 Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with part four of Minuteman Tactics. So today we are gonna take a slight break and we are gonna talk about safety. Because safety is important because you don't want to shoot your own guys. Now, in general, there are kind of two different ways to think about safety, right? There's, you know, on the range safety and then there's what we're gonna call operational safety or, you know, when it's out, we're out doing goon stuff because China invaded and it's red dawn and you gotta run around. How do you safely shoot with and around your buddies and only shoot the bad guys and not shoot your own guys? What kind of safety measures are we going to use to an order, in order to ensure that doesn't happen? So, let's discuss a few of those. Now, I differentiate between range safety and range safety and operational safety because on the range, right, if you go to a class or you're at a shooting range or whatever, it's everybody's pretty meticulous about it, right? We're all gonna get shoulder to shoulder online with like 25 people and it's like, oh, Bob, you're a quarter of an inch back. Like, why don't you push up a little bit? So, we're all online, you know, and everything's like perfect, right? Because we're on the range, no one's shooting at us. We have time, there's no reason to not do that, really. You know, just to go the extra mile, have the extra amount of safety so that, you know, there's no stupid accidents on the range. You can do that on the range. When people are shooting at you and people are moving and there's screaming and smoke and whatever, you're not gonna get that, right? Not only that, but it's just bad tactics to stand right next to each other in a perfectly straight line so that you make a nice, big, easy target. So, how do we achieve safety in that regard? So, let's talk about some helpful guiding principles and rules that we have in order to be operationally safe. The first one is trust. This entire thing hinges on trust. You need to trust the other guys in your crew. Whether it's just one other guy or a couple other people, you need to have a high amount of trust that when they're shooting with you and around you, they're not going to shoot you. And if you don't have that trust, you either need to train them to a level of that trust or they're off the team. It's really that simple. Either you can trust your own guy to not shoot you or you don't want to be on a team with them because there's nothing worse than when the bad guy is shooting at you, having to worry about your own guy shooting you. That's obviously not what you want. So, everything I'm gonna say, trust is the undergirding and overriding principle that has to guide all of this. You've got to trust your guys. And on a small, minute-man team, again, we are not in the military. We're not working with 19-year-olds. We don't have direct officer oversight. As we've mentioned in the previous parts of this series, so that trust has to be high. These are guys that you choose to train with. These are guys that you choose to associate yourself with. And so I really hope that you have that high level of trust. And if you have any concerns about their safety, now's the time to have that discussion. So, what kind of rules or things are we gonna implement in order to ensure that we have that trust? Everybody's working to the same standard of safety. Well, the first one is the four rules. I wrote these out of order. But the first one is the four rules of firearm safety, which I'm sure you're familiar with, right? Those should be ingrained in your soul and ingrained in the soul that people you're working with. All guns are always loaded or treat all guns as if they're always loaded. Never point your gun at anything you're not willing to destroy. That one's a big one in this department when we're talking about doing what we're talking about. Keep your fingers straight and off the trigger until you're ready to fire. And then know your target. It's foreground and it's background. Also a very big one in what we're talking about here. So, if you follow the four rules of safety, then which were handed down to us by the great Jeff Cooper and I think the 70s, right? Then obviously you can avoid and mitigate 99.49% of accidents and that's what we want. So, at the very base level, if the guys in your crew or someone on your crew doesn't have a solid understanding of the four rules of safety, that's a big problem. You need to explain that to them and they need to just do it, right? I've had friends of mine that have had to rehabilitate and now I completely and utterly trust them and that's a good thing. In the book, he talks about safety angles and he talks about three different angles that he kind of uses as safety. The first one is the 45 degree safety angle and training when you're starting to get used to this, right? So, again, if this is 90 degrees, right? And this is 45, like my rifle never gets within 45 degrees of anyone else, right? And that's a good starting point for a safety angle. After people have been experienced a little bit and kind of know what they're doing, he suggests using the 33 degree angle of safety, right? So, if that's 45, maybe 33 is kind of right there. And then he talks about once you're super experienced and you have a high level of trust, again, it always goes back to that trust, you can cut that down to 15, right? 15's pretty close, that's pretty close. And these are the safety angles that he uses and recommends. I'd like to add some other things to that. So, I think this is a good, helpful guide for understanding general safety angles. I think one of the biggest principles for being operationally safe with you and your guys is earn the shot to get online. Earn the shot to get online. We'll talk about some good examples and we'll talk about some bad examples. Say you're traveling in a wedge formation and you're traveling this way, right? And you take contact from over here. Well, this guy can shoot, right? And this guy can shoot. Because let's say there's about 10, 15 yards of spacing, they're within our safety angles that we just talked about, that's totally fine. Those two guys can shoot. This guy cannot shoot. And this guy should not shoot, right? What should happen is this guy needs to work to get himself online. And this guy needs to work to get himself online. They have to earn the shot. They have to physically move their body to a place where they are able to take the shot. That's what we're talking about. When I say earn the shot, that's what I mean. You have to do work to get to a place where you are allowed, from a safety perspective, to take that shot. We call that earning the shot. So, that's a great example of earning the shot. Now, bad examples. You see this in police shooting videos all the time. I'd say over 80% of body cam footage videos you see, you will not see cops earning the shot. Often in police videos, you'll see this, right? There's a bad guy over here, there's four cops here, and they're all shooting that bad guy. Now, the problem with that is this guy is cutting it super close, and so is this guy. If this front guy decides he needs to move in one direction or the other, he's in a lot of trouble because he's gonna run directly into the fire of one of his comrades, right? But you see this all the time. Cops are just in a semi-gaggle, they're just pulling out their guns, and they're sending rounds down range, either because they're afraid, or they're not thinking, or they haven't been trained, most likely to earn the shot, and so they're thinking, oh, it's fine, I can do that, and they'll just shoot that way. You also see this in a lot of SWAT, which are supposed to be more trained videos, where guys will shoot from the back of the bus. Shooting from the back of the bus. Say you have a bad guy here, you have a shield guy here, right, and you have a little stack of guys, well, this guy will just step right out here, here's your shield guy, and he'll start shooting the bad guy, and he'll think, oh, I'm fine, no big deal. Why can't I shoot from here? I can see him, and then they find out in the after-action report that about three rounds struck the back of the shield. That happens, and it happens more often than you think. If all of these guys were to earn the shot, then they would need to get up here and get online. Then there'd be nobody between them and the target, right? Know your target, it's foreground, what's between me and the target, and it's background. Cops don't ever check their background either, but that's a different rant for a different video. So I really think that this is a very large principle when it comes to safely shooting on teams, is earning that shot and getting online. You cannot have guys who are going to be lazy and just shoot because they can. They have to get used to the idea of physically moving to get to a place where they can then shoot. If you have guys who are just used to shooting where they're standing and not bothering to move, that's gonna increase your likelihood of accidents through the roof. This applies out in the field when you're spaced five, 10 yards apart, and it applies even more so when you start to get into CQB classes or CQB environments, right? Which in general we wanna avoid, but again we'll cover that when we get to the CQB stuff, but you need to have SOPs for how is a guy going, if I'm shooting right here and I'm standing in a doorway, how is another guy gonna get his rifle over my shoulder and in the fight, right? How are we gonna do that safely so that I'm not getting muzzled? If I'm on a knee and a guy wants to come up behind me and shoot the bad guy, how is he gonna do that safely so that if I stand up to move suddenly, I don't stand right up into his fire and catching the back of the head, right? There are very safe ways to do that and there are very, very unsafe ways to do that. And so we need to work those SOPs out with your team. If you wanna know more about that, I teach classes about that, come take a rifle class with me, it'll be a lot of fun. So there are two drills that you can do dry that I think are super beneficial to practice getting online. The first one is you can just get your guys out in the field, you can just have empty guns, you don't need loaded guns at all. And you can just practice getting online. And you can just say contact left, right? And everybody steps up and gets online left. You can say contact right and then this guy comes over here and everybody's online right and you can all safely shoot right, right? For the wedge, contact rear and contact front are pretty simple cause everybody's safe already. You can put your guys in a diamond formation, right? And do the same thing, contact left, contact right and this guy can come over, or this guy would actually come down here or this guy can come down over here depending on which side you're on, right? And you can just get your guys practicing moving. Just walk out in the field in formation and then start saying contact left, contact right, contact rear, whatever and have everybody physically move to where they would have to be. Then when everyone gets set, stop, look around, examine, yep, this is right, know this is wrong and then just do that for about a half hour, hour and your team's gonna get a lot better at getting online and remembering to get online. And that's a dry drill you can run for five, 10 minutes every time you go out with your guys. The other one that you can do is for working more in that CQB-ish environment we talked about earlier is just take a plot of ground and mark it off like 10 yards square, put a bunch of random targets and debris and whatever pieces of cover in here. Have your guys stand in that 10 yards kind of randomly scattered around and then just say, hey, contact left and everybody has to move to a piece of cover and not flag their guy or anybody else and get their rifle up, right? So you're still just doing the same thing but this way you have to move around obstacles, you have to move around your buddies, you might have to share cover, you're gonna get used to working right next to someone safely, not flagging anybody. Again, you do that for five, 10, 20 minutes every time you go out and you're gonna get a lot better at navigating around obstacles, knowing where all your guys are and then getting online, right? You have to have a high level of situational awareness to know where all your guys are. If I know where all my guys are, I know my safety angles and I know I'm online, I'm clear to send it. If I'm not sure where my guys are, then how do I know if I'm online or not, right? So again, this breeds having that situational awareness of where your other guys are because let's be honest, you don't have enough guys on your side to accidentally waste them. Again, this comes back to trust. You've got to trust your guys that they're gonna earn that shot, they're gonna get online, they're not gonna be lazy bums. The last thing I'd like to mention here about safety because I think it's important is IFF, identify friend foe. This is a good spot to think about having some kind of standardized uniform. Now, two caveats about that. One, if you're in a team of four guys that you've known everybody for six years, chances are you know what they look like regardless of what uniform they're wearing, right? They could be in multicam or woodland or greens or whatever, but you know, that's Bob. I've known Bob for six years. I know what his outline looks like. I've worked with him a bunch. No, I know what Bob looks like, okay? That's one point, and I think there's credence to that. I kind of generally fall in that bucket. The other perspective is, look, things are chaotic. We're not sure. You don't ever want to misidentify your guys. So it's helpful if you have some kind of IFF marker. If that means you're all gonna wear the same color top, if that means you're all gonna wear a fancy red bandana, whatever that means for you if you're all gonna wear tan pants, like whatever it means that you would have some kind of signifier to be like look, we're all gonna wear this and that's for IFF purposes so that in the heat of when things go crazy, I don't accidentally misidentify someone. That becomes, the larger your unit gets, the more important that becomes, right? When you might not necessarily know everybody, that becomes a really big deal. So having IFF markers on your team and starting to build that habit is only gonna serve you and it's only gonna help you. So I would recommend that you think through some kind of IFF marker, identify friend foe, as a both additional safety net and just it's not gonna do you any harm. So why not think through it? I hope that is a helpful perspective on operational safety and how to best conduct that. I look forward for seeing you for the next round of Minuteman Tactics. Two brave deeds, and endure.