Surveillance Part 6: Improving Situational Awareness (C)

From our list of the Components of Situational Awareness (Observation, Perception, Description, Memory, Human Behavior and Deduction) we just have Deduction left to cover, before getting in to some useful practical exercises in the next article.

Deduction

a. You have been honing your Situation Awareness skills for some time, paying great attention to what is happening around you, noticing more than you have ever before and can produce solid, detailed descriptions of it all as well as remember them accurately. You can read people's body language to gain extra insight into their emotions, state of mind and true intentions. You have also become an accomplished lie detector and spend your day profiling everyone you meet. All of which is great except that it is of purely academic interest unless you also actively use this new found Intelligence to make make informed decisions on which you act. This may seem obvious but it is absolutely crucial. The Department of Homeland Security might want you to "See something, say something" but if you see something out of the ordinary that represents a possible threat, we want you to quickly game out options for action in your mind and make a conscious choice to follow one of them. Doing nothing is a valid option. Waiting to gather more Intelligence is another. But neither should be the result of inertia, paralysis, laziness or fear of embarrassment. People die every day from worry about upsetting a stranger or making a fool of themselves. Don't be one of them. Social etiquette be damned.

b. The Human response to any sudden, stressful and threatening situation is, unsurprisingly, very animalistic: Freeze; Flight; or Fight. We never want to be the deer in the headlights, frozen in time and seconds away from being turned into hamburger. It might be appropriate if we are hiding in a hedgerow when the enemy searchlight sweeps in our direction (movement is much easier to detect than a static target because of the way the eye works). But other than the Stalag 13 or Tyrannosaurus Rex scenario, you are going to be much better served when the predator is about to strike by running away or fighting to the point that you prevail (and can then run away). Stress inoculation is the best at preventing a freeze reaction: training which seeks to replicate some of the physiological responses to life or death situations such that your body and mind become conditioned to the adrenaline dump, its effects on the human body, how to mitigate those effects and how to push through them as well as deal with the "hangover" when things calm down.

c. We will talk more about practical stress inoculation training in the next article but it is worth mentioning here the side effects of that adrenaline dump. Why? Because when you spot hostile surveillance targeted against you, whether from the Police State, a criminal or a stalking ex, you are going to experience an adrenaline dump whether you like it or not. Adrenaline makes your IQ go down (exponentially true in a group/mob setting), which inevitably affects decision making. The more you can minimize the effects of adrenaline rather than have it control you, the smarter you will be and the better decisions you will make. Interestingly - in a sweeping generalization sort of way - males and females differ in the way they experience an adrenaline surge. In men, it is like the syringe is dumped in all at once, with a flash of rage that dissipates as quickly as it peaks. For women, however, it is much slower to build and lasts longer. All other things being equal, the data supports that in a home invasion scenario an armed male defender will stop the threat close to the front door with a couple of shots. But responding police officers will find the attacker slumped deep inside the house with an entire mag dump in them when the defender is female. Worth knowing and appreciating the difference.

d. The bigger the adrenaline dump the more intense the effects can be. Much of this is tied to heart rates. When everything is on the line, when the street hood pulls the knife on you, the rapist grabs you in a choke hold or the dawn no-knock warrant team comes crashing through the door, a lot changes in your perception of the world around you. Your heart rate can go from resting to over 200 beats per minute in a couple of seconds and this comes at a significant cost to your performance and not just rational thought. Fine motor skills go first (above about 120 bpm), especially finger dexterity. As the heart races on, complex motor skills begin to suffer making hand-eye coordination very difficult (at about 150 bpm). Even higher and most people lose cognitive function, becoming extremely target focused, with tunnel vision, reduced hearing (auditory exclusion), loss of depth and time perception (everything appears in slow motion) and even memory loss (around 175 bpm). Loss of peripheral vision can be a very serious problem when confronted with multiple predators, leading a victim to be literally "blindsided" by an additional attacker. And focusing on the manifestation of the threat (e.g. the knife or the pistol) at the exclusion of the person wielding it, can lead to sub-optimal solutions. We have lost count how many times an attacking role player gets shot with Simunitions in their gun hand by a student during Force on Force training. Higher still heart rates put you in end game territory: loss of rational thought; hyper vigilance; inability to consciously move or respond. One significant implication is that the more fit your heart, the lower rate it will be beating under stress: the number one rule of Zombieland is cardio for a good reason. Exercise can indeed make you smarter.

e. Stress inoculation training provides another parallel benefit by giving you solutions to problems to put in your mental "library". You don't want the first time you have ever faced a knife attack to be for real: it helps enormously if you have run through multiple scenarios in a gym under competent instruction with a dull training knife first. Similarly for interaction with law enforcement: if you have studied the subject, absorbed good advice and even experienced arrest and detention procedures in a training environment, you will be much less likely to fall to pieces, worsen your situation or create hostages to fortune. The same for a kidnapping scenario where the shock of capture needs to be fought hard to ensure you never allow yourself to be taken to a second location. Nothing good ever happens at a secondary crime scene.

f. The more times you have faced a variety of dangerous situations, even (or especially) in scripted, controlled training environments, the better your expectation and preparation for how a real one might play out and the better your decision making will be on what to do about it. You want an extensive and comprehensive "library" of options, so that your chances are high of picking the right one to execute in as short a time as possible. You are building your muscle and mental memory of what to do.

The more practiced and current you are on getting off the "X" (out of the ambush site), drawing a pistol and engaging targets, ramming a vehicle, avoiding a skid, putting on a tourniquet, giving effective CPR, getting through a checkpoint, undergoing an ID check, destroying your phone, wiping your computer hard drive or dealing with a bump in the night - the better the likely outcome. Stretching your comfort zone, whether in quality training or real life experience, should be a continual goal.

g. An extension of this is to play the "What if" game. Whether on your own, with a partner or in your group, an excellent way to pass the time is come up with potential scenarios and to game out options for action (decision making) based on how the scenario evolves. Hence our series of Tactical Decision Games. This can be totally hypothetical as you are sat around the dining table, campfire or barbecue. Or it can be based on the scene in front of you as you go about your daily life. If you are outside of your castle you are in Colonel Cooper's Condition Yellow, paying attention to everything. As you spot something which could pose a potential threat you become alert to the possibilities that might turn into a real threat (Condition Orange) and, if that happens, you start conjuring up a plan of action you might take to deter, avoid, deescalate or counter attack. If the group of thugs on the street corner start tracking your movement down the sidewalk, will you cross the road? If they cross the road too, will you find sanctuary in a store? If they come in the store, will you call 911 and draw your pistol? On the interstate another Condition Orange might present itself: what if the truck decides to pull out if front of you as you both approach a section of black ice? Has the truck driver seen you, let alone the guy on the crotch rocket motorbike coming up behind you? What if the motorbike rider hasn't/cannot see the fast approaching patch of ice? Building up your exposure to possible situations and possible plans of actions will cut down the time it takes to make good decisions.

h. Sharing these thought processes and practices with others is important. It enables you to work much more efficiently together. This is especially true of kids and spouses. If the Family Unit has some basic understanding of what to do in an emergency, what to expect of your reaction and what you expect/require them to do, then they are much more likely to act in a way that is helpful rather than counterproductive. It is not difficult to make fun "What If" games for kids and it can beat yet another round of "I Spy" on a long road trip. When it is drummed into them from an early age that adults are to be respected and obeyed, you have some work to do as a parent to build judgment and critical thinking in them that sometimes adults are evil and dangerous: you need to give your kids permission to defy an adult under certain circumstances. A few "What If" scenarios will give them a good baseline.

i. An adjunct to building your mental and muscle memory is to be constantly evaluating both the good and bad aspects of your environment. Not just who is a potential threat but how can you shape things to your advantage should the situation go sideways. What offers cover or concealment? Where are the escape routes? How many doorways do you need to keep an eye on? What could you use as a potential weapon (and what could be used against you)? Where is a tactically good place to sit in this restaurant (back to a wall, away from a window, near an exit)? Can you make an expedient escape through this window or that fence? Becoming quickly familiar with any new environment and assessing its pros and cons is a valuable life skill. The more you practice, the better you will get.

j. Deduction, i.e. drawing a conclusion through reasoning, is a rich subject area encompassing analysis, judgment, statistics, risk analysis, planning and decision making. In our context it starts with taking the totality of your observations and making an active assessment of what they could mean along with some sense of probability. In the movie Ronin, the lead character Sam (De Niro), confidently says "Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt". While that might be true in certain tactical situations, the fact that the world is full of weird people doing weird things has to be taken into account before you go to guns, run for the hills or call in the cavalry. But if the panel van with the blacked out windows has been hanging out on your street corner for a week and you noticed a gun and an earpiece on one of the new crew mowing your lawn and you spotted the same car following you to work 3 times since Monday, then there is almost certainly no doubt. You need to take action to protect yourself before you are no longer able to do so.

k. Study and skill in decision making comes with lots of truisms which all play a role (sometimes competing against each other). Occam's Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the most likely. The Paradox of Choice says that decisions are easier and quicker to make when we give ourselves fewer options: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail but, if your bat belt has a Taser, pepper spray, a baton, a gun and a knife on it, you might struggle to choose where you are on the Force Continuum spectrum. A good plan enacted immediately is better than a perfect plan next week (to paraphrase Patton). And no plan survives the first encounter, always have a back up. Surprise, Speed, Strength and Violence of Action are vital when you are fighting for your life, whatever the plan was when you started. Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from surviving bad judgment (and it is a lot easier to learn from the mistakes of others than having to run the gauntlet yourself). By now, you should intrinsically know to avoid stupid people doing stupid things in stupid places.

l. Finally, at least for now, intuition can play a huge role in quick, reliable decision making. If something feels "off" about a person or a situation, trust your gut and act. Even if you cannot put your finger on it in the moment, do not allow yourself to override that inner voice. Millennia of evolution have given humans an innate instinct to detect danger when we choose to use it. The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker is the seminal work on the subject. Those subtle danger signals and micro warnings are what our senses are picking up and our brain processing in the background without conscious thought. They are just as valid as any obvious, in your face threat and they need to be taken seriously. A true Sixth Sense. In a broader context, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell offers excellent insights too. Filtering out the noise, focusing on a few particular details rather than an abundance of information, can make all the difference in making the right decision. Less can be more.