WHY SPEED MATTERS IN CQB
In the first article, I talked about what speed is: syncing your feet to move at the fastest possible pace at which you are still able to Observe–Orient–Decide–Act correctly in a CQB environment.
In the second, I talked about what speed does to the enemy. By continually changing the circumstances before he can recognize the new pattern and react coherently to what we are doing, we make his understanding, decisions, and options obsolete.
Now I want to talk about why that matters. And ultimately, it comes down to time.
HUMAN REACTION TIME
For simplicity’s sake, I am going to divide human reaction time into quarter-second blocks. Some people are faster and some people are slower. Some of these steps overlap, some happen almost instantaneously under the right circumstances, and some may disappear completely depending upon preparation and experience.
Don’t get wrapped around the axle arguing about whether one step takes 341 milliseconds instead of 215 milliseconds. This isn’t a neuroscience paper. It is a simplified planning model that is close enough for hand grenades and government work.
For our purposes, I’m going to break reaction to a stimulus into six steps:
- Observe the stimulus.
I run into the room. - Orient—frame the stimulus within the correct mental “box.”
That’s an enemy. - Decide to act.
I should shoot him. - Begin the physical action.
Move the hand to the gun. - Present and aim the weapon sufficiently to get a hit.
- Fire.
Give each of those steps roughly a quarter-second and we have a working model of about 1.5 seconds from initial stimulus to a useful physical response.
Again, don’t become fixated on 1.5 seconds. The number isn’t the point. The point is that a human being requires some amount of time to observe something, understand what it means, decide what to do about it, and physically carry out that decision.
There are things that can shorten that process. The most important one for this discussion is preparation.
If someone knows I am about to come through the door, he doesn’t necessarily have to figure out what the noise means, determine whether I am a threat, or decide what he intends to do. Some portion of his Observe–Orient–Decide process has already occurred. He is simply waiting for the stimulus that initiates the action.
There are also things we can do that interfere with or lengthen that process. We’ll come back to that.
TOTAL ROOM REACTION TIME
Now let’s make the problem harder. What happens if Mr. Opfor has four friends in the room with him? We could take our 1.5-second planning number, multiply it by five people, and get 7.5 seconds. And that would be completely wrong. Because reaction time is concurrent, not consecutive. Mr. Opfor doesn’t get 1.5 seconds to react, followed by 1.5 seconds for his first friend, followed by another 1.5 seconds for the next guy. All five clocks started at essentially the same time. If all five became aware of my arrival at approximately the same moment, then roughly 1.5 seconds later I can potentially have five different people reaching the end of five independent Observe–Orient–Decide–Act cycles.
That is what I mean by Total Room Reaction Time.
Adding people to the room doesn’t necessarily give me more time. It gives me more simultaneous problems to solve within the same amount of time. That distinction is important. If there is one person in the room, I may have roughly 1.5 seconds before I have a serious problem. If there are five people in the room, I don’t suddenly have 7.5 seconds. I may still have roughly 1.5 seconds. I just potentially have five serious problems at the end of it. There are techniques we can use to alter those reaction times, and preparation by the enemy can shorten them considerably. Those things matter, but they aren’t the point of this discussion. The important thing is that the clock is running for everyone at the same time.
OBJECTIVE REACTION TIME
Now make the problem bigger again. The room isn’t the objective. The breach that got me into the building may have alerted people elsewhere that something is happening. Noise, communication, movement, or simply seeing other people react can begin starting clocks throughout the objective. The people in the second room aren’t necessarily waiting for me to finish dealing with the first room before they begin reacting. Their clocks may already be running.
That is what I think of as Objective Reaction Time.
And unlike the first people encountered, someone farther into the objective may have had considerably more time to make sense of what is happening. He may have moved. He may have prepared. He may have communicated. More importantly, he may have begun constructing a mental model of the attack. That means Objective Reaction Time can work for either side. If everything the enemy observes supports a single coherent picture of what is happening, time works in his favor. Each new piece of information helps him refine his orientation. He begins to understand where the problem is coming from, how it is developing, and what he believes is going to happen next.
This is where the direction of the attack becomes important. If everything the enemy observes tells him the threat is coming from one place and progressing in one understandable direction, he doesn’t need a perfect understanding of what is happening. He already has one very useful piece of orientation:
Away from the threat is probably safer than toward it.
If the assault appears to be progressing from the front of the objective toward the rear, his mental model can be incomplete and still produce a useful decision. The fight is there. It is moving toward me. Therefore, I move away from it. Speed reduces the amount of time available to make and execute that decision, but it doesn’t necessarily invalidate the decision itself. As long as the problem continues to arrive from one understandable direction, “away” remains an option. This is why creating multiple simultaneous problems at the objective level matters. When the threat no longer appears to have one understandable direction, “away” becomes much harder to define. New information may no longer refine the enemy’s orientation. It may contradict it. The direction he believed was away from the problem may contain another problem. Something he thought was behind him may suddenly matter as much as what is in front of him. The mental model that told him where the fight was, where it was going, and where he should go to get away from it no longer works. Now he has to reorient. This wasn’t simply theoretical for us.
Over the years, through hundreds, and probably thousands, of training interviews, AARs, and interrogations, the same basic point kept coming back: when the threat appeared to be coming from more than one direction, people had difficulty determining where they could move that would take them away from it. That is the conceptual importance of presenting an objective with multiple simultaneous problems.
The value isn’t simply that more things are happening at once. It is that the observations available to the enemy may no longer support a single coherent explanation of what is happening—or even give him an obvious direction in which to move. The clock continues running, but instead of using that time to improve his solution, he is spending some of it trying to determine what problem he is actually solving.
The objective is not simply to give him less time. It is to make the time he has less useful.
And that changes the purpose of speed. Speed isn’t simply preventing him from reaching safety before I reach him.
It is helping prevent him from determining where safety is.
That is where Objective Reaction Time connects directly to the second article. If I allow enough time for the enemy’s model to become accurate, he becomes increasingly capable of making useful decisions about what to do next. So I don’t merely need to move quickly.
I need to keep changing the problem.
ORIENTATION
Go back to Step 2 of our simplified reaction process:
Orient—frame the stimulus within the correct mental “box.”
This is the part that interests me most. Have you ever seen the video of two teams passing a basketball around, one team wearing black shirts and the other wearing white, where you’re instructed to count the number of passes made by the team in white? While you’re concentrating on that task, something rather unusual walks through the middle of the scene.
A gorilla.
A surprising number of people never see it. Their eyes work perfectly well. The image reaches them. The problem isn’t that the gorilla is invisible. The problem is that their attention and orientation are organized around a particular model:
White shirts. Passes. Count them.
The gorilla doesn’t fit the problem their brain is currently trying to solve. That experiment deals with selective attention, and it isn’t a perfect analogy for combat. But it illustrates something extremely important about orientation.
Seeing something and understanding what you are seeing are not the same thing.
This is where the speed we’ve been talking about throughout these articles becomes something more than physical movement. If I can continually invalidate the mental model the enemy is using to understand what is happening, every new observation requires him to reconcile what he is seeing with what he previously believed. Something doesn’t fit. The direction is wrong. The timing is wrong. What he expected to happen next didn’t happen. Something he believed was still possible no longer is. Now he has to rebuild the model. And the clock is still running while he does it. This is why the second article wasn’t really about making the enemy think slowly. It was about making his thinking expire. He may observe perfectly well. He may reason perfectly well. He may make a completely rational decision based upon the information available to him. But if the situation has changed before he can act upon that decision, he has to begin reconciling his understanding with reality again. And if I can make that happen repeatedly, something important begins to occur.
His problem is no longer simply:
What should I do?
It becomes:
What the hell is happening?
That temporary inability to orient what the senses are observing is why speed matters. Speed matters because reaction requires orientation, and orientation requires a useful model of reality. If I can change reality faster than the enemy can rebuild that model, his eyes may be telling him exactly what is happening and he still may not understand it quickly enough to make a useful decision. That is the relationship between all three parts of this series.
Our speed is limited by how quickly we can correctly Observe–Orient–Decide–Act.
Our speed changes the environment faster than the enemy can maintain an accurate understanding of it.
And that matters because his reaction clock never stops while he is trying to figure it out.