The Survivability Onion Part 2
This is a guest blog by a friend of the center, coming to us via the Something Awful forums. Minor edits have been made for clarity or grammar.
Don't be ACQUIRED
Welcome to Jargontown. Target acquisition happens between target identification and target engagement, and is a necessary step to bridge the two. For a firearm, this may involve aligning the sights on target; for something more complicated, like indirect fire weapon systems or anti-air radar, coming up with a "firing solution" may be much more difficult and in-depth. Luckily, it is highly unlikely you will be targeted with anti-air or indirect fire (I hope). Your exact approach will be determined by the most likely nature of the threats you expect to face, and may involve multiple approaches if the threat simultaneously employs more than one means.
This isn't nearly as vital for individuals, but is still relevant. Imagine for a moment that you're running for your life in a beige morph suit, and the synthetic material is so slippery you lose your footing and fall. This would normally spell your doom and make you an easy target. However, what if you fell onto a thick carpet, more unkempt and overgrown than an abandoned lawn? They know you're there, they've identified you as a target, but if you suddenly seem to "disappear" it's going to be very difficult to correctly acquire you with small arms.
The most relevant takeaway: Concealment helps with detection and identification, but can also prevent you from being effectively acquired. Of course, this by definition won't stop incoming fire like cover would, and the threat may spray bullets towards your suspected position anyway, but it's sure better than remaining in plain view where there's no obstacle to prevent you from being acquired.
Don't be ENGAGED
You've been detected, identified, and acquired, so the fight's almost on, but we're not quite there yet. In order to engage you, the threat must be willing to engage you, deploy and ready their weapon systems, and make the decision to commence the engagement. These steps are not ordered and may occur simultaneously. One or more of these steps may have been performed in previous layers, but it is still possible to disrupt or deny anything that hasn't already been done.
First, the threat must be willing to engage you. Someone that may be willing to draw on you may lose that willingness if a firearm is already pointed at their face and they're not stupid enough to draw from the drop. A potential threat that would otherwise be comfortable physically threatening you with a knife when you're alone may no longer be willing to do so when you are out walking your pet, especially if that pet is obviously capable of posing a potential threat of actual attack, weighs in excess of a metric ton, bears a pintle-mounted crew-served fully-automatic heavy machine gun alongside a versatile selection of secondary general-purpose machine guns for force protection, and is a 2005 Toyota Hilux technical weapons platform.
These are extreme and potentially unrealistic examples designed to make a point, and (I am required to say this part out loud) it's a bad idea to randomly brandish lethal weapons just in case someone might have thought of picking a fight with you. But the same concept applies when you decide to take a friend or two with you when you go for a walk --- now engaging you requires engaging another person, which nudges the judgment of whether engaging is "worth it" in your favor. Other consequences that may loom over a potential threat --- social, legal, who knows what else --- can also affect someone's will to fight, as well as verbal judo or de-escalation that allows you to reframe yourself or the situation. And the ways in which you can deter a threat are potentially limitless. This can be very threat-specific, so doing your research and having good intelligence counts for a lot.
Deploying and readying a weapons system also seems pretty obvious at first, but this includes all the prerequisites to actually using that weapons system. To use something tucked away in your waistband you must take it out of your waistband, and spotting someone making the obvious "I am drawing" motion --- elbow out, hand to the waistband, grasping something --- means that they have not finished deploying their weapon. To fire a rifle, it must be unslung, loaded, and with a round in the chamber. If someone's weapon of choice is "their fists" or otherwise is not capable of reaching out and touching you outside of a certain range, staying outside that range will deny them the opportunity to actually use that tool against you.
Finally, the threat must make the decision to engage you. In a military context this might involve impairing C2 via comms sabotage or decap strikes so that the order to fire cannot be given or cannot reach its destination, but we're not in the military, and in all likelihood, the threats you're likely to face will make this decision for themselves instead of relying on an order. However, if you can get inside the threat's OODA loop --- a continuous process of observation, orientation, decision-making, and taking action --- you can still disrupt the processes that lead to making such a decision.
The following is incredibly dangerous and only provided as an extreme example: remember that you are not a SWAT operator, you are not protected by special law enforcement privileges, you don't have the advantage of expensive less-lethal implements or overwhelming force, and you are one person. Do not try this at home. But for example: Police SWAT teams are well-known for their ability to use speed, surprise, and violence of action to overwhelm someone perfectly willing to use lethal force against them, for instance by using less-lethal tools like flashbangs or stingers to disorient or disrupt their lethally-armed target followed by breaching the room and piling into it with guns yelling "DROP THE GUN! DO IT NOW!", all within a few seconds). In interviews with people who have survived being the target of SWAT encounters, there is a consistent theme: they report that they "didn't know what was happening until it was already over" and the zip-ties were on.
This is not merely metaphorical or rhetoric: by sufficiently impairing the ability to observe and orientate, the target is unable to even begin to make a decision, let alone act on it. An opportunity to act on this step as an individual may never come up --- I sure hope it doesn't --- but with enough creativity or sufficiently extreme situations, you may yet find a relevant use for it.
Don't be HIT
You are now in a fight, whether you want to be or not, because your attacker also gets a vote. Fists are flying, or barrels are going bang, or shit has otherwise popped off. There is, however, one thing still going for you: They have not yet touched you, and that's a requirement for them to do a violence.
Welcome to the world of fire and maneuver. Those are the two things that can keep you from being hit.
You can avoid being hit by using maneuver and staying out of the range of the weapon being used, getting off the X and into cover to prevent bullets from making their way to you unimpeded, escaping or evading, or otherwise gaining a decisive tactical advantage.
You can also avoid being hit by rendering the threat unable or unwilling to attack.
Rendering the threat unable to attack by means of force, and using maneuver to support fire, are both outside the scope of this post since they are well-covered elsewhere and generally the main focus of "self-defense with a firearm" education.
Once an attack has begun, the attacker will probably continue doing what they're doing unless something forces them to reconsider. For a threat with a firearm, one of the ways this can happen is the weapon becoming inoperable (by running dry or malfunctioning), but this cannot be relied upon. Often, being fully in cover precludes firing (since to effectively aim and fire a weapon from behind cover you must generally expose part of yourself), but when's the last time you stopped to take cover at a firing range?
The most effective way to force the attacker to take cover is to make sure that the attacker does not have a neat firing range to enjoy with a polite 180° bullets-only-go-this-way line, and to do that, you must turn it into a gunfight by returning fire. And remember, to be in a gunfight, you need to have a gun, otherwise it's just a sparkling shooting. Nothing will motivate someone to find cover like effective suppression.
Note that suppression doesn't mean "pray and spray" or "shoot real fast". It's any fire that can prevent the threat from doing what they want to do, and this effect can potentially be achieved with only a few well-timed and well-placed shots. The more accurate your fire is, the less volume you tend to need, and (unless you're carrying something much cooler than I am) volume isn't practical to employ, not to mention even more dangerous to bystanders --- you are always responsible for what your bullets hit, and you do not want to hit an unintended target because your hands and fingers are moving faster than your mind. Films and stories are very much not reality, but any depiction of a "sniper" tends to demonstrate the effectiveness and logical extreme of trading volume for accuracy.
The psychological effect incoming fire can have is not to be underestimated. I've never been personally targeted with effective small arms fire, nor taken force-on-force training (yet), but even a few stray rounds from something happening way further down the road than I was able to see had an immense effect on me, especially the first time it happened. I was stuck staring at the seemingly self-destructing concrete for three or four seconds trying to figure out what had happened, and once an additional example presented itself, I immediately dived into cover behind some stairs (injuring my forearms and a leg in the process), and waited there for what felt like half an hour before I was sure I could make a break for my apartment. It's fucking terrifying. I can only imagine what really being shot at feels like.
If the threat is taking 100% cover --- because they are afraid they will be shot if they don't --- that means they're not busy shooting at you, and this buys you time and space to maneuver, which gives you more options. This is how fire supports maneuver.
Do not suspend your "don't get hit" efforts to help a friend that did get hit. This may seem cold, heartless, or even cruel, but it's still in the best interest of you and your buddy, because if you do stop, then you will probably get hit, and anyone left on your side now has two problems. Finish the fight first.
You know how we joke that in video games, the guard AI can't figure out that "maybe approaching this pile of dead bodies and trying to wake one of them up is a bad idea because something made those bodies" and just becomes another addition to the pile? It may be less exaggerated in real life, but when it's your friend bleeding out and desperately crying for help, someone you've probably known or worked with or lived alongside for years, even professional soldiers can be tricked into trying to take care of their buddy before taking care of the threat. And that can potentially bait yet another teammate to try and rescue the rescuer-turned-casualty. Even once is a tragic result, and under pressure it can be easy to slip. That's why the Tactical Combat Casualty Care quick reference provides this helpful flowchart:
If you are in a fight (i.e you're personally being engaged) and an ally is hit, finish the fight first. Take cover and return fire (or take whatever measures are appropriate to the tactical situation) and if your buddy is able, direct them to move to cover and use their IFAK to apply self-aid. (You both remember your IFAK training, right? Patching holes is even more important than making them.) You're no use to anyone if you're dead, and setting down your gun in a gunfight is a bad idea. Don't become another case study: finish the fight first.
Don't be PENETRATED
For a hit to hurt you, it has to be an effective hit. This is more relevant for vehicles that can take a whole lot of armor. Unfortunately, you're probably not one of those, no matter how much Cars fanfic you may write.
Armoring against less-lethal attacks depends on the exact nature of the less-lethal weapon. CS and OC won't get through appropriate respiratory and eye protection, electronic control weapon probes have trouble with thick clothing and definitely solid plates, and other tools tend to have their own solutions.
You can redirect the force of blunt attacks so that the hit is not effective, even if contact is made. For example, protestors have used this to great effect against people wielding batons by holding the weapon arm back, preventing it from generating enough momentum to do any real damage. Even just falling properly and rolling with a hit will result in less transfer of kinetic energy than just tanking the hit.
You can stop edged attacks with a stab/slash vest, chainmail (butchers love the stuff, it's light and very effective protection) or other armor that resists cuts and thrusts, or even just any solid object that can't be (easily) cut or stabbed through, but this is not a desirable state of affairs.
You can, in theory, resist the effect of being hit with a bullet using ballistic armor. Very expensive ballistic armor. There are guides readily available (I think we even have a thread on body armor in TFR?), but as a poverty practitioner it's never been an option for me, so I'm only familiar with how to fight it, not how to use it.
Don't be AFFECTED
Another more-vehicle-relevant layer, and the final one. Unfortunately, engineers can't uparmor humans with redundant parts yet, so many ways of resisting being affected will not apply at the personal level.
You don't want to be taken out of the fight. You can practice taking a punch with sparring, you can practice working through OC exposure, but you can't "get better" at being stabbed or shot.
This layer is also called don't be KILLED.
Even if you are hit, it is vital that you keep fighting. As long as you can move, you can fight. If you can't fight (no weapon, no line of fire, no visible target), move to cover and apply IFAK self-aid. Contact emergency services to get trauma response rolling, since your efforts can only buy you more time, not a second chance. Stay awake and work the problem as best you can. Even if you think "it's over", being able to even have that thought means it's not over, and more lives than your own may be at stake. Even now, even in the most dire of situations, do not give up.
Never resign.