Yesterday I participated in KR Training’s first Team Tactics course.

The purpose of the course was to introduce concepts of working in a team within a civilian context, e.g. armed friends, spouses, etc..

What it really comes down to is shooting, moving, and communicating and how to coordinate those things. For instance, when communicating it should be loud, slowly, and using few but directed words. There’s a calling “verb” then a responding “noun”. For example, team member Alpha will yell “MOVE!” to tell team member Bravo to move to some location. Bravo responds with “MOVING!” and moves to the new location. Bravo will say “LOAD!” to tell Alpha to reload, Alpha responds with “LOADING!” and commences reloading and says “UP!” when he’s up and running again. Simple call and response type commands.

As well, the class incorporated some things that you just can’t do at other shooting ranges. For instance, 360º scans, movement between locations (with the pistol or long gun in your hands). The intent is considering how the real world can be and presenting skills for use in that real world situation. To further that end, while the first half of the class consisted of live-fire exercises, the second half of the class involved no use of live weaponry and only plastic dummy guns so we could do some FoF-style scenarios where the team techniques could be utilized in more realistic situations.

I opted to run the class with a pump shotgun for my long gun. Why? Because I could. 🙂  I know that an AR is the preferrable platform, but I just wanted to run a shotgun. Just something satisfying (and fun!) about racking the gun, lots of recoil, big booms, and seeing many big holes in the target. And I enjoyed the fact I used a wood-stocked shotgun… nothing tactical here! (except the 18.5″ barrel and side-saddle). I really need to do more shotgunning… it’s just so much fun!  I actually have some stuff to write on shotgunning for home defense… more later.

That class was good and I enjoyed it. While the live-fire stuff was fine, what I really liked were the scenarios because it puts you in well… it’s still an artificial environment, but there’s aspects of realism you just can’t have with cardboard targets. The unknown of what other live players will do, even in a cooperative artificial scenario, always makes for interesting “think-on-your-toes” situations.

Good stuff. I don’t want to tell too much about the class because, you just need to try it for yourself. 🙂