Alliance PD Shoothouse Instructor Development 3/20-3/21 2013

WayneF

Member
Alliance Police Department Special Response Team/Firearms Training Unit

Shoot House/CQB Instructor Development Course

20-21 March 2013

Alliance, OH

Instructors: Mike Jones, Joe Weyer, Kevin Brown


The shoot house, it is where our skills learned on the range can be put into use in a realistic environment. It forces a shooter to be constantly aware of their surroundings, actively seek out threats, properly use cover/concealment, communicate with teammates, maintain muzzle discipline, keep an eye on everyone’s position in the room and outside of it, and discriminate between threats, friendlies and unknowns


In short, it moves away from shooting and into the realm of fighting. It is also probably the most dangerous type of training you can do. Things can go very bad, very fast. That is what this course was meant to mitigate. It was an instructor level course on how to design, set up and run a shoot house in a safe and efficient manner.


I have trained with the Alliance PD crew several times now and I have to say that they are the perfect folks to put on this type of training. They not only train their own team and other LE agencies in the area but also see various government and military organizations come through on a regular basis. They also host courses from the likes of EAG Tactical, LMS Defense and TEES. Their house plays host from everybody from patrol officers fresh to the road to secret squirrel guys practicing hostage rescues and explosive breaching.


They bring this training experience and their own operational experience together with the sole mission of passing it along to others. It is an unique situation and they are honestly an asset to LE and .mil types that should not be understated. Thank you all for what you do.


The class participants included 11 hard shooting guys that ranged from a patrol officer, several SWAT cops from various departments and a crew of instructors from Patriot Defense Training LLC. This wide array of backgrounds, experiences and TTP’s would prove to provide a lot of learning opportunities very soon.


The course started out with a classroom portion where we discussed topics such as shoot house construction, types of houses and the pros and cons of various building materials. We then moved on to target selection. The house is not a place to skimp on targets, they need to be a reactionary target that is clearly identified when it is down or tragic mistakes can easily happen.


We then covered various TTP’s for how to perform a dynamic room entry. We discussed the pro’s and con’s of several different methods and went over how each team in attendance did things. It was put out in the beginning that the APD crew would not try to change how we did things as long as it was safe and sane.


Safety concerns such as firing around or behind another shooter and firing into other rooms or across hallways were discussed. We are constantly reminding folks to look “deep” including outside of the immediate room we are in, but how do we safely take a shot out of room, across a hall and into another if we have another team in the house? These were the kind of things we had to constantly keep in mind and work around.

We went over how to properly set up a medical plan. This includes identifying medical professionals within the class, covering who will contact EMS and how they will do it, assigning a person to flag down responding EMS and keeping a centrally located med bag and fire extinguisher that is easily accessible. Each shooter also kept a tourniquet and med supplies on their person so that care could be administered immediately.


This led us to talk about student’s capabilities. The main thing is not having any preconceived notions about their capabilities regardless of their background. It doesn’t matter if you are a boot patrol officer or a SOF guys, you are still an unknown.


Muzzle discipline, proper use of mechanical safeties are obvious but still have to be constantly reminded as very smart people tend to act very stupid when they walk into a house with a gun. Other issues such as personnel accountability were also hammered home. Keeping track of multiple people inside and outside of structure is much different than lined up nice and pretty on the square range.


That wrapped up the classroom portion and we spent the rest of the day running two man entries under the watchful eye of the APD instructors. This allowed us to discuss various TTP’s, see how they set up the house and get a feel for how to brief and debrief a run.


The next day started out with student instructors teaming up and designing their target/furniture sets. They would then administer a safety brief/med plan and start running the rest of the students through the house. Each student instructor team was able to run numerous groups of students through the house. The varied backgrounds of each team resulted in each run being different from the last.


The sets started out simple with a two room clear and progressively got more in depth until we were finally clearing the entire structure with numerous targets and shots that forced us to fire across multiple rooms and hallways while covering several danger areas at once.


I have always taken a huge amount of information away from training with the APD crew and this was no different. They kicked out a huge amount of information in two short days and with the help of the student instructors, the pace kept rocking the entire time. That allowed us to get a lot of runs in.


There is also a lot of learning just from seeing how other teams solve problems and set up their gear. This is a side benefit of training that I think a lot of people overlook.


If you are in a billet that has you operating a shoot house I can’t recommend this course enough. Be sure to check the Alliance PD website for other course offerings as well.


http://www.alliancepolice.com/...enforcement-training


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