small arms, are willing to pay for a taste of something they were never personally exposed to. That is fine, so long as that process is not confused with teaching a beat officer or home owner what they should know if the kind of trouble indigenous to their actual circumstances ever finds them.
Having Survived a Gunfight.
The notion that one who has survived a gunfight brings something special to the process is advanced by many knowledgeable individuals, including Jeff Cooper. With all due respect to those individuals, I see two difficulties with this idea.
First, it seems to me that whatever perspective or element of understanding a person attains by fighting with another for his life is very personal. As such, it cannot readily be taught. It may be related to others at length, but its essence cannot be passed along through conversation. This would seem to limit its value as a teaching asset.
Second, and more important, there are numerous reasons one might survive a gun fight beside posting a competent response. Many have survived gun fights by the incompetence of their adversary, by luck, or because they were rescued. Others have been “involved” in a gun fight to the extent they joined a dozen other police officers in kacking off rounds in the general direction of a goblin, and missed. There are many who became involved in an armed confrontation through incompetent handling of a matter before it came to a fight, and then had to be bailed out by others. These individuals would seem to hold nothing special as an instructor.
I submit that before one should credit participation in a gun fight as something to commend an instructor, he should want to know a lot of the specifics regarding how and why the fight got started, what the individual’s specific role was, and how the instructor acquitted himself. This information is virtually never available, at least not in reliable form.
Having Survived Several Gunfights.
We may be getting closer, but even this does not tell us what we need to know. The key bit of information here is why one guy is in so many gunfights. It might be the nature of the job; or it might be this guy is testosterone-poisoned and gets himself into jams through incompetent handling of situations before they escalate into an armed confrontation.
“Been There – Done That”
This vapid phrase epitomizes what is wrong with all of the pitches on the “useless criterion” list: it has macho, emotional appeal, but lacks any information content. Been where, done what, and what does that have to do with preparing me to solve my problem?
Any of these types of experience might possibly be pertinent to the question whether an individual is a good instructor. But one would have to know so much more to make any of these claimed experiences meaningful that it is hardly worth the effort. Conversely, I know several top-notch, highly competent, nationally known instructors whose pre-instruction careers included no police or military experience or gun-fights. These include a lawyer, a journalist, and jazz musician turned Tae Kwon Do instructor.
One does not need to rely upon stereotypes to determine whether a trainer is likely to be right for him. I have collected what I believe are much better suggestions directly from some of the “grey heads” who have been in the firearms training industry for decades. I will share their ideas here in a future issue.
I think that with realistic force on force training, you can find what works. I am not a believer that if you want to carry mace you need to be maced to know how it works, or that if you want to carry a stun gun you need to get shocked. On that same note, I don’t think you need to be in combat to know how to handle firearms. I think the deciding factor is enthusiasm for the art, continually practicing and learning new things. I’ve known SEALS that just ran on the beach, and SF members who never did much more then engage “supposed” targets.
My own personal opinion is that a good book, practice, the fundamentals of marksmanship and enthusiasm will go a long way and is much cheaper than attending some “advanced” course. A lot of these “schools” and “instructors” remind me of all the old plot lines in old Kung Fu movies. It reaks of the whole, “My Kung Fu is better than your Kung Fu!” bullshit. Fighting is an individual en devour, whether it be armed or unarmed. Selecting the right pistol and rifle is an entirely personal choice, and the only times they are dictated are if you are in a police department or military. Outside of those institutions its best to go with what works for you. The key here is practice, practice, and more practice. I would quicker bet my life to a guy who goes to the range every week with a .22LR Ruger 10/22 and a .22LR pistol than the dufus who dropped $2k on a “tactical” course. There have been Ultimate Fighters that have practiced mixed martial arts for only two years and won every title, there have been masters that studied Kung Fu for decades and got knocked unconscious in the first 30 seconds, and there have been long running champions who’s only fighting experience was driving a truck. Armed combat is no different. You can learn tactics and techniques from a book assuming you already know how to read. Everything else is about action.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/26/scotus.guns/index.html 
