Defensive Response: Justification vs. Necessity

When we're talking about doing reality-based training for personal offense or the defense of others we're talking about what may be the most critical moment in our lives. Preparing to not die or to protect one of our family members from dying and possibly taking another life. One of the things I always say is that there's a big difference between could and should. Just because you can use lethal force doesn't always mean that you should because there's a big aftermath price to pay here. How do you address that in reality-based training in your approach, Ken? Well, it was years ago a real black and white area for me as well, Rob. I would find myself contextually in situations where there's a justification to use lethal force in some sort of scenario. And I would look at those who would not use lethal force in those situations and wonder why. I thought you're justified to use lethal force, you got somebody doing something consistent with you being able to shoot them, why aren't you doing this? And when we got to the point in "Training at The Speed of Life" where we started to dissect the difference between justification and necessity, it was a real philosophical piece for me and I had to go to the mountain top on this. I started calling up everybody that I knew who had been in critical incidents and who were operational in various theaters and people who've been in civilian shootings and ask them the very pointed question. Have you been in situations where you were justified in pulling the trigger and did not? And if so, why didn't you? And almost to a man they had, they'd been in situations justified but they said, we were justified but it just, it wasn't necessary. And you gotta have both. An example, if you're in a situation out in the world and somebody pulls a gun on you and you recognize because you've been around them a lot, you absolutely without a doubt know that it's an Airsoft gun. Are you justified in shooting that guy? Would you be able to articulate it? Would you be able to say he pulled a gun and I was in fear of my life? Probably. But does that mean you got to shoot that guy? There's a justification, but there's no necessity. This is what differentiates us from them if you will, the righteous from the unrighteous, is that we have the justification, but there is no necessity and I think that you absolutely have to have both. SO that could be a real pitfall of scenario training is that, the instructor or the role player or maybe the student would say, "Okay, I have a checklist. I have a, I have b, I have c, shoot." And be rewarded for having done that when maybe that really wasn't the point of the scenario. Well, how many t-shirts have you seen over the years, kill them all let God sort it out. Or the braggadocio statement I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by six. Would you? Have you ever been judged by 12? It's not a fun process and as you said, this is the critical moment in your life, this is your million dollar moment. The system is gonna spend a million dollars on you and the spotlight is gonna be on you. And there are a lot of things that we need to consider. And so from an emotional, from a psychological perspective, are you on the righteous path? Are you doing the right thing? That doesn't mean we dwell and wallow in that, Patton said combat is not the place to be changing your belief systems. We need to be making these decisions in advance and that's the absolute value of reality based training is when we're spinning around, when we're going through that Boyd cycle, our OODA loop, observe orient decide act, we see what's going on, we orient to it. What's happening here? What are my options? Can I? Should I? Must I? We make a decision, we put that decision into action. Reality-based training gives you that experience in advance, it's creating pre combat veterans, was a phrase that was used to me at one point. And that to me is everything, if you don't have the experience in advance you're just gonna be spinning your gears. Yeah that pre combat veteran idea I think that was Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman that came up with that. Just a brilliant idea. Reality-based training can program you and we've talked about this before in different venues. Programming and visualization and the theater of the mind, so important to the outcome of the scenario. How vital is it that the instructor understands exactly what he wants out of this scenario and doesn't leave it up to the student to decide what the best answer is? Well, it's everything. The training staff need to know in advance what the beginning, middle and end is supposed to be. They should know what a good run looks like. That doesn't mean that it's going to go exactly as they think it should be choreographed, and this is why role players are so important. Is that a role player needs to be able to feed and blend. What is my student doing? Maybe I need to demonstrate the thread a little bit more overtly. What am I trying to accomplish? What are we testing here? So we're actually, when we're creating scenarios, we're starting with the end in mind. What are we testing? And then what situations do we put contextually into place in order to test these things? And this is where we will always come back to the concept of what are we trying to accomplish with the student? What's the best thing for the student? What does the student need to know? Contextually, what should we be testing with that student? Alexis Artwohl, Dr. Alexis Artwohl who wrote the book, "Deadly Force Encounters." Psychologist, has studied gun fighting for years and years, said that 80%, in 80% of gunfights your first gunfight, you have no recollection. For 80% of the people who get into these, no recollection of the beginning or the middle. You're standing there with a smoldering pistol in your hand going, what happened? Well, something happened. Experience doesn't come out of nowhere. So what I wanna do is make sure we're plugging that experience in, so that when you recognize the observation part of the OODA loop. You observe something, "I need to get into this fight." Behind the locked door in the unconscious mind in the experiential brain, we've got a place to go so that orientation and decision happen virtually instantaneously so we're going from observation to action. And this is what we're trying to program inside the brain and this is what the trainers absolutely have to have a solid grasp on. And this is where that justification versus necessity is gonna come in. It shouldn't be a checklist decision the way you would make a decision about buying a car. You shouldn't really picture yourself as getting into a situation where you're gonna literally decide, have I met this criteria? Have I met this criteria? Have I met this criteria? We've in some of our programs talked about evolving that process and the way we present it into recognize and respond and if you have the right training behind you hopefully you will recognize the true need as opposed to just to be going through a checklist of justification. I think your approach is brilliant and it's an important part of reality-based training.