SecurityDriver News

In light of all the discussion concerning the assassination in Mexico – I thought I would go over my thoughts on Kill Zones. 

Since being in the Kill Zone can Ahhhhh kill you – you should

            Understand what they are

            How to stay out of them

            And if you get in one – how to get out of them

            If you can’t get out – how to put up one hell of a fight – but keep in mind why they are called Kill Zones 

Understand what they are – This isn’t brain surgery – A Kill Zone is a time distance relationship – how much time do I have and how much distance do I have. If you attend a “Security Driving School”, and they don’t talk about this concept – ask for your money back.

How to stay out of them – First and foremost – the best way to avoid an ambush, hence the kill zone, is don’t be there when it happens. There are plenty of people who are an ambush looking for a place to happen, just hope they are driving the same roads you are. 

If you haven’t done it already, take a course that has a heavy emphasis on Surveillance Detection – Route Surveys, and Advancing. 

And if you get in one – how to get out of them – Driving out of the kill zone is an exercise in the laws of physics and is a measurable skill. These are not skills you learn sitting in the back seat of a vehicle driving around a race track. The only skill you learn sitting in the back seat is how to projectile vomit out the back window. Again – If you attend a Security Driving School and they don’t talk – demonstrate – practice – objectively measure your skill to escape the Kill Zone – ask for your money back.           

If you can’t get out – how to put up one hell of a fight. This is where shooting skills meet driving skills – there are shooting schools that emphasize these skills – but keep in mind why they are called Kill Zones

July 24, 2010

For the protection specialist or security driver the worst-case scenario is a deliberate attempt to stop the vehicle.  Surviving those scenarios requires the ability to keep the vehicle moving and clear the kill zone as quickly as possible – no matter what is happening outside the vehicle.

Focused, Intense, Effective Training

 VDI’s Immediate Action Driving Skills course is designed to provide security practitioners – from the entry-level protection specialist to highly experienced private sector, military and law enforcement professionals - the training and experience needed to deal with the worst-case scenario, a vehicle ambush. Where survival comes down to the driver’s ability to respond instinctively to the threat, when the difference between success and failure is measured in tenths of a second. 

This one day course provides students with an opportunity to:

 - Learn from professionals with real world experience

 - Experience the realities of driving through a kill zone        

 - Understand how to effectivelyoperate damaged vehicles

 Students will gain hands-on, practical experience in:

 - Pushing through roadblocks - (One & two vehicle ramming)

 - Defeating rolling ambushes - (PIT/Counter-PIT techniques)

 - Dealing with an incapacitated driver – (Driving from passenger seat)

 - Forced lane excursions – (Surface transitions)

For addtional information
Joseph Autera
Tony Scotti’s Vehicle Dynamics Institute
Tel: 732 738-5221
Cell : 732–586-4020   email: jautera@vehicledynamics.net

Or Tony Scotti
781 395 3097 email tonyscotti@securitydriver.com

This is the first of two articles by Derek Humble. Derek is a transplanted British security professional currently living in Toronto, Canada. After a career in the British Military he took a position with a large Canadian security provider operating a specialized department offering corporate protective services to Canada’s elite. In 1988 Derek decided to incorporate his own business that he named The Anvil Group.

The Anvil Group Inc under Derek’s guidance ran operations in Canada and around the world with operations in North, Central and South America as well as Europe. Derek has run numerous versions of secure driver programs around the world specifically Moscow, Chicago, Mexico City and London to name a few. He is a long time friend, and was an early graduate of the old Scotti School of Defensive Driving and has constantly strived to study the cerebral aspects to protective driving as much as the physical practical side of the business.

 Currently Derek consults with companies on matters of personal protection, risk management and travel risk assessments. His company is NEMESIS CONSULTING     Derek’s email dhumble@nemesisinfo.com

“Situation Awareness” Just a catch phrase or a vitally useful tactic? Part 1The phrase “Situation Awareness” has gradually entered the lexicon of security trainers and is seen in text books as an almost throw away line when talking about anything from driving the CEO in their day-to-day lives or driving down Route Irish. However few of those using this important term truly understand what is meant by being “Situation Aware” or even where that phase derives from.

 “Situation Awareness”, as a catch phrase, owes its birth to the very steep learning curve experienced by the Brits in the very difficult war against terrorists, both Republican and Loyalist, in Northern Ireland and the British mainland. As with all counter insurgency situations survival lessons must be learnt faster than the terrorists learn theirs. Staying ahead of the insurgent’s tactical learning curve means keeping friendly forces alive long enough to slow the enemy successes. This has been a core requirement in all counter insurgency wars since WW2. As the threat changes and increases so must the counter tactics to those dangers. Those immersed in facing a competent enemy, such as Irish, Iraqi, or Afghan insurgents or even the ordinary criminal element must developed training tactics that were/are meaningful, sensible. They must also be easy to learn and understand but most of all there is a need for tactical sustainability.

Whether the protector is in the military, law enforcement, government security, or in private sector protection, training is always budget, time and resource sensitive. Even those with significant budgets struggle with the needs of those on the leading edge of the battle. Physical skills taught need regular practice, areas needed for training are difficult to find and staff are often too busy with operations to be released to retrain. Situation Awareness is a tool that addresses the inability of operational personnel to regularly retrain and refresh to meet the required standards. How often have operational staff laughed when told that they need to re-qualify on a regular basis.

The maxim of “it is impossible to protect everyone, everywhere all the time from everything” has never been truer than it is now in the year 2010. A large part of the protective battle is to understand the “alert level requirement” to know this increases the sustainability of any protective task. High Risk situations (Route Irish) can be adrenalin demanding and then draining to the body. Intensive concentration is exhausting and in most cases a high state of awareness cannot be maintained for periods of hours let alone days, without a serious degradation in effectiveness. This alert level recognition and adoption is the age old difference between the veteran and the “new guy”. Boredom is equally debilitating and long periods of inactivity will have an equally negative effect on the need for a competent and timely reaction to incidents. The true protection professional needs to be able understand when to “up their game” and equally “when to safely relax” To arrive at this ultimate and enviable mental state is the aim of being “Situation Awareness”

All of the skills required to properly protect those at risk be they driving, shooting, first aid or intelligence gathering are secondary to the need to understand how to become, and stay, “Situation Aware”. All of the physical skills are of course important in the reactive phase of any protective assignment. However the best kind of protective skill will allow the protective practitioner to avoid discovering whether their shooting/medical skills are up to the mark by being “Situation Aware” and thus avoiding danger. Truly understanding where the risks are highest, what type of attack are likely , what tactics they prefer and how to detect and/or deter attacks will dramatically reduce need for using driving, shooting or fighting skills. The learning involved in this proactive approach is simple to understand and therefore easy to retain over lengthy periods of time. It can be constantly practiced, tested and modified in any operational environment. This is the approach that is truly sustainable. And this approach represents the one key element in surviving in the realities of day-to-day operations and/or daily duties. Being truly “Situation Aware” can be the protective equivalent of Zen the question is how to achieve it?

Whether driving to the mall, driving the boss to work or driving in a high risk environment most driving is done in the Comfort Zone. The Comfort Zone is a combination of speed – steering and/or braking where the vehicle reacts as the driver expects it to. The Red Zone is a combination of speed – steering and/or braking that creates big changes in the way the vehicle responds, changes that are not expected, and create anxiety. Unless it is a race, the Red Zone is not a place a driver would go to on purpose, it is a place visited only when bad things are happening.

 It  may be difficult to think of a 10,000 lb armored Suburban as “sensitive”, but a car’s controls are very sensitive to speed, the faster you go, the more sensitive the vehicles braking and steering become. This area of sensitivity is the Red Zone.

 Research indicates that going from the Comfort Zone to the beginning stages of the Red Zone, happens with an increase of a fraction of an inch on the steering wheel, and/or an increases of speed as little as 2 MPH. To complicate the issue research has also shown the driver gets into their own personal Red Zone way before the vehicle does. As the driver enters Red Zone the vehicle will send feedback that makes the driver feel uncomfortable (the researcher’s way of saying scared). At this stage of the Red Zone the vehicle is still controllable, but the level of skill needed to keep the vehicle under control has gone up dramatically, and the window of opportunity to maintain control is extremely small.

 Look at it as the vehicle has a limit and the driver has a limit. The drivers limit is much lower than the vehicles limit. Basically the driver is uncomfortable with a combination of speed – steering and/or braking that are below the amount of speed – steering and/or braking the vehicle can take. 

 It is the transition from Comfort to Red that creates a training challenge. In an emergency a driver will be required to quickly transition from their Comfort Zone, into the Red Zone, there can be no hesitation. Common sense dictates that a driver has to be trained to recognize and manage this transition. In our opinion this transition is the essence of driver training. One of the goals of a driver training program is to raise the amount of steering, braking and speed a driver is comfortable with.

A while back I contributed a short article to the “Training Log Book” by Rob Pincus. Rob came up with a rather unique and ingenious idea, a book that documents your training.  The book contains over 2 dozen essays from training industry professionals offering their advice in regard to defensive and tactical training. Whether you do a little or allot of training the book is a must. The essays are worth the price of the book.

For more info

A short article I did for State Farm Insurance

We have developed an iPhone Application on Distracted Driving. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) driver distractions are the leading cause of most vehicle crashes and near-crashes.  The App came about when we looked at a study released by the NHTSA and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI).  The study discovered that 80% of crashes and 65% of near-crashes involve some form of driver distraction – and the distraction occurred within three seconds before the vehicle crash!   For those in High Risk Security that number “three seconds” is familiar. It is the “Kill Zone”.

The Kill Zone Concept is used to train our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to avoid a vehicle ambush. Our iPhone Application uses the same theory to explain and avoid the dangers of Distracted Driving.

The theory is simple; a Kill Zone is a time-distance relationship. How much time does the driver have and how close is the problem (distance)?  The Kill Zone is directly related to the speed of the vehicle when the incident occurs.

An example of how Kill Zones relate to Distracted Driving look at the following scenario – You are 300 feet from a traffic light moving at 40 mph which is 60 feet per second. You get a text message; it takes 3 seconds to read the message – that means you drove 180 feet (3 seconds x 60 fps) without looking at the road. 

You were 300 feet from the traffic light, but as you were reading the text message, you moved 180 feet. When you looked up from the text message, you are 120 feet (300 -180) from the traffic light that has now changed from yellow to red.

You are 120 feet in front of the red light and closing in at 60 fps.  You are in the Kill Zone, a time distance relationship, the distance is 120 feet and some quick arithmetic tells you that you have two seconds to react. And you are driving deeper into the kill zone.

If you can get you foot on the brake in a half-second (that’s fast), you will travel 30 feet (half of 60 fps).  So at the point of applying your brakes, you are 90 feet from the traffic light (the initial 120 feet minus the 30 feet it took to reach for the brake). 

You will have to stop a car moving at 40 MPH (60 feet a sec) in 1.5 seconds. Life is going to get terribly exciting.

Our App uses case studies in the form of presentations, similar to the one above, and offers lessons learned.  The objective is to keep you out of the kill zone. 

You can direct any questions or comments to

tonyscotti@securitydriver.com

lawrence.snow@sjcwebdesign.com

Depending on your occupation, there is no doubt there are scenarios where one may need to drive fast. The difficulty associated with driving fast depends on three issues, the skill of the driver, the vehicle they are driving and the environment they are driving through. On an ice covered road 30 MPH can be exciting, on a four lane highway with the sun shining, 80 MPH could go unnoticed. In a three vehicle motorcade, the driver of the lead vehicle may not think 70 MPH is a problem, but the driver of the third vehicle may disagree with that assessment.

Driving fast is a complicated issue. Let’s be clear that driving fast in a straight line is not difficult, unless you are sitting in a Dragster that consists of a metal tube with a 6000 HP engine behind you, and you are planning on going 300 MPH in a quarter mile. Driving fast becomes difficult when you need to operate one of the other controls (brake – steering) of the vehicle. In a non racing scenario it makes little difference how fast you’re traveling in a straight line, the skill (and excitement) comes in when you need to do something with the car, like driving around a corner or making an avoidance maneuver, at that point it becomes not an exercise in high speed straight line driving, but an exercises in high speed braking or turning. All this requires training and practice, and there is an enormous difference between driving around a corner fast, and driving out of an emergency.

SOME BASIC THOUGHTS ON DRIVING FAST

As speed increases, drivers’ eye tends to focus on objects just a short distance in front of the car’s hood. Common sense says that the faster you drive the further ahead of the car your attention should be focused. In a high risk environment you need the eyes of everyone in the vehicle coupled with a method of communicating what they see to the driver, or drivers, this requires training and practice.

The faster you drive, the more often you should consult your speedometer. You cannot rely on your own judgment; the faster you drive, the more your perception of speed becomes distorted.

Don’t drive faster than you can see. If you are driving at 60 MPH you are moving approximately 90 Feet a Second, most researchers say that you need 2.5 seconds to react to what you see, that means at 60 mph you would need 225 feet to react to what is happening. It is my opinion that training considerably cuts down those 2.5 seconds.This is the most important issue and training point – When you increase speed, you are suddenly driving a very different car from the one you were in control of a few moments ago. If you double your speed from 40 mph to 80 mph, the forces acting on the vehicle, has been increased by a factor of four. Turning the steering wheel at 80 mph will put four times as much stress on the car as the same maneuver at 40 mph. And no matter what braking method you use, it will take you four times longer to stop the vehicle.

 It may be difficult to think of a 10,000 lb armored Suburban as “sensitive”, but a car’s controls are extremely sensitive to speed, the faster you go, the more sensitive the vehicles braking and steering become. Small changes in speed (as little as 2 MPH) will dramatically change the vehicles response to the drivers input. Controlling a vehicle while driving into a corner or through an emergency maneuver is a skill that needs to be learned, practiced, and measured.

To give an example of how sensitive vehicles are to speed; A competent driver can drive through our slalom exercise at 30 MPH with little or no problems; at 32 life will start to become exciting; at 35, doable but very exciting; at 37.5 the car will be sliding, but again doable; at 40 MPH the driver will not be able to complete the exercise. A change of about 2 MPH will be the difference between successes and failure. How this translates to the real world is that you can be driving 100 MPH in a straight line (easy to teach, it’s the pedal on the right – press on it) but if you need to make an emergency maneuver or drive around a corner you will have to slow the car down from 100 MPH to a speed that the driver – vehicle – environment can handle, and that is not easy to teach or master.

DESIGNING DRIVING EXERCISES

The purpose of  placing a student in a given exercise or scenario is to evoke a response from the driver/vehicle which introduces or reinforces specific skills or skill sets , and to afford an opportunity to coach the student on applying those skills and, of course, measure their baseline performance and quantify their improvement. None of this can be accomplished without understanding of vehicle dynamics. This understanding leads to questions that a professional driving instructor asks and can provide answers to:

 How far apart are the cones in the slalom?

What is the width of the barrier in the lane change?

What is the maximum capability of the vehicle, measured in G’s, in each exercise?

What is the maximum rate of de-acceleration of the vehicle?

At what speed does the student approach the vehicles maximum capability in each  exercise (or scenario) that you place them in?

Why are the answers to these questions so important? Because if the instructor does not know the maximum capability of the vehicle and what conditions and/or limitations an exercise will impose on that vehicle, it is impossible to measure the capability of the driver. And if the instructor cannot determine what the driver was capable of at the beginning of their training and then compare that to what the student is capable of at the conclusion of their training, there is no way to determine if the training was effective; in fact, there is no way to establish and meet objective goals for the training.  Perhaps more importantly, without measuring the student’s capability there is simply no way for them to fully recognize what they can, and cannot, do behind the wheel.

 Ultimately, you cannot separate vehicle dynamics from driver training; hence instructors MUST have a thorough understanding of vehicle dynamics and the ability to apply that knowledge to driver training.  Because once they have that understanding, they then have the ability to provide training that incorporates the three critical factors of survivability behind-the-wheel emergencies – the driver, the vehicle and the environment – into exercises that not only provide a mechanism for measuring the driver’s improvement, but also closely replicate the types of emergencies he or she is likely to face.

 For an example of just how advantageous this understanding  can be to the instructor, we  just need to look  back at a an Instructor-level Vehicle Dynamics and Exercise Design program TSVDI conducted for a Federal Agency. When we passed out the calculators (standard issue for the vehicle dynamics savvy instructor), one of the students was looking at the calculator like a monkey might look at a watch – confused. It wasn’t long before he came up to Tony and expressed his displeasure that he would have to learn math to pass the course. He, like many others we have trained, pointed out that during his high school days; (with some it even extends into their college days) math was the bane of his existence. In a roundabout way he made the point that he was concerned that he would not pass the course because of the math. Tony’s answer was the same for him as it has been for scores of others with the same concern – hang in for a few days, and give it your best shot, while we give our best shot to teaching you the math.

 Three days later, as we were on the track designing a training exercise to recreate a specific incident that involved their unique vehicles and the difference a new found knowledge of math and vehicle dynamics made was quite obvious. Tony had put together some guidelines for the students regarding the exercise design elements, and this same guy that had , just a couple of days before, been concerned about passing the course walks up to him  and says “I don’t agree with the way you suggested we design this exercise”. He then proceeded to walk Tony through nearly a full page of calculations he had worked out to express how he thought the exercise should be designed and thoroughly explained why he thought that. In just a few days this instructor had gone from being intimidated by the math required to design driving exercises to combining his knowledge of the laws of physics (and, god forbid, math)  with his operational knowledge of the agencies mission objectives, the unique vehicles they operated and the types of incidents they had faced in the past to develop an exemplary driving exercise; one in which the drivers capability to resolve the problem while maintaining control of the vehicle was able to be objectively measured and, more importantly, drivers would be able to recognize that they were fully capable of resolving successfully.

 At the end of the day, that is the real value provided by an instructor who understands vehicle dynamics and how they apply to drivers training.

There is a good article on “Skill Enhancement vs. Certification” on Jerry MacCauley’s Personal Protection Concepts Blog. Jerry has been a law enforcement trainer for over 29 years, and his Blog is filled with information for the EP Industry. If you are involved in training in any way – this is a must read.