 Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition of Minuteman Tactics. Just as a reminder, we are using max velocity tacticals, tactical manual, small unit tactics as our course book for this college course. So if you haven't read the chapter on CQB, I would recommend that you do that before you watch this. If you don't care about that, here we go. So when it comes to CQB, CQB for those of you who don't know is close quarters battle. This is not synonymous with like fighting in a city, right? Usually what we mean when we mean close quarters battle, what we mean is fighting inside rooms, clearing structures. That's come to be the modern use of the term. It used to mean some other stuff, maybe whatever. Who cares? The point is, right now, if you say CQB, what that means is kicking in doors and entering rooms. That's what we're talking about here. So the very first question is why? Why would you need this skill set? Why would you wanna learn tactics like that? When I first started getting into tactics and guns years and years ago, CQB was kind of the hot mess, right? And it's like, oh, you can get into the CQB stuff. And that's like, that's where the real work happens. And there's a couple of things with that. One, out of the global war on terror that we've been fighting for 20 some years, there was a lot of CQB stuff that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? There was a lot of CQB attacks and things that were initiated because that was what was needed for the time. In general, if you can, I would tell you to avoid CQB battles. Now, I've heard that before and I'm always kind of like, well, like why? Why are you saying that? And here's why. Inside a room, you know, even if it's a larger room, let's say 30 feet by 30 feet, right? That's still, what, 10 yards across at its longest point. I bring that up because the closer, of course, you are to someone, the less skill is required for them to hit you with bullets and the more likely they are to hit you with bullets. In general, the more expert of a marksman you are, the further you want to be from the bad guy because distance is your friend. Because if I have a high skill in shooting and you have a low skill in shooting and I'm able to maintain a large distance between you and me, well, then you're gonna have a much harder chance hitting me and I can hit you, right? That's some kind of basic marksmanship tactic, right? You want to be far away from the bad guy so that you can impose your will with your superior skill rather than close with the bad guy and thereby decreasing the skill gap, right? And taking the advantage away from yourself of being an expert shooter. Now, how good of a shooter you are, you may or may not be? Well, maybe you do like CQB because, hey, you're not that good of a shooter anyway. But the point being that when we talk about CQB, this is no longer in the self-defense shooting world, right? This is an aggressive hunting skill. So if you were gonna do some kind of CQB, you have an objective, you are looking for something, you are in intentional pursuit of something. Great example would be the Osama bin Laden raid, right? The United States military could have just dropped a bunch of bombs on that complex, but they didn't. They sent in two SEAL teams because they wanted to know for sure that they got them, right? There was a clear objective. So two SEAL teams were going in to kill this guy and that was the mission. That was a clear objective. We have to go in there to get someone or sometimes you have to go in there to get something, right? You usually have a clear objective. You're clearing the structure because you're trying to get someone or something or maybe it's part of like a more urban warfare battle and you're attacking a city or you're counterattacking a position that was taken from you because you're defending the city, right? And in order to take this part of the city to these blocks, you have to clear some structures in order to call them yours, right? But there's again, a clear objective of what you're doing. As a Minuteman, and let's say Red Dawn happens, China invades, yada, yada, yada, yada, is that a thing you'll be doing? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, but if you do it, make sure that you have a clear, intensive purpose. Maybe you're participating in a raid, right? You need to clear the structure as part of your raid. Don't just go clear buildings for the fun of it, right? Because again, buildings, because of that decreased size, tend to soak up casualties and you don't want that to be you. So why was our first question? You have to have a clear objective and you have to be intentionally working for something. The other thing, like, look, if you come home and your doors kicked in and you're like, well, my family's in there, I gotta go in there, hey, go, but let's just be honest, that's not CQB. That's one guy, you, running to a problem, right? That's not exactly what we're talking about here. That's just you trying to find the problem and deal with the problem. CQB, again, we need a more organized team setting of how we're going to handle this problem and clear this structure in as safe, and that's in heavy air quotes, away as we possibly can. Considerations. So if I'm going to be doing CQB, I know I'm going to be doing that, right? I am probably going to wear a pistol because if my rifle goes down, I'd like to be able to transition to that pistol. I'm also probably going to be as armored up as I can, right? My plates and my side plates and my helmet and like all the armor, because again, I'm decreasing that distance and if I'm going to get shot, I'd rather take it in armor. So I'm going to wear all the armor that I can get my hands on, right? If we have a shield guy, I'm bringing a shield guy. And then of course, this would also determine your kit or whatever, you know, if you're clearing buildings and you got a row of vehicles behind you, well, you're probably going to leave most of your sustainment gear in the buildings, right? Probably just take a little bit of water and maybe a pack, maybe not, maybe just a really small pack if you bring one and you know, bullets and mags and frags and you're going to go clear buildings, right? That's what you're going to do. So that would of course, as always, mission dictates gear, but consider these things as you think about CQB. Okay, let's, in the book, he goes through a way to do CQB. Now listen, there are multiple ways to do CQB. The first thing I'd like to remind you is this is all made up, okay? We've only been like intentionally really hardcore about doing CQB stuff since like the 70s or 80s, since the rise of the age of terror, right? When we started having to train super early units to like go into airplanes and take out terrorists and you know, there was the very famous SAS raid on the embassy in England, the Iranian embassy in England. Ooh, it might be the British embassy in Iran. Ooh, someone looked me up on that. But one of those two, right? In the 80s, very famous SAS raid that took place. Where again, guys had to go into rooms and get terrorists and clean, you know, make sure to save the hostages and that whole thing. So again, this is really all made up and everybody kind of does it a little bit different. You can go to one class and they'll teach you to do it this way and this is gospel and do it any other way is a dangerous safety issue. And then you can go to this other class and they'll kind of tie the opposite and you kind of have to discern what works for you and your crew. There are better ways and there are worse ways as with everything. However, remember, there is no gospel of CQB. There's just stuff that we make up that we think works and different people are gonna do things different ways. Another thing to remember is when we talked earlier about stuff like getting online and earning the shot in CQB stuff like that becomes even more important, right? Because again, smaller space and if you make mistakes and it's much easier to tag one of your buddies. So again, keep that in mind when we start talking about CQB stuff. Another consideration I'd just like to throw out there is silencers, use them because, you know, inside structures, if your whole team is running cams that's gonna be a lot, lot better for you, trust me. Okay, so let's talk about some terms. The first term we're gonna talk about is J-Hook versus Pi. So let's say you have a doorway right here. This is the room, right? Here's your doorway and we'll just say the door opens that way. A pie in the corner, right? Where you should probably be familiar with pieing a corner at this time. But with pieing a corner, I'm just gonna take that corner a little bit at a time, right? I'm gonna get my gun out and I'm gonna see down what I'm doing here and I'm just gonna take a little bit here and a little bit here and a little bit here and a little bit here and I'm slowly moving around to pie that corner and I'm just seeing what I can see. So I start here and I take a little step out this way, a little step out this way and soon I work all the way around the whole thing, right? So the idea being that I can see through here and then I see all of this to here, right? So I can clean a good, I don't know, I'm gonna make this up 90, 95% of the room and the only thing I have left then are the extreme corners where I have not cleared, okay? Now, in general, me, and again, this is just me, not the biggest fan of pieing the corner because if you go out and do this with one of your buddies, have them stand on the opposite side of the door and have you with a no gun or a loaded gun, don't point a gun at your friends, rule number one, pie the corner, okay? And take that step around. They're gonna see your shoulder and your hip before you see them. And that's why I don't like pieing because you are giving yourself away and if someone's paying attention, they're gonna be able to see you before you see them. So for me personally, not a big fan of the pieing method. Now, again, don't believe me. One, go try it. Two, if you like it, hey, you know, knock yourself out. Again, it's all made up, right? Okay, so the other method is J-hooking. So again, here we have our structure. Here's our door, okay? Door opens this way for whatever reason. A J-hook is just like what it sounds like, right? I am going to hook around, right? So it's kind of a J, I don't know, okay? Point being that I'm taking in one motion, I'm gonna go from this point to this point and I'm gonna scan quickly. So instead of pieing slowly, I'm going to start, right? I'm gonna get my gun out. I'm gonna start and I'm just gonna sweep. And I'm gonna move around in a, again, circular fashion. And as I'm doing that, if I see any bad guys, I'm going to engage on the move. But I'm gonna take that sweep and so it's a quick pie, essentially, right? You're going to take a J-hook as a quick pie. Now, you could do that by yourself. If you're the only guy, again, you just run into the problem, not CQB. Or if you're the first guy in the stack, right? You could J-hook and then the second guy could lead in. You could go in. You can do all kinds of things here. Again, sky's the limit. Remember, it's all made up. But I like the J-hook because it gives you more options if you wanna check that doorway before you start running into stuff. In our course book, you know, he talks about this step-center method and he's got a whole system. Again, remember, it's all made up, right? Everybody's got a different system. If that system connects with you and you really like the sound of it, do that. One thing I should definitely say about this is, look, go take a CQB course, right? Again, this is only a primer. Have me out, I'll do it. Go take it from someone else you think is super competent. But go take a CQB course. Because like shooting, right? This is something you have to get out and do in order to learn how to do better. Sitting here and watching me on YouTube, while a great primer and is gonna prepare you for that course is not the same as the course. So this'll help get you started. But again, go take a really good course. Another term we have is dead space. So you might hear this a lot. Dead space is space I can't see into, right? So again, let's say inside this structure here, let's say there's like a refrigerator in this corner. There's a little couch here. You know, there's a TV in this corner right here. There's a lamp right here. And over here, there's a big painting that's on the stand, you know, like eight inches away from the wall or something like that, okay? Point is, that's all dead space, right? Everything that I can't see, so if I'm right here, I can't see behind here. This is all dead space. This is all dead space behind the fridge and back in this corner. Behind this TV is all dead space. Behind this lamp, you know, it's a lamp, right? Very little dead space. But there's some dead space. Anything I can't see into, that's dead space. P-O-D or point of domination, not the band, right? You know, some of you'll get that. So point of domination. That, again, very confusing term. Not sure why we call it that. Just cause, I don't know. This is tactics in the military and we gotta talk about, you know, winning and dominating and whatever. So point of domination is where you go when you get into the room, okay? Real simple, that's your point of domination. It's where you're trying to get to as you enter the room. And from there, you're going to dominate the room. So let's talk about two-man clearing, okay? Again, the military manuals are out there. You can read the ranger manual and you can see how to do like four-man clearing. I'm gonna talk about two-man clearing here because one, it's not talked about as much. And two, again, in your situation, you being a minute man, more than likely, you might not have four guys to commit to a room and you might only be able to send two. So I would certainly start there with two, obviously four is preferable. Shit, 12 is preferable, right? But having to husband your resources as best you can, having two guys that can competently enter a room and clear it is probably more or less your best bet given who you are, given what you be doing. Again, remember, you're not doing this without a clear objective anyway. You're not just doing this for fun. So you got guys one and two here, okay? Now, breaching doors, that's a whole nother thing. Again, you're gonna have to take a class to talk about breaching doors. Depending on which way this door opens, determine who's gonna open the door and determines maybe the front guy will, maybe you'll breach and open your own door if this was like a hallway, right? And some guy had to cover down here. He has, so you have to guy two having to cover down here. Guy one might be his own breacher and assaulter, meaning he's gonna open his own door and he's gonna be the first one through. That could be the case. Let's pretend this is a controlled area out here, right? And you have other friends handling stuff for you. So in that case, maybe one guy will breach and the other guy will open. Again, depending on which way that opens, essentially, the breacher wants to open the door so that the assaulter can go through, right? So you want to open the door towards the assaulter. If the door opens out, you don't wanna pull it out so the assaulter can go in, right? If the door pushes in, you're gonna wanna push the door in and get out of the way so the assaulter can go in. Again, take a class, just a primer. After we negotiate the door problem, guy one can go wherever he wants. Essentially, guy two is gonna go the opposite way, okay? Again, you gotta feel a little mystic chi here. Mystic chi is bullshit, Jesus is Lord. And so you gotta go the way that you want and that you think is good to go, okay? So let's say guy one feels it and he's gonna go this way, okay? So guy one is gonna go right here. His point of domination, his first point of domination is about three feet in to the room from the doorway and about a foot to three feet off the wall, okay? That's his point of domination. And from there, he is going to, very first thing he's gonna do once he passes this doorway, his only objective in life is to clear this corner. You have to clear your corner. That's it, because only you can clear your corner. No one else can clear your corner, right? Because guy number two is gonna, of course, go the opposite direction and he's gonna go right here to his point of domination and he has to clear his corner, right? So guy number two can't clear guy number one's corner because he'd have to shoot through his buddy and vice versa. So once you enter that door, the only thing in your life that matters is clearing your corner. Hopefully, you're able to observe the room. Maybe you J-hooked before you entered the room, maybe you just opened the door and checked it out from the doorway before you went in the room, right? There are a variety of different things you could do there. So do something to open the door and see the room, right? If that means you open the door and you're gonna stand there and you're gonna peek in the room and check it out and then go in, that's an option. Some people would say that's suicide, don't do that. Open the door and go in, right? Again, different thoughts about how to do this, like super dynamically and all moving and action and yelling and flashbangs and whatever and a more measured slow pace. In general, I would tell you that CQB is about momentum and not speed. It's about momentum and not speed. There are times when we need to shoot fast, right? Bad guy, click, gun comes up, pop, pop, pop, right? We're gonna shoot fast in that case because we need to solve the problem. But we're not just running through things faster than we can see things. If you're just running into rooms, I did this in a CQB class, right? Open the door, went into the room. I got done and the instructor said, hey, there was a target right in front of you. Why didn't you shoot it? And I said, I didn't see the target, right? Because what I did was just open the door and enter the room. I didn't see the room. So don't go faster than you can see, right? You have to process this information. So when you open that door, either you're gonna have some kind of SOP, right? You're gonna open the door and you're gonna look. You're not gonna put your muzzle past the door frame because that would flag some guy in the corner that you're there, you know? But you're gonna open the door. You're gonna look into the room and see it. Or you're gonna j-hook it. Or you're gonna pie it. Or you're gonna do the step center thing he talks about in the book. You're gonna do some kind of method to clear and see what you can see from the doorway. And then you're gonna make entry into the room. Because if you open the door and this is a sandbag position with an MG, right? Spitting on the door. Well, hey, that's gonna be a much different problem to solve than just running into the room, right? So I want to see the room. So you've opened the door. You've seen the room. You've gone to your points of domination and you've cleared your respective corners. Again, can't say too much in just a video here. Let's do a class sometime. It'll be a lot of fun. But you and your buddy have to communicate what's going on, right? Meaning, hey, a tango down. I got dead space at 12 o'clock. I like using the clock method, right? Wherever you just came in from, that's always six o'clock. And then 12 o'clock is always dead ahead of you, right? And then you have three and nine. I'm a big fan of using the clock system. So guy one could say, hey, tango down in my corner because he had to shoot some guy. I got dead space 12 o'clock. Guy two could just say, you know, yes, you don't need to repeat anything back that you agree with than you see already. You know, if this was, again, if this was like some kind of bookshelf or something over here, guy two could say dead space at nine o'clock. Meaning, hey, in addition to everything you just said, I also have some dead space over here that we have to check out. Then you guys got a problem solved together, right? One of you should say, hey, to me and the other guy will come to you. For right now, let's just say, we're just trying to clear this dead space behind the couch, forget the fridge and pretend that's not there. Guy two comes to guy one as a buddy pair, right? They're going to come up here together and they're gonna take that corner together. Again, we can talk about shapes and how to negotiate different shapes. We'd have to do a class in real life and talk about this, but they're gonna take that corner together to clear that dead space. You need to have a method together so that you can both work in tandem to clear all the dead space in the room, right? That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to enter the room, waste the tangos and then clear the dead space, anything you can't see. From there, you're gonna worry about different portals, meaning like doors and windows, right? Other places people could come from, portals. And then you're gonna navigate to the next one. So at that point, let's say this was a closed door over here and this goes into another room, right? That's when you're gonna, you're gonna have to clear it all your dead space. Now you're gonna negotiate to this door and start over, right? You're gonna breach the door, you're gonna enter the room, you're gonna go to your points of domination, you're gonna clear everything. So again, this is something you have to take a class to really grasp fully, but I hope that this is a helpful primer in helping you understand the basics. What you're trying to do is open the door, see the room, enter the room to your point of domination, clear the dead space together and then proceed to the next problem, right? That's what you're trying to accomplish in a nutshell. And you can do that with just two guys. If you had four guys, you know, if you look at the manuals, right? Guy one comes down here and then heads up here. Guy two comes in the opposite way, clears his corner and then comes up here. Guy three ends up here and guy four ends up here. Something like that. Again, you can look at the military manuals, look at the ranger manual. It'll give you a real basic walkthrough of how to do it with four guys. But I think it behooves you to think about how to do it with two guys first because of who you are and the resources that you have available to you. I hope that this gives you a helpful primer to break down CQB. At the end of the day, I would say it's pretty simple. It's not easy. It's definitely difficult, but it's simple. You're just seeing rooms. You're negotiating around shapes. You're clearing dead space and you're solving problems. And you're communicating with your friend on how to do that. And you can, again, it's all made up, right? There are certain SOPs that are helpful. There are certain other SOPs that people would rather do. At the end of the day, honestly, you could probably make up some of those SOPs as far as how you're gonna communicate inside the room, for example, right? Again, I would tell you, go take a course. Go understand this concept better. A CQB course, one, is a lot of fun. And two, it's gonna be really eye-opening for how to negotiate and solve some of these problems. But at the end of the day, don't be mystified or intimidated by CQB. Like I said, it's simple. It's pretty straightforward. It's not easy, but it's simple. Do brave deeds and endure.