All of the Protective Intelligence, Situational Awareness, and Tactical Capability in the World May Not Matter (Part I)

Now, before the protection practitioners and trainers out there start shouting from the rooftops far and wide that “Joe Autera said that protective intelligence, situational awareness and tactical capabilities are all meaningless and not worth spending your time and money on”, perhaps it might be helpful to step back, take a deep breath, exhale slowly and consider what the title of this article does not imply. For starters, it does not imply that protective intelligence and/or situational awareness are inconsequential or overrated in terms of the value they add to the protection paradigm or continuum. To be clear on this, there should be no doubt in any protection practitioner’s mind that protective intelligence and situational awareness are essential elements of providing effective protection. As such, if the professional protection practitioner hopes to be successful, he or she must understand the critical role each plays in identifying potential threats and preventing attacks.

The title also does not imply that it would be unwise for the practitioner to expend their time, energy and money on developing or enhancing their understanding of protective intelligence and its applications, achieving sustainable situational awareness, or enhancing their tactical capabilities. Once again, to be absolutely clear on this, every practitioner has an obligation to themselves and their Principal to seek out, and take advantage of, opportunities for professional development and to reinforce that formal development through self-directed learning with an eye towards continuous improvement.

Clearly there are some very good reasons why protective intelligence, situational awareness, and tactical skill are universally recognized as essential to providing effective protection. However, regardless of how accurate and timely your protective intelligence is, how high a level of situational awareness you are capable of achieving and sustaining, or how tactically and technically proficient you may be with firearms, edged weapons, impact weapons, or even vehicles, success or failure for the protection practitioner is most often predicated upon the decisions they make, particularly in the eyes of the Principal. While it may not be spelled out in one’s job description, the very nature of protection work implies that one must be able make sound decisions in highly stressful situations and very dynamic environments. The sort of situations and environments where mere mortals …excuse me…the average person falters, flounders or fails. Let’s just say that decision making responsibility falls under the catch all bullet point “other duties as assigned”. Hence, the reality is that all of the protective intelligence, situational awareness, and tactical capability in the world may not matter much if the practitioner doesn’t have the capacity and capability for making critical decisions under stress.

To observe this reality first hand, one needs to look no further than those moments when we find ourselves viewing a video or still images depicting a protection practitioner pummeling a reporter, aggressively manhandling an overzealous admirer or protestor, etc. Unfortunately, the knee jerk reaction among practitioners who have the luxury of formulating their opinion under far less stressful circumstances than the practitioner whose actions are being called into question is that he or she obviously:

• was poorly trained (or untrained)
• lacked situational awareness
• didn’t understand the prevailing risk/threats due to gaps in their protective intelligence
• all of the above

While by the light of day it might appear to some that the root cause of virtually every failure on the part of a protection practitioner to respond appropriately to a potential threat is glaringly obvious, the facts of the matter may be far different. Now, that is not to say that those facts alone absolve the practitioner of responsibility for failing to act appropriately, or overreacting, as the case may be. As previously mentioned, practitioners are required and expected to make sound decisions under stress.  If you don’t believe that, then believe this – protection practitioners ARE required AND expected to make sound decisions under stress. But assigning blame to the “usual suspects” (i.e. intelligence gaps, a lack of awareness, and/or sub-standard tactics) is often times pure conjecture.

However, the fact is that it is entirely possible for a practitioner who is as well trained and well informed as the next guy or gal to be ill-equipped to meet hose particular requirements and expectations. This is not conjecture, but a statement of fact based on the findings of extensive research into human performance factors performed by some of the world’s foremost experts in their respective fields; research which has been validated in studies conducted in both clinical and field settings.  Based on these findings, a strong argument can be made that the practitioner who has failed to respond appropriately to a potential threat in actuality may have done exactly what any number of practitioners with similar access to protective intelligence, similar levels of situational awareness and similar tactical capability would’ve done in that same situation. In fact, those unfortunate practitioners whose missteps or miscues have been critiqued ad nauseum may have done nothing more – or less – than expose a persistent and pervasive gap in the most common approaches to protection training.  Now, before the accusations of heresy, blasphemy, or some other affront to training orthodoxy start flying, let’s take a closer, objective, look at why that may be.

For starters, let’s presume for a moment that you are familiar with the old adage “you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training”. That raises the question of what exactly is training. To paraphrase Mark Rippetoe, the architect of the Starting Strength weight training system, training is an activity performed for the purpose of meeting a specific performance goal, and therefore is more about the process then the exercises being performed. And inasmuch as the process must generate a definable result beyond the training environment, the process must be planned to produce that result. Now, let’s presume for just a minute that the practitioner who inadvertently finds him or herself starring in the latest “Guess What My Idiot…I mean my Protector…Did Today” video clip has, like many in the profession, dedicated themselves to training in a variety of tactical skills to the point of automaticity (i.e. developing an automatic response pattern as a result of learning, repetition and practice). For arguments sake, let’s also say their training regimen was not much different from that of other practitioners and included courses in close protection tactics and techniques, defensive tactics, deploying impact weapons and firearms, as well as medical and evasive driving skills. Now let’s also presume that this practitioner “did their homework” and collected, collated, compiled and analyzed a whole slew of information and, in doing so, developed a robust intelligence package relative to the Principal, the situation and the environment. In turn, this protective intelligence enhanced their ability to identify, process, and comprehend what was happening around them in real time. In other words, they were able to achieve and maintain a high level of situational awareness built upon a foundation of relevant protective intelligence and, of course, they had honed their tactical skills to the point of automaticity. When viewed as a whole, the practitioner in this notional scenario:

• had a well developed tactical capability
• had mitigated the gaps in their intelligence
• had an appropriate level of situational awareness

Yet somehow, despite having all of the “tools” they needed right there at their disposal, he or she still managed to pummel a reporter chasing an interview, manhandle that slightly overzealous fan, or do some other such thing that garnered the attention of the media and the wrath of fellow practitioners. Or worse yet, they clearly exceeded the legal boundaries regarding the reasonable use of force, resulting in serious bodily harm or death to a third party.  In other words, all of that protective, intelligence, situational awareness and tactical capability didn’t matter. At this point, you might be asking how that could possibly be. How could someone who has applied their training in the manner in which it was intended still fall short of expectations that they maintain the capability respond appropriately to a potential threat?

At the risk of oversimplification (along with the risk of overusing the analogy of training providing us tools for our tool box), the answer is that it’s simply not enough for the practitioner to have tools that that know how to use or that they’ve practiced using to the point of automaticity. They must have the capacity and capability to decide which “tool” is most appropriate for a given situation, when it is appropriate to use a given “tool”, and what is the most effective “tool” to use in any number of different situations. The critical factor in all of this is having the capacity and capability to make the most appropriate decision. Therefore, in keeping with Rippetoe’s definition of training, the question then becomes whether or not the training process they undertook was designed to provide this critical capability. Unfortunately, decision making – decision making under stress in particular – is simply not a focal point of many protection training programs. In fact, even some forms of tactical training that encompass decision making may not provide the desired outcomes with regard to making complex decisions under stress. For instance, a “shoot, no shoot” drill, particularly if the drill is built upon the singular premise that drawing and firing your weapon is the most appropriate course of action, simply may not provide the sort of capacity and capability for decision making under stress that the practitioner may be expected to have.  Drills that are designed around that assumption tend to fall far short in terms of developing complex decision making skills due to the fact that the student is placed in a scenario where drawing their weapon and firing is, for all intents and purposes, a foregone conclusion. How many reading this have experienced firsthand standing on the firing line, strong hand hovering near a holstered weapon, just waiting for the signal or command to commence fire, all the while anticipating having to make the decision as to which potential target or targets to engage? In those types of drills it’s not a question of whether or not to draw your weapon, it’s a question of when. Nor is it a question of whether or not you’re facing an imminent threat, it’s a question of which target poses that threat. In a scenario such as this – one in which it is pre-supposed that drawing and firing is absolutely the most appropriate decision – what’s conspicuously absent is the complex decision making process that typically takes place seconds, or even fractions of seconds, before the practitioner commits to drawing their firearm, or deploying their baton, or closing the reactionary gap and engaging with their hands, or simply guiding their Principal away from a potential threat, in the operational realm.  And if the practitioners training precludes them from engaging in the full range of decision making tasks, then there is simply no way to assess their capacity and capability to make sound decisions under stress, nor can they be improved upon.

To put a finer point on the direct correlation between failing to train on decision making tasks and undesirable outcomes let’s take a look at the evolution of another training drill that a majority of practitioners may be familiar with – weapons clearing drills. Some of those reading this are undoubtedly old enough to have incessantly practiced “tap, rack, bang” drills to better prepare for clearing weapons stoppages.  The three steps to the process of clearing a weapon being tap the magazine, racking the slide and pressing the trigger. However, some other practitioners reading this will likely argue that the three steps to clearing a stoppage are “tap, rack, ready”.  Newcomers to the profession may even recognize those steps as being “tap, rack, reassess”. Obviously, the conventional wisdom with regard to clearing weapons stoppages has evolved. Why the has the last step in the process evolved from “bang”, to “ready” and now “reassess”? Because there were a number of instances where someone who had deployed a weapon only to have it malfunction cleared the weapon using the process they had trained in to the point of automaticity and, rather than reassess then evaluate and make a decision as to what the most appropriate course of action would be now that the weapon was back in battery, they simply pulled the trigger. It didn’t matter whether the threat had been eliminated or incapacitated, once the person running the gun completed step two of the process he or she did precisely what they had been trained to do and went right on to step three – BANG!  They hadn’t been trained to clear the stoppage and then make a decision as to what the best course of action to take was after getting the weapon back into battery, so they didn’t. They had been trained to make the weapon go “bang” and that’s just what they did. They didn’t rise to the occasion, they fell to the level of their training…which did not include a decision making component. So now, practitioners are taught to tap the magazine, rack the slide and bring the weapon to the ready while reassessing the situation and deciding on the appropriate course of action.

While there is no question that should the practitioner find themselves in either a “shoot/no shoot” situation or having to clear a weapon’s stoppage while engaging a potential threat, they will be required to make critical decisions while under a tremendous amount of stress, it must also be recognized that these two examples certainly aren’t the only situations or circumstances where a practitioner would be called upon to make decisions while under stress. However, an objective analysis of traditional approaches to protection training, whether that training pertains to close protection tactics and techniques, defensive tactics, evasive driving or medical response, finds that the mechanisms for training practitioners in decision making tasks under stress are non-existent in many instances. Additionally, this analysis raises the question of whether the training regimen traditionally adhered to by practitioners provides sufficient interconnectivity between the various disciplines, or if the practitioner is left to their own devices to try and figure out how one correlates to the other.  Either of these dynamics creates a significant training gap which, in turn, increases the potential that the practitioner will fail when placed in a situation that requires them to make complex decisions as to what is the most appropriate course of action available to them in addition to, or conjunction with, applying their tactical skills. In combination, they may present the practitioner with an insurmountable obstacle.  History and experience show us that it is unrealistic to expect a practitioner to perform physical tasks, such a shooting or driving well while under stress unless they have been trained to do so. Yet, despite a lack of training on how to perform complex decision making tasks while simultaneously having to overcome the kinds of task and environmental stressors that practitioners are exposed to in the operational environment, there continues to be this misconception that the practitioner will somehow be able to make appropriate decisions. As long as that misconception exists, we can expect to see more instances where practitioners make inappropriate – sometimes exceedingly inappropriate – decisions under stress.

 

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About the Author

Joseph Autera is the President & CEO of Tony Scotti’s Vehicle Dynamics Institute, one of the world’s foremost providers of highly advanced, specialized driver training program. During his 20+ year tenure in the private security profession Mr. Autera has been responsible, at various times, for planning, directing and participating in threat detection,  anti-terrorism security, and executive protection in various moderate and high risk locales, ranging from South and Central America, Europe, and both the Middle and Far East.  His diverse experience also includes serving as the Director of Global Security for a multinational technology concern, as the Vice President of Global Security Services for one of the world’s leading providers of global risk mitigation and international crisis management services, and as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.