Tactical Tangents

For the first episode of the New Year, Mike and Jim tap one of the podcast’s most important resources: You, the listeners! We asked the members of the Tactical Tangents Facebook Discussion Group for a list of questions, with the promise of podcast swag for the best one. (If you’re not in the group, get in there and join!) What’s the best training for unsworn personnel to seek out to best enhance their safety on the job? How do you deal, as a leader, with that difficult team member who’s hard to motivate? These topics and many more get bandied about by Jim and Mike, using their experiences in the world outside the PowerPoint presentation. Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com

The A-Team couldn’t have pulled off a caper with four B.A. Baracuses , U2 never would have been a hit with four Bonos, and nine Legolases couldn’t have gotten the One Ring to Mordor. Putting together a good team is about more than just a mix of skills, though, and in this episode Jim and Mike talk about balancing personality types to build a team of winners. Some people are daring and some are risk-averse. There are process people and results people. For every rebel, there’s an i-dotting, t-crossing rules follower. All these personality types can bring something to a team; this kind of diversity really is strength! Selecting opposites that compliment each other is a valuable leadership skill. Most important is the self-awareness of what you bring to your team, and who can back you up in your blind spot. Links: Warnings Unheeded by Andy Brown   Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com

In this episode, Mike sits down for a discussion with Ross Hick. In addition to his career supervising violent felons as a Probation Surveillance Officer, Ross works as a trainer with Citizens Defense Research. One of his specialties is the psychology of critical incidents. There’s a lot of material out there on preparing for the fight, but Ross and Mike go on a deep dive about preparing for the aftermath.  Tactical skills and physical fitness can help survive the fight, but what about emotional fitness after the fight is over? In addition to common symptoms like sleep disruption and reliving the incident, high responders may find themselves in the uncomfortable position of feeling isolated and out of control afterward. In this episode Ross & Mike talk about therapy resources, the importance of finding meaning outside the job, and preventative care ahead of time for mental resilience in the wake of a critical incident. Links: Citizen Defense Research Sources of Power By Gary Klein The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com

Nobody wants to put on a show that’s all war stories. It sounds like you’re trying to fluff your resume and can bore others who’ve also been there and done that. Plus you don’t want to talk out of school. At the same time, there’s a lot of hard-won institutional knowledge that can come from those stories, especially the ones where Jim almost died. In this episode, Mike and Jim relax and let Jim share some of the lessons he’s learned from scaring himself half to death.  Hard landings, cockpit equipment malfunctions, fires, and near-miss almost midair collisions while in an inverted spin, these situations that were terrifying at the time can be humorous in retrospect as long as everyone lived. More importantly, they all offer the sort of lessons that can’t be learned from a PowerPoint presentation, only by things going badly wrong in real time. Jim’s here to pass his hard won lessons on to you. And watch out for pterodactyls! Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com

For all its chaos, the stereotypical active shooter situation is fairly straightforward: There’s a bad guy killing people, and the good guys need to close with him and stop him as quickly as possible. The events of November 2008 in the Indian city of Mumbai, however, showed us another, complex, kind of active shooter event and Mike takes a look at the takeaways from those fateful days. The Mumbai incident, perpetrated by a squad of ten terrorists who had been through a rigorous selection and training process, introduced multiple novel problems worth considering. What happens when there are multiple shooters at different scenes simultaneously? When they have access to serious arms, including grenades, possibly provided by a foreign actor? When they use structure fires as a weapon? When they have outside command-and-control monitoring the news and communicating with the shooters via cell phone? These and other complications inherent in an attack like this are examined in this episode.   Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com

There are people who believe that inserting the police in a situation makes things worse. Are they right? In this solo episode from Mike, he looks at the perils of the “fear biter” and the negative effects of an unmanaged fight or flight response on decision making skills. Stress management is important, and it can’t be learned in a PowerPoint class. The most notorious manifestation of this phenomenon is the “’Oh Sh*t!’ Bang”, where a scared or startled cop results in a lawful-but-awful shooting that might have been avoided by better stress management and more confidence in the officer’s physical skills. However, Mike also explains the many other places that the poorly managed limbic response can rear its ugly head: Bad communication in stressful situations, indecision or half-decisions that allow a developing situation to get much worse, and more.   Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com

America's largest mass killer attack revisited by retired LVMPD Lt. Will Huddler and Sgt. Ashton Packe, who share their accounts of the Route 91 Country Music Festival shooting with audio and video from the event. Lessons learned for first responders, patrol officers, tactical operators, and public safety commanders and leadership. VIDEO: https://youtu.be/mVfirxD7XYY This bonus episode is brought to you exclusively by BRINC Drones www.brincdrones.com  

Whether it’s a former significant other who just won’t accept the end of a relationship, or a semi-stranger from the internet who imagines a relationship where there never was one, dealing with a stalker can be a complex, stressful, and even dangerous problem. In this episode Jim and Mike take a deep dive into recognizing, countering, and ultimately prevailing against a problem stalker. Stalking is a problem that often isn’t recognized until it’s well out of hand, and advice from friends and relatives is often limited to platitudes about restraining orders or buying a gun. Our hosts take a look at the nuts and bolts of the problem with an eye to strategy and the recognition that legal solutions can be frustratingly time consuming.   Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com  

In a crossover episode of Tactical Tangents, Mike sits down with Danimal of The Thin Brewed Line to talk about setting up a training program to keep officers alive on the streets…and in the training environment. In a dangerous profession, the danger shouldn’t be coming from inside the program! Inspired by a tragic story of another preventable training fatality, Mike and Dan go over what’s needed to build a training program that resists complacency and challenges officers with pressure tested scenarios while avoiding the dreaded mindset of “It can never happen here!” Training to be adaptable, getting buy-in for quality training from superiors, and building a sustainable program that can be passed on to the next generation are all covered in this wide-ranging discussion. Links: Thin Brewed Line Podcast  Filthy Pirate Coffee Training at the Speed of Life by Kenneth Murray Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com  

What are we doing here and why are we doing it? With an assist from Mike, Jim lays out the secret; the keys to the whole mission of Tactical Tangents. These are the key concepts to helping the Doers do things better in the tactical world, whether military, law enforcement, or general personal defense. There are recurring concepts here at Tactical Tangents that are core to our mission, and this episode serves as a sort of Cliff’s Notes to lay them out for you, the listener. Understanding how innovation drives ideas, the importance of good decision-making, practicing and testing tactics and soft skills under pressure and the importance of repetition in building proficiency are covered, as well as the applicability of Boyd’s decision cycle from the strategic level down to that of personal tactics.   Like what we’re doing? Head over to Patreon and give us a buck for each new episode. You can also make a one-time contribution at GoFundMe.  Intro music credit Bensound.com