Training Evolution AAR, by Crusoe

During the fall of 2021 I built a training evolution to ramp up my personal preparedness and to either learn new skills or dust off the rust.  I wrote about it in December and this article is a quick after-action report and some observations from along this journey.  As always, I first define the requirements and then build a course of action (COA) to meet those requirements.  I find that not taking the shotgun approach focuses your efforts and, in the end, will save you money.  In a perfect world I would have changed the order of the classes, but since I have no control over the availability nor the timing, I went with the schedule I could create. For the purpose of this article, I will talk about them in my preferred order.

I personally believe medical training should be the cornerstone of your preparedness journey.  Mech Medic’s Partisan Life Saver Course, which is TCCC+, is a solid first step to getting your mind focused upon what is important.  Medical training has real world applications and can be used all along the permissive to non-permissive continuum.   As shown in the New York subway terrorist attacks, you never know when disaster is going to strike and having practical medical training can save you and your family.

This past March I went up to Pathfinder School in Ohio and took Dave Canterbury’s Basic Survival Course.  It was an interesting experience as every lesson immediately turned into a graded practical.  The instructors add stress to each test with the addition of a time limit with a go/no-go grading criterion.   This was one of the toughest courses I have taken in a very long time, and I highly recommend it.  Topics included shelter building, knots, land navigation, and fire.  Rain or shine you will be out in the woods learning practical skills to keep you alive.  I did not enjoy sleeping on two trash bags of leaves under an A-frame tarp in sub-freezing temps and snow, but in the end, I learned how to do that.

The RTO, RTO Advance and SIGNIT courses are the next logical step as you must learn how to communicate within that same continuum.  Comms are a perplexing subject and I believe you need formal training to jump start that learning process.  It is important to understand that operating under the umbrella of HAM and tactical communications are very much like comparing apples to oranges.  They share some of the same attributes but need to be classified as two separate entities.  The HAM community is not your friend (mostly), and you need to be aware of that.  One of our guys went to the local HAM meeting this month and the first half of the meeting was talking about how to find and report non licensed users.

The big daddy of them all was Brushbeater’s Scout Course.  It really is a capstone event that ends with a final exercise using elements from the previous three courses.   In my preferred sequence, by the time you get to the Scout Course you have much of the needed tools in your tool belt to maximize your learning experience.

What is next?  This is a conversation I had with Scout up at the RTO courses in Tennessee.  My requirements going forward is how to better operate within that permissive to non-permissive continuum.  In my opinion we will be cycling back and forth across this spectrum, and it will be imperative to be able to adjust accordingly.  Digital security, intelligence, tradecraft, and lower visibility operations appear to be the next logical step.  When studying Fifth Generation Warfare (arguably still Fourth Gen) those that control information operations are the ones that shape the modern battlefield.  I need to learn how to do that.