The Tactical Edge - September
Situational Awareness
Our exciting topic for
this month is going to be Situational Awareness. We are going to write the blog
in two parts. The first part is this month’s segment. Next month will present
the second half of the topic. If you’re watching the current news on TV, you’re
seeing a lot of events happening on the East Coast that will make this blog and
next month’s blog very important.
Do you ever see people
walking down the street and talking on their phone or texting? Do you think
they know what’s going on around them? What if there was a bad guy looking for
an easy target. Who do you think he would have his eye on? I will give you one
guess. Actually, he would probably be looking for anybody who isn’t paying
attention to their surroundings. His goal is to make his job quick and with the
lowest risk possible. Your job is to prevent him reaching his goal. That’s
where situational awareness comes into play.
Situational awareness: the basic definition is the ability to scan the
environment and sense danger, challenges and opportunities, while maintaining
the ability to conduct normal activities. In other words, to pay attention to
your surroundings while not appearing to be paying attention. It is simply
knowing what’s going on around you. The late Col. Jeff Cooper developed a color
code for situational awareness and states of readiness.
The colors are white,
yellow, orange, and red. This color code system is a mental process, not a
physical one, and should be utilized whether or not you are armed — though
being armed is always preferred. Being alert may help you to avoid a deadly
threat in the first place, which is always the best outcome. As Sun Tzu said several thousand years ago "Ultimate
victory is in avoiding the fight." That is the primary goal of
having a carry permit also. (Sun Tzu was a Chinese military general, strategist
and philosopher, who is believed to have written the famous ancient Chinese
book on military strategy, “The Art of War” which is used today in mlitary war
colleges around the world.)
Situational awareness is
not just about avoiding a mugging. It is an unfortunate fact that most people
stumble through life, blissfully unaware of the world around them. They remain
preoccupied in their own thoughts of work, personal problems, how to get a
date, or other mundane issues, with no thought to their immediate environment.
By not paying attention to their surroundings, they place themselves in
needless jeopardy.
To understand these
phenomena, go take a seat in your neighborhood hospital emergency intake area
one evening. Observe the unfortunates who come in for treatment and you will
get an excellent illustration of this point. About 20% of the individuals are
actually sick, ignore them. The remaining 80% are there because they did not
pay attention to their environment. These will be the folks who walked off the
loading dock, stepped off ladders twenty feet high, backed into running
machinery, stepped into the path of a vehicle, or allowed a thug to walk
right up to them unnoticed and hit them with a brick.
If you want to understand
how situational awareness really works watch a good Jason Bourne movie or a
James Bond 007 movie. These guys were the experts at situational awareness.
They knew what was going to happen before it could happen. They had an almost
superhuman ability to observe their surroundings and make detailed assessments
about their environment. That’s where you want to be.
Now that you know what
situational awareness is all about, let’s start talking about the color codes.
This month were going to cover white and yellow. Remember now that these are
states of mental preparedness to prevent an unwanted event.
WHITE
In condition White, you
are relaxed and unaware of what is going on around you. Ideally, a person is
only in white when asleep, but realistically we often drop our guard when we
are at home or in any other environment we assume to be safe. If you are attacked
in condition white, you may very well die — unless you are lucky. I prefer to
not depend on luck.
YELLOW
In condition yellow, you
remain relaxed, but are aware of who and what is around you. This merely means
that you are paying attention to the sights and sounds that surround you
whether you are at home or moving in society. Condition yellow DOES NOT equate
with paranoia or any other irrational fear of persons or places. Instead, you
simply have moved your alertness to a level of attention that will prevent you
from being totally surprised by the actions of another person. While walking
through an area you will loosely keep track of anyone behind you. When choosing
a seat in a restaurant, you will position yourself to see the entrance or to
minimize the number of people who might be behind you. You don’t need to insist
on securing the “gunfighter seat” which will put your back to a dead corner
and your face to the
entrance, because you are not anticipating a threat, you are merely conducting
an inventory of your surroundings and the other people around you. You will
also be running a cursory “what if” mental visualization of where a threat
could appear and what your reaction(s) should be. If you are attacked in
condition yellow, it should not come as a total surprise. Your response to a
threat should have been pre-planned to some extent, allowing you to simply run
an existing plan rather than having to make one up quickly while under fire.
By learning to observe your environment,
constantly evaluate it, and react appropriately to what you see, you can
achieve a large degree of control over your fate. This requires you to learn to
shift up and down a scale of readiness, just like shifting gears in a car, so
that you can match your level of awareness/readiness with the current
requirements of your situation.
Next month we will talk
about the colors orange and red. These are the areas that we are hoping to not
get into in a situation by using situational awareness.
Have a great month and
takes someone to the gun range or a shooting safety class. It will be good for
them and you will feel great about it yourself. In the meantime, keep your gun
clean and your powder dry.
