Let’s step away from the contents of the notional Force Continuum and look at how we can prepare ourselves to actually deliver.
The odds are overwhelming that your fight is not going to be what you think it is. Even if you’ve been in fights before, you probably haven’t been in enough fights to have a representative sample. And your assumptions are likely to get someone—the wrong someone—hurt.
It’s the baggage, the preconceptions that you bring into the problem, that is the obstacle to your proper mental conditioning. Someone might toss out a martial arts parable about the student with a full cup, but I’m sure that’s been done before.
Hollywood plays a large part in this. People like those reading this have doubtless seen dozens of action movies or watched Sergeant Saunders and LT Hanley spend some five years slogging across France (the real world saw it done in about 11 months) or gotten caught up in some Law and Order: Special Parking Enforcement procedural. But here’s the thing: that’s entertainment, organized to be visually appealing to the average attention span, which is about 8 seconds (and that has been shortened by a third in the last 20 years). Add in the mood music and lighting designed to create a certain desired visceral reaction and yup, we’re dealing in fantasy. And absolutely the stuff that we suck in from media influences our thought processes--that’s the whole truth behind advertising and product placement on the set.
Not only are we getting preconceived notions about what the fight is going to look like, which has the potential to create bewilderment when it doesn’t develop that way, we’re getting similar notions about what our responses to that situation will look like. You can’t be doing that to yourself, especially given the slant of things in the modern era. In this era, you need to understand how things work. There simply isn’t a singular human response. There are a wide variety of them, spread out among the population and the situations. By now, you know that I’m not an always/never guy; instead, I live in the world of maybe/sometimes/it depends. But I will make this “always” statement: any set of human response is always a continuum, spread out on a bell-like curve. Sure, most of us are going to cluster within one or two standard deviations from the peak. But there are absolutely the outliers sitting on the fringes. And to complicate things, not only are humanity’s responses spread out, but so are yours, changing as you gain experience, or go into something fatigued instead of fresh and so on.
What we want to do then, is to get a realistic idea of our potential problems, and train so as to position our responses in an advantageous spot on that bell curve.
Through the magic of surveillance video, we can get a decent look at the situations that we want to prepare for. Here, I’ll give a partial endorsement to the videos on various YouTube channels. Avoid most, or better, avoid all the commentary, because those influencers frequently miss the mark when they consider tactics. Avoid most if not all of the LE-centric videos, since our missions are usually quite different. And—this is important—don’t get sucked into what the chosen defender is doing, because after all, we’re trying to be better than the dude on the street. Frankly, some of the citizens depicted on these channels are alive out of pure dumb luck. Luck is not a tactic, and fortuitous outcomes reinforce bad tactics. What you ought to be studying is the bad guy: how does he plan and launch his assault? Does he ambush or does he stalk? Does he talk or con his way into contact, or does he blitz? What resistance is effective and what is just so much wasted energy? What clues do you see that argue for avoidance? For engagement? If the readership indicates to me that there’s a sufficient level of interest, we the Network can start providing some representative views of what happens.
Next, how to go about overcoming your personal mental conditioning, and moving your placement on the response spectrum? Read. Let your mind dwell and become immersed with structures and ideas that are pertinent to developing your resolve (we’re going to come back to that quality) and resilience. Yeah, I just said that Hollywood is bad. But the author who’s BTDT and is painting a picture of the truths he discovered is a treasure.
For example, in WWII we were faced with the problem of getting a group of citizen-soldiers ready for an existential fight with highly proficient, highly trained enemies. The Germans had been fighting for a couple of years while we had our heads in the sand, and that’s not even considering their time in Spain. They had gone to the desert and the tundra and the European plains and had proceeded to kick the butts of armies that had built global empires, empires that stretched across continents. They treated war as a science and had gotten quite good at it by late ‘41. The Japanese first invaded China/Manchuria a full decade before they turned their sights on us. They were brutal and efficient and had not the slightest concern for the lives on either side of the situation, not as long as the collective Empire was winning. Our first meetings with these foes saw us getting stomped into the mud.
To prepare our guys for the coming fights where the outcomes would determine whether or not we continued as a free nation, one of the things we did was give Joe reading material. “Men at War” was an anthology edited by Hemingway (yes, that Hemingway) and contained works of both fiction and non-fiction by Tolstoy, Winston Churchill, Kipling, Stephen Crane and others that addressed central ideas of preparing for conflict. Oh, and selections from the Bible are in there, too. You could do worse in preparing yourself than studying what your predecessors thought and felt and how they ended up winning. Or losing. I’ll offer up a reading list (and I welcome your recommendations) in a future post.
Next, we’ll look at fear as an obstacle to action.
