Is Experience A Valid Criteria When Selecting An Instructor?

[Old Dog]

I'll just go out on a limb here and say that most of the guys who have the most real-world experience are either still doing the job or have retired. And most of the guys I know (with military or law enforcement backgrounds) who've gone into the training arena ... seem to have been either chasing an easy gig (at least wanting to create their own hours) or chasing dollars.

Frankly, most of the trainers I really respect have been dedicated trainers for a while and they're certainly not those with the most -- or even any -- combat (or law enforcement experience). My last two deployments, only about ten percent of the guys I was with were guys I wanted to be with and the fact that they had combat experience didn't (as Bobson earlier so well noted) give them the ability to teach or train others ... and of the cops I know who've been in gunfights, it's more a matter of pure happenstance that they were there, rather than these events somehow rendered them with newfound ability to teach others how to survive armed encounters.

So, to answer the OP, I'd give a qualified "not always." And if a guy says there's only one type of flashlight to use, he's a tool.

And yeah (for kopfjaeger01) these days, I'm also a little leery too about the multitudes of polo-shirted, tattooed bald, bearded "former operators" with the cool shades who seem to populate all these newly-hatched training outfits springing up all over -- I'll take guys like Clint Smith or Ken Hackathorn any day ...

 

[kopfjaeger01]

Oh boy, I've got some good Hackathorn stories from early 90's. He taught some courses to the group I was with in the Marine Corps. Clint was always a class act.

 

[coloradokevin]

I haven't yet read any of the other responses, but here's what I can tell you:

1) Real life experience is valid whenever you are having an instructor teach you how to respond to situations in real life (regardless of topic).

2) An extremely experienced operator can still be a crappy instructor.

3) A person without operational experience might be a great shooter, and an excellent instructor — so, are you trying to learn better shooting skills or better tactics?

4) ANY instructor who tries to tell you that XYZ equipment is the ONLY equipment worth having is an instructor I wouldn't want to learn from. The person operating the equipment is almost always more critical than the equipment being operated. If I'm taking a class I want quality instruction, not a quality salesman.

5) Military experience and law enforcement experience can both be valuable in an instructor. Neither are necessarily required, and citizen self-defense situations with weapons are often handled differently than the experiences that cops and soldiers have (though police officers and citizens often have more similar self-defense encounters than soldiers). What I mean to say here is that you shouldn't be pursuing trouble as a CCW holder, whereas a police officer is often doing exactly that. Also, you aren't engaging in a war on a battlefield as a CCW holder, and the battlefield environment is different than a street survival situation against a mugger or two. With that said, having either operational LE or military experience can still be a valuable teacher… those who have been on the receiving end of gunfire can speak to the fact that it is very different than standing on a static range shooting at paper. There are some psychological and physiological effects that you experience in those situations that are difficult to explain if you haven't been there.


(Outside of my shooting experience, competition experience, and instruction experience, my experience includes well over a decade of conducting real life building clearances in the real world)



EDITED TO ADD: After reading some of the other posts in this thread, I must agree with some of the others… just because someone has been in a gun fight does not necessarily mean that they were the best at what they were doing, or that their survival was caused by anything other than luck. We all like to learn from those who have 'been there and done it', but when I think back on the instructors I've learned from, some of the best weren't even guys who had ever been in a gunfight personally.

 

[Hangingrock]

As an example Jeff Cooper father of the “Modern Technique”, his combat experience was limited in WW2 to commanding officer Marine detachment on the battleship USS Pennsylvania. As part of his duties he did naval gunfire survey after the initial landings. During the Korean War he was not a line officer but rather assigned to covert activities in the Far East. His lack of line combat experience had an effect on his Marine Corps career.

I believe his degree from Stanford was in history as his Masters from the University of California was in history also.

That said he was more of a teacher instructor with a limited actual combat experience.

Just an observation to the subject at hand.

 

[Vern Humphrey]

The answer to the question is yes and no.

To do a valid study, you need hundreds and sometimes thousands of events to study. No one has been in hundreds or thousands of gunfights. So from a SCIENTIFIC standpoint, personal experience would be considered "anecdotal evidence" and not really proof of anything.

On the other hand, people DO learn by experience, and they DO get better the more experience they have.

So, yeah, listen to people with experience -- but take it with a grain of salt.

 

[Corpral_Agarn]

Is experience valid?
It can be, sure.

Is it necessary?
Nah.

Are there good instructors who have no "valid experience"?
Absolutely.

 

[Officers'Wife]

I would have to ask experience at what?

My "training" came from people with infantry experience in Vietnam, Korea and WWII but it was shooting only. Their claim was they could "advise" in their experience with squad tactics but should the animal by-product hit the air conditioning I would more likely be all by myself.


A police officer or sheriff's deputy? Again, they are trained to "take control" of a situation and when it's time to shoot control has already been lost. And like the squad tactics I have no one to call for backup.

A lawyer? As with the first two, with their expertise can glean useful information but even the dishonest attorney will tell you there are too many factors involved to give a hard and fast rule.

The civilian not involved in law enforcement? Again, if my grandfather is to be believed the only successful fight is the one that was avoided. The person that has been in more than one is generally one to study of what not to do.

The student of shootings? Again, those that forget history are doomed to repeat it but history reruns are a variation of a theme. As the lawyers would say, too many variables.

In my mind the best advice I was ever given came from an old "boonie rat" that had a lot of "successful" fights under his belt. Say little, listen much, don't seek violence but should it come try not to err but if you must err, err on the side of violence.

 

[henschman]

Here is a good article that is relevant to this discussion. I may have posted it on here before. Anyway, it bears reading.

BLIND MEN, ELEPHANTS, AND THE ONE-EYED MAN

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

We have heard that term before, but I want to discuss it a little bit more because recently I have seen the resurgence of stuff that we dealt with many years ago. It seems as if every so often, the same people “rediscover” the things that they thought they knew.

We all recall the story of the blind men and the elephant. In various versions of the tale, a group of blind men touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement. The problem was that no one man, had the vision that would have allowed him to see the elephant for what it truly was.

Do we see that in the training world today? Oh you bet we do. The problem is that there are some blind men that like to wear what they have done in the past like a flag…or perhaps a billboard, in the hope of giving them more credibility over the other blind men. These guys will grab on to the elephant’s tail hard (or other body part if you will) and exclaim loud and hard, “You see. I have personally grabbed this elephant therefore I, or others who have grabbed this tail right here, like me, can tell you the truth about this animal”.

And the billboards they wear coupled with the vociferocity of their message makes them almost beyond reproach. "Good heavens", their devotees would say. "How could you possibly question him....he was assigned to......"

But the sad part of it is that they do not realize that they themselves are in fact blind to the rest of the massive animal before them. The blind leading the blind.

Take for example a police SWAT shooter. The man may have been in a half dozen gunfight on SWAT operations with his team. One would say this man surely has seen the whole elephant no? He went to battle with six or seven other guys, and attacked a target when the bad guys were at a disadvantage with overwhelming force and superior weapons. Certainly a noble action, but how does that compare to the nature of entire animal? That’s only one part, and as we will see, the trunk has little to do with the tail, and neither of them is indicative of what an elephant is like.

Another example is the military operator. The man may have killed 200 or more enemy soldiers while on infantry operations, or direct action assignments. Surely this man has an understanding about the elephant does he not? He assaulted a compound that had been under satellite surveillance for a week, where he knew contained exactly how many guys. The fast movers above softened it for them and they attacked the enemy and shot them to pieces. The courage of this man is beyond question, but again, what about the entire animal?

Do either one of those sound like a gunfight you might be in tonight, or during the next terrorist act, armed robbery or other unexpected event?

A third example is maybe that of a CCW man. He is not and was never a cop nor a soldier, but he carried a pistol and one day some bad guy tried to carjack him. He did everything wrong, but he still managed to prevail in the fight. Alright…certainly this guy has an understanding of the animal right? No…only another body part.

All three of these fictional examples are like the blind men who are very good at explaining the nature, texture, and smell of their particular experience, but all of them have only seen that, and are missing the complete image and experience.

The HRT/SWAT guy crashing a door into a fortified “crack house” has very little in common with what a lone private citizen CCW operator may have to face when dealing with a trio of gang members bent on his death. And the Delta shooter hitting a target with his team has little to do with how a trio of business owners caught behind the curfew in New Orleans, or Los Angeles need to operate to stay alive and get home. And none of them have much similarity in tactics to the lone operator in a third world country, finishing an assignment and then having to get home.

Trunks and tails, eyeballs and a**holes – they are all a part of the animal, but nobody, and I mean nobody, no matter what their background was, has been everywhere and done everything. And if they tell you that, or insinuate that, they are liars my friends.

So where does that leave us. Our goal is still to identify, study and dissect that massive beast – the elephant. Fortunately, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And the one-eyed man has enough vision to gather all the blind men and debrief them.

Article by Gabe Suarez

 

[strambo]

The problem with that article is that it refers to "tactics" being different, but tactics are pretty easy to train and modify to the needs of the end user. Just find an instructor well versed in proven tactics in whatever area suits you and learn from them. The tactics for a CCW holder or home defense are pretty basic anyway, not rocket science.

The big issue is how the mind and body operate under life and death stress, how it relates to regular performance, and how to train for that. Those with the relevant training, teaching, and 1st hand combat experience (no matter the setting or "tactics" used) would be the best to teach it "ideally." They've experienced the stress and adrenaline affects on them and can relate it to their training, knowledge of training others and observing student performance (and student combat AAR's if applicable-what worked for them or didn't etc.) as well as to the theories of how train for high stress events.

Edit: Another way to put it; LTC Grossman hasn't been in combat to my knowledge. His book "On Combat" is a great read on the effects of combat stress on the mind and body and how to train for it. An ideal instructor (IMHO) would be one who has read "On Combat" and other materials like it, and also been in combat themselves so they can relate 1st hand to the material and how it affected them, how the principles worked (or didn't work) etc.

They could then use this combined theoretical and experiential knowledge to prepare their students properly for life and death combat and let them know what to expect irregardless of the specific techniques or tactics being taught (those are inter-changeable).

 

[Sam1911]

It is good to talk about such things in terms of "ideally." I have known a few people who did go to some extraordinary lengths to produce effects that might simulate those stresses in their students, but that's very rare.

I'd say way more that 99% of defensive/practical firearms training that's available, from anybody does not give more than a passing mention of those probable effects.

It's more than most folks get (or even SEEK!) to instill a few shooting fundamentals, a few concepts for those simple home defense and man-on-the-street tactics you mentioned, and the bare bones of what constitutes lawful use of force.

With that in mind, we might circle back around to the question of how much experience in violent encounters of various kinds matters to the instruction people actually seek/pay for/receive, out there at the shooting ranges in America, circa 2016.

I can't disagree that it would be better to have a teacher who could actually instill the experience of making good decisions, applying smart tactics, and executing proper techniques while under the influences of fight-or-die stress, but I can say that neither the combat-experienced operators I've trained with, nor the cerebral "student of the criminal mind"/armed citizen instructors I've trained with made a whole lot of headway there. Force-on-force would be about the closest thing, but a) that's not the usual training experience, and b) the guys I've known who were most invested in F-o-F and were true pioneers in its use never fired a shot at anyone in their lives.

Which leads me to the belief that, for the most part, with a few exceptions, a trainer's combat/violence experience tends to be most useful as a marketing tool. Speaking in practical terms.

 

[2zulu1]

The problem with that article is that it refers to "tactics" being different, but tactics are pretty easy to train and modify to the needs of the end user. Just find an instructor well versed in proven tactics in whatever area suits you and learn from them. The tactics for a CCW holder or home defense are pretty basic anyway, not rocket science.

The big issue is how the mind and body operate under life and death stress, how it relates to regular performance, and how to train for that. Those with the relevant training, teaching, and 1st hand combat experience (no matter the setting or "tactics" used) would be the best to teach it "ideally." They've experienced the stress and adrenaline affects on them and can relate it to their training, knowledge of training others and observing student performance (and student combat AAR's if applicable-what worked for them or didn't etc.) as well as to the theories of how train for high stress events.

Edit: Another way to put it; LTC Grossman hasn't been in combat to my knowledge. His book "On Combat" is a great read on the effects of combat stress on the mind and body and how to train for it. An ideal instructor (IMHO) would be one who has read "On Combat" and other materials like it, and also been in combat themselves so they can relate 1st hand to the material and how it affected them, how the principles worked (or didn't work) etc.

They could then use this combined theoretical and experiential knowledge to prepare their students properly for life and death combat and let them know what to expect irregardless of the specific techniques or tactics being taught (those are inter-changeable).

Finally the subject of mindset has been mentioned, as in "mindset, skillset and toolset." In that order.

What I've learned over the years is that when things go bad, they go bad very fast; if the brain doesn't recognize a deteriorating situation, then one's skillset may not be needed. .....regardless of who one was taught by.

At this stage in life I tend to hang with those who have similar backgrounds as I do, but the door to learning new things has remained open for a lifetime, regardless of background.

 

[Old Dog]

Sam1911, you have summed up one of my own beliefs quite nicely.

Which leads me to the belief that, for the most part, with a few exceptions, a trainer's combat/violence experience tends to be most useful as a marketing tool. Speaking in practical terms.

Much of the industry training today is conducted as for-profit business (not many non-mil/LE instructors seem to volunteer their time to help out their community's private citizens) ... perception being thought of as reality in today's video-addicted culture, one has to sell his business somehow.

Anyway, as I noted previously, some of the best trainers/instructors I've ever been around had very limited or no military combat or law enforcement gunfight experience, yet were highly regarded by many of those who had that experience.

 

[strambo]

It is good to talk about such things in terms of "ideally." I have known a few people who did go to some extraordinary lengths to produce effects that might simulate those stresses in their students, but that's very rare.

I'd say way more that 99% of defensive/practical firearms training that's available, from anybody does not give more than a passing mention of those probable effects.

It's more than most folks get (or even SEEK!) to instill a few shooting fundamentals, a few concepts for those simple home defense and man-on-the-street tactics you mentioned, and the bare bones of what constitutes lawful use of force.

With that in mind, we might circle back around to the question of how much experience in violent encounters of various kinds matters to the instruction people actually seek/pay for/receive, out there at the shooting ranges in America, circa 2016.
...

This is a great point and becomes a "chicken or the egg" concept. The reason this rarely gets covered and taught (mindset, FoF etc) is because very few people ever get any professional training at all. Of those who do, most go to a course or 2 and so the majority of courses cater to the beginner student pool. At the top of the training pyramid are a few instructor and a few students doing more advanced training and FoF work.

I got plenty of FoF in the military, but on a unit scale so not nearly as useful as on an individual level. The biggest benefit is I have pulled the trigger on another live human being thousands of times in training.

I set out to find a simunition FoF for myself to attend this year because of how important I think it is, and couldn't find anything that remotely fit my schedule except the Simunition LE/MIL scenario instructor course! Well, that's right up my alley and even better that just a student course, so I'll be headed there in 2 weeks.

I don't see myself ever being a full-time trainer, but I love teaching people how to protect themselves and will try to crack the code on offering a local (PDX area) FoF course tailored to the typical CCW holder with minimal training.

Whenever I teach it is heavy on mindset and combat considerations, how a "gunfight" will go down typically and how to train for that, not just the raw mechanics of marksmanship (though I cover that as well.) I also always give a realistic portrayal of anatomy and the mechanism of injury for handguns. The fact that even a heart shot still leaves the brain oxygenated for 7-30s or more and that is a looong time to still be fighting for your life after a "perfect" vital organ shot. Puts the caliber debate and shoot 2 and assess concepts into a different perspective. Dumping lots of rounds center-chest while moving and shooting them to the ground and/or fluidly transitioning to the head makes more sense in that light.

Another training scar...shoot 2 and pause (Double taps Bro!). Drives me crazy. It's pretty funny to rig a clothed 3D target to drop if a hidden balloon is popped and watch people shoot 2 and pause, repeatedly, as the standing target just stares back at them until they hit the 4"-6" sphere center chest and it falls.

3d targets are ~$30 each and last a log time. Old clothing is free. The homemade PVC stand, string, and balloon is dirt cheap materials to make and imagination to rig it.

Much more realistic training is within the budget of anyone who can afford a gun and ammo, all that is lacking is knowledge and imagination.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

A lot to chew on so far

In my mind the best advice I was ever given came from an old "boonie rat" that had a lot of "successful" fights under his belt.Say little, listen much, don't seek violence but should it come try not to err but if you must err, err on the side of violence.

That's experience

 

[Jesse H]

His contention was that you need to use a light that doesn't have a constant on switch or you'll you'll hit the button too hard and turn the light on thus rendering yourself a "bullet magnet".

The (unknown) author made it quite clear that not using his preferred brand of flashlight (Surefire, 200 lumens or less) would guarantee that you would become a "bullet magnet"

I'm curious if he actually does have experience, but has been out of the game for some time. Most of today's offerings from Surefire are over 200 lumens. The classes I've taken from guys that have done it will recommend as much light as you can get.

Most of the guys on my SWAT team have 500+ lumens on their pistols and rifles. My hand held light is 960 lumens. As a SWAT team, when we hit a house on a warrant they're going to know we're there when we breech and bang. Thus we all go lights on our rifles.

In a patrol role, if I'm searching a dark building covertly, I'm going to use my handheld and constantly "pop and paint." Having a momentary switch will work just fine and it's easy not to turn it on. If you do, just simply click it off again. Using proper techniques it's not a big deal. It is highly preferred to have the switch on the tailcap.

Technique plays a bigger role than the equipment.

I'm usually skeptical of instructors who make claims with "always" and "never."