Urban Survival Skills

UrbanSurvivalSkills.com received the following comment/question: "Anonymous said... ....Dear Urban Survival Skills, I was going to make a comment on the firearms training post, but I'll make it a question here. I read and hear the term tactical all the time like tactical firearms and tactical shooting. What does this mean and what do I need to know about this other than going to one of those weapons schools you recommended?


UrbanMan replies: Boy, you mentioned a topic that I have long planned to write on an article on and that is the word "Tactical", an over used and misunderstood term. You see "tactical carbine", "tactical handgun", "tactical knife" over and over.

What "Tactical" means to me is the employment of tactics within a series of skills. If you are on a flat range shooting at a target, even doing some advanced skills like "tactical" (there's that term again) re-loads, shooting at multiple targets or doing failure drills, I suggest that you are NOT being tactical, you are just doing some firearms training, alebit maybe more advanced than some.

If you are shooting and moving to cover, shooting from degraded positions, adding multiple tasks such as communicating on a radio, scanning and checking your six, communicating to and/or directing other members in your survival group to bound, move or to give you supressing fire as you move,......then you are starting to add tactics to shooting and therefore doing some tactical shooting/tactical training.

Determing which cover is best; shooting and moving (3 - 5 second rush) to other cover; low crawling from cover to cover; not getting sucked into cover but using it as a protective obstacle between you and your adversaries; practicing exiting your vehicle and engaging targets; setting up "shooting problems" to solve as you expect to encounter in real life based on your environment; using white light or shooting with night vision goggles; role playing (with no live ammunition) to simulate what goes wrong in one on one and one on many situations....this is stactical training.

When we start to do these things we are getting into the "tactical" world and better preparing ourselves to survive the coming collapse. The Army uses "Training Principles" - my two favorites being "Train you as Fight,....Fight as Your Train", and, "Train Using Realism". If we employ these principles well, then we are so much the better when we come to the point of relying on ourselves for surviving.