All by Special Tactics Staff
The first two installments of our four-part article on school/church defense focused on the importance of integrating on-site armed guards and auxiliary security/support personnel with local law enforcement and offered seven suggestions for employing armed guards for school defense. This article deals with the incorporation of “auxiliary security assets” into the overall security plan. While this article references “school security,” the same principles can be applied to church security and other community facilities.
The last article on school and church defense focused on the importance of integrating three elements into a cohesive plan of action: On-site armed guards, auxiliary security/support personnel and local law enforcement. In this second part of the 4-part article, we will focus on seven suggestions for employing armed guards for school defense and how to integrate those guards into a larger plan/drill for responding to a deadly attack.
The Special Tactics staff offers our prayers for the victims of the tragic school massacre in Uvalde, Texas and for the families who lost loved ones. Unfortunately, it seems clear that we have not seen the end of this rising trend of violent attacks. We want to do everything we can to help prevent future killings or at the very least reduce their number. Several years ago we published a 4-part article series (on our old website) covering Tactical School/Church Security and Active Shooter Response. We are re-publishing that article series here starting with the first part on an “Integrated Approach” to security.
We have recently received some requests from instructors, asking for permission to use our presentations and learning materials in their own tactical schools and courses. The good news for those instructors and all the other tactical instructors out there is that you do not need permission to use any of our materials in your own training. Just like a high school teacher does not need to get permission from the textbook publisher to use a textbook in his/her class, any tactical instructor or school can use any of our materials, as long as they don’t steal them or break any copyright laws. If you are interested in using our materials for your course or school this article includes a few suggestions and ideas that might help.
Our new High-Intensity Military Urban Combat book is an abridged version of the longer Squad-Level Military Urban Combat manual published by Special Tactics in 2017 which required controlled distribution and could not be published digitally because it contained sensitive but unclassified information regarding U.S. military urban warfare tactics. This version has extracted two sections from the original manual that contain no sensitive information, making this abridged version suitable for international, digital distribution. The core value provided by this new manual is a focus on the often neglected subject of high-intensity conventional warfare. Such tactics and knowledge could prove particularly useful for allied military forces as conventional conflicts grow more common around the world.
The fundamentals for planning a good defense are the same, whether you are a military planner preparing to defend South Korea, a law enforcement/security professional assigned to secure a compound/event or a citizen trying to defend your home and family from an intruder. This article is the first in a 3-part series on defensive planning. This first part deals with anticipating the threat and making contingency accordingly.
For this week's discussion, we would like to hear your ideas for how to conduct, realistic and effective training, despite the ever-present challenges of limited resources. Whether you are a military leader, law enforcement officer, security professional or armed citizen, you have likely come up with some creative training techniques to make the most of limited time and resources. Feel free to include ideas relating to any aspect of tactical training
According to the Special Tactics philosophy, two critical factors have a greater impact on combat performance than any other: training and selection. While we have written several online articles on training, we have yet to cover selection. The following article offers some concepts and guidelines that can help any unit (regardless of size) improve its selection, promotion and incentives system. The article is adapted from our newest book, Winning the Fight: A Conceptual Framework for Combat Performance Enhancement.
Some tactical professionals and units choose larger caliber, higher-powered weapons because smaller rounds have failed to neutralize the threat in a combat situation. However, such choices always involve tradeoffs regarding factors like magazine capacity, weight, recoil characteristics etc. The question to our readers and contributors is "how important is stopping power" based on your personal experience and preference?
The Special Tactics Staff is planning a number of new initiatives and training opportunities for 2018. Here is the summary of what you can expect to see...
When tactical professionals get together to train or share ideas, they often waste most of their time arguing with each other and have little to show for it at the end of the day. With the threat level rising both at home and overseas, wasting precious training time and failing to make progress as an individual or a unit can have deadly consequences. Therefore, we believe that trying to solve the age-old problem of the “tactical argument” is a very important effort.
Winning the Fight is now shipping and the Amazon Kindle version is coming soon. One of the oldest maxims of combat, is that the core fundamentals for success remain the same whether you are defending your home from an intruder or commanding a combined arms task force in conventional warfare. This book provides clear, concise, practical guidelines for how to increase your chances of victory in any hostile encounter and is designed to radically change the way you think about problems, assess threats, train for combat, plan contingencies and adapt to unexpected changes.
We are very glad to announce that the Comprehensive Combat Fitness manual is finally ready to ship. The manual provides detailed instructions for creating a comprehensive fitness program designed to directly enhance your combat performance in a real-life scenario. The manual is designed to be flexible and does not aim to replace your existing fitness program, but rather to help you achieve greater results using whatever works for you. It provides scientifically proven methods to integrate your workouts, manage your recovery, measure your progress and adjust routines to your specific mission requirements and body type.
After many delays, the Squad Level Military Urban Combat book is now shipping. The manual is over 400-pages long and provides a wide selection of common sense concepts and tactical options, designed to help military units develop their own mission-specific tactics, techniques and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for both low-intensity urban operations (COIN and stability operations) and high-intensity conventional urban warfare.
This second installment in our three-part article on combat fitness provides some examples and suggestions for how to develop “combat performance evaluations.” Most performance evaluations in military or LE units test only one skill/attribute at a time (marksmanship, fitness, casualty care) in an isolated environment. An effective combat performance evaluation tests multiple skills/attributes simultaneously under realistic conditions, with little or no warning provided to those being evaluated. The article provides examples for both law enforcement and military, with low-budget and high-budget variations included.
How can we prepare for the unexpected? Whether you are a military leader, law enforcement officer, or a citizen trying to protect your home, attempting to answer this question is critically important for your success. All the great military theorists in history, from Sun Tzu to Carl von Clausewitz, have emphasized the uncertainty of combat and historical trends suggest that our chances of predicting future events are extremely low. If this is the case, how can we prepare for what we cannot predict? Drawing from Special Tactics’ new book, Winning the Fight, this article suggests two ways to prepare for the unexpected and increase your chances of success in combat,
How must urban combat tactics change if the United States and its allies find themselves in a high-intensity conventional war against a modern combined-arms force like Russia, China or North Korea? While many tactics and general principles will remain the same, there are some very important differences between high-intensity conventional urban combat and the sort of precision Close Quarters Battle (CQB) that the U.S. military has grown accustomed to practicing over the past seventeen years.
Many debates on tactical fitness focus on the question of which exercise or routines are the most effective. We believe the more important question is, how do we measure whether a fitness program actually improves effectiveness in a given mission set? Part 1 of this three-part article offers five common sense fitness principles that provide a good starting point for answering this question. Whether you are a unit leader/commander or an individual citizen, the same core principles of combat performance evaluation, program development, physical performance testing, personalized adjustment and worst-case scenario planning can help greatly improve your combat fitness and mission readiness.
Special Tactics is planning some major evolutions, including more articles/debates and the release next month of three new titles that are now available for pre-order. In the coming weeks, Special Tactics will be posting blog articles that relate to these upcoming titles as well as the current selection of tactical manuals. There is also some additional post-activity and new website functionality planned so stay tuned.
After publication of the Single-Person Close Quarters Battle manual, a large number of readers requested more information on two-person tactics. Given the rising frequency of deadly attacks and terrorist incidents, it is not unlikely that armed citizens and security professionals will find themselves in situations where they need to defend themselves with the help of a partner. This book focuses on deliberate, defensive tactics designed to increase your chances of survival in a deadly attack.
