Master on command—Tyro
on demand
Skip
Gochenour makes a distinction between exercising skills on
command vs on demand. This distinction may not be fully
appreciated by all practitioners or trainers.
Individual
experiences at the NTI have been widely reported over the years in
the gun press including Combat Handguns, American
Handgunner, Women & Guns, Guns, et al. The
internet contains many individual reports ranging from Raley’s NTI
VI posting to Tim Burke’s most excellent reviews of the last three
NTIs posted on the now defunct prodigy board. In our small tactical
community discussions of performance at the NTI are a common
debrief. An almost universal consensus is that the NTI can be a
humbling experience where trained practitioners do not always rise
to the level of skills they expected to employ based on their level
of training.
Inadequacy on
demand in well-trained practitioners could be a broad topic. Andy
Stanford has offered a mildly esoteric explanation in Hicks Law from
psychology that for every response choice added, the time to react
can double. John Holschen has posted some insightful observations
(appropriately) on the Insights lists that many trained individuals
lack an integrated fighting system. Responses are often a skill set
of discrete and unrelated techniques. John further observes that on
command the skill may be exercised at the 95-100% level. Yet when
asked to perform, on demand, there can be spectacular inabilities to
perform.
A tangible
illustration may be found in last year’s NTI. A target was set up to
fall from only a head shot and not from body hits. Observant
practitioners also might have reacted to body armor dressing visible
on the target. Many practitioners--many well-trained
practitioners--kept dumping rounds into the target’s body with
clearly no effect. It is rumored that the more compassionate ROs at
some point would whisper, “Head shot”, lest participants exhaust
their whole ammo supply on that one target.
Mozambiques,
failure drills, Plan B, two-to-the-body-one-to-the-head are routine
training exercises. A student with a few training schools or with
IDPA/IPSC competition experience may have shot hundreds of
failure-to-stop drills; however, it is almost certain that the
drills were shot on command as required by the Course of Fire
or under instructor immediate direction. It is also almost certain
that very few of the repetitions involved reactive setups requiring
a transition to Plan B based on the judgment of the shooter that
Plan A was not working.
Many other
examples from NTI could be cited, but the lesson should be clear.
Hundreds of on command ballistic repetitions do not assure that we
will perform on demand. Training by rote only takes us so far in our
path to unconscious competency. Thus our training remains incomplete
without realistically connecting situations to the skill sets
required to properly resolve the situations
And without
the NTI, such gaps in our awareness might not be so dramatically
revealed.
