Soldiers are not born with an ability to discern between friend and foe. Many lessons learned from law enforcement concerning threat identification must be incorporated into the military’s training regimen. The first lesson is a psychological one: Human beings rarely, if ever, expect something bad to happen to them. It is always the other guy who gets into a car accident, the other family’s home that is burglarized, and always the other convoys that get hit by the IED. If you were expecting to get into a gunfight, wouldn’t you bring something bigger than a pistol or rifle? It is almost a universal reaction of surprise that greets most warriors and cops when they become involved in a deadly force encounter, even when responding to armed holdup calls and calls where, intellectually, the officers should have known a violent encounter was likely.
Also, Hollywood and television give a false impression on how bullets work. In the movies, a bad guy is blown through a window when struck by one round. Reality is something quite different. Consider the following account of a civil affairs soldier who was an Arkansas cop in his civilian life. He relates his ordeal of confronting two violent, armed robbers at a convenience store.
Rolling into the store parking lot, he saw two armed men running out the front door. His first reaction was one of surprise. As he got out of his car, he was surprised a second time: The two men did not flee. Instead, they charged at him with their weapons blazing. The officer’s first reaction was one of incredulity: Bad guys were supposed to run when confronted by the police. He quickly recovered his wits, retreated to the back of his vehicle, and then went into his training mode: front site on target/trigger press. He quickly and successfully hit both subjects multiple times. Again, to his surprise, only one subject went down immediately, while the second subject hurdled over his downed partner and continued to charge. The officer quickly performed a combat reload (without hesitation and without thinking) and put more rounds into the second bad guy, hitting him with a fatal T shot to the brain. [The fatal T describes that area of the face between the two eyes and the tip of the nose. If you mark this area on a two dimensional target, it creates a “T” shape: hence, the “fatal T.”] That subject was DRT (dead right there), with his automatic pistol empty and slide locked to the rear. The officer then shifted his attention back to the first, downed subject, who—unbelievably to the officer, having hit him with multiple rounds—was trying to push himself up off the ground to continue the attack. It took more rounds from the officer to finally finish the job of addressing that threat. This event profoundly shook the officer, but he reports that it was the fact that he was twice-surprised during the event that impacted him most.
This same type of surprise occurs in urban combat settings with surprising frequency, so training soldiers on this type of law enforcement example can only help soldiers learn what to expect and how to react. The first time they see a subject survive multiple hits should not be in a life-and-death combat setting. If they are stuck on a “qualification” mentality, they will never survive combat.
In addition, we are not born preprogrammed with much in the way of threat recognition. For instance, most reasonable adults, without training, would not recognize that an opponent who was “blading” his body into a pre-assaultive stance or balling his fists was showing signals of imminent attack. Neither prudence nor the law requires the law enforcement officer take the first punch in such a situation. In other words, the law does not require an officer to gamble with his life, nor is the Constitution a suicide pact. Similarly, members of the Armed Forces do not give up their inherent, God-given right to self-defense. In fact, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Standing Rules of Engagement (SROE) recognizes this inherent right (CJCSI 3121.01B, 13 June 2005). A mission may require a squad to charge an enemy machine-gun emplacement, but the rules on how to do so should never require an American to get shot at first!
Nevertheless, before an individual can lawfully use deadly force in self-defense or defense of innocent others, he must be confronted with an individual or group that has demonstrated the hostile intent, ability, and opportunity to inflict death or grievous bodily injury upon himself or innocent others. The law enforcement model used to instruct on this concept is called the Threat Triangle.
We do not need to teach our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines clairvoyant skills to divine hostile intent. In fact, a suspect’s subjective intent, legally and tactically, is not at all relevant. An insane person, or someone highly intoxicated on drugs or alcohol, may possess very little ability to formulate subjective hostile intent. Or as FBI Supervisory Special Agent John C. Hall, one of America’s foremost experts on the law of Use of Force, is fond of quoting, “Very little mentation is required for deadly action. A rattlesnake is deadly but could not form the mental state required for conviction of murder.”
Rather, at a minimum, we should be training our warriors on threat recognition as we train our cops, especially when sending them into uncertain environments where the threats are not wearing enemy uniforms. We should train them to recognize hostile acts and objective hostile intent.
Individuals (other than when striking from a hidden ambush position) generally do not initiate a violent act without first exhibiting certain pre-assaultive behaviors (or “clues,” as they say in law enforcement settings). Perhaps the most prevalent pre-assaultive behavior threat indicator is verbal noncompliance. If a uniformed, armed police officer (or soldier) is pointing a weapon and yelling “Freeze” or “Halt,” compliance is required. Most reasonable people, regardless of whether the verbal warning is in a foreign language, will find it prudent to follow such direction. An individual should not be surprised if he is shot after openly disobeying a cop or soldier who is pointing a weapon and ordering him to freeze or halt.
Under certain circumstances, such as when a suspect ignores a command to “Drop the knife” or “Keep your hands where I can see them,” the verbal noncompliance might be an immediate precursor to deadly force. Under those circumstances, at the very minimum, the verbal noncompliance of a subject should place the officer or soldier in a heightened state of alertness and awareness that something may be awry. This is especially important at entry control points (ECPs) and traffic control points (TCPs), where the screening of many innocent persons and noncombatants might be interspersed with the quick, violent assault of an adversary.
More than any other part of the human body, the hands of a suspect are constantly a concern for most prudent law enforcement officers. The hands will most likely access the weapon or initiate the assault upon the suspect’s intended victim. That is why verbal noncompliance by a potentially armed suspect to a command “Show me your hands” must be viewed as a sign of demonstrated hostile intent or imminent hostile act. Under such circumstances, persons on patrol or guard duty would be foolhardy to wait to see a weapon before taking immediate action. The same holds true in combat settings, yet very few soldiers are ever taught this lifesaving fact. Many judge advocates and commanders wrongly instruct their warriors to wait until a threat actually points or fires his weapon before deadly force is authorized. Never accept such nonsense if written into a tactical directive or ROE: Take the time to educate your judge advocates or superiors on the tactical realities of such situations. They are oftentimes acting out of simple ignorance or “cutting and pasting” old ROE card information that is wrong.