The ALIVE! Triad: Gun, Knife, Empty Hands Aug 24, 2016

The ALIVE! Triad: Gun, Knife, Empty Hands

Aug 24, 2016

By Steve Miles

The "Three Disciplines" of ALIVE!. Gun, knife, and empty hands: these are the three legs of our active personal defense triad.

Gun, knife, empty hands, why these three? 

Because these are the three methods of active personal defense we are most likely to have available to us. Also, by training in these three we develop the ability to address any active personal defense situation with nearly any available tool.

What about sticks, batons, and machetes? 

By training in use and defense of the short knife, we develop a foundation for the use and defense of all single-hand impact and cutting weapons AND empty hands. Only short knife does this because it has the greatest utility, the largest array of attack and defense movements available. A system that originates training in another implement will inevitably leave gaps when it comes to the short knife. And a system that originates in empty hand training will be largely unsuitable to defense against knives and other weapons.

What about pepper spray, tasers, and stun guns? What if I want to use a weapon but I don't want to permanently harm an attacker? 

ALIVE! training doesn't restrict the use of "less than lethal" weapons when they are available, instead it makes them more effective. Training gives you skills and attributes, and skills and attributes give you options. The knife in particular readily provides "less than lethal" options to someone who is adequately trained, as does the gun when used as a striking implement.

Gaps cause failure in personal defense. Gaps in awareness, endurance, strength, skill, movement, timing, pressure, distance, action, function and many other things can be fatal. By training in gun, knife, and empty hands we give ourselves the greatest coverage and reduce potential gaps in our defense.

STAY ALIVE!

You CAN Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight! Nov 25, 2015

You CAN Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight!
By Steve Miles

Nov 25, 2015

"Don't bring a knife to a gunfight" - True. In a fight between two distant opponents outside of contact distance the gun is superior.

"Don't bring a gun to a knifefight." - False, but read closely: a pistol IS a suitable tool to use at contact distance, BUT ONLY if one is using knife-based tactics and actions to fight. In other words, parrying and counter striking with the pistol as an impact weapon, and only attempting to shoot an opponent when it's possible to do so without compromising one's defense.

Most gun instructors just don't understand the dynamics of a knife attack, so they teach ineffective single specific actions to take against a knife such as:

-Cover up head and contact shoot.
-"Speed rock."
-"Fail Safe" drop to ground and attempt to shoot upwards.

These actions are all inherently flawed because a knife attack isn't a single action, it's a series of actions. Knife attacks can include a sequence of jabs, single commited strikes, combos, grabs, punches, traps, and even fakes.

A single gun action in response to a sequence of knife actions is likely to result in trading stabs for gunshots. This is a loser for someone interested in their own survival. For one, we know that a single gunshot rarely stops the threat. And, any ER doc will tell you that knife attack victims die about three times more often than gunshot victims.

So what to do?

Learn to use your pistol like knife. Understand that "knife tactics" are really "contact range tactics" for use with any tool.


Stay ALIVE!



To learn more about ALIVE!™ Combatives or ALIVE! Gunfighting® contact the author Steve Miles via email to steve@combativestraininggroup.com

Copyright© 2015 Alive Technology Inc.

ALIVE!™ Reviewed May 19, 2015

ALIVE!™ Reviewed

I'm very happy to share a well written review of ALIVE!™ training by Becca Spinks writing for Sure Shots Magazine.  Becca is a skilled shooter and instructor in her own right and she adds a lot to any class she participates in.  -Steve

http://www.sureshotsmagazine.com/training.html

Another Tool for the Toolbox? May 11, 2015

Another Tool for the Toolbox?

By Steve Miles

Frequently I hear the phrase "another tool for the toolbox" used to describe the idea that the more fighting skills one learns the better a fighter one becomes.  On the surface this seems reasonable, but as students of violence are we really just seeking to "collect 'em all", blindly amassing a huge library of skills that we hope we can recall when needed?  In this edition of ALIVE!™ Methodology Monday we will examine this concept and look at some alternative strategies for prioritizing our skill development.

Can you find what you need?

First we need to address the expression itself.  "Another tool for the toolbox" is an idiom that doesn't necessarily have a literal meaning.  However, the use of the word "tool" does allude to a significant deficiency in how most people look at training: that is; they are "tool focused" instead of "fight focused".  Specifically, people say they "need to get some carbine training", or "need to build some knife skills", but are tool skills really what they want? I submit instead what they really want are fighting skills.  This isn't just semantics, it goes to the core of the way most of the training community has bamboozled itself into believing tool operation is equivalent to fighting.

At a typical pistol or rifle "operator" course the focus is entirely on handling of the weapon and shooting paper targets without any actual opponent involved.  With no opponent present, the training is largely "tool operation" and not fight training (see the April 6 post for more about what constitutes fight training).  Even in a knife skills course, if there are no actively resisting opponents, aka "sparring" etc, how many actual fighting skills are being learned in a way that will enable them to used against a criminal assailant?  Not many, if any.

So beyond the issues with tool fixation, we must also address the concept that "more is better" when it comes to "another tool in the toolbox".  How many tools do we need that essentially do the same task? At what point will we be confused as to which tool to use for which task?  How do we know what the tasks are?

One of the innovative things that ALIVE!™ does is provide an entirely new way to look at training, see what the required tasks actually are, and efficiently prioritize skill development.  In essence, ALIVE!™represents a brand new toolbox.

Planning on bringing this to the fight?

When a repairman arrives at your home he doesn't bring completely different tool sets for plumbing, air conditioning, and other home repair tasks, the repairman has one set of tools for the most common tasks he will face.

 ALIVE!™uses a single set of skills for knife, pistol, impact weapons, empty hands and even rifle to streamline your training requirements.  With one comprehensive set of skills, no training time is wasted learning separate gun skills, knife skills, ground skills, empty hands skills etc and then attempting to fuse them together into a functional system yourself.  

Likewise, the repairman isn't wheeling a full-size industrial tool box behind him. Instead, he usually walks in carrying a small tool bag with only a few essential tools. He knows what tools he is most likely to need because he has seen jobs like yours many times before.

ALIVE!™ allows you to examine the context of the fight situations you are most likely to encounter and experience them in opposition against fully resistant opponents.  By understanding the context of the situation, having experienced it in training, one can effectively prioritize training.

How does ALIVE!™prioritize training?  ALIVE!™uses several models to analyze and understand your potential fight situations, and then ensures that your training actually addresses them.  One of these is the PROACTIVE/REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM.

ALIVE!™ SIMPLIFIED PROACTIVE/REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM

The PROACTIVE/REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM helps one to identify the context of the fight and ensure appropriate material is trained.  "Proactive vs Reactive" is an either/or input, either the fighter is initiating action in that moment (proactive end) or reacting to an opponent's action (reactive end).  Note that the chart applies individually to each participant in a fight, there could be two fighters both reacting or two acting in a proactive context.  However, typically opponents end up at opposite sides of the spectrum.   The PROACTIVE/REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM is a component of a larger model, the FIGHT GRAPH, that uses additional inputs to map out the entire realm of possible fight contexts.   The simplified chart above shows some examples of where specific contexts might appear along the spectrum.

Why is this chart important to training?  What the PROACTIVE/REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM does is allow us to begin to categorize different fight contexts.  Not all fight situations are the same.  Different fight contexts require different tactics and techniques.  Once we categorize fight contexts we can see that the appropriate tactics and techniques are similar for contexts in the same category, and less applicable for contexts in other categories.   For example, the skills one needs to make a proactive shot against a hostage-taker are very different than the skills needed to use a pistol to reactively defend against a knife attack.  If this sounds like an all-too obvious assertion, rest assured that it is not obvious among many other personal defense systems.

A few weeks ago we discussed the "Modern Technique of the Pistol" and how Dennis Tueller's "21 foot rule" drill showed a major deficiency in relying entirely on static "front sight focus"shooting systems for personal defense (see that blog post HERE). Using the PROACTIVE/REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM we can see that the "front sight focus" shooting technique is most applicable in proactive fight contexts and, because different contexts require different tactics and techniques, it is less applicable in the kind of reactive fight contexts armed civilians typically find themselves in.

The PROACTIVE/REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM, like ALIVE!™itself, applies to all aspects of personal defense to include knife.  Common dogma in many knife systems is "there is no such thing as knife defense, only knife offense", or a variation of "we use our situational awareness to ensure we always attack first".  Both of these positions suggest one will always be proactive, and this is simply not the case.  Because situational awareness fails, the other guy might just be faster, laws, and many other reasons one can not always be the one initiating a fight.  But when fighting systems ignore this reality and instead prefer to "live in denial" by not prioritizing reactive knife defense they are doing a grave disservice to their students.

Going back to prioritizing training, if one finds that most of their potential fighting contexts are on the reactive end of the spectrum, one should not be spending most of ones time training skills that are appropriate for proactive contexts.  Instead, train tactics and techniques that hold-up under the pressure of an unexpected criminal assault. One must constantly question whether the skills being trained are appropriate to the context of the kind of fights one expects to be in.

Stay ALIVE!™



To learn more about ALIVE!™ Combatives or ALIVE! Gunfighting® contact the author Steve Miles via email to steve@combativestraininggroup.com

Copyright© 2015 Alive Technology Inc.

ALIVE! Gunfighting®: AK Rifle Primer BERTRAM April 25, 2015

ALIVE! Gunfighting®: AK Rifle Primer BERTRAM April 25, 2015

By Steve Miles

This past weekend I once again had the privilege of presenting the "AK Rifle Primer" at a superb private range in Bertram, TX.  This class is designed for people who want to learn how to run their AKs in the context of a close-range, frequently reactive, gunfight.  As such it's ideal for civilians or solo LEOs, but there's plenty of good material to be gleaned by team operator types as well.

The class has two main training goals:

First, students will become smarter than the average Soviet bear regarding the AK.  Unusually for an ALIVE! Gunfighting event, the class begins with lecture discussing how the AK functions, it's design, controls, and sights.  Students then zero their rifles at 25m using an offset that very closely replicates a standard 100m zero. 

Later in the day students learn about, handle, and shoot all the major AK variants to include AK-47, AKS, AKM, AKMS, AK-74, AKS-74, AKS-74U and others.  

During this process students have the opportunity to shoot all the other students' rifles as well.  This included some full-auto rifles generously provided by the range owner.

The second main goal is for students to learn the basics of close-range gunfighting with rifles, empasizing speed, accuracy AND mobility.  This included magazine changes, malfunction clearance, and other gunhandling, as well as side transitions, and vertical displacement skills.  Students learn the fundamentals of managing and imposing pressure in a gunfight.  Airsoft "corrections" were administered when students made tactical errors such as remaining stationary and exposed when changing mags or clearing malfunctions. This training forces students to think and function in terms of what will keep them alive in a gunfight, not necessarily what will give them the best scores in a 3-Gun match.

The final skill drill involves explosive horzontal displacement, aka "getting off the X", combined with an accurate first shot in the context of a close-range ambush.

As happens in every class, students begin skeptical of their ability to get hits while running, but after detailed instruction and coaching they are all able to achieve it.

This final drill really opens students eyes to what is possible when one is willing to go beyond "lowest common denominator" training.

Later this year we will conduct another "AK Alumni Course".  There we will build on the basics presented in the primer and explore AK-to-pistol transitions, cornering, 360 degree engagements, and more all in the context of the two-way gunfight using both airsoft and live fire.  Stay tuned!

To learn more about ALIVE!™ Combatives and ALIVE! Gunfighting® contact the author Steve Miles via email to steve@combativestraininggroup.com

Copyright© 2015 Alive Technology Inc.

ALIVE! Gunfighting®: Accessing While Under Attack BERTRAM April 18, 2015

ALIVE! Gunfighting®: Accessing While Under Attack BERTRAM April 18, 2015

By Steve Miles

This past weekend I was fortunate to be able to present our flagship gunfighting course twice in one day at a great private range.  There are two main goals for the class:

1. Immerse students in the context of various likely gunfight situations.  Most students know they need personal defense training but haven't really thought about what kind of training is best for their particular situations. It seems obvious that one should have a good idea of what the problem is before one goes seeking a solution, but the status quo in the firearms and personal defense industry is to instead insist on "mastering the (so called) basics" before attempting any sort of force-on-force training.  This is a gross error in teaching methodology.  Without any idea of what the required skill endstate should look like, students (and instructors) squander training time and resources developing skills that may only correlate to a very small percentage of likely gunfight predicaments.

2. Build students' critical thinking skills vis a vis their training choices.  Context is everything, and to ensure they are getting the most out of their training students must constantly compare the context of any training they perform to the context of the gunfight situations they expect to be in.  If contexts are not similar, students must ensure they are not developing "training scars" by embedding responses that are suboptimal for their likely gunfight situations.

At the beginning of both classes I asked students to complete the sentence "I carry a gun because I'm concerned about..."  Both classes gave the same four responses:

1. Street Criminal Assault
2. Witness to Armed Robbery
3. Home Invasion
4. Carjacking

Notice that the contexts that civilians want to learn how to prevail in didn't include "SEAL Team Raid", "SWAT Entry", nor "Felony Traffic Stop".  Yet these significantly different contexts are where much of the firearms training industry focuses their instruction, even for civilians.

A large number of students in the first class were members of the "Austin Sure Shots" pistol league.  The Sure Shots showed up with both skills and open minds and really progressed a lot during the class. By the end of the day everyone was running and gunning as if their lives really depended on it.  Here's the pics:

We'll be doing this class again soon.

To learn more about ALIVE!™ Combatives and ALIVE! Gunfighting® contact the author Steve Miles via email to steve@combativestraininggroup.com

Copyright© 2015 Alive Technology Inc.

ALIVE!™ Methodology Monday April 13, 2015

When Speed and Accuracy Aren't Enough

By Steve Miles

Last week we took a look at the "Modern Technique of the Pistol" with a critical eye towards its origins in sport shooting.  We recognized that assumptions made about what it takes to win against cardboard targets were inescapably different than those required to prevail against a live resisting opponent.  This week we will continue to deconstruct Modern Technique and go deeper into specifics of how and why a sport shooting system alone is inadequate for personal defense.

Jeff Cooper Commemorative Coin

"DVC" was the celebrated motto of Jeff Cooper, an acronym which explained the central elements of Modern Technique as:

Diligentia - Accuracy: You must hit your assailant in order to injure him.
Vis – Force: You must strike your opponent with sufficient force to incapacitate him.
Celeritas – Speed: You must strike him quickly, so your opponent does not injure you before you injure him.

Note that all three elements are "one-way", that is, DVC is solely concerned with achieving incapacitating hits on an opponent.  Speed and Accuracy make sense from the perspective of winning a timed sport shooting match, but Force seems incongruent as no real force is required to punch paper or cardboard targets. So where does the Force element come from?

Cooper seemed nearly obsessed with the .45 caliber 1911 pistol and its legendary stopping power aka Force.  He summarily dismissed the merits of other pistols that today seems like an over-the-top farce:

"As long as one doesn't get into a fight, a nine is fine." (Jeff Cooper)

 "Carrying a double action 9mm automatic pistol for protection is like playing golf with a tennis racquet. You can do it, but why should you?" (Jeff Cooper) 

When one understands the strategy of Modern Technique as "hit and incapacitate first", essentially a variation of "the best defense is a good offense", one begins to understand why the .45 caliber 1911's "one shot stop" mythos was a perfect fit for Modern Technique.  If an opponent can be incapacitated before he can attack, defined as sufficient Force, then Modern Technique's "one-way" strategy certainly works as it does against cardboard targets.  However, when faced with a living opponent who is already applying or about to apply his own deadly force toward the shooter, the "one-way" strategy falls apart under pressure because sometimes Speed, Accuracy, and Force are not enough.

"How Close is Too Close?"

Dennis Tueller was the first to substantively question the utility of a "one way" strategy in a 1983 SWAT Magazine article entitled "How Close is Too Close?".  In the article, Tueller presented the results of his study which indicated that inside of 21' an attacker could likely reach an officer before the officer could draw and shoot him effectively.  In 1984 one year after Tueller's SWAT article was published, a police training film titled "Surviving Edged Weapons" was released that demonstrated Tueller's findings and the work of other knife experts.  Between the SWAT article, the landmark training film, and the subsequent "21 Foot Rule" that has become urban legend, Tueller's study made a indelible mark on police and personal defense training that we still address today.  Although Tueller's conclusion in the article was that officers should retreat to maintain a "reactionary gap" so as to keep a shooting option viable, he irreversibly exposed the deficiency of the Speed and Accuracy  "one-way" dogma in close range active attacker contexts.  

1984 police training film "Surviving Edged Weapons" further expanded on Tueller's work.

Context matters in fighting, and if your shooting system is deficient against active attackers inside of 21 feet, it's deficient in the context of most law enforcement and civilian defensive shootings. To use Maslow's Hammer again, the tools of Modern Technique are speed and accuracy, and thus all their gunfight problems look like cardboard targets. 

An adherent to Modern Technique can either:

a) Continue to chant the "front sight...press" mantra and ignore that Modern Technique is inherently deficient in most shooting situations one is likely to find oneself in? Or..

b) Find a better way to deal with the context of close range active attackers.

Next time we will go deeper into understanding fighting context with the PROACTIVE TO REACTIVE FIGHT SPECTRUM.



To learn more about ALIVE!™ Combatives or ALIVE! Gunfighting® contact the author Steve Miles via email to steve@combativestraininggroup.com

Copyright© 2015 Alive Technology Inc.