I should probably mention that I've been running a wargaming exercise at Grim's Hall for a few days now. Tonight is 'last call' before I write up the lessons learned. We've had policemen and soldiers, including Special Forces and Marines trained in CQB, a Federal Air Marshal, gentlemen with completed infantry careers who then served in law enforcement, and at least one law professor drop into the discussion.

If you'd like to read through the discussion and contribute, AL, you're welcome. So is anyone else with military, law enforcement, or other allied experience.

BTW, the first major point of agreement for everyone was the utility of training exercises, including thought exercises. An airman said it best:

I was what's called a "Weapons Controller/Weapons Director" in the USAF. That's a variant on air traffic control, but over the battlespace, where what/whom/when to engage matters (friendly fire, to plagiarize, isn't). We had the usual air traffic control safety responsibilities, along with weapons ROE and knowing what should be used in which situation, as well as keeping the furball straight.

We practiced - thought drills - constantly. If you have this inflight emergency here, how do you get the plane and pilot home? If you have this tactical situation, how/whom do you engage?

It works. The first inflight emergency I had - and every subsequent one - I did exactly what the checklist said. When a terrorist bomb went off at HQ (1981 - it isn't a new phenomenon), we did what we knew had to be done and then looked out for ourselves. You do what you've practiced, even only mentally, if indeed you've practiced instead of idly wondering once in a while.

So, FWIW, there's a lot of expert opinion on the side of your point.

I also agree with the other part of your point, which is that this isn't about the victims. It's no one's fault that they weren't trained to deal with this kind of problem. It's just something we need to be thinking about. That was a clear parameter of the exercise -- not to say what should have been done on that day, but rather, to discuss two specific scenarios and what should be done in those two types of circumstances.

Armed Liberal, thank you for this post, A Failure of Doctrine, Not of People, which I think is perfect.

For myself, I believe that the right response to evil triumphant, to tragedy, to death, should be positive, not negative. The Jewish prayer, the Shama, is exactly right. Dwelling on the self-expressions of the evil one at Virginia Tech is exactly wrong.

I posted what I felt I had to say on positive doctrine and the remembrance and imitation of heroes such as Liviu Librescu. I'm not planning to pursue the topic further.

For a while, I think Winds of Change should encourage dog-blogging, cat-blogging, beautiful sunrises, petty items of good news and anything else people can come up with, regardless of if this would normally be seen as good enough for Winds of Change.

Something else worthy of consideration is that we are not limited to one doctrine for all situations.

Part of our mental rehearsal process should be to decide which doctrine to apply to the current problem.

Sometimes sitting quietly IS the best thing to do. Other times violent resistance is the best thing.

Grim - I saw it, and would love to do something I I get a break this afternoon. But I really want to shut down blogging on this here at Winds for a few days.

Would you take a guest post?

A.L.

Are you asking me to post on the subject here, or to post on some other subject (ala "shutting down the topic")? I can do either, and will be happy to respect your wishes either way.

I meant to say: Kaddish (link)

1. (worse) old doctrine > (better) new doctrine
2. there's a certain amount of crime that needs to be tolerated > the broken windows theory of law enforcement
3. slavery is a fact of life > liberty is a God given right for every human being
4. peasants should be kept disarmed and helpless > humans are not peasants and have every right to be as armed as the nobility
5. commerce is a zero-sum game with winners and losers, essentially the same as piracy or banditry > industry and commerce is the engine of improvement in the human condition

1. children take care of their parents when they are aged and can no longer work > the government takes parents' money when the need is greatest and gives it back years later at a terrible rate of interest
2. large families survive better than small ones > large families are a peculiar luxury and small families with no more than one or two children are normal
3. uprisings at taxation of 1 or 2% of income > acceptance of 30% or greater rates of taxation across the board
4. growing economy fed by population growth from having children ==> growing economy fed by importing workers and letting them refuse to assimilate.

LOL - Grim - I'm asking if I can post a scenario response over at your place...if I can get one done.

A.L.

Sorry, AL. I'd be honored to have you.

I had thought you were asking me to "take" one of the posts David Blue was suggesting, which were in accord with his suggestion (and yours) that we change the subject here for a few days. Which I would also be happy to do... I even have some puppy pictures, by coincidence.

Dog-blogging = good! Let's have those puppy pictures, Grim. :)

All right. Er, if someone will kindly tell me how to post pictures in Movable Type. :)

'upload files' on the lefthand menu...

...which service were you in again?? (ducking)

A.L.

Heh. Last MilBlogs conference, I had to take the Military.com boys to task because they kept sending me advertisement emails with the following subject line:

"Special education benefits for Marines!"

There is no single doctrine that I am aware of that can account for all the myriad of different ways the situation in Virginia might have played itself out. Like a lot of posters on the earlier thread, I am really not sure what lessons you are seeking to mine from this awful, once-in-a-lifetime (or less) situation.

Unless you somehow believe that this kind of thing will increase in frequency, in which case I'd like to hear more about that as a prelude to your efforts to psychoanalyze the US populace...

tcg #15, at issue is the Global Jihad. Sudden Jihad Syndrome is already common in nations with larger Muslim populations. If one untrained yet determined, armed, demented young man could cause this much havoc, what could a lone assassin with jihadist training do with weapons and a suicide bomb vest?

Somewhat less common, but still not all that rare, are coordinated attacks such as 9/11. What would a dozen modern-day Assassins, trained in the shadow of Tora Bora, wearing suicide bomb vests, carrying explosives and guns, and set on recording their atrocities straight to disk over a satellite phone, do? They could make Beslan look like a walk in the park, that's what they could do.

The doctrine conversation is not just about dealing with a single lunatic. It's also about a bigger problem. The world isn't as safe as people think it is, and it's becoming less safe every day as a direct result of globalization, as the danger in the worst areas starts to balance out with the safety in the most pacified areas and the two strains start to mix. The problem is that the average we're going towards is more akin to the slums of Mexico City than the Blacksburg campus on a normal spring day.

And that means people will need to learn to fight. Or they'll be sitting ducks.

There may indeed be multiple possible doctrines, as suggested above by mariner and tcg. And in the fullness of time and reflection those can be aired out, and debated. But in reality, where the time to collect information to decide which to employ is paid for in lives, then the choices narrow very quickly.

Granted that's true, however, if it wasn't for the fact that Customs Officer Gonzalez-Menendez intercepted
Mohammed Manea Al Quahtani, at the Orlando International Airport, the
Capitol Building and/or several other
major structures including the Russell
Senate Office Building, where Sen. Bob
Graham, congressman Porter Goss (and future CIA director) Former Intell-igence committee bigwig, David Boren
and Pakistani ISI chief Mehmed Ahmed
were meeting, would be no more. Ahmed who reportedly used Omar Sheikh (the
gobetween on the Danny Pearl case) as
a conduit for funds to Al Queda.

There is no single doctrine that I am aware of that can account for all the myriad of different ways the situation in Virginia might have played itself out.

There is one, and David Blue mentioned it on an earlier thread:

Fight to believe what is happening is happening, because the invitation to believe that it isn't happening, or isn't as bad as it is, will keep pressing itself on you. The emotional cost of believing that you are in the situation you are in may be high, but you have to keep gripping reality anyway.

I've been in that situation. Not a crazed gunman, thankfully, but walking in on three criminals robbing my home. I'm a middle-aged civilian woman. I have absolutely no military or police training and at the time I had no martial arts training, either. Even just the possibility of violence was something totally outside my experience, and the hardest thing I've ever done was making myself accept that it was really happening. Denial was a very seductive, much happier-looking place than the rather unpleasant reality I was actually in.

Did I rush them? No, I ran. I had a chance to escape and I managed somehow to ignore the intense desire to concentrate entirely on wishing my world back to normal. I got out the door and literally ran down the street screaming. Not especially heroic behavior, but it got the job done. I escaped unhurt.

My point is that the single most important thing you can do is recognize and accept that reality, no matter how suddenly out of whack it goes, is reality. Everything else flows from that. Maybe you'll decide to fight, maybe to run. Maybe you'll wind up choosing to hide anyway. And whatever you do may prove unsuccessful. Regardless, you've just tripled your survival options.

This applies to any sudden crisis situation, not just the menaced-by-a-psycho-killer that Chris Jones points out is not something the vast majority of people are ever going to find themselves in. Violent crime comes in a thousand varieties, there are scores of different natural disasters, there are car crashes, accidental poisonings, drownings, etc., every day. You can't train everybody in a foolproof backup plan for every emergency. You can teach the basic concept that denial is not a plan.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I don't blame or condemn the VT students for reacting as they did, even the ones who may have curled up into little balls with their hands over their ears. Most of them likely had nothing in their lives that could have prepared them for that, that could have given them the don't freeze default. I wish it had been otherwise and I hope it can be made otherwise, but it was in no way their fault.

#19 from Achillea: "Did I rush them? No, I ran. I had a chance to escape and I managed somehow to ignore the intense desire to concentrate entirely on wishing my world back to normal. I got out the door and literally ran down the street screaming. Not especially heroic behavior, but it got the job done. I escaped unhurt."

It was especially heroic behavior. It was perfect. It was magnificent. You grabbed reality with both hands, and acted accordingly, with all the power at your command. If there is any higher standard, I'm not aware of it, and I'm utterly skeptical that a higher standard could exist.

This is exactly what I'm advocating. Exactly.

It is in this light that the claim that the French are necessarily cowards needs to be adjusted.

In both World War I and World War II, the individual French soldier often fought bravely. But French doctrine in both cases was woefully inappropriate for the conditions of the time.

While French politics in pre-WWII days helped sap the political will of the army (and ultimately led to confusion and mass surrender), it is the French politicians who lacked backbone, not necessarily the French army.

#21 from Lurking Observer: "The claim that the French are necessarily cowards" would be asinine - it doesn't need an answer.

But I think senior French officers can't escape responsibility for poor doctrine. Therefore it isn't good enough to say the problem was politicians, not the army.

Anyway, to debate this would take us far from the topic of the thread.

#67 from chew2 at 7:26 pm on Apr 30, 2007

David Blue @ 62,

I said this:

"I think the debate here is not about the actual efficacy of any particular action by an unarmed student, run, hide, or charge, but about the societal values embodied by that course of action. You folks attack all but the warrior heroic action. You condemn all else implicitly or explicitly as soft and passive, and posit without evidence some wider societal passivity."

"A warrior ethos which trumpets a call to manhood and battle. "Die on your feet, not hiding under a desk."

If this doesn't characterize your views then I apologize. But comments you have made celebrating the "heroic" and condemning the "passive", caused me to believe that was your position. As I said, had there been more praise of those who fled quickly, I might have revised my opinion.

I'm glad to see you deleted the statement below, but hadn't noted that deletion when I made the above claims:

"Many of the victims at Virginia Tech had spent their lives in a social regime that dictated that fight was unacceptable, flight ridiculous, and passivity was OK. It's not surprising they fought as they trained, often hiding under a desk."

-

Though I took wise advice from Armed Liberal to change what I said to spare people's feelings, I still think that part of what I said is reasonable, and it's the part that seems to me to match what Armed Liberal is saying: a bad preparatory environment hurts you, so we should prepare people better.

I already quoted Armed Liberal's conversation with his son, and I will not do it again now, but that expresses the bad result to be expected from this kind of preparation, unless a wise father such as Armed Liberal takes the time to correct it.

I realize that some people may legitimately find the abstraction of "the primal heroic impulse" confusing. After all, Armed Liberal had pointed out to me that I might have been creating an impression I did not intend to. So, when I posted in this thread, I put in a statement of what I was not saying, and more important, I put in link to what I'm saying looks like in practice. Here it is again.

#45 from David Blue: "Here's where Achillea, who has applied the doctrine independently, said it works: (link)

If anyone says, your doctrine seems vague to me, give me a concrete image of its perfect application, I would say: In Achillea's response to unexpected danger, I see no flaw.

-

chew2: "You folks attack all but the warrior heroic action. You condemn all else implicitly or explicitly as soft and passive, and posit without evidence some wider societal passivity."

Put the example I linked to (with my comment in the post after it) and that claim you made side by side.

Dr. Helen, the Instawife, also wrote a prescient piece on bad preparation and consequent regression.

She said that educators seemed to prefer to spare their own feelings rather than prepare children properly to respond to the emergency of a school shooting. The thought of having children charge the gun, or be ready to do anything at all as opposed to not being endangered in the first place, hurts the teachers' feelings too much for anybody in the education bureaucracy to change the children's doctrine. But real violence, to which the kids will often not be able to respond effectively because they haven't been mentally prepared to do so, can hurt those kids a lot more than the teachers' feelings will be hurt. So the right thing would be to stifle one's tender feelings and do what's right for the kids.

Dr. Helen made another point that she is professionally qualified to make, as I am not (which is why I have refrained from making it), that post-shooting psychological trauma for the survivors seems to be worse for those who were paralyzed.

That would imply that even if the doctrine was just a universal Banzai! (which I do not advocate), and even if that made no difference to how many people were killed in how many incidents over time (which, like Achillea, I do not think is likely), this would still be an improvement because post-shooting mental health outcomes would be comparatively mild for the survivors.

Unfortunately I see no way to search Dr. Helen's blog than week by week and year by year, scanning all the archives.

Here is the piece by Dr. Helen I had in mind. I would reccommend to anyone to click and read it in full:

Dr. Helen: Friday, October 13, 2006, Let's Roll (link)

As you will see if you click, I misremembered it in part. I substituted a motive I consider more forgivable (overly tender feelings about children and unwillingness to imagine them endangered) for that which the comment noted by Dr. Helen actually suggested: blame avoidance.

Blame avoidance, rather than the special tenderness people feel for young children, might have been involved in the "gun-free zone" at Virginia Tech. So the difference is relevant.

In retrospect, Dr. Helen's post seems on-target.