Why Scenario Training - Part I

“If you are not progressing along the true way, a slight twist in the mind can become a major twist. This must be pondered well.”

― Miyamoto Musashi, The Complete Book of Five Rings

Rut-row!

I’m going to stir up a hornet’s nest with this one…

Over the years I’ve been asked by students on numerous occasions,

“Why don’t you do more scenario training?”

This is a fair question, and they deserve a good answer or at least I need to be able to explain my reasoning why I do not do a lot of scenario training. Once again, while I understand the question what they are really referring to is training to specific situations or what I call various "What if" scenarios.

In this Blog Post I dare go to a place that for many it is almost a taboo subject to broach and that is the validity of conducting scenario training or situational training as I prefer to call it. 

For many martial arts systems situational training especially in reality-based systems is the bread and butter of these systems. In fact, there are whole systems that are built almost entirely around the teaching of various techniques for specific situations. For this post I had to give it a lot of thought because I think where the confusion as to its validity is more mental, or better yet perceptual and contextual, than physical.

“You can only fight the way you practice”

― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

Before I go any further, I need to define the differences between scenario and situational training at least in this context.

scenario

― a postulated sequence or development of events.

Now, scenario training when set up right does provide a benefit, but I believe there is a difference between effective scenario training and what generally falls into the category but is actually something else. It's a pustulate based on what we have either experienced firsthand, perceive happens, or have seen in real situations. However, when we get into a specific technique or "what to do" what I’m really talking about is what I will refer to as situational training or situation training. 

situation

― a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself

This is really what most people are doing when they train to specific threats, everything is very specific to include their relationship to the perpetrator. Where a person finds themself in a particular "situation" where you are dealing with a unique circumstance. When you engage situational training, you are generally focused on a few aspects to the exclusion of other factors. Now, all situational training at its origin begins with a hypothetical question and is scenario driven. But I need to take it further because in order to get there from here there must be training.

training

― to cause a change in behavior. The act of teaching a person or yourself a particular skill or type or behavior needed to do a particular job, activity or to prepare for something.

For the sake of this post, I define scenario training as training focused on a broader contextual event or series of hypothetical events and is more awareness focused. Whereas situational training as a specific response or technique to a very specific circumstance or context.  

So, the question, does scenario or situational training work? 

The answer is yes, but...

The Edge of Reason

“Train to the edge but not beyond it.”

―Col Robert Faucet, USMC

I remember those words as a young officer like they were yesterday. Col Faucet was a battle-hardened Vietnam Vet and at that time one of the few still in the military. He was all about training and designing training to be as realistic as possible but with the caveat of not going beyond the range of common sense and what was reasonable for us to accomplish.

I can tell you right now nobody on planet earth does more training than the US Military, basically because no one has the resources we have to do it. This is why our allies love conducting joint training with us. It’s simple, training with the US is always more fun especially when we are picking up the tab.

I will also tell you no one does more scenario or situational training than the military. Every large-scale training operation, no matter how many moving parts, no matter how complex, is scenario based with a thousand little situations presented.

For such training to relevant and effective there are a few things it needs to have:

• It needs to be as realistic as possible so that people can use to formulate and analyze to develop a variety of responses to situations.
• Designed and framed so that students recognize situations where they become familiar based on things likely to occur.
• Are interactive, requiring students to think about different potential responses or solutions.
• Offer students the chance to problem-solve and practice, at least mentally situations they might face.

While not all inclusive the above is important because the purpose of the training is to prepare students with one or more appropriate responses, making them more effective while also boosting their confidence.

I can tell you, when done right well-developed scenario or situational training allows students to not only try out multiple responses but analyze and learn from the potential repercussions especially when things go wrong. It's just as important to know why something works and equally important, why not. 

It also provides a measure of safety where people can practice and learn from their errors before making fatal mistakes in situations. Thus, the value of pressure testing a technique or a person’s skill. This doesn’t mean the training is without a measure of risk or danger it just means that common sense safeguards (i.e., training to the edge but not beyond it) are in place to ensure people are not injured at least seriously.

When it comes to situational training, we’ve all seen this sort of thing before, it basically goes like this,

A person is presented with a situation, its demonstrated, they are then taught how to deal with that situation, you’re given the reasons behind the technique, they are taught the prescribed technique and concepts behind the technique(s) or counters, why you want to do it the way they instructors say it should be done and the repercussions for doing it otherwise.

So, then you do it and after a few tries because it's set up for you to succeed... it works.

Well of course it worked, it was set up that way because the whole point was to train you in the proper steps in the beginning. It's only later if presented right the same situation is set up to make it more difficult for you to execute the technique forcing you to focus or perfecting it, or in some cases set up for it to fail so that you can also learn what the limitations of a given technique are. (I'll come back to this in a diifernt blog post because it speaks to how progressive training and the progressive desensitization training, we do in Warrior Flow works.) 

I also want to make a point here before I go on because this, I believe is also what is missing from most situational training. There is not enough emphasis on the limitations or effectiveness of any technique. A lot of factors come into play to make something work, like lots of practice, physical ability, and especially, the context one may find themselves in such a situation. If not presented right a person can either develop a false sense of confidence in the technique or never develop the proper skill or moral will to make it work. Neither one is good.

“No plan survives initial contact.”

―Carl von Clausewitz, On War

While situational training (and scenario training) has a lot of merit to it from my observation one of the major problems with most of what I see is that the situations no matter how logically contrived. The real problem is they are presented out of context because they are framed the wrong way.

I get sent stuff by people all of the time of various situations that are presented on YouTube and by now I’m sure everyone has seen the current whipping boy Dale from Detroit Urban Survival Training (D.U.S.T.) Let’s just say I could do a whole series of blog posts on this guy and a few others.

Most of the criticisms of Dale are valid but some of the stuff people say also reveals to me that they don’t know what they are talking about either and they really need to shut the Hell up. I’ve found that many of his critics while pointing out what they construe as bad even dangerous advice, often offer advice making you twice as deserving to go to Hell than themselves if you’re stupid enough to listen to them.

There was a video I saw where a guy was critical of Dale from D.U.S.T. Basically, it was a situation where the guy has the gun literally on Dale’s chest and then he demonstrates how to get the gun offline and disarms the guy. We’ve all seen this type of demo a thousand times. Then the guy who is criticizing the technique goes on to state how it’s not remotely possible because the guy can pull the trigger faster than you can do the move due to the distance/time required to move your arm to deflect the weapon offline versus the perps' ability to pull the trigger since it's a shorter distance to pull the trigger.

I understand his point, the problem is, first, how do you get in that situation in the first place which he never addresses, also he does not understand reaction time and how it really works. I’ve written all about it before so I’m not going to rehash it here. But the most important thing he overlooked, and it told me he doesn’t know shit about guns. Is it’s one thing to pull the trigger with a toy or prop gun that fires pellets, with a light trigger pull, quite another to pull the trigger especially if it is double action on a real handgun.

Dale also, to be fair, said something stupid in the video I’m describing referring to how easily you can disarm someone in order to validate the effectiveness of the technique he was teaching. He actually said,

“…the hands are not made for holding onto things very well.”

Whaaaaat!?!

I’ll say this I don’t know about you but when I do pull ups, use power tools, shoot a gun, use a knife, pump gas, or cook, I don’t use my feet. So, I don’t know what the Hell he’s referring to.

Just sayin…

I’m just going to leave that one there because it speaks for itself and there’s no way he can defend such a stupid remark.

Anyway...

Context “is” Everything

“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

Just as important as it is to know what to train you need to also know how to train within the proper “Context”. 

Context is everything when training because it frames the who, what, when, where, why, and how. It grounds the training in reality and helps students and Instructors alike train with the proper focus and prevents you from going off on unrealistic tangents and flights of fancy. Trust me I could go off as to how people frame things in training improperly and then wonder why people become confused, stagnant in their development, disillusioned, or don't learn at all. 

A concern I have with situational training is the way most of it is presented generally overlooks the obvious and from what I’ve seen, actually locks people's minds into situations that make no sense from a real-world standpoint. The problem is most training in this fashion is too situational and asks all of the wrong questions.

So, for example, when I’m asked what I would do? Or what to do if someone pulls a gun or a knife? Because these are the two most common questions I get from "many people", especially if they are untrained in anything. The first thing I ask them is,

"Well, how does that happen?

I'm not saying it doesn't happen but how does that happen?

How does someone you don't know from Adam just walk up on you, invade your space with intention, and pull a gun or knife out on you especially at close range?"

Usually, at this point, I get the Scooby Doo answer,

“Ri-don’t-row!?!”

They say this because not only do they not know, no one has ever asked them or framed the question in that fashion. All they know is from thousands of hours of entertainment and now YouTube videos. That guns and knives have mystical qualities and that you are somehow supposed to wait for someone to make a suspicious move and then either attempt some technique or figure out what to do. Trust me I could go on about the mystical fear people have of guns alone and how many instructors actually reinforce those fears.

Anyway, my purpose is not to play stump the monkey with them but to get them to think about it in context and ask themselves the right questions because if they are not thinking of the context of how these things may go down then they will not develop the necessary awareness and skill to know what to look for. This is the fundamental difference between proper scenario training versus situational training where scenario training focuses on training from a broader context. Framing a thing from a more holistic view by taking into consideration the sequence of events in its totality. 

Listen, I can give all sorts of “advice” and teach all sorts of things but if I don’t frame it in its “proper context” it really doesn’t matter what I tell them. Without framing things in "context" such advice or techniques as I’ve seen all over YouTube and Facebook is worthless.

Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why a lot of criticism of techniques are useless as well, it's because they are viewed from an unrealistic context. In other words, because they (the critics) can see the technique, and hear the explanation behind it, they then provide an answer as to how "they" would counter the technique. But the truth is once you’ve seen and examined it, at that moment you know something that 99% of attackers probably don’t know or would never think to do. Let’s face it people show up in numbers to attack people or use weapons for a reason. They don’t want to get hurt either. But these critics have a level of hindsight once seeing the technique where of course they can figure a way out of something or around something. Anyone can pick anything apart once they've seen it especially from the safety of their keyboards. 

Yet these critics don’t see the irony in that, based on the given situation, if they knew what they knew at the time the attack was going down it probably wouldn’t happen in the first place or at least the way the bad guy planned. Because the critics would know what was going to happen which in turn would cause them to respond in a different manner because their actions changed the situation and relationship between them and the attacker.

Now stay with me as I try to explain this.

This is what I see a lot of, they place themselves in the position of the bad guy then show how they would easily counter the move to counter the bad guy's attack. Once again in their own counters to the scenario or move they are doing the exact thing that they are criticizing. That is, waiting for the other guy to do something, and then applying some form of counter based on a situation of how someone may counter an attack. In other words, their "counter" to the counter is a specific situation in and of itself, is basically the same kind of thing they're criticizing, which in turn by the way, can be countered as well. Unreal…

Where once again without ever asking the most important question before they get started. I agree to a point where folks are critical of certain methods and how they may be dangerous because they are based on a number of assumptions about the fight or how attacks (e.g., robberies, car jackings, assaults, etc.)  go down. But from my observation they get a number of things wrong. Their logic is circular and just one big self-licking ice cream cone. 

They spend more time more time trying to disprove others than presenting things that are actually useful.

It’s sort of like that joke,

“Question: How many martial artists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Answer: 100. 1 to change the bulb and 99 to criticize his technique.”

These critics fall into the category of the 99%.

I can tell you another reason why people are hyper critical of situational training is they are also trying to prove their kung fu is better than another person's "kung fu." This is really what bothers people about Dale of D.US.T., he gets a lot of hits and followers on his YouTube channel and what really bothers folks are not the hits, but the positive feedback he receives. They’ll tell you that they provide their comments as a public service, but the truth is they’re just butt hurt because they’re not getting 1 million followers or whatever he has.

Other Considerations

The other thing I want to discuss as I speak out of the other side of my mouth so to speak, and I see this all of the time, is that too many martial artists who are critical of different scenarios or techniques on how to deal with something. Are critical because they know they have a level of skill to overcome a lot of this stuff. Again, anyone can pick something apart after they’ve seen what it is via the power of hindsight, an advantage you don’t have if the moment of truth arrives.

I see this a lot especially with people well trained in sportive martial arts. So, stay with me here. One advantage to their credit that people who compete in a martial art have over people who don’t is 1) they get hit or slammed with intention; 2) as a result they get immediate feedback for success or failure; and 3) due to the nature of competition they are always being pressure tested. As a result, it can create an artificial perception that what they do in competition will work in a less structured dangerous environment where there are no rules.

It's funny because I was talking with one of my instructors recently and they were talking about Doug Marcaida who's on the awesome show Forged in Fire on the History Channel, and they were telling me about some stupid comments someone made about him on the internet, and I said something along the lines, 

"Let's cut the crap here you know, and I know they're just jealous that he's doing what they would love to be doing and that is cutting stuff with blades on TV and getting paid for it."

He concurred. I also said, "But you'll notice none of these so-called experts want to challenge him to a knife fight."

He just laughed. Yeah...

Anyway...

I’m not saying they can’t make it work it is just that if the game changes they had better figure something else out and be able to make the mental leap, which is a separate ability in and of itself. Also, most people who compete in sport fighting do so because they have the physicality to do so, something the average person especially as they age just cannot do.

On the other side of the argument, you have the reality-based self-defense practitioners who argue that their techniques will work for a variety of reason. Lethality of certain techniques, no rules, etc.

The truth is both camps are wrong to some degree because they overlook the fact that once something happens outside of your experience even if you are looking at it, it’s invisible to you, something we discovered he hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you can’t see it with your mind, you can’t see it with your eyes.

A Tale of Two Divergent Mindsets

What worked

I’m’ going to discuss and offer here two divergent views of scenarios or scenario training and why I train differently than just teaching people a technique and how to deal with a bunch of what if questions.  First, I’m going to talk about what worked and then what didn't and in Part II cover a method that I've found that actually works. For it is not in the skills per se but how and what you think about in training.

Just understand that whether training for large scale combat or dealing with a situation on the street. War is war and an attack on your person, or your family is war. the point is the principles of war do not change nor do the concepts of successful scenario and situational training. 

I can tell you that nobody does more scenario training than the US military or any military for that matter. But the secret to how we develop our scenarios is we build up first individual skills, then use scenarios, then unit skill, then conduct scenarios and so on all the way up to the division and corps level. There is no ambiguity about the fact that the scenarios we set up are designed to 1) kill the enemy; 2) win the battle; and 3) make it back home. The point is our goals and objectives are clear. 

I can tell you from the work we did in the Marine Corps and with the Army with the Combat Hunter and Combat Profile training it was amazing how wrong we were in a lot of our training and how by focusing on awareness skills we were able to drop IED KIA's by 90% within a 6-month period after units deployed to theater.

It wasn't so much that we just taught them what to look for specifically, rather it was how to view things in the proper context and how to properly focus their awareness. The main thing was instead of looking for the shiny object they were taught to look at what didn't fit, what didn't look right or make sense. Once we built in the skills, we ran them through ever increasingly ambiguous scenarios and had several situations built into the scenarios designed to link the common threads of what had to happen within each scenario to hone their skills. 

Also, training on how to learn the atmospherics of the local population Marines and Soldiers learned how each tribe was a unique entity in itself so you couldn't apply the same standards to every region because much of their behavior was influenced by geography. What seemed odd to you or me, at first in the Hindu Kush once you understood the area, later would make perfect sense. But it's the same here in America. The point is instead of just training them in a bunch of specific things to look for we trained them how to think, how to get ahead of the curve in thought.

They already had the skill to shoot and move they just needed to develop the skills to do it before the bad guys were able to get the drop on them.  Most importantly we trained people how to view things in their proper context, how to see with their mind, and ask themselves the right questions. To engage in the type of introspective self-talk from the perspective of the Hunter, (a perspective sorely missing in most self-defense training) thus the program design, Combat Hunter. IED injuries and deaths literally dropped as I said 90% overnight. 

[As a side note, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing training facilities and training lanes to teach these skills. Of course, the usual suspects at the Death Star (Pentagon) scoffed at what we were doing and the cost, until our Commanding General put them in their place and asked what was the cost of a Marine or Soldiers life? He then, speaking slowly so they wouldn't get confused, broke it down for the idiots at OSD Comptroller's Office, in a language they understood. SGLI $400K, Burial cost $100K = total cost $500K per servicemen, not including recovery and transportation costs on a C17 or C5 Galaxy, which brings that figure closer to $1M per serviceman.]

What Didn’t Work

Now, as I said, nobody does more scenario training than the US military for reasons that I’ve already covered.

Yet…

When it comes to large scale training operations, we screw it up all of the time. It’s not so much that the operations themselves are flawed it is the lessons learned or the objective goals where we get it wrong. The reasons are ego, fear of failure, or in some cases people just don’t know how to run effective training nor its purpose. More often than not in the military when an operation is set up especially a large-scale operation instead of developing realistic scenarios to wargame to learn from them, adjust fire, adapt, overcome, and win. We stack the deck to ensure that the Blue Force which always represents the good guys always win.

I’ve done dozens of large-scale ops and the most memorable one was Millennium Challenge 2002 where I was part of the Joint Special Operations Cell as the Marine Ground Combat Element rep and literally. During the Op the Higher Command had to stop the operation and reset it numerous times. Why?

Simple, because they forgot the part that in real war the enemy gets a vote and when you set up your scenario under the context that the enemy is allowed total free play based on their capabilities. Well... Game on!

So, instead of letting the scenario play out, learn from it, adjust our strategy, and continue with the operation the Command decided to reset the game because we were losing. You see, the game was rigged from the start and as a result the OPFOR (opposing force) were supposed to lose. But they didn’t.

It reminds me of that scene in the movie Demolition Man where when Simon Phoenix started beating up cops, where one cop said,

“We're police officers! We're not trained to handle this kind of violence!”

The same happened on that Op, they basically got all stampy feet mad because they were losing and took their toys and went home so to speak. It was so bad that after the third reset, the Commander of the OPFOR retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who was working as a contractor quit the exercise in disgust. Oh, and he wrote a scathing report about it.

I won’t get into how he did what he did because it deals with some sensitive stuff but trust me, everything people were warning the high command about before the op started during the planning phase, was ignored and well, we got our asses handed to us. People like Micah Zenko have written about it but don’t know the full story, for the truth is "much worse."

Millennium Challenge or as we called it “Millennium Crank,” is a perfect example on a large scale of what is wrong with most scenario training. From start to finish it was framed in the wrong context, with the wrong objectives, so we got the wrong answers. Instead of establishing what the purpose was in context. The top brass chose to use it as a showcase to prove how brilliant they were especially on the day the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld came to observe to operation. The operation was screwed up and doomed to fail from the start because they forgot that 1) the enemy gets a vote; 2) no plan survives contact; 3) combat is fluid everchanging; 4) ruthlessness trumps everything; and 5) all warfare is based on deception.

In Part II, I’m going to tie this together and get into some ideas of how regardless of what you teach you can develop more effective scenarios rather than just present situations to students. Most importantly how to think in a manner where they raise their awareness to get ahead of the attack curve.  

Thanks.

LtCol Al Ridenhour, USMC (Ret)

Creator, Warrior Flow