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.