Tactical Tuesday with Modern Milsim
Tactical Tuesday is the podcast where we discuss in detail the application of a broad spectrum of actual military (and in some cases law enforcement) tactics to Military Simulation (MILSIM) operations. Our goal is to assist players in formulating more efficient tactics, techniques and procedures that will make them more effective on the MILSIM battlefield.
Tactical Tuesday with Modern Milsim
Tactical Tuesday Episode Fourteen - Tactical Mindset: Using the Most Important Six Inches Between Your Ears
In this episode of Tactical Tuesday with Modern Milsim, we discuss the Tactical Mindset including situational awareness, Jeff Cooper's Color Situational Awareness Scale, John Boyd's OODA Loop, Slow is Smooth - Smooth is Fast and tactical patience . Specifically, we discuss:
- Definition of Tactical Mindset (1:00)
- What If? game (2:04)
- Jeff Cooper's Color Coded Situational Awareness Scale (3:36):
- John Boyd's OODA Loop (6:02)
- Observation (7:27)
- Orientation (8:20)
- Decision (10:31)
- Action (11:24)
- Mental Models (12:07)
- OODA Loop Tempo (13:15)
- Slow is Smooth - Smooth is Fast (14:24)
- Tactical Patience (20:01)
- and more.
A new episode of Tactical Tuesdays is uploaded on the first and third Tuesdays of each month.
SHOW LINKS/RESOURCES
To learn more about Craig White click HERE.
To find “From Alpha to Omega, A Milsim Tactical Primer and Training Manual” : https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FZ57B23/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
To find “From Insertion to Extraction: Advanced MILSIM CQB Tactics, Techniques and Procedures” : https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07THX1CFT/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1
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You can also find “From Alpha to Omega, A Milsim Tactical Primer and Training Manual” and “From Insertion to Extraction: Advanced MILSIM CQB Tactics, Techniques and Procedures” at Amazon.com.
TACTICAL TUESDAY WITH MODERN MILSIM - EPISODE 14 TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to another episode of Tactical Tuesday with Modern MilSim. Through this podcast, we will bring you real world tactics, techniques, and procedures that will enable you to succeed on the MilSim battlefield. It's time to make ready.
Hello and welcome to episode fourteen of Tactical Tuesday with Modern MilSim. As always, I am your host, Craig White. Thank you for being here. Now today, we're going to talk about the tactical mindset, including the importance of situational awareness, Boyd's O.O.D.A., or OODA loop, tactical patience, and the meaning behind slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
So what is the tactical mindset? Well, the tactical mindset, sometimes also referred to as the warrior mindset, is a way of looking at your environment in such a way as to develop and maintain situational awareness, to be able to anticipate likely enemy actions, and to develop a means for countering enemy action before it is initiated. Having a tactical mindset goes beyond simply learning tactics. Instead, it is the process by which you apply tactics, techniques, and procedures, or TTPs, to various tactical issues you may encounter in the real world.
As you know from the discussions we've had in my earlier podcast episodes, situational awareness is critical to success on the MILSIM battlefield. Being aware of your surroundings, including recognizing possible locations for enemy ambushes and likely enemy avenues of approach, as well as terrain that will favor you and disadvantage the enemy, will give you a serious edge over someone who does not. Some of the issues that impact situational awareness are addressed in episodes one and two of this podcast. Check them out for additional information on these subjects.
Now, one of the ways that you can exercise your mind and develop a tactical mindset is playing the “what if” game...and it's not really a game at all, it's just simply a method of thinking about things in a tactical manner. As you move through your environment, you're constantly evaluating your surroundings for dead space, possible enemy positions, and other potential threats as well as how you plan to neutralize that thread if it manifests itself.
For example, what are you going to do if you enter a building and the enemy throws a grenade at you? If the enemy comes down a particular trail while you were on it. Is there cover readily available to you? Can you get to the cover before the enemy can engage you? Etc. Etc. Essentially, the “what if” game is just a matter of looking at your environment from a tactical perspective, from the viewpoint of yourself, and from the enemy's viewpoint. The point of the “what if” game is to develop a tactical way of looking at your surroundings.
Knowing how to conduct a battle drill is one thing. Anticipating potential threats while already having a plan of action to neutralize that threat is something else. You need to be exercising your mind and not just learning drills. If you do not exercise your mind by thinking about potential tactical situations ahead of time, you will be unprepared for them when they actually occur and will likely fail to overcome the threat. As the Greek warrior Archilochos sagely stated, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. You must train your body and your mind. If you start forming good tactical habits, they will become second nature to you.
Now, one system that helps in developing the tactical mindset is Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Cooper's Color Code System of Situational Awareness. This system uses four color stages to identify an individual's mental state during a life-threatening event. Now, some of you may be familiar with Jeff Cooper's awareness spectrum. Colonel Cooper came up with a color scale that represents the varying condition levels of an individual's awareness to potential threats.
These levels of awareness are white, yellow, orange, and red. The first level of awareness under this system is represented by the color white. Condition White represents an individual that is oblivious to his surroundings and is not in any way prepared for combat. Such an individual will likely not fare well when engaged by the enemy. By the time he can react to the enemy engagement, he is already down.
Condition Yellow represents an individual that is exercising cautious vigilance for potential threats. An individual that is at condition yellow is relaxed but is paying attention to people, terrain, and circumstances around him or her. He is constantly evaluating his surroundings for threats. In other words, he is playing the what if game as he moves through his surroundings. If he sees something out of the ordinary that represents a potential threat, the individual would transition to an orange awareness level. Yellow is the awareness level you should be in while on patrol, while defending an objective, or anywhere else where the enemy may be encountered. Your weapon should already be up and ready to engage the enemy should he reveal himself.
At condition orange, the individual has identified the threat and is ready to take lethal action against it. This commonly involves bringing his weapon on target and being ready to fire. Once the individual reaches condition red, a clear and present danger has been presented to him and he is already engaging that threat.
Now, Jeff Cooper's awareness condition scale has some application to Milsim. At no time should you find yourself in condition white while you were on the Milsim battlefield. At the very least, you should remain at condition yellow in an effort to be vigilant for signs of enemy presence, but more at a condition orange in anticipation of action. You must be ready to transition into condition red and engage the enemy as quickly as possible to neutralize that threat.
Now Jeff Cooper's Awareness Condition Scale is a good starting point for describing situational awareness. There is a more comprehensive model. It is John Boyd's observation, orient, decide, and act otherwise known as the O O D A or OODA loop.
Although Boyd originally conceived the OODA loop as a means of dealing with unknowns at the operational level of the battlefield, it has now become a learning system or method for dealing with uncertainties inherent in all levels of conflict. According to Boyd, ambiguity and uncertainty surrounds all decisions made on the battlefield. The inability of an individual to accept this fact, and to make sense of a change in reality around him, leads to failure. When circumstances change, people often fail to change their perspective and instead continue to see the fight as it should be…instead of how it really is. Now Boyd's OODA loop has been overly simplified over the years to where it is often referred to as a simple self replicating loop, rinse and repeat as needed.
Unfortunately, this overly simplified explanation of the OODA loop removes a lot of the power and effectiveness in applying it. So in this episode, we're going to discuss the more expansive OODA loop as Boyd intended it. A good thumbnail or diagram of the OODA loop is attached in the comments to this post for this episode on the Modern MillSim Facebook page. It is also attached as an image to the chapter markers for this episode on the Tactical Tuesday with Modern MillSim website.
So let's talk about each step of the OODA loop in more detail. First, let's discuss the observation step. The OODA loop always starts at the observation stage. This is where data collection occurs. The more data you can effectively observe, the more accurate your insight will be, and the faster it can be absorbed and evaluated at the orientation stage. Observation consists of several elements including, but not limited to, unfolding circumstances, implicit guidance and control such as doctrine, intelligence, and other information provided by command staff, unfolding interaction with your environment and other outside information. More importantly, it also includes feedback from the decision and action step of the loop. In other words, the observation stage also includes the information derived from results of decisions made in a prior cycle of the OODA loop. This feedback refines the results of decisions of subsequent evolutions of the OODA loop.
Orientation is the second stage of the OODA loop. Orientation means analyzing information collected during the observation stage with a focus on making a decision based on that analysis. Although Boyd recognized five main influences in analyzing information gathered during the observation phase, there are others. These influences include your own previous experience, training analysis, cultural traditions, genetic heritage, and other new information to help form a decision on how to act on the observations that you have made. Now, during the orientation portion of the OODA loop, you apply your own experiences to decide what action to take.
If you have been doing the “what if” game, You have been creating mental models or paradigms which you can draw upon to more quickly orient, decide, and act. These mental models or paradigms help you recognize patterns and move more quickly through the OODA loop. Moving more efficiently within the OODA loop, especially at the orientation stage, provides a distinct advantage over those who do not. You are processing information faster than the enemy, and as a result, you are acting on information before he does. By the time the enemy has acted on the same information, which you have already processed, it is no longer relevant. You have already acted to change the circumstances surrounding him. As such, the enemy must act on the outdated and or erroneous information, or reset his OODA loop to orient on these new circumstances.
This is what is meant by getting inside the enemy's OODA loop. Now, Boyd also identified two problems that are likely to be encountered during the orientation stage of the OODA loop. First, we often observe imperfect or incomplete information during the observation stage. And, two, we can get inundated with so much information that separating relevant from irrelevant information is difficult. We can address the first issue by collecting more accurate information during the observation stage and applying feedback from the results of decisions made from previous cycles of the OODA loop to the current one. We can address the second issue by using our own experience combined with the pattern recognition vetted from mental models to weed out irrelevant information.
Now the third stage of the OODA loop is decision. This is the stage where you make a decision and form a course of action. The success or failure of these decisions are based on your capabilities, your experience, and the quality of your observations and orientation to those observations. It is important to understand that decisions are dynamic in nature and should be considered works in progress. Decisions will be modified as new information is received as well as feedback concerning the success of decisions made in prior cycles of the OODA loop. The more accurate your observations are, the more effective your decision will likely to be and therefore the faster you'll be able to process information to the OODA loop. Now during this phase we are essentially moving forward with our best educated guess regarding which of our mental models will work. This is why we want to vet our mental models during training before relying on them in the field.
And then the final state of the OODA loop is action. This is a stage where you execute the decision you made during the previous stage of the loop is important to understand that the OODA loop is a smooth, continuous, and dynamic process, and not simply a checklist.
The objective of the OODA loop is to move through each stage of the loop, especially the orientation stage, more quickly than your enemy, with a high degree of accuracy and efficiency. As mentioned earlier, your training, your familiarity with applicable TTPs, and experiences, Including any mental models developed as part of engaging in the what if game should speed up your information processing at the orientation phase of the OODA loop.
So at this point, I want to talk a little bit more about mental models. If accurate, mental models should speed up the orientation step of the OODA loop. The danger is when mental models have not been tested ahead of time to make sure they are accurate and effective. For example, if you have formed a mental model of how to clear a room based on a method that has been disproven in the real world, applying it to observed information will likely produce a bad decision and an unsuccessful result.
Good judgment is the key to successful use of the OODA loop. Even if one has perfect information, it is of no value if one does not see the patterns. Without judgment, data means nothing. Remember, it is not necessarily the one with more information who will come out victorious. Is one with better judgment, the one who's better at discerning patterns.
And this is why mental models are so important to the tactical mindset. The more accurate mental models you have at your disposal, the more you have to work with in creating additional new ones. You can create mental models based on your in the field experience, by use of the “what if” game, and also by educating yourself on strategy, tactics, and similar fields of knowledge.
Now, as touched upon earlier in this episode, the tempo at which you can successfully complete cycles of the OODA loop is very important. Keep in mind there are two principles that are central to effective use of the OODA loop. First, the individual that can go through successful consecutive OODA loops faster than their opponent will, when the conflict and to rapid OODA looping on your part, reset your opponent's OODA loop by causing confusion, it sends them back to square one.
This delay provides you with more time to complete your OODA loop before your opponent does thereby increasing your advantage geometrically. So what I'm getting here is It is always best to, whenever possible, create mental models that you have vetted with real world experiences and training so as to give you an advantage in using the OODA loop.
If you have such mental models, you can recognize patterns in your orientation phase based on your observations in the field and be able to process information more quickly through the OODA loop. That gives you a clear advantage over the enemy. Being prepared does it for you.
So now let's talk about another subject, and this is more closely aligned with CQB environments, but is also applicable to land warfare and that is the phrase, “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”. Now obviously when you're talking about this particular phrase, it is often misunderstood because they seem to be inconsistent with each other. How can smooth be related to going slow and also going fast? Well, the slow is smooth portion of the phrase means two things.
First, you must initially train slowly so that the fundamentals of a tactic, technique, or procedure are performed properly. You must ensure that the correct muscle memory pathways are imprinted when you first start training with a particular technique or procedure. As you start getting familiar with the tactic or technique in question and start pushing yourself, the execution of that tactic or technique will become smoother, and as a result, you will also be faster in implementing it.
You want to first train slowly with a particular tactic, technique, and procedure, or TTP, to make sure you are performing it correctly before it gets ingrained in muscle memory. When you slow down, you can start internalizing the TTP in a way that makes it more effective when you need it. Train correctly the first time so that you do not have to unlearn a bad habit later.
As you get more familiar with the TTP, and it starts to become second nature to you, your movements will be smoothed out, and it's at that point where you start working on speeding up execution of the TTP in question. Basically, when they're talking about slow is smooth, it means you're getting rid of all the jerkiness and all the hesitation for not being familiar with the TTP in question, because you have rushed the training with it.
As opposed to preparing it correctly, simply put, training and practice makes one proficient in a given TTP. Proficiency leads to perfection in the execution of it. Be deliberate in your training of tactics, techniques, and procedures as you are learning them. Don't rush to failure, make muscle memory your friend so that you can turn your cognitive skills toward gaining and maintaining situational awareness.
The second meaning of slow is smooth is to move only so fast as you can smoothly execute the TTP in question. Doing so allows you to do it right the first time without a lot of fumbling around and making mistakes because you tried to perform the TTP too fast. For example, it does you no good if you can get a round off in under one second.
If you cannot hit your target, you've gained nothing and given the enemy time to ensure a hit on you. It is better to take that additional half second to ensure that you have good hits on target and put him down. The smoother that you can execute the TTP, the faster you can perform it. Now, although this concept is applicable to land warfare, it is especially applicable to MOUT operations and CQB.
In these environments, the typical shooter will want to clear rooms as quickly as possible, i. e., fast is fast. However, the problem with that approach is that your movements are faster than your ability to discriminate targets and to eliminate them. The central rule of CQB engagements is to never move faster than you can identify a target.
Discriminate whether the target is a friend or enemy, and if the target is an enemy, to eliminate it. To use one of Doc Holliday's famous quotes, take your time in a hurry. Speed, in and of itself, is not the goal. Momentum is. Momentum maintains your initiative. Momentum allows you to maintain your situational awareness. Momentum forces the enemy to react to your actions and hinders his ability to set up defenses to your actions. You are inside the enemy's OODA loop. Before the enemy can orient and act on the information he observes, that information is no longer relevant and his OODA loop resets. Be deliberate, not fast.
Execute the TTP correctly instead of rushing it. Your execution will be smoother and as a result your speed will increase. Due to the reduction of mistakes made if you execute it too fast. If the team is using dynamic room entry, which we will discuss in depth in later episodes, it makes use of speed and violence of action to overwhelm the enemy and eliminate him. Keep in mind that a deliberate pace for room clearing allows the entry team members to gather more accurate information regarding risk assessment and target discrimination.
Now, one thing you have to keep in mind that although slow is smooth, being too slow makes you dead. If you train properly so that your TTPs are well ingrained in your muscle memory, execution of the technique or tactic will be second nature, and your body will execute them with little conscious thought. When you reach that level of competence, your brain can focus on higher level functions. such as determining whether a target room is fortified, whether your team should use dynamic, deliberate, slash hybrid, or eliminate penetration room clearing techniques, whether the team should use grenade in the room, etc, etc.
If you have not sharpened your TTPs so that they are second nature to you, you will be floundering around trying to figure out how to properly execute the TTP in question. This is what will get you killed. If you are too slow, you are dead. And so this is what is meant by slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Train slow so that your body movements become smooth and by being smooth they become fast. Similarly, do not let your body outrun your mind. Do not move quicker than you can properly execute the TTP and can discriminate and eliminate targets.
And so finally, let's talk about tactical patience. Tactical patience is a part of the tactical mindset. Instead of engaging the first enemy you see, pause a few moments, if you are undetected, or if you can do so without endangering yourself and your team, to allow more enemy to enter the kill zone. This allows your tech to be more effective and with the most impact. Similarly, be patient while moving. Stop from time to time to conduct SLLS checks, S L L S checks, In an effort to detect enemy presence before proceeding further, moving in a deliberate but stealthy manner can also facilitate your ability to detect and avoid enemy ambushes and similar attacks.
So in closing, remember that the mental mindset is a way of recognizing potential threats and danger areas. and being ready to apply an effective counter to such a threat if it materializes. You need to be able to think several steps ahead of the enemy and have a counter in place and ready to go if the threat in question actually materializes.
This is where the “what if” game comes into play. You should be constantly evaluating your surroundings for threats and decide how to counter them should they show up. For example, identify a potential cover and concealment not only for you, but also for the enemy. In urban areas, identify windows, doors, etc. that could provide the enemy with cover while also providing him with lines of sight and fields of fire against you. In conducting the “What If” game, you will also begin building a library of mental models that can be used to speed up your use of the OODA loop and allow you to complete cycles of the loop faster than the enemy.
Remember that you only have to complete repeated cycles of the OODA loop just a bit faster than your opponent. Doing so increases your situational awareness, it also gains and maintains your initiative so that the enemy is reacting to your actions and not the other way around. Maintaining situational awareness and initiative over the enemy is the route to victory. Similarly, training with TTPs will allow you to execute them more smoothly and without mistakes. In doing so, the speed in which they are executed will also increase. Remember that you want to move deliberately, but not so fast that you cannot effectively discriminate and eliminate the enemy. Momentum is key, not speed for its own sake. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Now next week we're going to discuss breaking contact including the use of lateral and inside peels. If you have any topics you would like to see covered in future episodes of Tactical Tuesday, please let us know by posting it on the Modern Milsim Facebook page. If it's not one of the topics we are already planning to cover, we will likely add it to our ever growing topic list.
If you like this podcast, please subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, as well as many other podcast directories. As always, thank you for your support, and I'll see you at our next episode. See you then.
To our listeners out there, thank you for tuning in and I look forward to providing you with new episodes every two weeks. If you like what you're hearing on this podcast, please subscribe and provide us with a review. We want to know what you like and how we can improve. You can also contact us on our Facebook page at Facebook.com/ModernMilSim with any suggestions you may have. In our next episode of Tactical Tuesday, we will discuss breaking contact including the use of lateral and inside peels.
If you want to know more about application of real world tactics, techniques and procedures to MilSim, please check out From Alpha to Omega: a Milsim Tactical Primer and Training Manual, as well as From Insertion to Extraction: Advanced CQB Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. Both books are available at Amazon.com. As always, thank you for your support, and I'll see you at our next installment of Tactical Tuesday.
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