Three C's of Coordinated Defense

The 3 C's of coordinated defense. Now we used to call these the 3 C's of tactical operations with a team or the 3 C's of team operations, and then a tactical environment because these 3 C's really came out of working in the CQB, the close-quarters battle world and the executive protection team world. But we now apply it all the way down to family defense, active shooter response in the workplace, and even just the coordination between any two people that happen to be armed in a worst-case scenario in a public space that are now gonna come together and try to work together to be as capable as possible. And these 3 C's are really simple. I want you to think about them and understand how they integrate with one another. The first C is Coordinate. Now coordinate means to have a plan and to be able to execute that plan. And notice I said that this could even be for two people who just happen to be in an environment together that may have never met before. But if you, as the leader of that two person element, if you will, have a plan, if you have a way of coordinating with any other good guy who happens to have a firearm or any other person who happens to be interested in helping you defend themselves, defend you, defend the other people in the environment, maybe during an active shooter situation, then you can start putting your plan into place. As everyone says, "It's too late to form a plan when you're in the middle of a worst-case scenario." You've gotta have that plan ahead of time. And if you know that you're gonna be in an environment with your coworkers, if you know that you spend a lot of time traveling with one person in particular, obviously your family inside of your home, then you can discuss the plan and actually practice. You can run through drills, you can do simulations, you can even do scenarios to make sure that your plan is in place, well-practiced, well-rehearsed, and you have the best chance of going ahead and coordinating in the heat of the moment. Now, part of that plan has to also be the second C, Communication. So the first C is coordination that's to have a plan. The communication, the second C is incredibly important because you need to be able to account for the variables. Generally, the variables are going to be things that your plan can't predict. You don't know where the bad guy is gonna be. You may not know where you're going to be if your plan has to do with being in the public space maybe traveling with your family. If you work with someone and you travel to different towns where you spend time in your community outside of the workplace, you can't predict things like where the exits are going to be. Of course you can't predict how many bad guys there are. You may not be able to predict the nature of a threat beyond just the fact that there is someone who's trying to hurt you. And the nature of the threat may change how you execute your plan. So communication is incredibly important, what you see or what you need. The third C is Cooperation. Ultimately without a plan, and if your communication breaks down, cooperation is all you have. If there are multiple people in a room, and there's a threat trying to get into that room to hurt us, we're probably going to very quickly improvise some concept of what to do. And if that concept doesn't get fulfilled, in other words, if someone's supposed to go to the left and they go to the right, you've got to cooperate. In the military, we'd say, "You have to look for work, you have to fill the gaps, you have to find something to do, you have to find work." When you have a responsibility, your coordination, your plan, when you try to communicate, and you try to tell someone what you see or what you need, and those things aren't working, when someone isn't meeting their responsibility, the communication isn't working, the cooperation fills in those gaps. It creates the opportunity for you to just do what you have to do in that worst-case scenario. Obviously, it's much better to have that first C and the second C working well together. And that means practicing ahead of time. Think about what your plan is, understand what the communication is going to sound like, going to be like. Maybe it's even gonna be nonverbal communication inside of a family where you're gonna have some maybe signals that you'll use for one another. Of course, those things fail, you fall back to improvisation with the intent of helping people meet their goals. Cooperation, if someone isn't doing what they're supposed to do, you may need to do it for them. At the end of the day, your plan doesn't really matter if your plan isn't being executed, your plan isn't working. The 3 C's of coordinated defense: Coordination, Communication and Cooperation.