Feb.27.2009
by Ed Beakley
II. Training Decision Makers to the ‘Ace’ Level [Part 1]
Operational Thread Premise:
There are two critical elements missing from most current HLS/HLD training programs. First is the notion of dedicated opposing force and second, the need to include non-scripted decision making situations. Most training events and drills are based on availability of resources – both human and physical - necessary for the management of, or the consequences of, a specific disaster type. As stated previously, these mostly pre-scripted drills fail to address crisis development, eliminate the Observation and Orientation stages of the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) Loop by pre-determining their characteristics, thus eliminating uncertainty, and therefore, bypassing the essential element of critical command thinking.
The result: Level of readiness defined as instantaneous ability to respond to a suddenly arising major crisis based on locally available, un-prepositioned and un-mobilized countermeasure resources is either unchanged or decreased due to these flaws built into current philosophy of drills. Therefore, this approach reduces or negates achievement of performance that our technical superiority promises.
Based on reports like that on Mumbai and Secretary Napolitano’s concerns, is there a need and a receptive ear for a Scream of Eagles II from the first responder community?
Resolution suggests a TOPGUN or “combat training center” type approach for homeland security and defense education, training, and exercises.
If the eagle screams were to be answered, then development of an HLS/HLD “TOPGUN” will require answering these Questions?
- Can the “train to the ace level” concept behind Top Gun, Red Flag, National Training Center at Ft Irwin, i.e. the combat training center or “CTC” concept be applied to hyper complex crisis, worst case disaster command control learning?
- Would “first mission” exposure for operational level decision makers provide value added? (consideration that given funding constraints, daily normal real world law enforcement, fire response, emergency management, and job rotation, there may be only one opportunity in a three year cycle to expose the candidates. Can one exposure make a difference? What would be the impact of dynamic simulation interjected into the classroom?
- What needs to be included in pre-exercise classroom and simulated command problems to make the learning and training effective? In particular, by who and how are cognitive elements and related decision making in crisis taught?
- What kind of research needs to be done in this area?
Discussion now open. Please reply to projectwhitehorseatroadrunnerdotcom.
Refs:
RC#30 TOPOFF – Should Eagles Scream?
Scream of Eagles – Happy Birthday TOPGUN
RC#29 National Security Exercises Need Change; TOPOFF meet TOPGUN – Maybe
JEB – 24 Feb, 2009
[For Part 2 see: II. [Part 2] Scenarios – To the ‘Ace’ Level]
16 Responses to “II. Training Decision Makers to the ‘Ace’ Level [Part 1]”
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Kick-off e-mail message for “train to ‘Ace’ level” dialogue
Ranger’s comment seem a good “kick-off” line. For low-probability-high-impact disasters it represents – good as it may be- consideration that what we have is certainly necessary but not sufficient to being best as possible for a truly resilient community. Or as John Giduck over at Archangel said – “our worst has got to be better than their best.” And it’s tough plowing to get one up on “a Katrina.”
The operational thread is defined here: http://blog.projectwhitehorse.com/the-intersection/training-decision-makers-to-the-ace-level/
In this context consider the Combat Training Center (CTC) model as follows:
1. Physical places where both classroom and field learning takes place. It includes OPFOR, 360 peer review, metrics, and expectation of failure as necessary in learning
2. Hybrid lash-ups of smaller exercises, tabletops, simulation (whatever you can use) to create a dynamic “parallel learning” world for decision makers. I.e., they play as the play evolves. Included are major objectives for decision makers at all levels, leveraging but not screwing the pooch for the tactical events. Though people’s bad decisions should reflect up and down. Remember failure is learning element. The play shouldn’t follow a scripted routine AND most certainly the OODA side is play. Inclusive of #1 elements
3. Mobile or virtual CTC’s – again with #1 and #2 elements
Basic rules: SMEAC
1. The web post and the above are guidelines. Based on your experience say what you need to.
2. Given this e-mail, I now ask for your ideas on expanding the envelop for decision maker learning in the face of CAT 5s
3. Please “reply to all” as basic approach. Certainly you can contact me as necessary, but we want all to see – Medici Effect no?
a. Length: paragraph to whatever, just remember you want folks to read and comment
b. If you want to attach PPT, PDF, Word Docs of any length, do so. I will work with how to present. Already have several excellent things from preliminary discussions
4. Reply at will to others comments. It may get messy.
5. If tangled, I’ll moderate. When we run out of ideas and comments, I’ll put together as “comments” under the Thread
For those who didn’t follow the Resilient Community – Actionable Intelligence evolution, see RC#25 Resilient Communities and Actionable Intelligence (Part 1) example of how this will eventually get presented.
That’s it. Fight’s on AND THANKS FOR YOUR WILLINGNESS TO “PLAY”
[PWH Note: Almost immediately after initial “send,” received a reply from Rick Brown, co-author of America’s Army, focused on “having done CTC” and hard won lessons learned that should be applied as we think through ToL implications for resilient communities. (Includes the original and two follow-ups)]
Suggest might look at the CTC rationale in Chap 6 America’s Army – that applies interagency. Whatever the bottom line is that you are preparing folks to follow up locally bottom up. End state from mine the other day: ToL is most effective when the teams cross boundaries – of organization, of function, of level, of profession and of culture.
Bottom up it thrives on action-enabling workarounds and rolodexes plus shared human desires not to be surprised,
• if on top to know ground truth
• if on the bottom to know what is coming (including re disaster support etc ,etc)
All informally as the lubricant to accelerate formal processes. The intensive sharing right left up down (plus a how to guide) develops the team shared trust, shared purpose, shared competence that all stimulate confidence – as iterations occur, confidence multiplies and high performance is generated and sustained ACROSS EVERY BOUNDARY selected starting locally. \
Then use the various exercises to expand the teams.
RESIST THE URGE “TO ORGANIZE” TOP DOWN!!!!
Add #1: A strong suite of U.S. is ” Yankee Initiative”. Tell someone what and how in micro detail and most will bristle. Almost instantly come up with a better way and usually right because they know the local situation – that can only be assumed from on high – who will with absolute certainty try to mold the local situation to fit the looking down model
Recipe for disaster in most any situation.
Rolodex and workarounds are “as American as apple pie”. Let them go within educated/trained ground rules and Joe/Jill Sixpack leaders will form ToL
Precinct supported by municipality supported by state supported by fed – i.e., support down NOT up!
Army CTC model built to reinforce bottom up – local initiative, good folks teaming together to shared purpose, with shared trust, shared competence etc – NOT top down.
As they work together they gain confidence – high performance is accelerated.
Add #2: One other observation. Key to below(PWH note previous e-mails) is common doctrine, tasks conditions standards so the various members of the various teams share specific competencies. Without that, below quite difficult – certainly not high performing leader teams.
This is a public agency responder/trainer opinion (mine only) that concurs with Rick Brown’s posting.
Question for the group by what a “decision maker” is in terms of our discussions. Is this the first responder who needs to recognize a WMD/CBRNE incident and make essential decisions to save lives and obtain resources? Is it those field level supervisors/managers who will run events for the first hour to the first day? Is it the agency heads in EMS, Law and Fire, who will direct policy level actions for Incident Commanders to follow? Is it the elected officials who will create public policy through rule making of funding? Is it the State and Federal managers who will come to give support to locals?
My belief is that all of them are decision makers who play a role in managing a large event. They all play roles in preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery. If I am right, then training to the “Ace” level needs to not only reach the higher level decision maker, but also needs to be in the equation of the responders and supervisors who will be in the fight early. I equate them with the pilots of individual aircraft.
A set of training programs would be needed to create Ace decision makers at each level and that they align. Training such as this would accomplish part of what is needed. It accomplishes building a tiered response capability, but it does not address a larger problem in my opinion. We each create programs to train leaders in our own discipline, but we are poor at training them to work well with other disciplines when it comes to handling out of the ordinary incidents. There may be policy level interactions between professions, but this is missing to a various extent across the country. How many law enforcement agencies train with fire or EMS from the responder level to the management level.
If they do train, do they ever do it as a surprise event. Most I have seen are scripted so that each profession will not be embarrassed. Large scale exercises test a few folks and often do not have a level of realistic appraisal to them.
My conclusion is that we have a far to go and the cost will be high, which means the focus should be risk and capabilities based( as I hear will be the focus of future DHS grant funding). The true measure of what response agencies can do if we are surprised with an incident remains to be seen as it is rare to find an agency that evaluates with surprise exercises beyond the field level and almost none do it inter-agency or inter-profession.
The intersections to cross here are vertical from responder to manager/elected official, local to state to federal as well as horizontal between disciplines and agencies within those disciplines.
There is also the funding intersection that most of us have not located
on our maps yet.
The challenge will be to do all this with power and comm grids knocked out or greatly limited…need to have exercise that focus on “do-without-PPTs” and reduced techno tools and comms…my kids do not know how to communicate without IM and FaceBook….never heard of couriers and messengers. No photo copiers/scanners….anyone remember carbon paper….no computers….anyone have a manual typewriter or note pad…………….
It can all be done, using the existing facilities and synthetic environments all linked together by high speed connections and some imaging wizardry plus a few high resolution, wall to wall screens. It has been done, with people from the US, Italy, and France addressing issues of a major disaster (liquefied phosgene spill). A pilot that went quite well, whose continuation and expansion has been stopped for reasons of political EU correctness (it will NEVER happen HERE!). As you can see, top level people were involved, 1RPs, pre-hosp/in hosp medical personnel, and it was delightfully messy, with a glorious range of errors from the most stupid to the most unexpected, with people at some sights throwing cups of coffee at each other or telling others to go and do physiologically difficult acts to themselves.
It revealed glaring discrepancies in following seemingly unified approaches, amazing lack of effort coordination, and rapid ego-mushrooming combined with quite staggering lack of the ability to coordinate large scale effort. In short – it boiled down to the lack of leadership, with 1st echelon people doing well within the arena in which they were professionally trained (e.g., police, paramedics, etc.), and rapidly disintegrating leadership at progressively higher levels. It went for 4 hrs, since we were limited by technology (synchronization shift) which is not a problem today, and also money. We had no chance of introducing physical stress that would affect all people involved, and then throw in a few more road-blocks.
The preparation of the entire event took 2.5 months, and it has been done 6 (SIX) years ago. With all people, all boxes, all sites, and all coffee, doughnuts, wine (French) and whatever the Italians had (looked like pizza – a lot of cooked tomatoes, at any rate) and the cigarettes at out end (yes, we were terribly incorrect here), the total cost came up to about 250 – 300 thousand, paid by MedSMART. We tried to present it to our “law makers” and the rest of DC crowd receiving a nice pat on the head, a boot in the seat of the pants, and a slam of the door once we were on the undisturbing side of it.
In essence we proved that TOPOFF (which they were preparing then, as it turned out) did not need to cost 25 million, that even more far reaching conclusions could be reached much faster, and that we lived (and live) in the environment of lamentations accompanied by self-glorification and chased by occasional burp of remorse with VERY little done to address the situation. In the parallel world of the military, such approach would result in casualties and vast number of combat unrelated serious accidents. The problem would be addressed ruthlessly and decisively – but the stakes are different there. In the civilian world a lot of time is now spent on the “federal, state, local, tribal, territorial” mantra and…?
In summary, it doesn’t take much effort, money, or philosophy – it requires ingenuity, a certain degree of uniformity, and definitively a lot of will to address the situation rather than present pretty pictures at conferences (guilty here myself) and thunder from the soap box on the “problems we face” (equally guilty here, and deserving to be shot for the crap professed. I was not aware of ToL then, though.)
[Following sent by PWH related to complex medical problems and ICS as discussion point]
My thought on introducing “medical stuff” isbased on involvement with exercises in which “medical” is only introduced by way of mulage, ID’ing problem, and then transport of patients. In contrast to a few, very few, briefings I’ve seen noting how unique certain trauma issues of disasters (say children in the equation) can be very sensitive to decision, action, and need therefore, for very specialized medical advice for incident command on how to handle. What routinely occurs is then perfect example of “scripting out the OODA portion” and jumping right to “let’s exercise the ambulance and airplane guys.” Right personnel are never even brought into ICS, game moves on time even if in reality, action here could drastically effect overall decision making and other actions by other units – Fire, LE
Neither medical personnel nor incident commanders learn anything, no?
How to introduce in no holds barred “CTC” event?
Reply from Dag von Lubitz
Medical stuff and its participation depends on the nature of what happens. The approach would be different when bringing in victims of hypothermia after a ship disaster or being marooned on the blizzard stricken road, to one you’d use in a chemical spill, or release of a bio-contagion. Or explosion. Etc.
We all think that in the case of bioterrorism all will heroically go to their pots and fight till the bug kills them, while several studies show the likelihood of something completely different taking place – the “heroes” running away as fast their legs can carry them. Understandably, mind…How do you train for what one of my colleagues once called “acceptable cowardice”? Unless facing the damnation, you will never really know what your response will be (seen often in the military where people big and sturdy cower in the corner while supposed wimps do the acts of manly valor).
In trauma, your job in the field is to stop further damage as best you can, and get the patient out as fast you can. Crude, crass, often brutal and it works. 1st echelon is concerned with nothing else but making sure that what heads for the plastic bag is put together, can breathe, the ticker is galloping steadily, and the pressure in the tubing is acceptably stable and reasonably high. You remove odd looking bits, you push the misplaced ones back in place, you stitch the holes, put a drainage tube here and there, and get the lad off to gentler hands who will, in time and at the expense of a lot of pain and suffering by the owner of the previously badly mangled hull, restore it all to the near pristine (and in near future to a fully pristine) glory.
In short it is all a very dynamic combination and interaction of professional training (skills essentially) combined with professionalism in asset employment, logistics, and the presence of mind. The operational word is “consequence management.”
Reply From GI Wilson
Dag, your excellent description leads me to suggest it must be called “consequence leadership” vs. consequence management ! I think you imply it is all about the art-of-doing.
From Dag
GI, In the end isn’t it what it is all about? We have probably the world’s best responders, we have the world’s best “company and regiment” level commanders, and we have a completely messed up top in DC/States that is the source of the problem. People are not stupid, but ended up being completely stupefied by what is being thrown at them: let them, instead, have the opportunity to create, to invent, and first of all – to think again, and we will have these problems addressed rapidly. We are all on the same side, for cryin’ out loud!
Reply from Ranger Dorn
Dag, while I cannot begin to guess what responders would do in a bio/pandemic, there is some documentation of responders staying at their posts in disasters. The last two large California earthquakes had the bulk of agency personnel staying on the job. This was noted in discussions with personnel from the impacted agencies as well as info from multiple CISM debriefs. Responders and families had high levels of stress both during the events and afterwards.
Another indicator of responders intent, relates to smallpox. A number of response agencies received requests for families to be inoculated along with the responders so that they could remain at their posts. There were some exceptions to this devotion during the hurricanes, but the folks I worked with from local agencies had been on duty for weeks and not seen home. My gut tells me that most will remain at their posts. I hope we do not have to test my theory.
From Dag
Ranger,
I did not say that all will run. Many will – for sure. If it was about them alone, they’d not. But if you come home and infect your kid, well…There is nothing more frightening than a lethal disease, where the sight of first symptoms is also the death warrant – and while chances are you may not get it, imagination begins to play its own game. When I had microbiology course I opened all doors with my elbows, since there were LETHAL GERMS on door handles. I had at least two colleagues who never got over the phobia, had to abandon their studies. Similar considerations apply here, and the problem of “Katrina desertions” comes into such category: not fear for personal safety but fear for the fate of the closest family, elderly maybe even helpless parents, newborn child, pregnant wife, etc. The condemnation of those people comes too readily – sort of British cavalier “lack of moral fiber” approach – the methods to address the issues that have massive impact on force morale essentially zero. We are all human, with human emotions, etc.
We have historic documentation of pandemic impact on personnel, but the spunk of the personnel changed. Another example: Forsmann who made the first catheterization of human heart made it himself, on himself, then with the blasted thing sitting in his atrium galloped three flights of stairs up, and made his own X-ray. Today, you would have reams of papers to be signed, then five committees making the decision, then the decision changed because some or another protection group protested (it is still YOU who is to be the guinea pig, so you’d think you decide the fate of your own heart – not so simply, me cutie…). And then, most likely it would not be you, since we are not molded with that kind of manly spunk anymore, but with a lot of penguin reflexes (push the other bastard into the ocean. If he gets eaten – we wait. If not, we push another sod in, and if HE swims, we all go in). Hence, we’d find a “human volunteer” (either a homeless or a half-starved student), and do it all “humanely.”
Judging responses based largely on psychology on historical precedence is dangerous, because the psyche of the past generation was formed by different reality, required a different degree of mental resilience to severe assault, and responded differently. We do not have “mass casualty” environments like in WW1 for example, and I doubt if ANY soldier today would cold bloodedly go right into the face of a machine gun “because that was the thing to do, and when the whistle blew, you just went over the parapet.” I can tell you one thing for sure: had I been given an order like that, I’d be the first to show the coolest blood ever, and run in the opposite direction as fast as my legs would revolve. At least I hope I’d have THAT much presence of mind, instead of freezing in terror right there.
ALCON,
I’ve been monitoring this thread for the last few days. There is a lot at stake here, at many levels.
I will raise a few issues and make a few suggestions based on my experience and perspective. Essentially, I have spent the last 15 years seeking to move the ball forward regarding decision-support and operations for catastrophic terrorism and natural disasters in a major metropolitan region. This has included both intelligence and operations as an operator, analyst, fisrt line supervisor (sergeant) and middle manager (lieutenant). It also includes training personnel at all levels of multiple organizations, and even running a multidisciplinary, interagency task force.
I think we need to educate, train, and mentor personnel at all levels (tactical, operational, and strategic) to perform crises decision-making in a complex environment against a range of threats.
This will require both individual and team preparation (education, training, mentoring), as well as cross-training in specialties other than ones own (i.e., intelligence specialists in operations and operations folks in intelligence, etc.) It will also require training across disciplines (I have trained cops, fire, hazmat, public health and EMS personnel to work in integrated intelligence analysis and mission-planning teams. It becomes clear when doing so that “teams” of leaders–and analysts–are needed to meet the complexity and uncertainty found in “Cat 5″ events.).
These efforts have to start small, and be amplified with iterative evolutions of increasing complexity. They also need to be tested with drills and exercises (also of varying degrees of iterative complexity, with new functions, roles, and players added.)
Once the team and/or individual is proficient, they need to be challenged at the next level of complexity, as well as in interaction with the other echelons of play. I also believe that playing against a “red team” and “playing with other echelons in cooperative and competitive manuver helps hone skills. Finally, I belive the team has to be challenged with performance decrements (lost, injured, and dead (simulated at least in training and exercises) team members, degraded coms, austere conditions, irate commanders, executives, and politicians, etc. To be able to meet the real challenges we are preparing them for.
The days of a “gentleman’s course” must be over (sadly they are not, especially above a certain rank or rate). My preference is to prepre my team to operate to perform mission critical tasks with a third of optimal capacity.
this preparation should prepare personnel to work a position one up and one down from their normal tasking.
This should also include evolutions at home and in expeditionary settings–I’ve learned much deployed or seconded to other agencies and jurisdictions. (Doing an IPB/IPO–intel preparation of the battlespace or intel preperation for operations–work up or COA–course of action–analysis in another city opens one’s eyes!)
I believe these are essntial elements of preparing for the next attack (or campaign) or catastrophic event. This will require meta-leadership (and meta-analysis). I hope we can stimulate the will to do so, and inspire or subordinate leaders (not to mention our bosses) to embrace these challenges!
John, good points about the efforts to move ahead. I remember training with you and a CST at Dugway, UT, in a combination of field exercises and live agent handling. We had the bare bones of responder and technical experts as well as line supervisors there, but higher levels were not involved although the incidents had strategic implications.
How do we get a level of in depth training like this to meet with the needs of training higher level officials who will take charge? Our responders can have all the skills in the world, but be wasted if those in charge do not know what is available or how they may be utilized. I believe we have more capabilities since 9-11 as responders, but I am not sure the
response system is complete.
Ranger,
I well remember that week-long training evolution. Good stuff!
I fear the upper echelons eschew the unfamiliar. They don’t want to appear inept in front of their troops. While I appreciate that inclination, leadership demands moving beyond it. I don’t think bottom-up pleas will work–they will be ignored. Nor is it likely top-down mandates will work–they will be ignored or more likey the task will be delegated (probably certain).
The answer then lies in peer-mandate. This is what happened in the UK. ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) served as the catalyst for getting senior police prepared for complex command at Gold (strategic), Silver (operational), and Bronze (tactical) levels.
The senior UK police I have worked with are light years ahead of their US counterparts at all levels of critical incident command. In part this is due to sustained operational experience (historically the IRA and now AQ affiliates), but in large measure it is due to professional norms. We must develop those here! We need a peer-proponent to advocate senior command education, training, and mentorship. This will include command colleges, personnel exchanges with military and police worldwide, and exchanges between police and fire (at a minimum).
I’m sure the next (few) 9-11 scale events will drive this, but a “peer-proponent” involved in the IACP, IAFC, NSA, or Major City Chiefs would work better!
Reply from Dag von Lubitz
I am sure you may recall Gen. Brown’s remark about “initial command support.” Critical. Without that bottom up initiatives fail. Mandated initiatives – we have seen their fate too, so there is no need to discuss. Peer initiative that you mention is, essentially, “command support” since ACPO has such role in so many different ways. Mind you, UK situation is facilitated by vastly lesser fragmentation and significantly higher “jointness.” Much of their thought re training derives from the armed forces with which they cooperate very closely (the “Irish tradition”) and with which many policemen are affiliated through reserve component, territorials service, etc. Our own environment would greatly benefit from such influences but, unfortunately, forever finer granularity of the field is diligently en- and reinforced by the political top echelons. Situation is not hopeless, and all may change pretty soon.
Who are the decision makers?
I thought that we were discussing tactical command…but the discussion evolved into wider issues….so my question is in the context of Ed’s thread about the CTC and decision-making training….
So again – as far as our discussion goes – what are we referring to? It seems to me, by inference that everybody is speaking from the techno-tactical and operational level….most insights presented so far seem to be presented from that perspective….is that this our focus?
From 26 yrs of involvement at both these major “floors” of the building – I can tell you that they are VERY different in their perspectives and processes….almost “parallel Monads” I find that almost all tactical operatives have selective knowledge or understanding of the strategic level….
8 years ago I gave a “concept brief” in DC about mind-science applications for decision making in crisis that seems to interface with the issues brought up so far. I called it “Battlefield ‘Mind’”.
Summarizing the relevant non-neuro parts, please allow me to open another “can of worms.” consider this:
As boring as these points are – I have found, time and again that their mundane and trivial nature trumps even the most brilliant of operational insights. I cant begin to describe the web of self-promoting infighting that stands in the way of good decision-making. Given these traumas I have taught myself to shy away from Army War College thesis Style analysis and statements that sound great but are meaningless unless
translated into real-world (underscore “real”) environment.
I believe that although we have spent some time discussing stress inoculation, and that is a good thing, we still do not know for sure how responders, especially newbies, will react when they see the real thing or something that they have not seen before. This is in fact the reason that we want to make the training as real as possible.
My experience is in restrictive living environments violent mentally ill and challenged folks, from time to time we have issues, that come from their rights to be in the community. We support them with staffing and support while they are out and about. On bad days entire neighborhoods have been in an uproar, with police involvement, staff injuries and frightened neighbors. I train my staff for everything I have seen, but the most important training is to get them to work with the adrenaline rather than against it when crises arise. We have several techniques to do this, but there is little time to go into this now and the training does produce solid results, but we can always do better.
I think most would agree with Ranger’s earlier sentiment. “I cannot begin to guess what first responders would do in the face of a
bio/pandemic…”
Dag makes a realistic point concerning human nature with the following statements. “Judging responses based largely on psychology on historical precedence is dangerous, because the psyche of the past generation was formed by different reality, required a different degree of mental resilience to severe assault, and responded differently. We do not have “mass casualty” environments like in WW1 for example, and I doubt if ANY soldier today would cold bloodedly go right into the face of a machine gun…..”
For me personally the biggest fear in my field is not being assaulted. My biggest fear is a false accusation that would cost me my job and reputation if I cannot prove that something did not happen. So I insulate myself from this by always having someone else present. For others it is contracting some type of blood borne disease from a client. Yet many folks don’t even know what their fear is until the confront it, or they are deluded about their degree of courage. In short what one man fears another may dismiss. There is also the issue of culture, in my immediate living environment, gun shots in surburbia would be shocking, yet in my early years, they were expected.
One point that we have to remember as well is that we have people who are hardened, irreverent, itching for a fight, yearning to cause massive casualties and carried along by virulent ideas of revolt against whatever. In my field the Virginia tech massacre was an example of such madness and spillover. He was the poster boy for Health & Welfare’s current state.
Just one small point to expand on and may be important to some….combat is stressful, exhaustive, and bone chilling (nothing more awaking than facing another human who is out to kill YOU at all costs), I have found at times my training for a large part was actually harder than combat in many respects….point is training can be harder than the real thing at times
…..another thing I used to train ‘rookies’ going into combat for the time was firefighting training and all live fire ranges ….Navy shipboard firefighter training is particularly good for you train with real fire not blanks or laser tag. Makes a big difference when you take rounds the first time. Lastly, each day in combat is different….some days personnel are incredibly brave blazing away then the next day the very same personnel never fire a round and are slow to act.
Colonel – fantastic points….. and from personal experience – painfully realistic (you dont want to ask).
Now lets take this cold truth to the next level – imagine the same warrior mental dynamics in action when an attack is ongoing (not consequence phase yet) ON DOMESTIC SOIL….so that we are handling a Mumbai type of event near our homes…not Falujah….changes a lot of things…right?
This has been the nub of the issue for me since the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici theatre started in the Nineties.
Are we training to that mindset? Hearing people talking about a deliberate attack as nother “criminal” or “HAZMAT” incident seems to indicate otherwise, in spite of all the money spent on sensitizing folks to the harsh reality.
Fadi,
Is there a possibility that we have desensitized? The truth of demanding training has been discovered (as so much else in this realm) by the Germans nearly 150 years ago. Still, as GI points out, there is a difference between the laser light “tagging one” and the dull thump felt when the real thing strikes you, and then…This is the moment when the movie script ends.
Can you train for that, and the mind numbing sensation and the rattling knees when you go to action? Once in, all changes, but the before and the thereafter are the “twisters” and maybe the reason why performance changes so unpredictably. Lots of writing about it, nothing conveys the reality, and all becomes either a nauseating pulp or academic drivel. Naval firefighting as introduction to true manliness?? Irrepressible stench of burning oil, searing heat, and battling the hose. The reality of it? Far worse. And the stench too. Stays with one forever.
In the end – HOW to prepare/train for the reality of real life (I think, one can not)?
Who does Mumbai if it happens at home? Law enforcement? Largely unable. Special forces a la SAS in London? By the time all political moves to allow for that will have taken place, the place will burn to the ground. Then WHO? The stark reality of it all is the avoidance of realities and “unpleasantness” at the expense of a tragedy when the former arrive in one form or another. Who to blame for it. Politicians are an easy and habitual target, but they, in turn respond to their constituencies. Constituencies? Their main problem right now is how to retain their employment and keep roof over the head? Responders? They operate largely as they are told by copious, at times conflicting, reams of paper thrown at them from the elusive “above.”
Shall action be taken in form of a flank attack, devising a specific alternative through interaction of the concerned “at the bottom”, then pushed up? Might be among the most powerful career-stoppers ever? Seek allies outside? The ranks are too closed and too unwilling to allow outsiders get the real glimpse of what happens. SO WHAT THE BLAZES DO WE DO? We can’t sit on our hands and wait. As GI said, too important,
Dag,
You are touching upon my core efforts and I have a lot to say…but I will only make one comment that needs to be said…
“The stark reality of it all is the avoidance of realities and ‘unpleasantness’ at the expense of a tragedy when the former arrive in one form or another.”
FE – respectfully, agency leaders don’t “avoid realities” but rather have a different set of weighting rules for what is a problem and what is not…they honestly and with full integrity believe that what their agencies can do today is quite sufficient and people like you and I are barking up the wrong tree….
The reason being that our emergency services ARE very effective in handling familiar emergencies for the most part…and they should be, especially given the fact that the cost us 4:1 in comparison to the second most expensive tier systems (Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, Japan etc.)….
I have lectured about the normal heuristics underlying this approach….So I have no criticisms against these follks…they are using the same flawed brain machine that you and I use and just like them I often reach equally flawed conclusions…
I am very optimistic, though…for tangible reasons that belong in another post.