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The following article was first printed
in the REALITY CHECK column of COMBAT magazine.
Used here with permission from Mr. Martin
We continue our interview with Marcus Wynne, a former US Federal Counter-terrorist operative, who is now involved in VIP & Corporate Security, and defensive training.
In part one we discussed the breakthroughs with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) applied to close-quarter combat, we presented the first British discussion of the US Army's Jedi Project. We then covered your current work in training women through the innovative Nikita Project. I would like to emphasise that this type of training, despite having a strong theoretical base, is in fact very much "hands on" and practically orientated. Indeed, a major feature of NLP is the involvement of as many types of sensory input:- visual, auditory, and of course kinaesthetic, or "doing it/feeling it".
The interview was conducted in Minneapolis, USA in October 1994, and first published in my "ON GUARD" Column. In the next issue of COMBAT, we will be presenting an update, with a new interview with Marcus, covering his latest research.
DM: Marcus your training programs based on advanced human learning technologies have very clearly defined outcomes. Obviously, the final validation is the ability to perform... as long as the test is realistic. I think some of the problems you are encountering with the inertia of some current organisations, is the fact that the test medium they use is not valid and does not correlate to the real world.
 That's exactly what we're seeing. A friend of mine who works in the intelligence community as a paramilitary/firearms instructor made reference to an historical project that he's working on. One of the things that he's analysing is that many of the survivors of World War Two Special Ops, the American OSS and the British SOE, whose close-quarter-battle training was very short, very rudimentary, but very intense, and focused on scenario-based training. What is amazing is that these old timers, who are in their seventies and eighties, are still able on demand to re-create and utilise those combative shooting skills that they learned years ago, without ever practising! And they can do that under stress, while we have young 25-30 year old police officers who after 13 weeks of intensive firearms training, and qualifying once per month, are still losing gunfights at under seven yards! What is it that we're doing wrong? Our thesis, our supposition is that we are failing to involve them in a situational environment that as closely as possible approximates the reality in which they will use those skills. And in doing that we're doing ourselves a disservice as instructors, while we're doing a grave injustice to our
students.
DM: Having worked with you over the past seven or eight years I know you share our opinion that there is no separation between the different aspects of close-quarter battle.... it's all fighting. We don't separate out the unarmed combat from the knife training; and we don't split the hand-to-hand from the tactical pistol work. So do you see the scenario-based training, and the NLP approach as being just as significant to unarmed combat?
Absolutely, absolutely. That's not only an outgrowth of experience in terms of the operational venue, both in the military and governmental sectors; but it's also an outgrowth of martial arts background. The martial arts I've had the longest acquaintance with are the Filipino martial arts, that make no distinction between knives, stick and in a lot of instances guns in close-quarter battle, along with empty hand techniques. It's all one flow, it's all one technique, and it's all one mindset. That universality is what we lose so often with that artificial separation of armed and unarmed training. We lose track of the fact that what we are in fact doing is we are fighting, and we are using a tool. We are not doing marksmanship; we are fighting with the gun.
DM: Let's move on to another interesting concept which you presented on the Ohio BG Course. During your class on the Mental Aspects you introduced a concept called The OODA Loop, which I understand you adapted from the training of fighter pilots. Perhaps you can share that with ON GUARD readers?
Gladly. OODA is an acronym for OBSERVATION-ORIENTATION-DECISION-ACTION. It's a three-dimensional model; it's the Situational Awareness model that was developed first of all in studies of jet fighter pilots, who operate in a three-dimensional environment. Then it's been adopted as the latest strategy for the light infantry units, Special Ops units, and was applied with the most devastating effect by the US military planners during Desert Storm.
Specifically, the theory behind OODA is that it is a continual loop, an information-processing loop, that the human being goes through in terms of an evaluation of the environment. The "O" stands for Observation, that is when the operator is in the situational awareness mode of relaxed alertness, what Jeff Cooper calls "Condition Yellow", the individual constantly scans the environment and
identifies something; then Orients, (the second "O"). That is, they focus their attention on whatever they have observed and make an evaluation based on their experience, their intelligence, and their "feel" of the situation.
They, "orient", they make a determination, is this a threat? Is this something I have to do something about, or not? At that point they go into the "D", which is the Decision cycle...what am I going to do? Am I going to put into effect pre-arranged plans, how am I going to act on this? Which is "A", which is Action. You put into effect what you have decided to do. You act, then you go back into the loop of "O", observing; you observe how the situation has changed as a result of your action. It's an ongoing, circular and three-dimensional process...and what the theory is, whether it's personal combat, or military strategy, is you want to break your opponents OODA Loop.
You win the fight by assessing the situation faster, and therefor getting inside your opponents OODA Loop, where you're turning faster and acting faster. When someone is observing me I want to be past orientation into decision, or even most of the way into action. In other words I've lapped them, if you can imagine a circle within a circle. By the time that opponent has oriented on me it should be all over.
DM: Can you give readers an example of how they might apply the OODA Concept?
Certainly, you can apply that in the martial arts venue constantly, in terms of, for example street awareness. You're walking down a street and you see someone approaching you. You're observing you're in tune with your surroundings. You orient on that person based on your experience and your evaluation of the situation. You determine is that person a threat? Then you decide what am I going to do.... am I going to cross the street, am I going to avoid this, am I going to prepare myself to defend myself, am I going to take my weapon out...what am I going to do? Then at that point you act. You either choose to do something, or choose not to do something. You may cross the street. Then you go back into observation...the situation has now changed. So, is there going to be a new orientation? If you cross the street and that individual crosses it too, that orientation kicks in a different decision/action cycle, which you then go into. That would be just one example.
One way of breaking that would be, if I saw someone coming to me and I was in a bad neighbourhood, if I wanted to break their cycle I might
deny them observation, I might step into the shadows, or, turn around and walk the other way. I would
deny them the ability to observe and orientate on me. By that I'm inside of their cycle...I may have broken the entire cycle of violence that may be escalating.
It's a real elegant concept that serves very well for VIP close-protection because most often we're in the situation of a small Spec-Ops unit in that there's only those resources we bring with us. We don't have the back-up and we have to out-think the opposition. We have to be smaller, faster, more mobile; that's how we win our fights, because we assess the situation to avoid the trouble. We win because we assess faster and we act faster than our opponent does.
DM: Great concept, with obvious relevance to the individual martial artist too!
As a final point while working together over the past weeks as a Bodyguard Training Team you, I and Evan Marshall have had many hours of off-duty discussion on the directions that specialised defensive training is taking. All agree that we our still only just scratching the surface, and that over the next few years there will be really significant advances in defensive training. Can you comment?
I absolutely agree. I think that where we are at, in terms of combatives, whether it's martial arts, unarmed combatives or, close-quarter-battle. Whether in the private, governmental or, military sphere; whether in the counter-terrorist venue, or in the military spec-ops venue; what we have discovered is that it all comes back to what has been talked about for two thousand years. The weapons are irrelevant...we've got the most advanced handguns and everything else...it really is irrelevant. What's important is the mind. What's important is how effective we make our operators, whether they be an unarmed guy working the door in a bar in Liverpool, or, whether it's an undercover operator working in the middle of Beirut; we still have to instil that the real weapon is the mind.
Where we are really going to stretch training is, we've spent millions of dollars on state-of-the-art shooting facilities, the best guns and the latest ammo; but when we look at the results of the close-range reactive scenarios we are not doing any better. That means there is something fundamentally wrong. What we need to do then, at this point, is to address that variable, that is, what is the mindset, where's the mental orientation? I believe we have an ethical and moral obligation, to give our
students the very best mental preparation we can, so they can survive in those kind of circumstances. There's no excuse for us to back away from that.
We've encountered a lot of resistance, as we've already mentioned, from many people who have spent so much time, money and energy committing to these institutional approaches to training, and are very resistant to the idea of taking in new and advanced human learning technologies. The thing is, where the real progress will be made, is going to be made internally, it's going to be made mentally. It's going to be in the mental training and conditioning that we are experimenting with right now. That's where the big leap is going to be made, and that's where I think we'll see the increase in survivability.
DM: Marcus, thanks for sharing this with our readers.
© Copyright 2001 Dennis Martin
Tune in next month for: Marcus Wynne: The Way of the Jedi (Part 3)
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