How America Keeps Getting It Wrong With Putin

John Giduck, JD, PhD, MSS

A friend of many years recently published a piece in The Cipher Brief: “Conservatives of America: Putin Is Not Your Ally”. His bio with the articles says: “Greg Sims, served in the CIA’s Clandestine Service for over thirty years, including multiple field tours as Chief and Deputy Chief of CIA stations.  He is currently retired.” Being retired does not keep him from continually monitoring and analyzing many of the most important and potentially threatening geo-political issues in the world today, or sharing with us his many years of experience and expertise on the Soviet Union, the new Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin. In his analysis he explains how the US – including and especially the Donald Trump-supporting right wing – cannot afford to play into Russian President Putin’s hands.

I, personally, began traveling to and working in what we generally and overbroadly call “Russia”, back when it was still the communist USSR. I spent more than thirty years in and out of that part of the world, working, touring, training with their police and military and studying for a master’s degree in Russian, Ukrainian, Soviet and Slavic history, art, culture, language and politics. I watched the Soviet Union dissolve, had the opportunity to meet Gorbachev, had meetings in the Kremlin and the notorious Lubyanka KGB headquarters, watched Yeltsin rise to power and then unravel, leaving the nation (and much of the region) in the hands of a previously unknown KGB apparatchik in the form of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Over the years, Putin has done some great things for Russia and the Russian people. When asked what my thoughts on Russia were, my response had always been that Russia could be a strategic ally to the US on certain issues, much as it was in World War II. But it was never going to be a friend, and no one should ever make that mistake. Never has that been truer than with Putin at its helm. About 180 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “Russia has a unique capacity for attracting the world’s attention.”  That is as true today as it was then. To his credit, Putin pulled an economically destroyed and humiliated Russia out of the smoldering ruins of communism and the bleary-eyed alcoholic hangover that Yeltsin had left it with. As Putin was doing so, I had numerous high-ranking officers in different Russian Spetsnaz (Special Forces) units and federal police commands tell me that if Russia wasn’t going to be respected by the world, they’d rather go back to being feared. Through his refunding, retraining, reorganizing, reequipping and rearming of the Russian Army, GRU and MVD Spetsnaz, he went quite far in that direction. While Putin has never been popular with the West, when Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 2007, I felt it was well-earned. From my observations, for quite a number of years he had been the single most effective national leader on the planet. No president or prime minister had done more for his or her country than Putin had for Russia. A number of generals and colonels told me, “Putin is our Ronald Reagan”. To a large degree, and from a purely Russian perspective, he earned that praise. When speaking publicly on a regular basis back then, I would tell audiences that what Putin did would be good for Russia, not necessarily good for the US and the rest of the world.

But we made mistakes with him. Anyone who has ever worked in Russia on a long-term basis came to realize that on almost every level dealing with them is a power struggle. Russians respect strength, not weakness or gentility. It is a basic rule of human nature that niceness is seen as weakness, and weakness draws aggression. There is no one for whom that adage is more consistently applicable in every respect than Vladimir Putin. In one 2007 meeting with then-Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, knowing she was terrified of dogs Putin brought his 100 lb Labrador in to meet her. News agencies reported, and photos confirmed, that while she shrank back in her chair from the approaching dog, Putin merely sat there and smirked.

In 2001, then-President GW Bush significantly misjudged Putin and how he would respond to kindness, when he said, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.” “I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Pres. Bush’s brother, Jeb, took a more realistic view. In June 2015 he said: “I think to deal with Putin, you need to deal from strength. He's a bully.” In Nov. 2018, weighing in on the bombshell revelation that Russia was found to be shipping nuclear fuel to Iran, Sen. John McCain said, “I looked in Mr. Putin's eyes and I saw three letters — a K, a G and B”.

Six years later, that miscalculation saw Putin willing to stand toe to toe with Bush, NATO and the UN when Russia invaded the Republic of Georgia immediately to its south on August 7, 2008. The Georgian region of South Ossetia sat just across the border from Russia’s North Ossetia and the Beslan school that was the site of a horrific, three-day terrorist mass-hostage siege in Sep. 2004, that I depicted in detail in my first book Terror at Beslan, followed by a more in-depth analysis in When Terror Returns (both of which are in the process of having new editions completed and published). I was there at the end of the battle to retake the school and was in Georgia right after the start of the invasion. Pres. Bush chose to do nothing, joined in that same lethargy by Pres. Obama five months later, but also the EU, UN and NATO. The strongest reaction was merely the statement that, “We are unwavering in our support for Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and we will continue to call on Russia to withdraw its forces from the occupied regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.” This came from Katherine Brucker, Chargé d’Affaires of the US Mission to the OSCE. The response of the UN security council was even more tepid. I told numerous people I knew in the US government that by doing nothing we had just guaranteed the same would happen to Ukraine. It did not take a crystal ball. Of course, Putin has held onto both of those regions of Georgia ever since.

America’s miscalculations with Putin got worse when, on March 6, 2009 in Geneva, Hillary Clinton, the new Secretary of State under Pres. Obama, presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a large red button that supposedly said “Reset” to represent what she and Obama hoped would be a new era of friendly relations with Putin and Russia. Despite the countless fluent Russian speakers in the State Department, however, the button really read перегрузка or peregruzka (in Roman letters) which meant “overcharged” or “overloaded”. Mr. Lavrov immediately said, “We will not let you do that to us.” Maybe he got it wrong, and Secretary Clinton was actually signaling that Russia could continue overloading the US with its demands and behavior. At the very least this communicated sheer incompetence on the part of the US, something else to never let Putin gain the upper hand through.

Fast forward to Feb. 2012 when, on the heels of numerous other hiccups with Russia, news broke that Pres. Obama – with Ms. Clinton still Sec/State - had surreptitiously gifted to Russia and Putin as many as seven strategically located, resource rich Alaskan islands. Among the seven were Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette and the Henrietta islands. Reportedly, the US received no money or other concessions for them, the media was not told, Congress was not involved and even Alaska had not been given any advance notice. News of this quickly spread on the internet, but shortly a number of arguably Obama-supporting fact checkers came out and said it was all false. Some said the US had never claimed them; at least one said George HW Bush had given them to Russia in the early 1990s; and others said they had always belonged to Russia. While there does appear some information that Wrangel Island had a very limited Soviet military outpost there for a time during the Cold War, it seemed to have been long abandoned. No matter which version you choose to believe, the fact remained that strategically situated islands off America’s coast were in the hands of Putin. Two illustrative reports on the different perspectives can be found at The Jamestown Foundation’s Nov. 2022 report saying this entire issue is blowing up again:

https://jamestown.org/program/wrangel-island-controversy-resurfaces-with-a-vengeance/

And this report from The Gateway Pundit:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/02/report-obama-administration-is-giving-away-7-strategic-islands-to-russia/

No matter what the reality, or the backroom maneuvering that went on, simply walking away from any claim to the islands showed weakness. At the very least it showed fear of Russia. When dealing with Putin, neither is good. Facts notwithstanding, Putin recognizes that the perception of strength is as good as actual strength. That’s why when the media was featuring photos of Pres. Obama golfing and riding a bicycle in short pants, Putin was posing for pictures hunting tigers in Siberia, riding horses bare chested and going at it on the Judo mats to showcase his black belt. Putin looked like a warrior, Obama looked like a wimp. Pundits regularly made the comment with regard to numerous geo-political issues, that Putin was playing chess while the American president played checkers.

As though our generosity toward Putin could not have gotten worse, on Mar. 26, 2012, just one month after the Alaskan islands affair, unknowingly in front of a hot mic Pres. Obama told Dmitri Medvedev, who would soon be the outgoing president of Russia, that when Putin re-entered the presidency, he would have "more flexibility" to give Putin what he wanted on missile defense and other contentious issues. Putin had spent four years as prime minister changing the Russian Federation Constitution so he was no longer term-limited and could return to the Kremlin as president. But first Obama had to get past his last election that coming November. To win, he couldn’t be seen as a sycophant to the Russian leader. At least not yet. In order to do that, Obama urged Medvedev and Putin to just give him more "space" until then. Medvedev said he would relay the message to Putin.

With Obama and those very assurances back in the White House, it took Putin only one year to move on Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region and Crimea in early 2014. As before, Pres. Obama chose to do nothing. I was in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv at the time. For years afterward, Russian military commanders and proxies fought the Ukrainians, many of whom were mere citizens defending their homes in eastern Ukraine. Then, on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin launched an invasion of the entire country; a war which I have now been to twice. In my latest book 1500 Years of Fighting (on Amazon), I present all of this and the reasons why Russia’s vaunted army has stumbled in its wars in Chechnya and Ukraine, its generally poor performance in the Georgia invasion, but also why it performed admirably in such battles as Stalingrad in World War II and its defense against Napoleon in 1812.

With the historic return to the White House of Pres. Donald J. Trump, and upon his oft-repeated promises he could and would end the Ukraine War on his first day back in office, there was hope the war could be resolved quickly, peacefully and equitably. Of course, no ending would be fair to the million or more who have died and been wounded, all due to Russia’s invasion. Both supporters and detractors of Pres. Trump would have been happy to see his assurances come to fruition. But we are nearing three months since his inauguration and little has happened beyond a bold American attempt to grab Ukrainian natural resources in repayment for American money and weapons, a move to give Putin exactly what he wanted from his invasion in the first place (i.e., Donbass and Crimea, among some other towns), plus no NATO admission for Ukraine ever, no US security guarantee, and an embarrassing display of American hubris toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy upon his visit to the White House on February 28, 2025. In that meeting, Pres. Trump and VP Vance behaved more like two high school football players bullying a smaller kid in the locker room than statesmen conducting a negotiation for the benefit of the country and the rest of the world that must still face Putin and Russia’s as-yet unrestrained aggression.  

In response to Russia walking away from peace talks and launching its latest attack on Ukrainian civilians, and Ukraine’s military answer to that attack, Pres. Trump again found fault with Zelenskiy. On April 15, just three days ago, the BBC reported that “Trump again blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war with Russia – a day after a major Russian attack killed 35 people and injured 117 others in the Ukrainian city of Sumy.” Blaming Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, Trump went on to say, “You don't start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” On the same day, The Economist reported that Trump administration officials were dissatisfied with “European countries' ongoing support for Ukraine, underscoring the growing rift between Washington and Europe.” That leaves the US siding with Putin against Ukraine and Western Europe; hardly the message the world needs Putin to hear.

Greg Sims is right. In his article, he cautions political conservatives in the US, many of whom jumped on board with Pres. Trump’s ignominy during the Zelenskiy meeting, that there is a danger to Pres. Trum proceeding in this fashion with the kneejerk support of a large faction of the American people. Mr. Sims says that the US should engage with Russia, “but we should do so as Ronald Reagan did with the USSR, with toughness, from a position of strength, and without sacrificing our fundamental principles.” Without addressing the Ukraine War or our treatment of Pres. Zelenskiy, specifically, he reminds us that, “In Putin’s world, the government treads heavily and cruelly. He’s not one of us; he’s the opposite of us. To borrow a phrase from the great conservative Margaret Thatcher, now is not the time to go wobbly on Russia.” Any continued attacks on Ukraine and its president by our own White House will be viewed by Putin as exactly that: both wobbly and weak - inviting aggression.

The simple fact remains that it just did not have to be done that way. There was no value in it, and no visiting foreign head of state has ever been treated to such humiliating deportment by two domineering hosts in front of the world press in White House history. Yes, I know that since that debacle the Trump Administration has trotted out all manner of rationalizations for their conduct. But they fall grievously short of justifying such actions on behalf of the United States and the American people. And that is coming from someone who looked forward with great hope at Donald Trump retaking the reins of the country.

In a decades-long series of American diplomatic blunders dealing with the man who is the most aggressive, murderous, threatening and invading strong-arm dictator in the world today, Pres. Trump has now further enabled, emboldened and encouraged him to do more. He’ll certainly keep doing it to Ukraine. Blaming Zelenskiy and Ukraine for being invaded is like blaming a victim for being murdered or a woman for being raped. Only in this case, it is doing both of those things on a massive scale, because the rapes and murders have been on a massive scale. If we continue along this path, it only remains to be seen who Putin casts his avaricious eyes upon next. And what, if anything, the US will do about it.

There is a doctrine in war strategy that comes from the Arthashastra, a 4th century BCE Sanskrit text. It says: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Through Pres. Trump’s treatment of Pres. Zelenskiy, while in the middle of a war for his nation’s very existence, Donald Trump has just unwittingly made us the friend of Putin.

Mr. Sims’ article can be found at: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/conservatives-of-america-putin-is-not-your-ally

He can also be found on Linkedin at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-sims-b39a1115a/

 

The officer can feel the adrenaline racing through his veins at the same time his patrol car races toward the school, lights and sirens slicing the previously peaceful morning.  The dispatcher had struggled to keep her voice steady, telling him they were receiving numerous reports of gunfire in the hallways, of children lying in pools of blood.

The young cop runs his response through his head, trying to calm himself, ready himself for battle.  He had been well schooled in Active Shooter protocols.  But what would he confront?  What must he be ready for, and did his training adequately prepare him for the broad spectrum of possible tactical threats to the children he swore to protect?

Make no mistake, America’s schools are under siege.  But few realize the entire spectrum of extreme tactical threats that they face, and that our law enforcement officers must be prepared to respond to.  Simply teaching schools to “lock down” in response to every threat is insufficient.  As well, the tactical spectrum is so wide that merely offering our rescuers the two options of going in (Active Shooter), or holding and securing (Stable Barricade Scenario) are just as insufficient.  As with any problem, the key to not only preparing for it, but resolving it when confronted, is knowledge.  With this knowledge comes the recognition that all three levels of LE-school response – SROs, patrol and SWAT – must develop joint tactics, as they will all be involved.  Anyone with a terrorist mindset understands the value of attacking kids in schools.  Whether our own homegrown child shooters, adults or trained al Qaeda terrorists, they all understand that nothing brings more fame, or devastates a community and a nation better, than the killing of its children.

Single Student Shooter.  The lowest level of extreme tactical threat (X-Tac) to schools is the single student school shooter.  This applies to high school age children and below.  With this age group, the shooter will only attack his own school, or schools below his grade, but never above.  You will not see a high school student attacking a college, nor a middle school age kid attacking a high school.  Though the variables in human nature ensure exceptions to any rule, the lack of maturity and sophistication of shooters at the different levels of the X-Tac Spectrum provide a fairly predictable model.  At these ages, children are too intimidated by older kids, and nature’s rule of child socialization would render it almost impossible psychologically for a child to attack a school full of older students.  That, coupled with the fact that few children would have a reason to attack a higher school, allows officers to presume that lone kids in a school are attacking their own, or a lower grade school; most likely one they left the year before.

At this age, the student shooter may have put together some rudimentary explosives, but will not have the resources to carry many into the school.  He will be heavily armed, however.  Due to his status as a lone attacker, he will not be able to control his target victim population, but will move through hallways, engaging targets of opportunity.  Where he can breach a room, he will do so and engage what targets present themselves before moving on.  Given the option of schools to attack, he will have perfect intelligence on the emergency response plan, and will have factored that response into his attack.  Though no one has yet attacked a school with an armed police officer present, at some point a student will decide to increase his fame by doing so.  He will know the SRO is the first tactical hurdle he must overcome.  He will likely have made a recent attempt to develop a relationship with that SRO, so that his approach will not alert the officer to possible danger.  The same will occur in the next two higher levels of the tactical threat spectrum.  Though the recent example of Virginia Tech (VT) will have left this shooter wanting to fortify the building prior to his attack, his solitary status, size of the school, and ubiquitous presence of students, will make that difficult, allowing easy entry by police.

Low Multiple Student Shooters.  The next more difficult X-Tac will involve only two or three shooters at the high school level and below.  Their target selection will be limited in the same way as the single shooter.  Due to age, immaturity, psychological co-dependency and limited numbers, these shooters will not separate.  They may use their numbers to better control and assail groups of victims in rooms, but will otherwise fail to control their target population, moving through hallways and delighting in the predatory response to fleeing prey.  At this X-Tac level, the presence of numerous explosives is greater, as happened at Columbine where Kleibold and Harris had built 90 devices.  Also, with these numbers, and with the example of Cho at VT to guide them in tactics, they may attempt to secure major points of egress (main external doors), and drive their victims in that direction.  At this level, as with the single shooter, LE can employ Active Shooter responses, and with the exception of concern over IEDs, move quickly past rooms and areas that are unsecured, in the direction of the gunfire.

High Multiple Student Shooters.  These attacks will be launched by kids in the same age groups, but will involve four to eight shooters.  This was seen in 2006 in Kansas where an attack was prevented involving five kids; and one week later in Alaska, where six teenagers were prevented from assaulting their school.  It is highly unlikely that LE would ever confront more than eight.  Due to maturity levels and typical group dynamics among children and teenagers,  at numbers above eight, one will be ostracized by the group, or will otherwise get cold feet and report the planned shooting.  The greatest tactical hurdles for LE at this level, however, are the presence of significant numbers of IEDs, efforts to secure and fortify major points of egress (external doors), and, most importantly, the recognition of the advantages of dividing their forces.  With Low Multiple Shooters, they cannot split up without at least one youth being on his own, which is unlikely. 

With numbers of four and above, our own teenagers will eventually recognize that separating into two or three teams will yield them a substantially increased body count.  They will follow a standard military hammer and anvil attack plan, or as is often described, having the hounds move to the hunters, with the quarry driven ahead of them.  At this X-Tac level, they may also use one team to ambush arriving police officers. It is here that standard Active Shooter doctrine increases the threat to the first entry team, and they must be careful of moving past areas that have not been cleared and secured.  For any Hasty Team that is assembled, the rear guard position becomes critical to the team’s survival.  If intel on the shooters is sparse en route to the school, all LE must assume that they are confronting this number of attackers in responding to any school assault and maintain excellent rear security. 

Young Adult Single Shooter.  Here the attacker would most likely be a college student, a recent college dropout, or possibly a recent high school dropout, as with the killer in Erfurt, Germany who killed 17, including a law enforcement officer.  Though the number of assailants is dramatically reduced at this X-Tac level, the threat to victims and LE may actually be greater.  At this age the attacker benefits from increased maturity, greater intellectual sophistication, and better tactical planning.  Statistically, this is also the age where increasing numbers of Americans begin exhibiting symptoms of severe depression and paranoid schizophrenia, and evidence indicates that may have been the case with Seung-Hui Cho at VT; just as thousands of students at colleges across the country suffer from the same mental afflictions.  Shooters at this level will be very well planned, armed, trained, and emotionally disengaged from their victims.  As young adults living away from home, they will have had enhanced opportunities to purchase any manner of weapons and ammunition, train at gun ranges, and use their increased sophistication to research and develop tactics and fortifications that will make rapid LE response almost impossible. 

By this age the shooters may have had a decade of immersion in violent video games; excellent training for an attack (see Dave Grossman’s books On Killing, On Combat and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, along with his Bullet Proof Mind series.).  Coupled with their likely mental illness, police will be confronted with a cold, well programmed, killing machine, whose only emotion may be rage.  The main advantage with these shooters, is the fact that due to their disenfranchisement with society and even others their own age, it would be unlikely they would team up with anyone.  At none of the X-Tac levels up to and including this point, would it be likely that the assailants would take and hold hostages.  At these levels arriving officers will be confronted with indicia of an Active Shooter scenario: they will hear gunshots, see students in windows calling out to them, students jumping from windows, and other victims streaming out of doors.  But at this level, if a college age student chooses to attack his former high school, or a high school student or dropout chooses to attack his former middle school, holding hostages for a short time before “going active” is possible.

Adult Single Shooter.  As the age of attackers increases, so does the planning and preparation.  As well, so does the ease of taking life.  For LE, this means the level of threat, and the tactical difficulty they confront, will increase proportionately. Here, as with the Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, and Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in 2006, you have an increased probability of older attackers holding hostages for a time before going active.  At this level, and that of the college age shooter in a high school, responding officers cannot ever afford to believe that they have a stable barricade situation.  Officers and commanders must understand that they are responding to a Pre-Active Shooter scenario.  It will go active at any time, often with no warning, just as happened at Nickel Mines.  Keep in mind that this will not be similar to a bank or convenience store robbery: where the robbers were only there for money, but rapid police response upended their plan.  In the vast majority of those situations, the presence of SWAT and negotiators result in the robbers surrendering with no one getting hurt.  But when these adults go into schools with guns, there is no reason for them to be there but the deaths of children. 

In Adult Shooter situations, the assailant will go through all six phases of the Islamist Mass Hostage Siege Model,* though they will move through them very quickly.  Fortifications will have been quickly assembled, but sufficient to make many standard LE and SWAT entries difficult, if not impossible, given the short period of time they will have to enter with hostages being shot or blown up.  After chaining the three public entry doors to Norris Hall, Cho managed to discharge 204 rounds in approximately nine minutes, killing or wounding 55.  Only a high speed police response prevented him from firing the other 174 rounds he had in magazines on his person.  At Nickel Mines, Charles Carl Roberts needed only seconds to pull the trigger ten times on little girls, compared to the rapid two and one-half minutes it took Pennsylvania State Police SRT teams to breach a heavily fortified building.  Even Duane Morrison’s threat that he had a large bomb in the Bailey school, and the stacking of chairs and desks between himself and the classroom door, making it difficult for the entry team to move quickly toward him while he used 16-year old Emily Keyes as a human shield, constituted sufficient fortifications to make a rescue difficult. 

No matter how fast LE is responding or breaching, you can anticipate one round being discharged by the Adult Shooter every second or two (three at the most) into the controlled hostage group.  The reality is that innocent people are going to be killed, or at least wounded.  Whether you wait until the attacker begins shooting hostages to initiate your rescue, or dictate your own assault schedule, you must expect that there are going to be victims.  The only advantage, is that at this level you will not see more than a single adult assailant, unless part of a trained terrorist team, as described below.

Multiple Terrorist Decimation Assault.  This will be tactically identical to the High Multiple Student Shooter scenario, with the exception that it will be conducted by a coordinated team of better trained, better armed, adult attackers.  The “active” assault against the students and teachers in the building will dictate an immediate attack by arriving law enforcement.  The terror team will have prepared ambushes for arriving officers.  This attack will only end when the terrorists have been killed by police.  An attack of this nature in America is less likely than a Terrorist-Mass Hostage siege stretched out over days.

Multiple Terrorist-Mass Hostage Siege.    This is the worst and, therefore, most tactically difficult.  Here you will be dealing with a team (anticipate at least ten) of well trained, heavily armed adults who will have been conditioned to not only kill as many innocents as possible, but as many cops as they can.  They will intend to die inside the building, and will keep killing innocents until police kill them.  Before that, the assailants will attempt to drag the standoff out for a period of days.  Al Qaeda and related groups know all about Active Shooter responses of American LE agencies, and will ensure that the first cop to arrive on scene will be confronted with a cold, dead, quiet building.  There will be none of the indicators of an Active Shooter situation.  What hostages were going to escape will have already done so.  All of the others will be controlled in a single collection point, most likely a gym, auditorium or cafeteria. 

The first officer on site will see several large vehicles, with engines running, parked just outside the front doors.  Most likely this will include at least one school bus.  If there is an SRO in the building, they – like all of the Low and High Multiple Student Shooters, Young Adult and Adult Shooters – will have to eliminate that officer first.  They know that if arriving officers hear a single gunshot, the police are going in, and will keep pouring cops into the building until the battle is over.  In that event, American LE would effectively be following the Israeli model for dealing with mass hostage takings: Attack right away no matter what.  This means SROs must be sufficiently armed with both weapons and ammunition, equipped with adequate body armor, and trained, to stay alive to keep firing so that arriving LE assaults immediately.  To wait until the terrorists want the assault to come, is to ensure a greater body count of hostages and police.    

From the arrival of the first officer on scene, throughout the days of the siege, they will make it easy for American LE to not attack; until the terrorists are ready for the battle.  They will negotiate until all of their goals have been met, which will not include a peaceful surrender.  The earliest point at which negotiations will end, however, will be when fortifications have been completed.  At that point, if SWAT has not already launched a rescue operation, the terrorists will begin the mass execution of hostages, compelling police to attack.  When the rescue comes, police should anticipate a large number of explosives fortifying the building, in addition to heavy firepower.  Be ready for them to wire bombs to hostages, and even to place young females wearing suicide belts or vests, in among the hostages.  When it is over, all of the terrorists will be dead; they will allow no other result.  Some of the hostages will have died.  As well, tragically, some of the police will likely not be going home that night. 

Whether al Qaeda ever attempts to attack U.S. schools, we have not seen the last of the schools shootings and hostage takings in this country.  It is due to the broad spectrum of extreme tactical threats to schools – and the varied tactical hurdles that LE confronts – that SROs, patrol and SWAT teams must develop tactics that will be used in tandem during an actual attack.  Schools must be taught what is expected of them, including what intel must be communicated to police immediately.  Tactics must be developed, or modified, to deal with these various scenarios.  Knowledge is, indeed, power.  But it is only powerful when used to prepare for the problems that American law enforcement will continue to face in her schools.

The following are the phases of a terrorist Mass-Hostage Siege

1. Attack on the building;
2. Submission and Control of Hostages – may include some initial murders to stun hostages;
3. Fortifications – will begin early on and may continue throughout Negotiations;
4. Stabilization – will show LE a stable scene so that they do not attempt rescue right away;
5. Negotiations – used by terrorists to gain time for both media access and to fortify building;
6. Rescue – may be forced by terrorists at time of their choosing through the beginning of the mass execution of hostages.

This article was published in JEMS (Journal of Emergency Medical Services) Supplement to its Oct 2008 issue.  The supplement was entitled:  “The War on Trauma: Lessons Learned From A Decade of Conflict.”

 

The article, in unedited form and written by John Giduck, was published under the title:  “Terror In America’s Schools: The Need To Prepare First Responders To Defend Our Nation’s Children.”

 

America is a nation at war. That is a reality, not political rhetoric. And some of the battles in that war are going to be fought on American soil—in our communities, among our homes and loved ones. Our enemy has promised us that some of those battles will be fought in our schools as our children are captured, tortured and even killed.

Yet for all their courage and desire to be at the forefront of every battle, such battles will not be fought exclusively by our brave men and women in military uniform. As I explained in my book, “Terror at Beslan,” most, if not all, of these battles will be fought by our law enforcement officers in conjunction with fire/rescue and EMS personnel willing to throw themselves into harm’s way.¹ Thus, we must not delude ourselves when asking just where those battles will take place, or what they will be like when they occur. We must be prepared.

Terror targets can be categorized in a number of ways. There are high-, medium- and low-value strategic targets; high-, medium- and low-value tactical targets; critical infrastructure targets; government, law enforcement and military targets; psychological and emotional targets; financial and economic targets; and even symbolic targets. Though they had tremendous psychological and economic side effects, the Twin Towers were primarily symbolic targets to the enemy, representing American economic hegemony throughout the Muslim world.

            There are countless terror targets in America. For this reason, we must understand the targets terrorists are most likely to strike, and develop plans to respond to those attacks. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiled a list of 7,000 of the most “high risk” sites for terror attack.² But even that does not begin to acknowledge the many thousands more that are not only predictably attractive to terrorists, but are the very types of targets that have been attacked by this same enemy countless times around the world. Indeed, in developing its 7,000-site terror target list, DHS included merely 100 of the nation’s 3,400 drinking water facilities that store large amounts of chlorine gas; if any of these facilities were attacked, the gas stored could result in harm to, or the deaths of, 1,000 or more people.² Worse still: There isn’t a single elementary, middle or high school on that list.

 

Why Schools?

When anyone with a terrorist mindset is deciding what type of attack to launch, they typically have two essential options: Decimation Assault or Mass-Hostage Siege. Decimation Assaults are much more frequent, easier to plan and execute, and can usually yield all the results the terrorists seek with the majority of targets. That is, they need only send suicide bombers into a site, or plant explosives in advance of actual detonation. By simply bombing most physical targets, they accomplish this objective. By blowing up innocent people on streets, in transportation hubs and modes, and small-to-medium-size public venues (e.g., bars, restaurants and markets), terrorists achieve some terror, but it doesn’t have a long-lasting impact.

In Israel, for instance, when these attacks occur, they are cleaned up immediately. Within hours, damage to buildings is repaired, streets are scrubbed clean, sidewalks are bleached and the bodies are buried by nightfall. For the enemy, the terror impact isn’t significant, largely due to the fact that the body count is not high.  The attacks on 9/11 were a Hybrid or Synergistic Attack, as weaponized aircraft became the terrorists’ explosive devices. They needed only to deliver those weapons to their intended targets, but to accomplish that, they had to take, hold and control a relatively large number of hostages, along the lines of a mass-hostage siege.

However, when seeking to cause the greatest psychological, emotional and lifestyle impact on an entire nation, through the deaths of large numbers of the most innocent, no target offers terrorists as much impact as the killing of children. Terrorists have learned that when you first take and hold large numbers of children hostage, you, in fact, hold an entire nation hostage. Should terrorists come to America and take more than 1,000 of our children and women hostage as they did at Beslan Middle School No. 1 in southern Russia in September 2004, all of America would hold its collective breath through the days of that siege, terrified of the end they knew was certain to come. Holding innocents hostage over long periods of time exponentially increases the terror impact on not only the target government and the citizens of that country, but of that nation’s allies.

Whether Decimation Assaults or Mass-Hostage Sieges, children and schools rate high among the most prolific terror targets in the world. Israel first experienced its own Beslan over the night of May 15 to 16, 1974, when terrorists took and held 105 children and five adults in a school in the town of Ma’a lot, near the Syrian border. When the battle to retake the school was over, 26 children were dead and 56 others wounded. Another school was taken in Bovennsmilde, Holland, in May 1977. Between 1984 and 1993 more than 300 schools were attacked in Turkey, ultimately resulting in that country having to close down more than 3,000 schools. In the first six months of 2006 alone, 204 schools were attacked in Afghanistan, at a time when U.S. and NATO troops were at their peak control of that country. Many more have been attacked since then. The number of schools being attacked in Pakistan is rising, as well as in Indonesia and Iraq. All of the schools in three southern districts of Thailand have been closed due to Syrian-trained terrorists attacking them, children, teachers and principals in recent years. When I was working there in early 2008 they held a conference for all teachers and administrators in an effort to get the schools reopened.  More than a half dozen bombs were detonated at and around the hotel, and eight of those attending murdered within two weeks of its conclusion.  The list goes on.

Famed military and law enforcement trainer Lt. Col. Dave Grossman stresses repeatedly that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. From its own past behavior, our enemy has not only learned the great value of children in schools as an optimal terror target, but has told us what they may yet do to an America that has gone back to sleep since 9/11. Usama bin Laden has stated on prior occasions that before this jihad is over he will see to the deaths of four million American citizens, including two million American children, and that they are not only viable but noble targets.  This exists on Web sites to this day, including the following statement by bin Laden spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith in May 2002: We have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many, and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.  Today, as a result of U.S. conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports have been received that the terrorists have increased those numbers as high as 15 million Americans including 10 million American children.

For this reason, there is much to be gained from studying previous attacks. Anyone with a terrorist mindset sees the value in attacking children in schools. Whether dealing with a strategic-level attack by al Qaeda or similar international terrorist groups, or our own terror-minded citizens who crave revenge on an uncaring society for all the wrongs done them in their lives—real or imagined—they all come to recognize the value of attacking children.

When you must hold and control an exponentially greater number of hostages, no one is easier to do it with than children. And when terrorists ultimately seek to kill a large number of hostages, no one is easier to kill than children. No segment of society would have the emotional and psychological impact on all of America as dead children, for no culture can withstand the decimation of its young.

And there is no other place in America than schools where large numbers of children can be found, relatively unprotected, through long periods of the year and where schedules are easy to obtain through even rudimentary intelligence gathering efforts (most are on school Web sites).

 

Learning from the Past

In examining just the most recent significant school attacks in America, we can glean valuable lessons. Though the attack on the school in Beslan may well be the worst thing imaginable, right now our enemy is imagining an attack quite a bit worse than even that.

Attacks on schools can and will take place on a variety of levels for both our tactical operators and medic/rescuers. For instance, lower-level school attacks by our own student shooters and adults in recent years may well approximate the homegrown, individually motivated terrorist attacks al Qaeda is seeking to inspire in every one of the 2-plus million Muslims in America. Therefore, it is important to look at some of the more significant recent attacks that our enemy is even now studying, and looking to outpeform.

I have encountered many school administrators who say that they don’t have to worry about Beslan happening at their schools. They point out that there were more than 100 bombs there and that was only possible because Beslan sat on the edge of a war zone. In reaching such a conclusion, however, they are ignoring the intel on one of the more devastating attacks America has already experienced.

Most people in our country are familiar with some aspects of the attack on Columbine High School in Colorado, committed by Dylan Kleibold and Eric Harris on April 20, 1999. What many do not know: In that attack, two untrained teenage assaulters manufactured and dragged more than 90 explosives to the school. The majority of the bombs did not explode, due to an error they made in the use of a certain type of watchface as a timed detonator.

And while most school administrators and teachers do not know what that mistake was, they must recognize that all students who have ever contemplated launching a Columbine-style attack—and all of the terrorists considering the same thing—do know what Kleibold and Harris did wrong. Each of them will ensure that mistake is not repeated.

The body count at Columbine resulted in modifications in law enforcement response tactics throughout the country. “Active Shooter” responses by police since that time have resulted in many school attacks being quickly stopped before the shooters could amass a Columbine-level toll in human life. But nothing about Active Shooter response addresses the holding of children hostage.

In two of the more recent attacks in America, we have seen adults entering schools, intent on holding hostages, sexually assaulting young girls and ultimately killing students in buildings that should be sanctuaries from harm. On Sept. 27, 2006, Duane Morrison entered Room 206 in Platte Canyon High School in bucolic Bailey, Colo. He held hostage seven young ladies, brutally sexually assaulting all of them over a 4-hour period, before his threats to blow up the building forced a law enforcement entry that resulted in the death of 16-year-old Emily Keyes and himself.

Just five days later, on Oct. 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts walked into a one-room Amish school building in tiny Nickel Mines, Pa. He drove everyone out of the building but 10 young girls, all of whom were bound by their feet and made to lie shoulder to shoulder beneath the blackboard. He, too, had come to sexually abuse children before killing them. Shortly after the arrival of the Pennsylvania State Police, he began shooting into those defenseless girls. At the sound of the first shot, police raced to the building and attempted immediate entry, where they encountered lumber Roberts had nailed over the doors and windows. The police fought desperately to gain entry; one state trooper tore out all his fingernails trying to rip wood away. Breaching the building took a little more than 2 minutes—rapid entry in light of the fortifications encountered. But Roberts needed merely 8 seconds to discharge 13 rounds into the 10 girls, killing five and leaving one brain damaged.

Seung-Hui Cho had the advantage of seeing all of this in the half-year prior to his attack on the Virginia Tech campus. In each attack, the tactics and fortifications of the assailant were better than the ones that had come before. At the Bailey, Colorado school, Morrison had packed the space between the door and himself—30 feet across the room—with all of the desks and chairs. He held Emily Keyes in front of him as a human shield while police fought their way through the jumbled furniture, not daring to take a thin-margin shot from such a distance. One week later, Roberts’ fortifications were even better. Cho improved on them both.

At Virginia Tech, Cho selected Norris Hall in part because it was one of the few remaining buildings whose doors had the old-style swing bars, rather than the solid push bars found in buildings today. This enabled him to simply loop chain through the bars and secure them with locks, thereby easily trapping his prey in the building, as well as fortifying it against law enforcement entry.

As with the two prior school incidents, law enforcement fought to gain entry, ultimately blowing the deadbolt lock out of another door with a shotgun slug. Contrary to news reports, from the moment of the breaching round, it took the entry teams merely 28 seconds to maneuver through a large and complex machine shop, race around a corner and down a short hall into a recessed staircase (while a second team raced all the way down a 40-yard corridor to the next set of stairs), and reach the second floor, forcing Cho take his own life.

Even then, the carnage was so great the police would not initially accept that there had been only one shooter. While attempting to secure the students against further attack, they and two tactical medics began providing medical care to the dozens of affected students and teachers. In all, 30 innocent people perished, with another 25 suffering wounds and injuries. This, in addition to the two lives Cho took earlier that morning in a distant dormitory.

 

Beslan Stands Alone

My own experience with school attacks is greater than I would like it to be. Two of our organization’s founding directors led the investigation into Columbine; I know dozens of the police and SWAT team members and leaders who responded to that attack. I was asked to the Bailey, Colorado school to conduct an assessment of the law enforcement response immediately after the siege ended. I know two of the Pennsylvania State Police SRT team members and leaders at Nickel Mines, and had coincidentally been nearby training the York City SWAT team when the shooting took place, enabling me to contact the operators to understand what they had confronted. And when Virginia Tech happened, I was asked to travel there immediately with a small team of top law enforcement professionals to begin an in-depth assessment. I was inside Norris Hall; I saw the remnants of the damage Cho inflicted.

But as bad as Norris Hall was, it was not the worst either I, or the world, had ever seen, for the tragic title of “the worst school attack” belongs to Beslan, Russia. In fact Virginia Tech was exactly one-tenth of the devastation of Beslan.  The time I’d spent working and studying in Russia every year for almost two decades—including annual time spent over 13 years with Russian Special Forces units (spetsnaz)—proved invaluable to helping me gain entry into the school immediately after the battle ended. I debriefed dozens of soldiers, government officials and townspeople.

 

Beslan Facts

At Beslan, 49 terrorists took more than 1,200 mostly women and children hostage at approximately 9:00 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2004 (the first day of school in Russia). Hostages were brutalized in ways that are almost unspeakable. Children were beaten savagely; older teenage girls were raped, some repeatedly, through the days of the siege. Several fathers were murdered immediately in the gym where the hostages were originally massed, and another 21 of the largest adult males and older teenage boys were shot to death. Many of their bodies were dumped out a second-story window to rot in the sun.

The Beslan terrorists brought upward of 200 explosives into the school. Many were placed in the gym where the majority of hostages were held throughout the siege. Others were spread throughout the school, with numerous booby traps set in the hallways. Other groups of children were held in separate rooms amidst bombs designed to kill them when a rescue attempt ultimately came. Three belt-fed machine guns (two PKM 7.62mm machine guns and one PKT (7.62mm) free standing tank turret machinegun) were set up in the 80-yard-long main corridors on the first and second floors. These corridors were barely 8 feet wide, similar to the tight confines of the hallway in Norris Hall at Virginia Tech.

When exploding bombs in the gym forced the rescue 2 ½ days later, terrorists were standing children up in windows as human shields while they fired indiscriminately into both fleeing hostages and rescuers racing in the other direction, toward the school. The spetsnaz couldn’t fire at the terrorists for fear of hitting the children. This was repeated inside the building throughout the 10-plus-hour gun battle to retake the school. In the northern courtyard, the military moved up two BTR 80s (wheeled armored personnel carriers) into the northern courtyard to provide cover for advancing teams, and to protect wounded and rescued hostages while being evacuated.

Avenues into the southern courtyard were too narrow to permit vehicles large enough to have provided any benefit at all, leaving hostages and soldiers alike to fend for themselves out in the open. Inside the building, the special forces had to contend with several series of fighting positions staggered throughout the long corridors, tripwires and booby traps, and the three belt-fed machine guns in hard fighting positions with children stood up before them to slow down the attack of the soldiers.

Even as the battle raged in different parts of the school, many of the more than 700 wounded hostages were evacuated under fire. With more than 300 additional hostages ultimately dying, the demands were overwhelming on the soldiers, medics and even townspeople to provide critical lifesaving care to all of those affected by bullets, bombs, ceilings collapsing in several places including the entire gym roof caving in, and fire. In addition, 21 elite special forces soldiers were killed and more than 60 wounded.

 

Preparing for the Worst

The mass chaos and tactical needs presented by major incidents of this type has yielded a valuable model for preparedness and training. If studied and applied, it should ultimately ensure that those lives were not lost in vain. Certainly, the recent attacks on U.S. schools have provided important realizations about the need to prepare for such attacks.

The one consistency with all people possessed of a terror mindset is the desire for attention, the need to be made famous as a result of the horror they perpetrate. To become famous they need the news media to splash their names, faces and accomplishments throughout the world. To garner that level of devotion by the news media, they need accomplish only one thing: exceed the last, biggest body count of innocent victims.

That means that the next Kleibold and Harris are putting a plan together to kill more people than died at Columbine. To achieve that, they need better fortifications in order to slow the police response and entry into the building. They are all studying the attacks that have come before, and are devising tactics they believe will be impossible for law enforcement to overcome. The next Cho on a college campus is attempting to devise a plan and fortifications that will allow him to exceed Cho’s numbers of killed and wounded. And terrorists both within and without the United States are attempting to devise plans that will exceed the numbers the terrorists achieved at Beslan.

For that reason, it’s important that all of those professionals America turns to in times of crisis recognize the value in preparing for the worst thing that could happen, making the Beslan model of tremendous value. In looking at both Beslan and the recent attacks on American schools by our own socially manufactured predators, the conclusion is inescapable that there are only two things that will stop the next attack and save the lives of the targeted victims: brave men and women with guns, and brave men and women with the medical skills to save the wounded under combat conditions. Thus, the single most crucial aspect of preparedness for all of America’s tactical operators, firefighters and paramedics is the need to train to kill and to rescue.

At Beslan, teams spent all day racing toward the school, across open ground, to bring stretchers full of much-needed re-supplies of bullets, weapons, water and medical kits to the beleaguered troops inside, only to turn around and race back out across those same killing fields carrying the wounded on stretchers their hands could barely hold. Many just carried children in their arms, or dragged adults by limbs across the yards to safety. Exhausted, many of these teams needed others to step into their role while they sought brief respite. Others were simply shot down trying to shield children with their bodies.   

All of our personnel must not only hone their abilities to take life to save the innocent, but also save life and rescue the wounded under fire. Just as importantly, our fire/rescue and paramedic personnel must go into these battles with a tactical mindset and knowledge to ensure not only the safety of the wounded, but of themselves and those around them. 

 

New Skills Needed

To deal with both the tactical (combat) and combat casualty care (first aid under fire) aspects of the battles yet to come to America, law enforcement operators and tactical medics alike must possess the same capabilities. If they don’t, people will die. Medical professionals must realize the differences between first aid and tactical combat casualty care (TCCC). In a combat environment, priorities change. Stopping hemorrhage through the use of clotting agents and tourniquets is critical. The first personnel on scene to assist victims of gunshots and bombs must be able to invasively open breathing passages, treat collapsed lungs and evacuate the wounded, often through walls and out windows. The same “tactics” can benefit law enforcement operators who may have to advance down hallways, straight into the face of automatic weapons fire.

Police must be able to use these same skills to treat the hostages, their teammates and themselves, because TCCC is all about staying in the fight. Though the combat capability and synergy of actual tactical medics will have to be substantial, both fire/rescue and EMS, must also be able to pick up any weapon and either load or unload it, relieve a jam and return it to combat effectiveness. In a gun battle with a committed enemy and innocent victims in between, no one can afford the luxury of job specialization. Both groups must be able to deal with re-supply and evacuation of wounded; and must be able to use the same devices and tactics to do both while keeping hands free to provide their own suppression fire.

In short, tactical medics, EMS, fire/rescue and law enforcement personnel alike must be able to shoot their way into and out of a building, and across open ground. Police must not be afraid to break traditional rules of emergency care. Lt. Anthony Wilson, commander of the Blacksburg, Va., SWAT team—who along with Virginia Tech PD SWAT commander Lt. Curtiss Cook led the assault on Norris Hall—says: “When it comes to kids, the rules all change. No matter what you’ve been told as a cop, if it’s a child and you have to stick your gloveless hands into that little body to stop bleeding, you’re going to do it. If you have to put your mouth on that little kid’s mouth to breathe life into him, you’ll do it without hesitation.”

 

This necessary skill set will require three essential evolutions in the training of those we will ask to go into the next Columbine, Norris Hall and Beslan.    But the wheel need not be reinvented as we can look to the model that already exists in both America’s conventional combat arms units, and its Special Operations Forces.  At the top would be the medics assigned to SWAT.  Just as our most elite counter-terror hostage-rescue units have highly trained medics deploy with every one of their entry teams, so too must specialized tactical medics undergo substantial training with the SWAT teams they are assigned to.  These will be the elite of the on-site medical professionals assigned to assist police.  In order for them to operate dynamically, and under intensely violent situations, they must train with – and be trained by – the teams they will be entering buildings and battle with.  This will actually cost very little in the way of money.  Medics must be willing to undergo SWAT training with their assigned units, and maintain themselves to the same physical standards.  They will need similar equipment to their police teammates in the way of body armor, uniform and clothing, but little else.  They may even be able to be an added resource for extra ammunition, as they can carry heavier loads than the operators who must move at lightning speed in tight confines.  Whether these medics would – or should – be armed would be a matter for the individual departments, and may be determined by pre-existing policies, and in some cases state law.  Having at least one sidearm for each medic, however, would likely result in the lives of police, medics and innocent victims being saved at some point.

 

The next level of advancement in training and ability would be seen in increased tactical awareness and understanding in all fire/rescue and EMS personnel.  Though these individuals would not need the expertise of the tactical medics, some increase in their knowledge of how patrol officers respond, what tactics they employ in entering a building, clearing and securing of areas, handling of hostages, wounded suspects, withdrawal under fire, small team formations and the like would greatly enhance the ability of the two groups to operate together in active shooter situations, particularly in those jurisdictions where it is likely patrol will arrive ahead of SWAT.  These medical professionals would function on the level of standard military medics assigned to infantry platoons.  They will not require the extreme tactical knowledge of their counterparts with units like Delta, SEAL Team Six and Army Special Forces, but they will need sufficient knowledge to ensure they can get their medical expertise to where it is needed, while under fire, and without interfering with those engaged in combat.  These professionals can, as well, receive all of the training they need from the very departments they will be assisting. 

 

Just as the medics will have to be trained in combat tactics by the police, so, too, must the police be trained in superior first aid by the medics.  This is the third aspect of the new evolutions in capability.  They must be better at rendering aid to their law enforcement comrades, themselves and the victims.  In a battle environment where police can expect to suffer casualties at the rate of one cop for every five terrorists shot (as the Russian special forces do), in addition to dozens (and even hundreds) of dead and dying victims, even those medics assigned to police will be overwhelmed.  At Norris Hall there were two tac medics, and they would have had to treat 55 people if the police had not been sufficiently trained.  Ultimately, when the killing of the bad guys is over, it’s all about being able to save the lives of the good guys.

 

To develop this ability in our brave men and women who will be called into dangerous and violent situations again and again, does not require large budgets for equipment or six-figure DHS grants.  What it does require, however, is a willingness to train and a desire to be better than we are now.  In advancing the skill level in the two critical areas of tactics and medicine-under-fire, we can, once again, turn to the model of the Army Special Forces.  In SF, each ODA 3 is comprised of two specialists in each of the five SF MOS’s 4, and the first duty of each specialist is to teach his expert skill set to all of the other members of the team.  In this way they are always working hard to make each other better, so that any one team member can step in and do another’s job if that person is wounded or killed.  Our police, medics, EMS and firemen can ill afford a different attitude in the battles America is yet to fight on her own soil.  While some advances in equipment will be helpful, the real requirements are dedication, discipline and a willingness to commit time and effort. 

For these reasons, the Asymmetric Combat Institute, the International Tactical Response and Medicine Society (ITRAMS) and the Archangel Group, Ltd., have been working to prepare America’s warriors to be able to do these very things: kill and rescue. Since 9/11 Archangel has trained thousands of police, soldiers and state and federal agents in unprecedented and innovative ways to conduct these battles against a committed, well prepared and deadly enemy. At the same time, ACI and ITRAMS ahve been working with the most elite Special Operations soldiers and sailors who are conducting operations in our overseas combat zones to provide the most advanced, efficacious casualty care and extraction techniques for combat at home—techniques that represent an enormous evolution in casualty care from early conventional first aid and CPR.

Together, these organizations have forged a tactical skill set that no police officer, SWAT operator, SRO, firefighter or paramedic can be without.  A program of common skills that have joint tactical and medical applications has been developed.  New, and inexpensive, evacuation and medical equipment is now available that every police officer, soldier, medic, ambulance driver or firefighter can benefit from.  And cutting edge training in TCCC is now available to everyone.  No longer is this equipment and training limited only to our elite military Special Operations Forces.  Nor can we afford for it to be, as the police, medics and firefighters are the ones we will be turning to when this enemy returns.  They have promised us the deaths of millions of American citizens—including our own children—before this war is over. The only way to prevent them from reaching that goal is our ability to kill them and rescue and resuscitate our own; for our enemy will allow us no other solution.

 

 

John Giduck is a senior consultant with the Archangel Group (www.antiterrorconsultants.org), an agency that provides training to U.S. law enforcement, government agencies and military. He has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian studies, and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies and has worked with several Russian special forces units. He has authored “Terror at Beslan” and co-authored the newly released “The Green Beret in You: Living with Total Commitment to Family, Career, Sports and Life.”

 

Editor’s Note: The author’s book, “Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools,” provides a detailed account of the events at the Beslan school siege. Learn more at http://www.archangelgroup.org

 

 

REFERENCES

1. Giduck J: Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools. Archangel Publishing Group, Inc.: Golden, Colorado, 2005.

 

2. Ahlers MM: “Agency says 7,000 sites at ‘high risk’ of terrorist attack.” CNN.com News Report, June 21, 2008.

 

3. Operational Detachment – Alpha, or A-Team as it is commonly known to the public, is the foundational unit of Army Special Forces.

 

4. An MOS is a military occupational specialty. While the conventional military has hundreds, the Green Berets have only five, called the 18-series designations, as each begins with the number 18.

 

Below is an article I wrote and that was published in the law enforcement magazine, BLUE, for its December 2024 issue. 2024 marked 25 years since the mass attack at Columbine High School. I interviewed former VA Tech Police SWAT leader, Lt. Curtis Cook, who in 2007 led his team into the worst mass-shooting murder at a school in US history. Curtis provides a retrospective of what American police needed to learn from Columbine, through VA Tech and up today, in addition to what they have learned and what they yet need to learn.

Also, here is the link to the complete Dec. 2024 edition of BLUE Magazine, free for anyone wishing to download and read:   

https://www.thebluemagazine.com/s/BlueV15_I5-final-web.pdf

 

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

25 Years after Columbine - A SWAT Retrospective on School Incidents

By: Dr. John Giduck

In the morning of Monday, April 16, 2007, 23-year-old Seung-Hoi Cho shot two students in a dormitory on the Virginia Tech (VT) campus. Several hours later he walked into Norris Hall, chained the three sets of doors shut, then proceeded to mow down students in classrooms on both sides of a second-floor hallway. In all, he killed 32 students and professors. Another 27 were wounded or injured.

When the call came out that there was an active shooter in the building, SWAT teams from Blacksburg and VT police departments went racing there. Arriving in only two minutes, they fought their way into the building, then raced up two sets of stairs at either end of the hallway forcing Cho to take his own life. Lt. Curtis Cook led the VT SWAT operators into Room 211 where the killer was found. It remains the greatest mass shooting murder at a school in US history.

This year marked the 25^th anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Since that seminal event, the nation has endured hundreds of other school shootings. Lessons that America believed police had learned at Columbine in how to respond to attacks in our schools have sometimes been ignored. It seemed an appropriate time to gather the thoughts and reflections of the man who led a rescue team into the worst one of all, as he looks back over a quarter century of mass killings in our schools.

Beyond providing a few briefings for other SWAT teams and having taught ALERRT classes at VTPD as a certified instructor, Curtis has seldom spoken publicly of his experience. This year he agreed to sit down and answer questions on the lessons American police should have learned from these horrors and what they need to be prepared for in the future.

Prior to joining VTPD, Curtis was a Navy Surface Rescue swimmer, then a deputy sheriff with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia, where he served as a patrol sergeant and SWAT team Entry Leader. He joined VTPD in 1997 and became the SWAT commander in 2007 as a lieutenant. The attack at the school happened shortly after that. Curtis retired from law enforcement in 2014 with 28 years’ service. When Columbine happened, Curtis was a patrol officer at VTPD and had just started instructing officer survival at the police academy.

 

BLUE: What were your thoughts on Columbine, how it was handled and what law enforcement (LE) needed to learn?

CURTIS: I think most everyone in LE had the same thoughts after Columbine: the police did what they’d been trained to do, but there was also the realization that people are going to die if you wait on SWAT. It was apparent after Columbine that the traditional response wouldn't work in that type situation. New techniques and procedures had to be developed for active shooters.

 

BLUE: Do you believe that LE nationwide learned what it needed to from Columbine?

CURTIS: I think it got the attention of law enforcement, but I'm sure a lot of departments struggled with how to task patrol officers with a response that SWAT would normally handle. In addition to just the tactical side involving entry and movement, the new issues were how to deal with explosive devices and mass casualties. If they weren’t going to be able to wait on SWAT, patrol officers had to be trained to respond and eliminate the threat.

 

I attended several presentations on Columbine that taught me and a lot of officers important information. But there were other events outside of school shootings that everyone needed to learn from and incorporate. For that, I also attended debriefs on the North Hollywood shootout and even the Texas Tower shooting. Columbine footage was being shown as part of our Immediate Action Rapid Deployment (IARD) training, and the Hollywood shootout identified the need to have specialized training and place rifles in police vehicles to respond to heavily armed suspects. But in the end, you can give police all the training in the world, equip them with better body armor and weapons, but none of that will ever make a difference if they aren’t doing everything they can to get into a building and move as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat and save innocent lives.

 

BLUE: Is it your impression that LE nationwide did adopt the tactics it was obvious were necessary for responding to active shooters in schools?

CURTIS: Yes and No. I know that many departments were adopting the LAPD – IARD training and techniques post-Columbine, and many departments were using their SWAT teams to train patrol officers in building searching and room clearing. But even after VT, I was shocked to learn that some departments had still not conducted any formal active shooter training. I think it was clear, however, that you not wait on SWAT to arrive at a school shooting. ALERRT has since become the standard for LE active shooter training across the US, butI have no idea how many departments have received that training.

 

BLUE: What are your professional thoughts on the responses to school shootings like that at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, FL in 2018, Uvalde, TX in 2022 and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN in 2023?

 

CURTIS: In Florida, I understand that the school resource officer (SRO) thought the shots were outside because shots sometimes don't sound like shots. However, it’s at that time, just like VT, when you have to quickly identify where the shots are coming from and relay that information to all responding officers. Once he learned the shots were inside, he should have entered. I believe he failed to act and failed to protect. What seemed to make that worse were flaws in the school’s lock-down procedures, which caused a serious delay in the code-red activation.

 

I think the deputies that arrived and took cover behind their vehicles, instead could have formed a contact team and entered the school. From what I understand, they had active shooter training and not immediately moving into the building was contrary to that training. So, at least the training was correct. But that’s been the problem at times. We all know what must be done in these situations, but it’s not always being done.

 

I believe departments should be putting their most highly trained officers in schools. I fear that many departments feel the uniform presence alone, or parking a police vehicle in front of a school, will deter a shooter. It may, but that SRO inside needs to be highly trained and equipped for active shooters. 

 

As to Uvalde, I don't even know where to start. After Columbine and VT, it’s hard to understand how this could happen. It was without a doubt a total failure of LE until the Border Patrol guys went in. It’s another clear case of failure to act to save lives and protect, and poor or untrained supervision and management. If the officers had active shooter training, why didn't they utilize it? I hate to hear things like: “the officers got shot at, so they stopped and left the building.” Yes, you may get shot at, and you may get hit, but in that circumstance, in my opinion based on my training and experience, they needed to try to fight their way in to save those children.

 

In the Covenant School shooting, the officers did what they were supposed to: they made entry, moved rapidly to the shooter and eliminated the threat. Despite the tragic loss of life, it was a success for LE. But there are still lessons to come from it. If the school would have had trained, armed police or security, they may have stopped the shooter much earlier, just as happened in the Apalachee School shooting in Georgia in September of this year. Despite the outcome of the Parkland, FL shooting, there really is no substitute for having armed, trained police or even security inside a school.

 

BLUE: In looking at all this over the years, how do you see the events at VT in April 2007 and how you/VTPD and Blacksburg handled everything that occurred that day, including your response to the Norris Hall shooting? In hindsight, if the same attack happened today would you do anything different?

 

CURTIS: I think Cho made a horrible error when he committed the first murders. Although it did create somewhat of a diversion, he didn't anticipate the activation and deployment of two SWAT teams. It was clear that command from both BPD and VTPD were actively assessing everything together and making critical decisions. Like Columbine, we encountered something different, a new tactic, something unique in the doors chained from the inside of a building with limited access points and small windows. Responding officers did what anyone would have: they tried to enter through the doors, then changed tactics and found a different way in.

 

As far as actions in Norris Hall, everyone on the teams did exactly what they were trained to do: go directly to the sounds of gunfire, gather intel while moving, and when no shots are being fired, slow down, communicate, search for the gunman, identify and eliminate the threat, then treat and evacuate the wounded.

 

Like so many other cowards, he chose not to engage our team and took the easy way out. I have to remind myself often that the actions of those teams did contain him and forced him to stop shooting. That saved lives.  Many more people were in the building and he had plenty of ammunition. We were fortunate in that we had command staff from both departments that worked well together, we had officers from other departments that trained and worked together. The teams had a mutual understanding of tactics and procedures for dealing with active shooters. As far as what I would do different, I've spent many sleepless nights since 2007 asking myself that same question. Basically, I would have used any means necessary to create an entry point, most likely utilizing a truck or vehicle to try and ram the doors. With the design of the doors and frames at Norris Hall it may not have worked, but looking back, it might have been another option.

BLUE: What should police officers nationwide learn from all of this?

CURTIS: I think what should be learned from VA Tech is when responding to an active shooter, you have to expect the unexpected, and you have to anticipate that you may encounter something that you have never trained for in the past. Departments need to do regular joint training and “what if” the scenarios to death. It needs to be understood that these killers study each other; they study police tactics and responses, and try to find ways to defeat those tactics. Police should be doing the same thing with the attacks that have come, to include terror attacks like the Bataclan Theater shooting in Paris in 2013 or even the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016. The Pulse Nightclub shooting may not have been an actual terror attack, but those two events saw a similar tactic used that police weren’t ready for. But who on the LE – or even government – side is paying attention, studying these things and advancing our training ahead of the next attack? I can tell you, though, that there are a lot of bad guys out there doing that very thing.

While there are many things we should have learned from Columbine and the many school attacks that have happened since, the single overriding lesson is that police cannot delay a single second. Each second lost is a bullet that didn’t have to go into the head of a kid. Though it may be controversial still, that even includes a solo officer going in if backup is not arriving immediately. Under no circumstances can you wait minutes or an hour, as happened with Uvalde. You are a trained, armed adult and this is the calling you answered in life. You may get shot and you may die, but you can fight back. For children inside, they have nothing to fight back with and them dying is a 100% certainty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curtis Cook

 

In addition to his navy and law enforcement service, during his police career Curtis served as an instructor, both in-house and at the police academy, in Firearms, Defensive Tactics, Active Shooter response, Chemical Weapons/OC Spray, SWAT, CQB, Advanced Patrol Tactics and Homeland Security. He has also taught Citizen Emergency Response Team courses and women’s self-defense. After retiring from law enforcementin 2014 with 28 years’ service he worked another two years at the VA Tech Department of Emergency Management.

 

 

 

John Giduck

 

Dr. John Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. His dissertation was on the evolution of jihadist terrorist mass-hostage siege tactics throughout the world. He has trained police departments and SWAT throughout the US. He is the author of Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools; Shooter Down! The Dramatic, Untold Story of the Police Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, along with co-author Police Commissioner Joseph M. Bail; and When Terror Returns: The History and Future of Terrorist Mass-Hostage Sieges. He can be contacted at john@circon.org.

 

 

Can You Shoot Too Fast?

An Analysis of Vladimir Putin’s Bodyguard’s Shooting Speed and Skill

By Dr. John Giduck with Ross Rienau

Our good friend, retired US Army master sergeant Dave Funk, shared a video of one of Putin’s executive protection (EP) agents doing a fast draw, rapid fire shooting demonstration. He was looking for comment on the efficacy of the shooting and the value of the training presented. It can be located on Youtube under “Putin’s Bodyguard in Shooting Training” at:

https://youtube.com/shorts/BzssEf6CmO8?si=9Xe34ZMbxEvHmljh

Over my years training in Russia, much of it was in hand-to-hand combat with a couple of different Spetsnaz (Special Forces) units. We also were schooled in counter-terror operations and small unit tactics, tactical shooting, and even some training in KGB EP work, but also high-risk VIP protection with one of the specialized units of Spetsnaz. That was for covering generals and other high-ranking government officials in the war in Chechnya. I still have the KGB 9th Chief Directorate lapel pin gifted to me by the colonel who ran the training, like the lapel pins you see on Secret Service agents in the US. Going back to the Soviet days, the 9th Directorate was the group that always provided EP services to hi-level government officials. Much of this and more is highlighted in my new book 1500 Years of Fighting: The Complete Book of Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet Martial Arts from Cossacks to Spetsnaz and Beyond.

 https://www.amazon.com/1500-YEARS-FIGHTING-Complete-Ukrainian/dp/B0DR3K872F/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_pl_foot_top?ie=UTF8.

As a general rule, Russians really cannot shoot. Certainly, not to the level of Americans. Retired Spetsnaz Major Dr. Konstantin Komarov, once explained to us that America is a gun culture. Whether someone grows up shooting guns or not, everyone here is subsumed into a culture of guns, from Western shoot-em-ups, iconic Vietnam and WWII movies and TV shows, Rambo films, cop, SWAT and detective series, and the Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Dirty Harry franchises to military service, hunting, shooting ranges, air soft and paintball competitions. He said we have a natural affinity for and comfort with guns, which few if any other countries have. When retired Green Beret Sergeant Major and former World Combat Pistol Champion John “Andy” Anderson accompanied me to Russia to train with the Spetsnaz, even their best shooters were awed by his speed and accuracy. None of them could come close. In fact, none of them had ever seen anyone shoot to such a level. At that point, though, he was years out of military service and competition and not even as fast as he had once been. During a recent lunch with a Spetsnaz veteran (there are a lot in the Denver metro area), we were discussing this video. He acknowledged that, “Compared to Americans, Russians can’t shoot. If we can shoot well at all, I mean like Americans, it’s usually because of training we got here in the US.” The hand-to-hand combat skills of the Russian Spetsnaz are incomparable and, in my assessment, far superior to anything the US military and law enforcement do. However, their shooting is not on par. Much of that was due to the fact that ammunition was expensive and even the most elite units did not have the budget for it. Instead, they would train hand-to-hand combat up to 20 hours a week.

In my initial study of the promotional video (link above) of one of Putin’s security detail, I was impressed by the speed, but also saw limitations and other factors that did not bode well for reality-application in an EP scenario.  

Consider that all his targets are only two to three feet away. That is fine and at that range he is not likely to miss, but agents on details like Putin’s are not also trained to be concerned about anyone else around them when they pull the trigger. It is not America; if they shoot a bystander there will be no congressional hearings, special committee investigations or lawsuits. Anything further away, and he would likely have no idea whom his bullets would be going into. Martial arts master, bodyguard and instructor to several European Special Forces units, Kevin Scours, said that his accuracy “will drastically decrease with increases in distance and dynamic movement.” Also, it is not a valid drill if he cannot do it with one hand on his protectee while engaging these threats. Otherwise, he cannot control his client moving into his line of fire. Can he do it while physically moving a client around and not shoot him, too? Looking at the film repeatedly, it seemed that wherever his client was, the agent would have been sweeping him (and likely other members of his team) with the barrel of his gun.

When we have done EP training programs for SWAT teams, regular police and civilians, I always show video of Putin’s EP detail in a real world scenario. Putin was standing with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel in front of an audience, with a large crowd around them that included security agents. To say the least, Putin’s team performed poorly when a small group of topless female protestors of the Femen group all ran at him. Femen is a Ukrainian radical feminist activist group whose goal is to protect women's rights. They are known for painting slogans on their upper bodies and breasts and running around topless in public. When this outbreak occurs, Angela Merkel’s team performs remarkably. She just disappears. Even when you slow the video down and freeze-frame it, you can scarcely see how they make her vanish. Putin’s guys are like the Keystone Cops, chasing topless women around, tackling them and rolling around on the floor with them, even losing their grip on them.

Here’s a short excerpt from the Femen topless protest. If you slow it down and zoom in on what the different bodyguards are doing, it is very educational.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkMWCiw6JqM

For more detailed analysis I asked my friend and colleague Ross Rienau to review the Russian shooting demo video. Ross is a world class three-gun shooter, a tactical firearms instructor, NRA instructor and EP professional. After viewing the shooting video several times, here was his assessment.

He misses the right-hand target on the fourth string of fire. Like you mentioned, these targets are at arm’s distance - or just outside – and they are using full-size IPSC targets. If this scenario played out in an empty field, then we have no problems. If it is somewhere more crowded, then we would most likely see problems.  His shooting on that string reminds me of the oft-used quote, “You can’t miss fast enough to win.”

The EP agent is also not using a concealed holster but an outside the waistband (OWB) dropped and offset holster. One of the issues I have been made aware of over the years, is that Russians – even at the highest levels – have not typically developed a recognition of the importance of top-level, well-designed holsters for concealment, access, speed of draw and weapon retention. The holster you select depends on the tactical circumstances you are anticipating or other circumstances you will be operating in (even if just a civilian with a “Carry Concealed Weapon” permit or CCW). In fact, Russians are known for often still carrying handguns in jacket pockets and one of our teams in Chechnya reported seeing a NGO security expert with his sweater actually pulled over his sidearm and holster and tucked under the holster and into his pants. In fairness, in this case the Russian is probably using this set up for the same reason I do in competition: it is faster to present a firearm from. But that is for the peculiar circumstances of competition, not a reality situation. It makes the video look good, but most likely would not be how an executive protection professional would or should be carrying.

Obviously, this is something that was practiced and set up in a known environment. Jerry Miculek, a world-renowned professional shooter, talks in some of his videos about expectations of speed between known and unknown environments. To paraphrase, he said that the time it takes to accomplish an act in an unknown and unexpected environment will be double or more that of a known environment. This is even when performing something you have practiced. When looking at the video and trying to get an idea of the time involved, the Russian EP agent appears to be doing a single target-engagement series in a little over a second. Not too shabby! Take into account it would take him two-plus seconds in a more realistic environment and the practical application of this is reduced. Add in a concealed weapon and holster setup, plus a client and other security detail members moving about, and I just don't see it having practical value. It is much better to practice removing the obstacle in the direction of travel for the client, or turning to the direction of a possible threat (contact right, front, left or rear) while trying to get you and your body armor between the threat and the client.

With a drill like this – especially if it is trained for application in a reality situation – we have to ask whether a single shot to each target would neutralize the threat. Even when using a high expansion projectile, the terminal ballistics just are not there. At least not four times over. His shots were not all in vital areas either. If you did hit all of them, it might buy you a second or two more, though.

At the end of a run, he simply looks all around, which is fine. You fight like you train and you should always train to be ready to respond to more threats. That is the value of maintaining a “perimeter of awareness”. Looking at it from a strictly EP view it does not make as much sense.  EP planning should have you moving to a pre-planned primary route or secondary or even tertiary.  If you are conditioning yourself to engage in this type of behavior in every training and every run you will repeat this in a real event. Even in non-lethal environments like competitions I see solid shooters get messed up when the rule set on a stage changes from two placed rounds for a target to be considered neutralized (a common set of rules in three gun), to a different number of “hits”. If you have run through your intended shots during training and are going to visually sweep the immediate area for further threats, always move off the X with the client, evacuate that immediate area or add in some other option that will apply to your expected situation, so you do not get stuck with only one option. Secours agrees, adding that this drill “violates the first rule of body guarding which is namely to get the target out of danger. The guard is completely static, shows no concern for a client and makes the dangerous assumption that one round will finish everyone.”

Also, it strikes me as a problem if, as an executive protection professional, you allow your client and you to be surrounded on all sides by threats. Is it possible? Sure, anything is possible. So many failures would have to happen to get to that point that it makes me think your time practicing shooting would be spent better on other drills and planning for your EP operation.

Like a lot of my beginner students, he begins his draw with a significant lean away from the firearm to allow for easier access. While this does not seem like a big problem to begin with, it actually is. Any limitation of that movement from an outside force or static object for that matter will most likely cause a fumbled or missed draw. I prove this in basic CCW courses sometimes by standing close beside a student who is performing the lean away draw. As soon as they bump into me, the muscle memory they had instilled into their draw from bad practice is blown and they typically miss the draw completely. At the very least, they will fumble and have to make time-draining adjustments. In the case of an EP agent, you also cannot be caught leaning away from – and exposing - your protectee. But if that is how you have trained, that is what you are going to do.

*********

Ross and I both acknowledge that on a certain level the Russian’s performance is impressive. He is clearly fast and his demo can “wow” a crowd. But for shooters like Ross, Andy, Jerry Miculek and so many others, that is the easy part. Retired Delta Force Command Sergeant Major, Chris Kurinec, commented: “Practice something enough, you can make anything look difficult, like a chef cutting vegetables.” If you are going to train, however, train for the reality of an actual encounter, whatever that happens to be for you. Do not use this video as a standard to measure your own skill against, and absolutely do not use it as an exercise to imitate. Whether a professional bodyguard, police officer, SWAT operator, Green Beret, SEAL, armed security professional or just a dad or mom with a CCW out with your family, train for the reality of the circumstances you are likely to be confronted by.

That includes being legally responsible for what you do and where your rounds go. Kurinec said, “It is not a flexible drill, … I would not want to be in the area when he kicks this off.” Secours adds: “If there is value in this type of training, it is extremely limited as it assumes no responsibility for tactical decision making - the assumption is that everyone is a target.” Much as the gunfighters of the Old West told us, it is less about being the first one to get a gun out and pull a trigger, than it is about being calm, deliberate, smooth and focused, and making sure your shots count. Wyatt Earp famously said: “Fast is fine but accuracy is everything.”

The officer can feel the adrenaline racing through his veins at the same time his patrol car races toward the school, lights and sirens slicing the previously peaceful morning.  The dispatcher had struggled to keep her voice steady, telling him they were receiving numerous reports of gunfire in the hallways, of children lying in pools of blood.

The young cop runs his response through his head, trying to calm himself, ready himself for battle.  He had been well schooled in Active Shooter protocols.  But what would he confront?  What must he be ready for, and did his training adequately prepare him for the broad spectrum of possible tactical threats to the children he swore to protect?

Make no mistake, America’s schools are under siege.  But few realize the entire spectrum of extreme tactical threats that they face, and that our law enforcement officers must be prepared to respond to.  Simply teaching schools to “lock down” in response to every threat is insufficient.  As well, the tactical spectrum is so wide that merely offering our rescuers the two options of going in (Active Shooter), or holding and securing (Stable Barricade Scenario) are just as insufficient.  As with any problem, the key to not only preparing for it, but resolving it when confronted, is knowledge.  With this knowledge comes the recognition that all three levels of LE-school response – SROs, patrol and SWAT – must develop joint tactics, as they will all be involved.  Anyone with a terrorist mindset understands the value of attacking kids in schools.  Whether our own homegrown child shooters, adults or trained al Qaeda terrorists, they all understand that nothing brings more fame, or devastates a community and a nation better, than the killing of its children.

Single Student Shooter.  The lowest level of extreme tactical threat (X-Tac) to schools is the single student school shooter.  This applies to high school age children and below.  With this age group, the shooter will only attack his own school, or schools below his grade, but never above.  You will not see a high school student attacking a college, nor a middle school age kid attacking a high school.  Though the variables in human nature ensure exceptions to any rule, the lack of maturity and sophistication of shooters at the different levels of the X-Tac Spectrum provide a fairly predictable model.  At these ages, children are too intimidated by older kids, and nature’s rule of child socialization would render it almost impossible psychologically for a child to attack a school full of older students.  That, coupled with the fact that few children would have a reason to attack a higher school, allows officers to presume that lone kids in a school are attacking their own, or a lower grade school; most likely one they left the year before.

At this age, the student shooter may have put together some rudimentary explosives, but will not have the resources to carry many into the school.  He will be heavily armed, however.  Due to his status as a lone attacker, he will not be able to control his target victim population, but will move through hallways, engaging targets of opportunity.  Where he can breach a room, he will do so and engage what targets present themselves before moving on.  Given the option of schools to attack, he will have perfect intelligence on the emergency response plan, and will have factored that response into his attack.  Though no one has yet attacked a school with an armed police officer present, at some point a student will decide to increase his fame by doing so.  He will know the SRO is the first tactical hurdle he must overcome.  He will likely have made a recent attempt to develop a relationship with that SRO, so that his approach will not alert the officer to possible danger.  The same will occur in the next two higher levels of the tactical threat spectrum.  Though the recent example of Virginia Tech (VT) will have left this shooter wanting to fortify the building prior to his attack, his solitary status, size of the school, and ubiquitous presence of students, will make that difficult, allowing easy entry by police.

Low Multiple Student Shooters.  The next more difficult X-Tac will involve only two or three shooters at the high school level and below.  Their target selection will be limited in the same way as the single shooter.  Due to age, immaturity, psychological co-dependency and limited numbers, these shooters will not separate.  They may use their numbers to better control and assail groups of victims in rooms, but will otherwise fail to control their target population, moving through hallways and delighting in the predatory response to fleeing prey.  At this X-Tac level, the presence of numerous explosives is greater, as happened at Columbine where Kleibold and Harris had built 90 devices.  Also, with these numbers, and with the example of Cho at VT to guide them in tactics, they may attempt to secure major points of egress (main external doors), and drive their victims in that direction.  At this level, as with the single shooter, LE can employ Active Shooter responses, and with the exception of concern over IEDs, move quickly past rooms and areas that are unsecured, in the direction of the gunfire.

High Multiple Student Shooters.  These attacks will be launched by kids in the same age groups, but will involve four to eight shooters.  This was seen in 2006 in Kansas where an attack was prevented involving five kids; and one week later in Alaska, where six teenagers were prevented from assaulting their school.  It is highly unlikely that LE would ever confront more than eight.  Due to maturity levels and typical group dynamics among children and teenagers,  at numbers above eight, one will be ostracized by the group, or will otherwise get cold feet and report the planned shooting.  The greatest tactical hurdles for LE at this level, however, are the presence of significant numbers of IEDs, efforts to secure and fortify major points of egress (external doors), and, most importantly, the recognition of the advantages of dividing their forces.  With Low Multiple Shooters, they cannot split up without at least one youth being on his own, which is unlikely. 

With numbers of four and above, our own teenagers will eventually recognize that separating into two or three teams will yield them a substantially increased body count.  They will follow a standard military hammer and anvil attack plan, or as is often described, having the hounds move to the hunters, with the quarry driven ahead of them.  At this X-Tac level, they may also use one team to ambush arriving police officers. It is here that standard Active Shooter doctrine increases the threat to the first entry team, and they must be careful of moving past areas that have not been cleared and secured.  For any Hasty Team that is assembled, the rear guard position becomes critical to the team’s survival.  If intel on the shooters is sparse en route to the school, all LE must assume that they are confronting this number of attackers in responding to any school assault and maintain excellent rear security. 

Young Adult Single Shooter.  Here the attacker would most likely be a college student, a recent college dropout, or possibly a recent high school dropout, as with the killer in Erfurt, Germany who killed 17, including a law enforcement officer.  Though the number of assailants is dramatically reduced at this X-Tac level, the threat to victims and LE may actually be greater.  At this age the attacker benefits from increased maturity, greater intellectual sophistication, and better tactical planning.  Statistically, this is also the age where increasing numbers of Americans begin exhibiting symptoms of severe depression and paranoid schizophrenia, and evidence indicates that may have been the case with Seung-Hui Cho at VT; just as thousands of students at colleges across the country suffer from the same mental afflictions.  Shooters at this level will be very well planned, armed, trained, and emotionally disengaged from their victims.  As young adults living away from home, they will have had enhanced opportunities to purchase any manner of weapons and ammunition, train at gun ranges, and use their increased sophistication to research and develop tactics and fortifications that will make rapid LE response almost impossible. 

By this age the shooters may have had a decade of immersion in violent video games; excellent training for an attack (see Dave Grossman’s books On Killing, On Combat and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, along with his Bullet Proof Mind series.).  Coupled with their likely mental illness, police will be confronted with a cold, well programmed, killing machine, whose only emotion may be rage.  The main advantage with these shooters, is the fact that due to their disenfranchisement with society and even others their own age, it would be unlikely they would team up with anyone.  At none of the X-Tac levels up to and including this point, would it be likely that the assailants would take and hold hostages.  At these levels arriving officers will be confronted with indicia of an Active Shooter scenario: they will hear gunshots, see students in windows calling out to them, students jumping from windows, and other victims streaming out of doors.  But at this level, if a college age student chooses to attack his former high school, or a high school student or dropout chooses to attack his former middle school, holding hostages for a short time before “going active” is possible.

Adult Single Shooter.  As the age of attackers increases, so does the planning and preparation.  As well, so does the ease of taking life.  For LE, this means the level of threat, and the tactical difficulty they confront, will increase proportionately. Here, as with the Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, and Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in 2006, you have an increased probability of older attackers holding hostages for a time before going active.  At this level, and that of the college age shooter in a high school, responding officers cannot ever afford to believe that they have a stable barricade situation.  Officers and commanders must understand that they are responding to a Pre-Active Shooter scenario.  It will go active at any time, often with no warning, just as happened at Nickel Mines.  Keep in mind that this will not be similar to a bank or convenience store robbery: where the robbers were only there for money, but rapid police response upended their plan.  In the vast majority of those situations, the presence of SWAT and negotiators result in the robbers surrendering with no one getting hurt.  But when these adults go into schools with guns, there is no reason for them to be there but the deaths of children. 

In Adult Shooter situations, the assailant will go through all six phases of the Islamist Mass Hostage Siege Model,* though they will move through them very quickly.  Fortifications will have been quickly assembled, but sufficient to make many standard LE and SWAT entries difficult, if not impossible, given the short period of time they will have to enter with hostages being shot or blown up.  After chaining the three public entry doors to Norris Hall, Cho managed to discharge 204 rounds in approximately nine minutes, killing or wounding 55.  Only a high speed police response prevented him from firing the other 174 rounds he had in magazines on his person.  At Nickel Mines, Charles Carl Roberts needed only seconds to pull the trigger ten times on little girls, compared to the rapid two and one-half minutes it took Pennsylvania State Police SRT teams to breach a heavily fortified building.  Even Duane Morrison’s threat that he had a large bomb in the Bailey school, and the stacking of chairs and desks between himself and the classroom door, making it difficult for the entry team to move quickly toward him while he used 16-year old Emily Keyes as a human shield, constituted sufficient fortifications to make a rescue difficult. 

No matter how fast LE is responding or breaching, you can anticipate one round being discharged by the Adult Shooter every second or two (three at the most) into the controlled hostage group.  The reality is that innocent people are going to be killed, or at least wounded.  Whether you wait until the attacker begins shooting hostages to initiate your rescue, or dictate your own assault schedule, you must expect that there are going to be victims.  The only advantage, is that at this level you will not see more than a single adult assailant, unless part of a trained terrorist team, as described below.

Multiple Terrorist Decimation Assault.  This will be tactically identical to the High Multiple Student Shooter scenario, with the exception that it will be conducted by a coordinated team of better trained, better armed, adult attackers.  The “active” assault against the students and teachers in the building will dictate an immediate attack by arriving law enforcement.  The terror team will have prepared ambushes for arriving officers.  This attack will only end when the terrorists have been killed by police.  An attack of this nature in America is less likely than a Terrorist-Mass Hostage siege stretched out over days.

Multiple Terrorist-Mass Hostage Siege.    This is the worst and, therefore, most tactically difficult.  Here you will be dealing with a team (anticipate at least ten) of well trained, heavily armed adults who will have been conditioned to not only kill as many innocents as possible, but as many cops as they can.  They will intend to die inside the building, and will keep killing innocents until police kill them.  Before that, the assailants will attempt to drag the standoff out for a period of days.  Al Qaeda and related groups know all about Active Shooter responses of American LE agencies, and will ensure that the first cop to arrive on scene will be confronted with a cold, dead, quiet building.  There will be none of the indicators of an Active Shooter situation.  What hostages were going to escape will have already done so.  All of the others will be controlled in a single collection point, most likely a gym, auditorium or cafeteria. 

The first officer on site will see several large vehicles, with engines running, parked just outside the front doors.  Most likely this will include at least one school bus.  If there is an SRO in the building, they – like all of the Low and High Multiple Student Shooters, Young Adult and Adult Shooters – will have to eliminate that officer first.  They know that if arriving officers hear a single gunshot, the police are going in, and will keep pouring cops into the building until the battle is over.  In that event, American LE would effectively be following the Israeli model for dealing with mass hostage takings: Attack right away no matter what.  This means SROs must be sufficiently armed with both weapons and ammunition, equipped with adequate body armor, and trained, to stay alive to keep firing so that arriving LE assaults immediately.  To wait until the terrorists want the assault to come, is to ensure a greater body count of hostages and police.    

From the arrival of the first officer on scene, throughout the days of the siege, they will make it easy for American LE to not attack; until the terrorists are ready for the battle.  They will negotiate until all of their goals have been met, which will not include a peaceful surrender.  The earliest point at which negotiations will end, however, will be when fortifications have been completed.  At that point, if SWAT has not already launched a rescue operation, the terrorists will begin the mass execution of hostages, compelling police to attack.  When the rescue comes, police should anticipate a large number of explosives fortifying the building, in addition to heavy firepower.  Be ready for them to wire bombs to hostages, and even to place young females wearing suicide belts or vests, in among the hostages.  When it is over, all of the terrorists will be dead; they will allow no other result.  Some of the hostages will have died.  As well, tragically, some of the police will likely not be going home that night. 

Whether al Qaeda ever attempts to attack U.S. schools, we have not seen the last of the schools shootings and hostage takings in this country.  It is due to the broad spectrum of extreme tactical threats to schools – and the varied tactical hurdles that LE confronts – that SROs, patrol and SWAT teams must develop tactics that will be used in tandem during an actual attack.  Schools must be taught what is expected of them, including what intel must be communicated to police immediately.  Tactics must be developed, or modified, to deal with these various scenarios.  Knowledge is, indeed, power.  But it is only powerful when used to prepare for the problems that American law enforcement will continue to face in her schools.

The following are the phases of a terrorist Mass-Hostage Siege

1. Attack on the building;
2. Submission and Control of Hostages – may include some initial murders to stun hostages;
3. Fortifications – will begin early on and may continue throughout Negotiations;
4. Stabilization – will show LE a stable scene so that they do not attempt rescue right away;
5. Negotiations – used by terrorists to gain time for both media access and to fortify building;
6. Rescue – may be forced by terrorists at time of their choosing through the beginning of the mass execution of hostages.

This article was published in JEMS (Journal of Emergency Medical Services) Supplement to its Oct 2008 issue.  The supplement was entitled:  “The War on Trauma: Lessons Learned From A Decade of Conflict.”

 

The article, in unedited form and written by John Giduck, was published under the title:  “Terror In America’s Schools: The Need To Prepare First Responders To Defend Our Nation’s Children.”

 

America is a nation at war. That is a reality, not political rhetoric. And some of the battles in that war are going to be fought on American soil—in our communities, among our homes and loved ones. Our enemy has promised us that some of those battles will be fought in our schools as our children are captured, tortured and even killed.

Yet for all their courage and desire to be at the forefront of every battle, such battles will not be fought exclusively by our brave men and women in military uniform. As I explained in my book, “Terror at Beslan,” most, if not all, of these battles will be fought by our law enforcement officers in conjunction with fire/rescue and EMS personnel willing to throw themselves into harm’s way.¹ Thus, we must not delude ourselves when asking just where those battles will take place, or what they will be like when they occur. We must be prepared.

Terror targets can be categorized in a number of ways. There are high-, medium- and low-value strategic targets; high-, medium- and low-value tactical targets; critical infrastructure targets; government, law enforcement and military targets; psychological and emotional targets; financial and economic targets; and even symbolic targets. Though they had tremendous psychological and economic side effects, the Twin Towers were primarily symbolic targets to the enemy, representing American economic hegemony throughout the Muslim world.

            There are countless terror targets in America. For this reason, we must understand the targets terrorists are most likely to strike, and develop plans to respond to those attacks. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiled a list of 7,000 of the most “high risk” sites for terror attack.² But even that does not begin to acknowledge the many thousands more that are not only predictably attractive to terrorists, but are the very types of targets that have been attacked by this same enemy countless times around the world. Indeed, in developing its 7,000-site terror target list, DHS included merely 100 of the nation’s 3,400 drinking water facilities that store large amounts of chlorine gas; if any of these facilities were attacked, the gas stored could result in harm to, or the deaths of, 1,000 or more people.² Worse still: There isn’t a single elementary, middle or high school on that list.

 

Why Schools?

When anyone with a terrorist mindset is deciding what type of attack to launch, they typically have two essential options: Decimation Assault or Mass-Hostage Siege. Decimation Assaults are much more frequent, easier to plan and execute, and can usually yield all the results the terrorists seek with the majority of targets. That is, they need only send suicide bombers into a site, or plant explosives in advance of actual detonation. By simply bombing most physical targets, they accomplish this objective. By blowing up innocent people on streets, in transportation hubs and modes, and small-to-medium-size public venues (e.g., bars, restaurants and markets), terrorists achieve some terror, but it doesn’t have a long-lasting impact.

In Israel, for instance, when these attacks occur, they are cleaned up immediately. Within hours, damage to buildings is repaired, streets are scrubbed clean, sidewalks are bleached and the bodies are buried by nightfall. For the enemy, the terror impact isn’t significant, largely due to the fact that the body count is not high.  The attacks on 9/11 were a Hybrid or Synergistic Attack, as weaponized aircraft became the terrorists’ explosive devices. They needed only to deliver those weapons to their intended targets, but to accomplish that, they had to take, hold and control a relatively large number of hostages, along the lines of a mass-hostage siege.

However, when seeking to cause the greatest psychological, emotional and lifestyle impact on an entire nation, through the deaths of large numbers of the most innocent, no target offers terrorists as much impact as the killing of children. Terrorists have learned that when you first take and hold large numbers of children hostage, you, in fact, hold an entire nation hostage. Should terrorists come to America and take more than 1,000 of our children and women hostage as they did at Beslan Middle School No. 1 in southern Russia in September 2004, all of America would hold its collective breath through the days of that siege, terrified of the end they knew was certain to come. Holding innocents hostage over long periods of time exponentially increases the terror impact on not only the target government and the citizens of that country, but of that nation’s allies.

Whether Decimation Assaults or Mass-Hostage Sieges, children and schools rate high among the most prolific terror targets in the world. Israel first experienced its own Beslan over the night of May 15 to 16, 1974, when terrorists took and held 105 children and five adults in a school in the town of Ma’a lot, near the Syrian border. When the battle to retake the school was over, 26 children were dead and 56 others wounded. Another school was taken in Bovennsmilde, Holland, in May 1977. Between 1984 and 1993 more than 300 schools were attacked in Turkey, ultimately resulting in that country having to close down more than 3,000 schools. In the first six months of 2006 alone, 204 schools were attacked in Afghanistan, at a time when U.S. and NATO troops were at their peak control of that country. Many more have been attacked since then. The number of schools being attacked in Pakistan is rising, as well as in Indonesia and Iraq. All of the schools in three southern districts of Thailand have been closed due to Syrian-trained terrorists attacking them, children, teachers and principals in recent years. When I was working there in early 2008 they held a conference for all teachers and administrators in an effort to get the schools reopened.  More than a half dozen bombs were detonated at and around the hotel, and eight of those attending murdered within two weeks of its conclusion.  The list goes on.

Famed military and law enforcement trainer Lt. Col. Dave Grossman stresses repeatedly that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. From its own past behavior, our enemy has not only learned the great value of children in schools as an optimal terror target, but has told us what they may yet do to an America that has gone back to sleep since 9/11. Usama bin Laden has stated on prior occasions that before this jihad is over he will see to the deaths of four million American citizens, including two million American children, and that they are not only viable but noble targets.  This exists on Web sites to this day, including the following statement by bin Laden spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith in May 2002: We have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many, and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.  Today, as a result of U.S. conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports have been received that the terrorists have increased those numbers as high as 15 million Americans including 10 million American children.

For this reason, there is much to be gained from studying previous attacks. Anyone with a terrorist mindset sees the value in attacking children in schools. Whether dealing with a strategic-level attack by al Qaeda or similar international terrorist groups, or our own terror-minded citizens who crave revenge on an uncaring society for all the wrongs done them in their lives—real or imagined—they all come to recognize the value of attacking children.

When you must hold and control an exponentially greater number of hostages, no one is easier to do it with than children. And when terrorists ultimately seek to kill a large number of hostages, no one is easier to kill than children. No segment of society would have the emotional and psychological impact on all of America as dead children, for no culture can withstand the decimation of its young.

And there is no other place in America than schools where large numbers of children can be found, relatively unprotected, through long periods of the year and where schedules are easy to obtain through even rudimentary intelligence gathering efforts (most are on school Web sites).

 

Learning from the Past

In examining just the most recent significant school attacks in America, we can glean valuable lessons. Though the attack on the school in Beslan may well be the worst thing imaginable, right now our enemy is imagining an attack quite a bit worse than even that.

Attacks on schools can and will take place on a variety of levels for both our tactical operators and medic/rescuers. For instance, lower-level school attacks by our own student shooters and adults in recent years may well approximate the homegrown, individually motivated terrorist attacks al Qaeda is seeking to inspire in every one of the 2-plus million Muslims in America. Therefore, it is important to look at some of the more significant recent attacks that our enemy is even now studying, and looking to outpeform.

I have encountered many school administrators who say that they don’t have to worry about Beslan happening at their schools. They point out that there were more than 100 bombs there and that was only possible because Beslan sat on the edge of a war zone. In reaching such a conclusion, however, they are ignoring the intel on one of the more devastating attacks America has already experienced.

Most people in our country are familiar with some aspects of the attack on Columbine High School in Colorado, committed by Dylan Kleibold and Eric Harris on April 20, 1999. What many do not know: In that attack, two untrained teenage assaulters manufactured and dragged more than 90 explosives to the school. The majority of the bombs did not explode, due to an error they made in the use of a certain type of watchface as a timed detonator.

And while most school administrators and teachers do not know what that mistake was, they must recognize that all students who have ever contemplated launching a Columbine-style attack—and all of the terrorists considering the same thing—do know what Kleibold and Harris did wrong. Each of them will ensure that mistake is not repeated.

The body count at Columbine resulted in modifications in law enforcement response tactics throughout the country. “Active Shooter” responses by police since that time have resulted in many school attacks being quickly stopped before the shooters could amass a Columbine-level toll in human life. But nothing about Active Shooter response addresses the holding of children hostage.

In two of the more recent attacks in America, we have seen adults entering schools, intent on holding hostages, sexually assaulting young girls and ultimately killing students in buildings that should be sanctuaries from harm. On Sept. 27, 2006, Duane Morrison entered Room 206 in Platte Canyon High School in bucolic Bailey, Colo. He held hostage seven young ladies, brutally sexually assaulting all of them over a 4-hour period, before his threats to blow up the building forced a law enforcement entry that resulted in the death of 16-year-old Emily Keyes and himself.

Just five days later, on Oct. 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts walked into a one-room Amish school building in tiny Nickel Mines, Pa. He drove everyone out of the building but 10 young girls, all of whom were bound by their feet and made to lie shoulder to shoulder beneath the blackboard. He, too, had come to sexually abuse children before killing them. Shortly after the arrival of the Pennsylvania State Police, he began shooting into those defenseless girls. At the sound of the first shot, police raced to the building and attempted immediate entry, where they encountered lumber Roberts had nailed over the doors and windows. The police fought desperately to gain entry; one state trooper tore out all his fingernails trying to rip wood away. Breaching the building took a little more than 2 minutes—rapid entry in light of the fortifications encountered. But Roberts needed merely 8 seconds to discharge 13 rounds into the 10 girls, killing five and leaving one brain damaged.

Seung-Hui Cho had the advantage of seeing all of this in the half-year prior to his attack on the Virginia Tech campus. In each attack, the tactics and fortifications of the assailant were better than the ones that had come before. At the Bailey, Colorado school, Morrison had packed the space between the door and himself—30 feet across the room—with all of the desks and chairs. He held Emily Keyes in front of him as a human shield while police fought their way through the jumbled furniture, not daring to take a thin-margin shot from such a distance. One week later, Roberts’ fortifications were even better. Cho improved on them both.

At Virginia Tech, Cho selected Norris Hall in part because it was one of the few remaining buildings whose doors had the old-style swing bars, rather than the solid push bars found in buildings today. This enabled him to simply loop chain through the bars and secure them with locks, thereby easily trapping his prey in the building, as well as fortifying it against law enforcement entry.

As with the two prior school incidents, law enforcement fought to gain entry, ultimately blowing the deadbolt lock out of another door with a shotgun slug. Contrary to news reports, from the moment of the breaching round, it took the entry teams merely 28 seconds to maneuver through a large and complex machine shop, race around a corner and down a short hall into a recessed staircase (while a second team raced all the way down a 40-yard corridor to the next set of stairs), and reach the second floor, forcing Cho take his own life.

Even then, the carnage was so great the police would not initially accept that there had been only one shooter. While attempting to secure the students against further attack, they and two tactical medics began providing medical care to the dozens of affected students and teachers. In all, 30 innocent people perished, with another 25 suffering wounds and injuries. This, in addition to the two lives Cho took earlier that morning in a distant dormitory.

 

Beslan Stands Alone

My own experience with school attacks is greater than I would like it to be. Two of our organization’s founding directors led the investigation into Columbine; I know dozens of the police and SWAT team members and leaders who responded to that attack. I was asked to the Bailey, Colorado school to conduct an assessment of the law enforcement response immediately after the siege ended. I know two of the Pennsylvania State Police SRT team members and leaders at Nickel Mines, and had coincidentally been nearby training the York City SWAT team when the shooting took place, enabling me to contact the operators to understand what they had confronted. And when Virginia Tech happened, I was asked to travel there immediately with a small team of top law enforcement professionals to begin an in-depth assessment. I was inside Norris Hall; I saw the remnants of the damage Cho inflicted.

But as bad as Norris Hall was, it was not the worst either I, or the world, had ever seen, for the tragic title of “the worst school attack” belongs to Beslan, Russia. In fact Virginia Tech was exactly one-tenth of the devastation of Beslan.  The time I’d spent working and studying in Russia every year for almost two decades—including annual time spent over 13 years with Russian Special Forces units (spetsnaz)—proved invaluable to helping me gain entry into the school immediately after the battle ended. I debriefed dozens of soldiers, government officials and townspeople.

 

Beslan Facts

At Beslan, 49 terrorists took more than 1,200 mostly women and children hostage at approximately 9:00 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2004 (the first day of school in Russia). Hostages were brutalized in ways that are almost unspeakable. Children were beaten savagely; older teenage girls were raped, some repeatedly, through the days of the siege. Several fathers were murdered immediately in the gym where the hostages were originally massed, and another 21 of the largest adult males and older teenage boys were shot to death. Many of their bodies were dumped out a second-story window to rot in the sun.

The Beslan terrorists brought upward of 200 explosives into the school. Many were placed in the gym where the majority of hostages were held throughout the siege. Others were spread throughout the school, with numerous booby traps set in the hallways. Other groups of children were held in separate rooms amidst bombs designed to kill them when a rescue attempt ultimately came. Three belt-fed machine guns (two PKM 7.62mm machine guns and one PKT (7.62mm) free standing tank turret machinegun) were set up in the 80-yard-long main corridors on the first and second floors. These corridors were barely 8 feet wide, similar to the tight confines of the hallway in Norris Hall at Virginia Tech.

When exploding bombs in the gym forced the rescue 2 ½ days later, terrorists were standing children up in windows as human shields while they fired indiscriminately into both fleeing hostages and rescuers racing in the other direction, toward the school. The spetsnaz couldn’t fire at the terrorists for fear of hitting the children. This was repeated inside the building throughout the 10-plus-hour gun battle to retake the school. In the northern courtyard, the military moved up two BTR 80s (wheeled armored personnel carriers) into the northern courtyard to provide cover for advancing teams, and to protect wounded and rescued hostages while being evacuated.

Avenues into the southern courtyard were too narrow to permit vehicles large enough to have provided any benefit at all, leaving hostages and soldiers alike to fend for themselves out in the open. Inside the building, the special forces had to contend with several series of fighting positions staggered throughout the long corridors, tripwires and booby traps, and the three belt-fed machine guns in hard fighting positions with children stood up before them to slow down the attack of the soldiers.

Even as the battle raged in different parts of the school, many of the more than 700 wounded hostages were evacuated under fire. With more than 300 additional hostages ultimately dying, the demands were overwhelming on the soldiers, medics and even townspeople to provide critical lifesaving care to all of those affected by bullets, bombs, ceilings collapsing in several places including the entire gym roof caving in, and fire. In addition, 21 elite special forces soldiers were killed and more than 60 wounded.

 

Preparing for the Worst

The mass chaos and tactical needs presented by major incidents of this type has yielded a valuable model for preparedness and training. If studied and applied, it should ultimately ensure that those lives were not lost in vain. Certainly, the recent attacks on U.S. schools have provided important realizations about the need to prepare for such attacks.

The one consistency with all people possessed of a terror mindset is the desire for attention, the need to be made famous as a result of the horror they perpetrate. To become famous they need the news media to splash their names, faces and accomplishments throughout the world. To garner that level of devotion by the news media, they need accomplish only one thing: exceed the last, biggest body count of innocent victims.

That means that the next Kleibold and Harris are putting a plan together to kill more people than died at Columbine. To achieve that, they need better fortifications in order to slow the police response and entry into the building. They are all studying the attacks that have come before, and are devising tactics they believe will be impossible for law enforcement to overcome. The next Cho on a college campus is attempting to devise a plan and fortifications that will allow him to exceed Cho’s numbers of killed and wounded. And terrorists both within and without the United States are attempting to devise plans that will exceed the numbers the terrorists achieved at Beslan.

For that reason, it’s important that all of those professionals America turns to in times of crisis recognize the value in preparing for the worst thing that could happen, making the Beslan model of tremendous value. In looking at both Beslan and the recent attacks on American schools by our own socially manufactured predators, the conclusion is inescapable that there are only two things that will stop the next attack and save the lives of the targeted victims: brave men and women with guns, and brave men and women with the medical skills to save the wounded under combat conditions. Thus, the single most crucial aspect of preparedness for all of America’s tactical operators, firefighters and paramedics is the need to train to kill and to rescue.

At Beslan, teams spent all day racing toward the school, across open ground, to bring stretchers full of much-needed re-supplies of bullets, weapons, water and medical kits to the beleaguered troops inside, only to turn around and race back out across those same killing fields carrying the wounded on stretchers their hands could barely hold. Many just carried children in their arms, or dragged adults by limbs across the yards to safety. Exhausted, many of these teams needed others to step into their role while they sought brief respite. Others were simply shot down trying to shield children with their bodies.   

All of our personnel must not only hone their abilities to take life to save the innocent, but also save life and rescue the wounded under fire. Just as importantly, our fire/rescue and paramedic personnel must go into these battles with a tactical mindset and knowledge to ensure not only the safety of the wounded, but of themselves and those around them. 

 

New Skills Needed

To deal with both the tactical (combat) and combat casualty care (first aid under fire) aspects of the battles yet to come to America, law enforcement operators and tactical medics alike must possess the same capabilities. If they don’t, people will die. Medical professionals must realize the differences between first aid and tactical combat casualty care (TCCC). In a combat environment, priorities change. Stopping hemorrhage through the use of clotting agents and tourniquets is critical. The first personnel on scene to assist victims of gunshots and bombs must be able to invasively open breathing passages, treat collapsed lungs and evacuate the wounded, often through walls and out windows. The same “tactics” can benefit law enforcement operators who may have to advance down hallways, straight into the face of automatic weapons fire.

Police must be able to use these same skills to treat the hostages, their teammates and themselves, because TCCC is all about staying in the fight. Though the combat capability and synergy of actual tactical medics will have to be substantial, both fire/rescue and EMS, must also be able to pick up any weapon and either load or unload it, relieve a jam and return it to combat effectiveness. In a gun battle with a committed enemy and innocent victims in between, no one can afford the luxury of job specialization. Both groups must be able to deal with re-supply and evacuation of wounded; and must be able to use the same devices and tactics to do both while keeping hands free to provide their own suppression fire.

In short, tactical medics, EMS, fire/rescue and law enforcement personnel alike must be able to shoot their way into and out of a building, and across open ground. Police must not be afraid to break traditional rules of emergency care. Lt. Anthony Wilson, commander of the Blacksburg, Va., SWAT team—who along with Virginia Tech PD SWAT commander Lt. Curtiss Cook led the assault on Norris Hall—says: “When it comes to kids, the rules all change. No matter what you’ve been told as a cop, if it’s a child and you have to stick your gloveless hands into that little body to stop bleeding, you’re going to do it. If you have to put your mouth on that little kid’s mouth to breathe life into him, you’ll do it without hesitation.”

 

This necessary skill set will require three essential evolutions in the training of those we will ask to go into the next Columbine, Norris Hall and Beslan.    But the wheel need not be reinvented as we can look to the model that already exists in both America’s conventional combat arms units, and its Special Operations Forces.  At the top would be the medics assigned to SWAT.  Just as our most elite counter-terror hostage-rescue units have highly trained medics deploy with every one of their entry teams, so too must specialized tactical medics undergo substantial training with the SWAT teams they are assigned to.  These will be the elite of the on-site medical professionals assigned to assist police.  In order for them to operate dynamically, and under intensely violent situations, they must train with – and be trained by – the teams they will be entering buildings and battle with.  This will actually cost very little in the way of money.  Medics must be willing to undergo SWAT training with their assigned units, and maintain themselves to the same physical standards.  They will need similar equipment to their police teammates in the way of body armor, uniform and clothing, but little else.  They may even be able to be an added resource for extra ammunition, as they can carry heavier loads than the operators who must move at lightning speed in tight confines.  Whether these medics would – or should – be armed would be a matter for the individual departments, and may be determined by pre-existing policies, and in some cases state law.  Having at least one sidearm for each medic, however, would likely result in the lives of police, medics and innocent victims being saved at some point.

 

The next level of advancement in training and ability would be seen in increased tactical awareness and understanding in all fire/rescue and EMS personnel.  Though these individuals would not need the expertise of the tactical medics, some increase in their knowledge of how patrol officers respond, what tactics they employ in entering a building, clearing and securing of areas, handling of hostages, wounded suspects, withdrawal under fire, small team formations and the like would greatly enhance the ability of the two groups to operate together in active shooter situations, particularly in those jurisdictions where it is likely patrol will arrive ahead of SWAT.  These medical professionals would function on the level of standard military medics assigned to infantry platoons.  They will not require the extreme tactical knowledge of their counterparts with units like Delta, SEAL Team Six and Army Special Forces, but they will need sufficient knowledge to ensure they can get their medical expertise to where it is needed, while under fire, and without interfering with those engaged in combat.  These professionals can, as well, receive all of the training they need from the very departments they will be assisting. 

 

Just as the medics will have to be trained in combat tactics by the police, so, too, must the police be trained in superior first aid by the medics.  This is the third aspect of the new evolutions in capability.  They must be better at rendering aid to their law enforcement comrades, themselves and the victims.  In a battle environment where police can expect to suffer casualties at the rate of one cop for every five terrorists shot (as the Russian special forces do), in addition to dozens (and even hundreds) of dead and dying victims, even those medics assigned to police will be overwhelmed.  At Norris Hall there were two tac medics, and they would have had to treat 55 people if the police had not been sufficiently trained.  Ultimately, when the killing of the bad guys is over, it’s all about being able to save the lives of the good guys.

 

To develop this ability in our brave men and women who will be called into dangerous and violent situations again and again, does not require large budgets for equipment or six-figure DHS grants.  What it does require, however, is a willingness to train and a desire to be better than we are now.  In advancing the skill level in the two critical areas of tactics and medicine-under-fire, we can, once again, turn to the model of the Army Special Forces.  In SF, each ODA 3 is comprised of two specialists in each of the five SF MOS’s 4, and the first duty of each specialist is to teach his expert skill set to all of the other members of the team.  In this way they are always working hard to make each other better, so that any one team member can step in and do another’s job if that person is wounded or killed.  Our police, medics, EMS and firemen can ill afford a different attitude in the battles America is yet to fight on her own soil.  While some advances in equipment will be helpful, the real requirements are dedication, discipline and a willingness to commit time and effort. 

For these reasons, the Asymmetric Combat Institute, the International Tactical Response and Medicine Society (ITRAMS) and the Archangel Group, Ltd., have been working to prepare America’s warriors to be able to do these very things: kill and rescue. Since 9/11 Archangel has trained thousands of police, soldiers and state and federal agents in unprecedented and innovative ways to conduct these battles against a committed, well prepared and deadly enemy. At the same time, ACI and ITRAMS ahve been working with the most elite Special Operations soldiers and sailors who are conducting operations in our overseas combat zones to provide the most advanced, efficacious casualty care and extraction techniques for combat at home—techniques that represent an enormous evolution in casualty care from early conventional first aid and CPR.

Together, these organizations have forged a tactical skill set that no police officer, SWAT operator, SRO, firefighter or paramedic can be without.  A program of common skills that have joint tactical and medical applications has been developed.  New, and inexpensive, evacuation and medical equipment is now available that every police officer, soldier, medic, ambulance driver or firefighter can benefit from.  And cutting edge training in TCCC is now available to everyone.  No longer is this equipment and training limited only to our elite military Special Operations Forces.  Nor can we afford for it to be, as the police, medics and firefighters are the ones we will be turning to when this enemy returns.  They have promised us the deaths of millions of American citizens—including our own children—before this war is over. The only way to prevent them from reaching that goal is our ability to kill them and rescue and resuscitate our own; for our enemy will allow us no other solution.

 

 

John Giduck is a senior consultant with the Archangel Group (www.antiterrorconsultants.org), an agency that provides training to U.S. law enforcement, government agencies and military. He has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian studies, and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies and has worked with several Russian special forces units. He has authored “Terror at Beslan” and co-authored the newly released “The Green Beret in You: Living with Total Commitment to Family, Career, Sports and Life.”

 

Editor’s Note: The author’s book, “Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools,” provides a detailed account of the events at the Beslan school siege. Learn more at http://www.archangelgroup.org

 

 

REFERENCES

1. Giduck J: Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools. Archangel Publishing Group, Inc.: Golden, Colorado, 2005.

 

2. Ahlers MM: “Agency says 7,000 sites at ‘high risk’ of terrorist attack.” CNN.com News Report, June 21, 2008.

 

3. Operational Detachment – Alpha, or A-Team as it is commonly known to the public, is the foundational unit of Army Special Forces.

 

4. An MOS is a military occupational specialty. While the conventional military has hundreds, the Green Berets have only five, called the 18-series designations, as each begins with the number 18.

 

Below is an article I wrote and that was published in the law enforcement magazine, BLUE, for its December 2024 issue. 2024 marked 25 years since the mass attack at Columbine High School. I interviewed former VA Tech Police SWAT leader, Lt. Curtis Cook, who in 2007 led his team into the worst mass-shooting murder at a school in US history. Curtis provides a retrospective of what American police needed to learn from Columbine, through VA Tech and up today, in addition to what they have learned and what they yet need to learn.

Also, here is the link to the complete Dec. 2024 edition of BLUE Magazine, free for anyone wishing to download and read:   

https://www.thebluemagazine.com/s/BlueV15_I5-final-web.pdf

 

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

25 Years after Columbine - A SWAT Retrospective on School Incidents

By: Dr. John Giduck

In the morning of Monday, April 16, 2007, 23-year-old Seung-Hoi Cho shot two students in a dormitory on the Virginia Tech (VT) campus. Several hours later he walked into Norris Hall, chained the three sets of doors shut, then proceeded to mow down students in classrooms on both sides of a second-floor hallway. In all, he killed 32 students and professors. Another 27 were wounded or injured.

When the call came out that there was an active shooter in the building, SWAT teams from Blacksburg and VT police departments went racing there. Arriving in only two minutes, they fought their way into the building, then raced up two sets of stairs at either end of the hallway forcing Cho to take his own life. Lt. Curtis Cook led the VT SWAT operators into Room 211 where the killer was found. It remains the greatest mass shooting murder at a school in US history.

This year marked the 25^th anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Since that seminal event, the nation has endured hundreds of other school shootings. Lessons that America believed police had learned at Columbine in how to respond to attacks in our schools have sometimes been ignored. It seemed an appropriate time to gather the thoughts and reflections of the man who led a rescue team into the worst one of all, as he looks back over a quarter century of mass killings in our schools.

Beyond providing a few briefings for other SWAT teams and having taught ALERRT classes at VTPD as a certified instructor, Curtis has seldom spoken publicly of his experience. This year he agreed to sit down and answer questions on the lessons American police should have learned from these horrors and what they need to be prepared for in the future.

Prior to joining VTPD, Curtis was a Navy Surface Rescue swimmer, then a deputy sheriff with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia, where he served as a patrol sergeant and SWAT team Entry Leader. He joined VTPD in 1997 and became the SWAT commander in 2007 as a lieutenant. The attack at the school happened shortly after that. Curtis retired from law enforcement in 2014 with 28 years’ service. When Columbine happened, Curtis was a patrol officer at VTPD and had just started instructing officer survival at the police academy.

 

BLUE: What were your thoughts on Columbine, how it was handled and what law enforcement (LE) needed to learn?

CURTIS: I think most everyone in LE had the same thoughts after Columbine: the police did what they’d been trained to do, but there was also the realization that people are going to die if you wait on SWAT. It was apparent after Columbine that the traditional response wouldn't work in that type situation. New techniques and procedures had to be developed for active shooters.

 

BLUE: Do you believe that LE nationwide learned what it needed to from Columbine?

CURTIS: I think it got the attention of law enforcement, but I'm sure a lot of departments struggled with how to task patrol officers with a response that SWAT would normally handle. In addition to just the tactical side involving entry and movement, the new issues were how to deal with explosive devices and mass casualties. If they weren’t going to be able to wait on SWAT, patrol officers had to be trained to respond and eliminate the threat.

 

I attended several presentations on Columbine that taught me and a lot of officers important information. But there were other events outside of school shootings that everyone needed to learn from and incorporate. For that, I also attended debriefs on the North Hollywood shootout and even the Texas Tower shooting. Columbine footage was being shown as part of our Immediate Action Rapid Deployment (IARD) training, and the Hollywood shootout identified the need to have specialized training and place rifles in police vehicles to respond to heavily armed suspects. But in the end, you can give police all the training in the world, equip them with better body armor and weapons, but none of that will ever make a difference if they aren’t doing everything they can to get into a building and move as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat and save innocent lives.

 

BLUE: Is it your impression that LE nationwide did adopt the tactics it was obvious were necessary for responding to active shooters in schools?

CURTIS: Yes and No. I know that many departments were adopting the LAPD – IARD training and techniques post-Columbine, and many departments were using their SWAT teams to train patrol officers in building searching and room clearing. But even after VT, I was shocked to learn that some departments had still not conducted any formal active shooter training. I think it was clear, however, that you not wait on SWAT to arrive at a school shooting. ALERRT has since become the standard for LE active shooter training across the US, butI have no idea how many departments have received that training.

 

BLUE: What are your professional thoughts on the responses to school shootings like that at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, FL in 2018, Uvalde, TX in 2022 and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN in 2023?

 

CURTIS: In Florida, I understand that the school resource officer (SRO) thought the shots were outside because shots sometimes don't sound like shots. However, it’s at that time, just like VT, when you have to quickly identify where the shots are coming from and relay that information to all responding officers. Once he learned the shots were inside, he should have entered. I believe he failed to act and failed to protect. What seemed to make that worse were flaws in the school’s lock-down procedures, which caused a serious delay in the code-red activation.

 

I think the deputies that arrived and took cover behind their vehicles, instead could have formed a contact team and entered the school. From what I understand, they had active shooter training and not immediately moving into the building was contrary to that training. So, at least the training was correct. But that’s been the problem at times. We all know what must be done in these situations, but it’s not always being done.

 

I believe departments should be putting their most highly trained officers in schools. I fear that many departments feel the uniform presence alone, or parking a police vehicle in front of a school, will deter a shooter. It may, but that SRO inside needs to be highly trained and equipped for active shooters. 

 

As to Uvalde, I don't even know where to start. After Columbine and VT, it’s hard to understand how this could happen. It was without a doubt a total failure of LE until the Border Patrol guys went in. It’s another clear case of failure to act to save lives and protect, and poor or untrained supervision and management. If the officers had active shooter training, why didn't they utilize it? I hate to hear things like: “the officers got shot at, so they stopped and left the building.” Yes, you may get shot at, and you may get hit, but in that circumstance, in my opinion based on my training and experience, they needed to try to fight their way in to save those children.

 

In the Covenant School shooting, the officers did what they were supposed to: they made entry, moved rapidly to the shooter and eliminated the threat. Despite the tragic loss of life, it was a success for LE. But there are still lessons to come from it. If the school would have had trained, armed police or security, they may have stopped the shooter much earlier, just as happened in the Apalachee School shooting in Georgia in September of this year. Despite the outcome of the Parkland, FL shooting, there really is no substitute for having armed, trained police or even security inside a school.

 

BLUE: In looking at all this over the years, how do you see the events at VT in April 2007 and how you/VTPD and Blacksburg handled everything that occurred that day, including your response to the Norris Hall shooting? In hindsight, if the same attack happened today would you do anything different?

 

CURTIS: I think Cho made a horrible error when he committed the first murders. Although it did create somewhat of a diversion, he didn't anticipate the activation and deployment of two SWAT teams. It was clear that command from both BPD and VTPD were actively assessing everything together and making critical decisions. Like Columbine, we encountered something different, a new tactic, something unique in the doors chained from the inside of a building with limited access points and small windows. Responding officers did what anyone would have: they tried to enter through the doors, then changed tactics and found a different way in.

 

As far as actions in Norris Hall, everyone on the teams did exactly what they were trained to do: go directly to the sounds of gunfire, gather intel while moving, and when no shots are being fired, slow down, communicate, search for the gunman, identify and eliminate the threat, then treat and evacuate the wounded.

 

Like so many other cowards, he chose not to engage our team and took the easy way out. I have to remind myself often that the actions of those teams did contain him and forced him to stop shooting. That saved lives.  Many more people were in the building and he had plenty of ammunition. We were fortunate in that we had command staff from both departments that worked well together, we had officers from other departments that trained and worked together. The teams had a mutual understanding of tactics and procedures for dealing with active shooters. As far as what I would do different, I've spent many sleepless nights since 2007 asking myself that same question. Basically, I would have used any means necessary to create an entry point, most likely utilizing a truck or vehicle to try and ram the doors. With the design of the doors and frames at Norris Hall it may not have worked, but looking back, it might have been another option.

BLUE: What should police officers nationwide learn from all of this?

CURTIS: I think what should be learned from VA Tech is when responding to an active shooter, you have to expect the unexpected, and you have to anticipate that you may encounter something that you have never trained for in the past. Departments need to do regular joint training and “what if” the scenarios to death. It needs to be understood that these killers study each other; they study police tactics and responses, and try to find ways to defeat those tactics. Police should be doing the same thing with the attacks that have come, to include terror attacks like the Bataclan Theater shooting in Paris in 2013 or even the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016. The Pulse Nightclub shooting may not have been an actual terror attack, but those two events saw a similar tactic used that police weren’t ready for. But who on the LE – or even government – side is paying attention, studying these things and advancing our training ahead of the next attack? I can tell you, though, that there are a lot of bad guys out there doing that very thing.

While there are many things we should have learned from Columbine and the many school attacks that have happened since, the single overriding lesson is that police cannot delay a single second. Each second lost is a bullet that didn’t have to go into the head of a kid. Though it may be controversial still, that even includes a solo officer going in if backup is not arriving immediately. Under no circumstances can you wait minutes or an hour, as happened with Uvalde. You are a trained, armed adult and this is the calling you answered in life. You may get shot and you may die, but you can fight back. For children inside, they have nothing to fight back with and them dying is a 100% certainty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curtis Cook

 

In addition to his navy and law enforcement service, during his police career Curtis served as an instructor, both in-house and at the police academy, in Firearms, Defensive Tactics, Active Shooter response, Chemical Weapons/OC Spray, SWAT, CQB, Advanced Patrol Tactics and Homeland Security. He has also taught Citizen Emergency Response Team courses and women’s self-defense. After retiring from law enforcementin 2014 with 28 years’ service he worked another two years at the VA Tech Department of Emergency Management.

 

 

 

John Giduck

 

Dr. John Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. His dissertation was on the evolution of jihadist terrorist mass-hostage siege tactics throughout the world. He has trained police departments and SWAT throughout the US. He is the author of Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools; Shooter Down! The Dramatic, Untold Story of the Police Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, along with co-author Police Commissioner Joseph M. Bail; and When Terror Returns: The History and Future of Terrorist Mass-Hostage Sieges. He can be contacted at john@circon.org.

 

 

The Horror of Real Hand-to-Hand Combat

A Case Study From the Ukraine War

By Dr. John Giduck, JD, PhD

All the tactical professions need to enter a new era of reality-based close-quarters battle preparedness. Nowhere is that truer than with American police. Every day police must put their hands on often-resistant suspects, far more than the military does. This translates to the necessity that current defensive tactics (DT) training abandon systems that are more fashion than effectiveness. To not do this, risks the safety and lives of our officers. This reality is a focus of my just-released book 1500 Years of Fighting: The Complete Book of Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet Martial Arts From Cossacks to Spetsnaz and Beyond. It includes a critical analysis of the fighting training of US military, Special Forces and law enforcement (LE) relative to the peerless ability of the Russians who employ systems that began to be developed 15 centuries ago and have been evolved for modern policing and military operations.

On 2 Jan 2025, SOFX posted video footage from a GoPro camera mounted on a Ukrainian soldier’s helmet that documents a hand-to-hand engagement between he and a Russian soldier that concludes with the Ukrainian’s death (https://www.sofx.com/graphic-helmet-footage-captures-intense-hand-to-hand-combat-between-ukraine-and-russian-soldiers/). It reports that this occurred during Ukraine’s autumn offensive against Russia’s Vostok (East) Group in an effort to recapture the village of Trudovoye. The Ukrainian soldier was participating in a clearing operation in the area. There are two video versions on the site. One is 15 minutes long and the other 8:04 in length.

The longer footage begins with Ukrainian drones striking targets in the area that was later cleared by ground forces. The Ukrainian soldier engaged in a firefight, then encountered the Russian combatant. The ability to discern everything that occurs is difficult. I viewed this tape at least a dozen times, slowing it down to quarter-second increments and freezing the frame continuously to determine what exactly occurred in each moment. This is the very combat reality that I address in-depth in 1500 Years of Fighting. In the book I critically examine the most popular martial arts today, and assess the US Army’s adoption of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) techniques vis-à-vis their efficacy in real world hand-to-hand combat scenarios. However, the same is needed for many police departments’ and SWAT teams’ defensive tactics training programs.

Points that are emphasized in the book include never going to your back with an opponent pulled on top of you., unless absolutely necessary. This technique has come to be known as the Gracie Guard and is a favored move in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. With it, you lie on your back with your legs wrapped around a person on top of you. It has proven to be an adequate sport technique seen in the UFC and other MMA events, but it has little application in a true fight with no rules. In that position, as you hug your opponent to you, he is perfectly situated to bite your nose and ears off, amputate your fingers with his teeth, take out pieces of your face and even bite your throat out. The Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) call this “tactical biting”. They are the only people I ever trained with who teach biting as a combat discipline. It is also a position you never want to be in if your opponent might be armed, which is something police must always assume. You also lose the ability to observe or control his access to a knife or gun. He has the advantage of using his bodyweight and gravity against you. Again, this is a fine technique on a flat mat with no obstacles impeding your movements and when rules are being followed. But in battles in war and on the street, there may be debris, rubble, obstructions, other people in your way, cars and the real possibility of your opponent’s friends coming up and joining in, even shooting or stabbing you. All of this happened in this battle. In real life, there are no rules. Fighting is not an “art”, it is all about survival. Another point I make is that if you are training for art, but your enemy is training for war, you are going to lose.

Some of these important lessons can be gleaned from studying the YouTube videos of such events as Officer Karli Travis being attacked by a hammer-wielding man on 12 Aug 2023 and the 27 Jan 2024 Times Square attack on two NYPD officers by a gang of illegal immigrants. The “Russian” hand-to-hand systems have reality-based principles and techniques for dealing with all such violent assaults. Most LE DT systems do not. Although this battle between the two soldiers goes on for a long time relative to most hand-to-hand encounters, or even real-world street fights, it presents a valuable case study for preparing police and soldiers for the worst type of combat.

The following is a step-by-step analysis of this close-quarter fight in the Ukraine War from the eight-minute tape. It is a tough film to watch, even for hardened police officers and combat vets. The audio is garbled and unclear. It took former Soviet Spetsnaz Sergeant Igor Livits using a hi-tech set of headphones and many times through it to be able to report what is said.  I offer this breakdown to help focus everyone’s viewing of it, so no one needs to watch it repeatedly, trying to figure out what is actually taking place. For ease of reading, I will refer to the Ukrainian as Yuri and the Russian as Ruslan.

1:01  Yuri enters through the gate into a rubble-strewn yard.

1:05  Gunfire erupts, Yuri returns fire on the small building he is approaching.

1:34  Yuri has moved up on the building. His right hand is already bloody.

1:37  Yuri is against the building moving to his right. He turns the corner to the left and encounters Ruslan standing on the other side of the corner, who grabs Yuri’s AK, pushing it to his right.

1:38 Ruslan’s helmeted face is clearly seen for the first time. Yuri strikes Ruslan in the face with a left hook.

1:40 - 1:48 The two continue to grapple on their feet. Ruslan appears to bend over and take Yuri to the ground. At 1:47 The two are on the ground. Yuri is on his back with Ruslan on top of him. Whether he fell to his back intentionally, pulling Ruslan on top of him as BJJ trains people, fell  unintentionally or Ruslan pushed him to the ground cannot be determined. Yuri appears to bring his right leg over the back of Ruslan, putting him in at least a half-guard position. When he first hits the ground. Yuri yells, “Baza, Gargon, help!” Baza means ‘base’ and he is clearly calling his command for assistance. Gargon is Yuri’s codename which is Russian/Ukrainian for Gargoyle. No one ever answers or comes. From the beginning of the video to the end the two are saying sexually graphic and profane things to each other. Many cannot even be translated to English.

1:48  Ruslan raises a knife in his left hand and stabs Yuri in a downward arc that appears aimed at Yuri’s neck.

1:49 Yuri attempts to block more knife strikes with his right hand.

2:01 Yuri has something in both hands he appears to be trying to block Ruslan with. From the shape, it could be a canteen, though it is impossible to tell.

2:03 Ruslan’s face appears again. He looks Asian and speculation of some has been that he might be one of the 11,000 North Koreans sent to support the Russians in the war. However, the speech of the two combatants indicates that he is not. Roughly 15% of Russia’s 146 million people are Asian and Russia, itself, straddles Europe and Asia, even sharing a border with China to the south.

2:04  With Ruslan on top of Yuri, the knife is now in his right hand and he raises it then drives it downward. Someone says “Nyet, ne Pravda” which means “No, not true” or “not right.”

2:07  Yuri now has a knife in his right hand and his right leg is again brought around Ruslan in what appears to be a guard or half-guard position.

2:10  Yuri grabs the blade of Ruslan’s knife with his left hand while trying to stab Ruslan with his right-handed knife. Ruslan blocks it with his left hand, grasping Yuri’s wrist.

2:12  Yuri now has a knife in his left hand and raises it to strike. Where that knife came from is not shown.

2:13  Yuri continues to try to stab Ruslan with the knife in his right hand, raising it high in front of the camera to bring down.

2:14-2:15  Yuri raises his knife to stab downward again but his right arm is moved across to his left with Ruslan seemingly blocking the strike. It appears that Yuri has knives in both hands at this point.

2:16 – 2:17 Yuri’s right hand knife moves across his body to the left and attempts to stab Ruslan on his right side.

2:20  Yuri’s right-handed knife appears again, raised up at the far right edge of the screen and stabs downward and slightly to the left.

2:23  Ruslan appears to have his left hand grasping Yuri’s right fist holding the knife, with Ruslan’s right hand holding Yuri’s right wrist. With both of his hands on Yuri’s right knife-hand, he is pushing it away to Yuri’s right.

2:25  Yuri manages to push his right hand over toward his left.

2:26  Ruslan has disarmed Yuri’s right-hand knife as the hand is now empty. Ruslan now raises a knife in his own right hand, and Yuri attempts to block it.

2:27 – 2:28  Yuri grasps the blade of the knife in Ruslan’s right hand with his own left hand, cutting his palm.

2:29  Yuri pushes the knife back and away to his left.

2:33  Yuri continues to hold the blade of Ruslan’s knife.

2:33 – 2:34  Yuri appears to attempt to bring his right leg across Ruslan’s face, possibly attempting an arm bar, but immediately withdraws it. Ruslan raises his knife high and stabs downward.

2:35  Ruslan stabs Yuri again. Yuri grabs Ruslan’s knife hand with both of his own hands.

2:39  Yuri grasps the blade of the knife with his left hand while maintaining hold on Ruslan’s wrist with his own right hand.

2:39 – 3:01  Driving downward with the weight of his body behind it, Ruslan thrusts his  knife into Yuri repeatedly. Struggling continues with Yuri trying to block the knife.

2:46  Ruslan’s knife is pushed down toward Yuri’s left side, his bloodied left hand is clearly visible.

2:49  While continuing to grasp Ruslan’s knife and knife hand, Yuri is repeatedly stabbed by Ruslan using his body weight to drive the knife downward.

2:50 – 4:05  Ruslan breaks free of Yuri’s grasp and continues to stab downward as Yuri attempts to block the strikes. Throughout this time, Yuri continues to yell “Baza” repeatedly in a loud but fading voice.

4:06  A large spurt of blood lands on the ground to the left of Yuri.

4:16  Ruslan reaches out and picks up a sharp pointed pane of glass or thin piece of broken ceramic tile, and begins to stab Yuri with it in his side. At this point, it is presumed Yuri has disarmed the knife from Ruslan’s right hand.

4:27 Ruslan drops the shard to the left of Yuri, as Ruslan says “You fuck me, off with your fingers” and locks his teeth into the right hand of Yuri that is now holding a knife. Both combatants’ hands are bloody. Yuri says, “I hate you.”

4:57 The two are talking to each other, but Ruslan continues to raise his knife high to drive down into Yuri.

5:13  Yuri tries to reach his right hand across his body toward the ground on his left side. What he may be reaching for is not in view.

5:20 – 5:50  Yuri continues trying to block the knife in Ruslan’s hand.

5:56  Ruslan is stabbing Yuri again.

5:57  Ruslan plants his right foot out to Yuri’s left side, securing better leverage for stabbing.

6:00  Ruslan moves into a side mount position on Yuri’s left side. From the audio, another Russian appears to move up behind Ruslan, though the video does not show him. A third voice says, “Let him go, I want it too.”

6:20  Yuri’s left hand is holding Ruslan’s right arm with a grip inside his elbow.

6:45  In the final minutes of the video, he continues to yell: “Base, base, base, base.” Yuri says, “That’s all, Mama, goodbye.”

6:48  Ruslan sits upright, disengaging. Yuri’s left hand is grasping the top (collar) of Ruslan’s tactical vest, while they continue talking. The fight appears to be ending.

7:17  Yuri lets go of Ruslan’s vest, dropping his hand.

7:19  Ruslan stands up and walks away. Yuri’s breathing is labored.

7:58  Yuri’s head falls to the left.

8:04  Video ends.

In the verbal exchange between the two combatants after the fight, Yuri told Ruslan, “Don’t try to help me, let me die quietly, please leave. Thank you.” Ruslan responded, “You fought great,” to which Yuri replied: “Thank you. Goodbye. You were the best fighter.” 

The fight went from 1:37 to 6:48, fully five minutes fourteen seconds.

In sum, the hand-to-hand battle begins with both on their feet, just as all fights typically start. One person goes to – or ends up on – his back. But he is close to a wall, with debris all around making maneuvering difficult to impossible. Both opponents draw knives and stab the other, though the top person has the advantage of bodyweight, gravity and leverage. The bottom person uses the Gracie Guard, but it is not sufficient to overcome the top man’s advantages. Contrary to BJJ principles, Russian hand-to-hand experts do not believe the bottom person utilizing the guard is in the superior position. They say that it is still an inferior or defensive position or, at best, a neutral one. The attempt at an arm bar from the bottom is unsuccessful. The top person utilizes an improvised weapon with which to stab his opponent when he loses his knife, demonstrating another main tactic of Russian training. The top person also uses Russian tactical biting and at one point a second threat appears (although does not take a role). In the end, far too many stabs from the top person results in the death of the bottom man.

The reality of this and other situations prove the vulnerability of the popular BJJ technique of fighting from one’s back. Mike Scales, a former US Army NCO and black belt, who is also Jiu Jitsu-trained, says, “When you have gear on and in a situation like that, there are a whole lot of things that are going to trip you up and get you caught on. From the top position, you have greater ability to move and can use your bodyweight and gravity against your opponent.

Retired Virginia Tech SWAT leader Curtis Cook, who led his team into the massacre in Norris Hall in 2007, concludes by saying this film clearly demonstrates “the will to fight to survive.” When he was SWAT commander, he “saw the need for more advanced training beyond basic defensive tactics that were being taught in the academy. I wanted our team to be able to fight in full gear, with a weapon and against multiple attackers. This included weapons retention and delivering strikes and kicks while moving through a target. I also stressed if you are knocked to the ground, you fight to get back up. I’m not a fan of wrestling in full gear with weapons to try and get an arm bar on a suspect, but I do see a need for some practical ground fighting techniques.”

Matt Adams is a career SWAT leader and trainer, but also holds multiple black belts and is a former international bare knuckle karate competitor. He observed:

Once the Ukrainian winds up or goes to his back, he cannot get out of the position. One, he can't slide across the ground like you can on a mat which is making it difficult for him to pull off an escape. Two, he's fighting a real person that's trying to kill him. It's great to know how to counter an attack on the ground but it isn't so simple as BJJ people want to believe. It's not as easy as securing the weapon, slide out and reverse. The guy is actually trying to kill you while you're doing this. Three, the Russian does the unthinkable as far as sport combatives: he bites. And draws blood while doing it. The Ukrainian stayed in the fight. He never gave up, but exhaustion and blood loss were taking their toll as it wore on. Neither could get a grip on anything because the blood was making everything slick.

Retired Marine and former Penn State wrestler Lt. Col. Joe Bierly adds: “Just note the ‘terrain’.  Not a flat gym floor….piles of rubble everywhere. Your stance becomes even more critical.” Russian Systema master, Jiu Jitsu black belt and trainer of two European Special Forces groups, Kevin Secours agrees with others in saying:

I don’t know that he so much went to his back as fell on his back. Ground fighting is a reality. I’ve been on both sides of this before, sometimes against multiple attackers. The Ukrainian had a lot of gear and the ground was terribly cluttered. That is why the old combat-oriented Japanese Jiu Jitsu material had less hip escapes and movement than BJJ depends on. Sad reality of war. This fight could have gone either way. It definitely reinforces why we don’t want to volunteer for the ground, but also shows the necessity of training it because it happens. Most importantly it shows how long these encounters can last.

Police Chief Dr. Ron Camacho, a former SWAT leader and Russian hand-to-hand combat practitioner, agrees, adding: Often “there are still rules to street fights here in the US. The exception is when someone goes overboard. There are often people around trying to break up fights or running to call the police. So, while seeing BJJ successfully used in a war zone would be incredibly rare and possibly foolish, there is a place for it where ‘rules’ still hold true. It is easy to learn and especially valuable with this new crop of officers, many of whom have never been in a fight. It is an expedient method to give our new officers some tools for their toolbox. The best practice is to combine BJJ with other techniques, such as disarms, strikes, and other defensive moves.” 

 But there are times when, for many reasons, it is not going to work even in a civilian environment. That dictates not having an over-reliance on grappling, and definitely not fighting from one’s back. As emphasized in 1500 Years of Fighting, in my Russian martial arts gym we used to train this very situation a lot, including having someone in your guard or in the mount on you, with one or two others coming to kick you in the head or stab you, even as the person in your guard stabbed you. Another point I stress in the book, was that in my time in Russia they taught great grappling skills, and then trained you to use those skills to avoid ever ending up on the ground, especially on your back. Australian security professional Simon Luciow, another Russian hand-to-hand expert who trained extensively with the Spetsnaz in Russia, agrees with the vulnerabilities of being on your back. “Going to your back in a real conflict, just guarding up someone for a long time, isn’t going to work when everything bad happens in the first minute, and the other person has something to cut you with.”

A currently serving Green Beret who reviewed this video, said to me that BJJ might be the best sport fighting style, but has little application in real-world hand-to-hand. Part of that is due to their lack of focus in dealing with knives and handguns. He explained:

Many of those who carry knives don't understand that people don’t die after one stab and are seldom even incapacitated. Knife fights can go on for a surprising amount of time. Here, they stabbed the absolute shit out of each other and still had the strength and will to continue on. When we teach the ‘kill class’ and explain the anatomy of how to kill someone we explain ‘switches’ and ‘timers’. Switches turn things off immediately (whether it is life, paralysis of parts of the body, or sight) and then timers are strikes that bleed the enemy out (whether slow or fast bleed out).

Medical research shows that even if a heart is completely cut out, the person can continue to function for some time. The brain continues to think and act. This can go on for up to a few minutes even, until the brain and other organs finally lose all oxygen due to the lack of blood circulation. However, this elite soldier echoes the others in saying: “While I do agree that going to your back should be avoided during hand-to-hand combat (especially in a CQB situation), it is a reality that you may end up on your back and need to figure that problem out, so it should be trained but not be considered the standard.”

Former Spetsnaz, Igor Livits, says that the problem with applying modern Jiu Jitsu to combat, is that they do not effect offensive takedowns followed by controlling the opponent on the ground and only then look to eliminate him through submissions, chokes or the use of a knife or handgun. This is the tactic of Russian SAMBO, but he points out that even sport wrestlers are more capable at this than Jiu Jitsu practitioners. This is also exactly what the Russian did in this fight with the Ukrainian. All of this is as true for police as soldiers in combat.

This gets us to two sets of principles for combat the Russian Special Forces reinforce relentlessly, and that American police can benefit from keeping always in mind. The first are the psychological commitments needed to survive a fight to the death:

1. Comfort with pain;
2. Comfort with proximity;
3. Commitment to total violence; and,
4. Commitment to total victory.

In this instance, the Russian appeared to have all four. The second set articulates the assumptions you must always make when engaging in a reality fight:

1. Assume your enemy is stronger, faster and better trained;
2. Assume your enemy has multiple weapons hidden on his body;
3. Assume you must deal with more than one attacker; and,
4. Assume that there are witnesses and at least one person has a camera (today everyone does).

These are all important rules for American police to keep in mind and apply at all times to ensure they get to go home at the end of the day. Beyond that, videos of this fight and other events are crucial to study to focus police officers’ training for realistic battle and survival.

Postscript: It was later learned the Russian soldier was Andrey Grigoryev from Yakutia. He was awarded the Gold Star - Hero of the Russian Federation, Russia's highest award for valor. The Ukrainian soldier has not been identified. 

Dr. John Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. His dissertation was on the evolution of jihadist terrorist mass-hostage siege tactics throughout the world. He has trained police departments and SWAT throughout the US. His latest book, 1500 Years of Fighting, can be found on Amazon. He is also the author of Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools (listed by Police1 as one of the top 15 all-time must-read books for police); Shooter Down! The Dramatic, Untold Story of the Police Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, along with co-author Police Commissioner Joseph M. Bail; and When Terror Returns: The History and Future of Terrorist Mass-Hostage Sieges. He can be contacted at john@circon.org.

The officer can feel the adrenaline racing through his veins at the same time his patrol car races toward the school, lights and sirens slicing the previously peaceful morning.  The dispatcher had struggled to keep her voice steady, telling him they were receiving numerous reports of gunfire in the hallways, of children lying in pools of blood.

The young cop runs his response through his head, trying to calm himself, ready himself for battle.  He had been well schooled in Active Shooter protocols.  But what would he confront?  What must he be ready for, and did his training adequately prepare him for the broad spectrum of possible tactical threats to the children he swore to protect?

Make no mistake, America’s schools are under siege.  But few realize the entire spectrum of extreme tactical threats that they face, and that our law enforcement officers must be prepared to respond to.  Simply teaching schools to “lock down” in response to every threat is insufficient.  As well, the tactical spectrum is so wide that merely offering our rescuers the two options of going in (Active Shooter), or holding and securing (Stable Barricade Scenario) are just as insufficient.  As with any problem, the key to not only preparing for it, but resolving it when confronted, is knowledge.  With this knowledge comes the recognition that all three levels of LE-school response – SROs, patrol and SWAT – must develop joint tactics, as they will all be involved.  Anyone with a terrorist mindset understands the value of attacking kids in schools.  Whether our own homegrown child shooters, adults or trained al Qaeda terrorists, they all understand that nothing brings more fame, or devastates a community and a nation better, than the killing of its children.

Single Student Shooter.  The lowest level of extreme tactical threat (X-Tac) to schools is the single student school shooter.  This applies to high school age children and below.  With this age group, the shooter will only attack his own school, or schools below his grade, but never above.  You will not see a high school student attacking a college, nor a middle school age kid attacking a high school.  Though the variables in human nature ensure exceptions to any rule, the lack of maturity and sophistication of shooters at the different levels of the X-Tac Spectrum provide a fairly predictable model.  At these ages, children are too intimidated by older kids, and nature’s rule of child socialization would render it almost impossible psychologically for a child to attack a school full of older students.  That, coupled with the fact that few children would have a reason to attack a higher school, allows officers to presume that lone kids in a school are attacking their own, or a lower grade school; most likely one they left the year before.

At this age, the student shooter may have put together some rudimentary explosives, but will not have the resources to carry many into the school.  He will be heavily armed, however.  Due to his status as a lone attacker, he will not be able to control his target victim population, but will move through hallways, engaging targets of opportunity.  Where he can breach a room, he will do so and engage what targets present themselves before moving on.  Given the option of schools to attack, he will have perfect intelligence on the emergency response plan, and will have factored that response into his attack.  Though no one has yet attacked a school with an armed police officer present, at some point a student will decide to increase his fame by doing so.  He will know the SRO is the first tactical hurdle he must overcome.  He will likely have made a recent attempt to develop a relationship with that SRO, so that his approach will not alert the officer to possible danger.  The same will occur in the next two higher levels of the tactical threat spectrum.  Though the recent example of Virginia Tech (VT) will have left this shooter wanting to fortify the building prior to his attack, his solitary status, size of the school, and ubiquitous presence of students, will make that difficult, allowing easy entry by police.

Low Multiple Student Shooters.  The next more difficult X-Tac will involve only two or three shooters at the high school level and below.  Their target selection will be limited in the same way as the single shooter.  Due to age, immaturity, psychological co-dependency and limited numbers, these shooters will not separate.  They may use their numbers to better control and assail groups of victims in rooms, but will otherwise fail to control their target population, moving through hallways and delighting in the predatory response to fleeing prey.  At this X-Tac level, the presence of numerous explosives is greater, as happened at Columbine where Kleibold and Harris had built 90 devices.  Also, with these numbers, and with the example of Cho at VT to guide them in tactics, they may attempt to secure major points of egress (main external doors), and drive their victims in that direction.  At this level, as with the single shooter, LE can employ Active Shooter responses, and with the exception of concern over IEDs, move quickly past rooms and areas that are unsecured, in the direction of the gunfire.

High Multiple Student Shooters.  These attacks will be launched by kids in the same age groups, but will involve four to eight shooters.  This was seen in 2006 in Kansas where an attack was prevented involving five kids; and one week later in Alaska, where six teenagers were prevented from assaulting their school.  It is highly unlikely that LE would ever confront more than eight.  Due to maturity levels and typical group dynamics among children and teenagers,  at numbers above eight, one will be ostracized by the group, or will otherwise get cold feet and report the planned shooting.  The greatest tactical hurdles for LE at this level, however, are the presence of significant numbers of IEDs, efforts to secure and fortify major points of egress (external doors), and, most importantly, the recognition of the advantages of dividing their forces.  With Low Multiple Shooters, they cannot split up without at least one youth being on his own, which is unlikely. 

With numbers of four and above, our own teenagers will eventually recognize that separating into two or three teams will yield them a substantially increased body count.  They will follow a standard military hammer and anvil attack plan, or as is often described, having the hounds move to the hunters, with the quarry driven ahead of them.  At this X-Tac level, they may also use one team to ambush arriving police officers. It is here that standard Active Shooter doctrine increases the threat to the first entry team, and they must be careful of moving past areas that have not been cleared and secured.  For any Hasty Team that is assembled, the rear guard position becomes critical to the team’s survival.  If intel on the shooters is sparse en route to the school, all LE must assume that they are confronting this number of attackers in responding to any school assault and maintain excellent rear security. 

Young Adult Single Shooter.  Here the attacker would most likely be a college student, a recent college dropout, or possibly a recent high school dropout, as with the killer in Erfurt, Germany who killed 17, including a law enforcement officer.  Though the number of assailants is dramatically reduced at this X-Tac level, the threat to victims and LE may actually be greater.  At this age the attacker benefits from increased maturity, greater intellectual sophistication, and better tactical planning.  Statistically, this is also the age where increasing numbers of Americans begin exhibiting symptoms of severe depression and paranoid schizophrenia, and evidence indicates that may have been the case with Seung-Hui Cho at VT; just as thousands of students at colleges across the country suffer from the same mental afflictions.  Shooters at this level will be very well planned, armed, trained, and emotionally disengaged from their victims.  As young adults living away from home, they will have had enhanced opportunities to purchase any manner of weapons and ammunition, train at gun ranges, and use their increased sophistication to research and develop tactics and fortifications that will make rapid LE response almost impossible. 

By this age the shooters may have had a decade of immersion in violent video games; excellent training for an attack (see Dave Grossman’s books On Killing, On Combat and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, along with his Bullet Proof Mind series.).  Coupled with their likely mental illness, police will be confronted with a cold, well programmed, killing machine, whose only emotion may be rage.  The main advantage with these shooters, is the fact that due to their disenfranchisement with society and even others their own age, it would be unlikely they would team up with anyone.  At none of the X-Tac levels up to and including this point, would it be likely that the assailants would take and hold hostages.  At these levels arriving officers will be confronted with indicia of an Active Shooter scenario: they will hear gunshots, see students in windows calling out to them, students jumping from windows, and other victims streaming out of doors.  But at this level, if a college age student chooses to attack his former high school, or a high school student or dropout chooses to attack his former middle school, holding hostages for a short time before “going active” is possible.

Adult Single Shooter.  As the age of attackers increases, so does the planning and preparation.  As well, so does the ease of taking life.  For LE, this means the level of threat, and the tactical difficulty they confront, will increase proportionately. Here, as with the Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, and Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in 2006, you have an increased probability of older attackers holding hostages for a time before going active.  At this level, and that of the college age shooter in a high school, responding officers cannot ever afford to believe that they have a stable barricade situation.  Officers and commanders must understand that they are responding to a Pre-Active Shooter scenario.  It will go active at any time, often with no warning, just as happened at Nickel Mines.  Keep in mind that this will not be similar to a bank or convenience store robbery: where the robbers were only there for money, but rapid police response upended their plan.  In the vast majority of those situations, the presence of SWAT and negotiators result in the robbers surrendering with no one getting hurt.  But when these adults go into schools with guns, there is no reason for them to be there but the deaths of children. 

In Adult Shooter situations, the assailant will go through all six phases of the Islamist Mass Hostage Siege Model,* though they will move through them very quickly.  Fortifications will have been quickly assembled, but sufficient to make many standard LE and SWAT entries difficult, if not impossible, given the short period of time they will have to enter with hostages being shot or blown up.  After chaining the three public entry doors to Norris Hall, Cho managed to discharge 204 rounds in approximately nine minutes, killing or wounding 55.  Only a high speed police response prevented him from firing the other 174 rounds he had in magazines on his person.  At Nickel Mines, Charles Carl Roberts needed only seconds to pull the trigger ten times on little girls, compared to the rapid two and one-half minutes it took Pennsylvania State Police SRT teams to breach a heavily fortified building.  Even Duane Morrison’s threat that he had a large bomb in the Bailey school, and the stacking of chairs and desks between himself and the classroom door, making it difficult for the entry team to move quickly toward him while he used 16-year old Emily Keyes as a human shield, constituted sufficient fortifications to make a rescue difficult. 

No matter how fast LE is responding or breaching, you can anticipate one round being discharged by the Adult Shooter every second or two (three at the most) into the controlled hostage group.  The reality is that innocent people are going to be killed, or at least wounded.  Whether you wait until the attacker begins shooting hostages to initiate your rescue, or dictate your own assault schedule, you must expect that there are going to be victims.  The only advantage, is that at this level you will not see more than a single adult assailant, unless part of a trained terrorist team, as described below.

Multiple Terrorist Decimation Assault.  This will be tactically identical to the High Multiple Student Shooter scenario, with the exception that it will be conducted by a coordinated team of better trained, better armed, adult attackers.  The “active” assault against the students and teachers in the building will dictate an immediate attack by arriving law enforcement.  The terror team will have prepared ambushes for arriving officers.  This attack will only end when the terrorists have been killed by police.  An attack of this nature in America is less likely than a Terrorist-Mass Hostage siege stretched out over days.

Multiple Terrorist-Mass Hostage Siege.    This is the worst and, therefore, most tactically difficult.  Here you will be dealing with a team (anticipate at least ten) of well trained, heavily armed adults who will have been conditioned to not only kill as many innocents as possible, but as many cops as they can.  They will intend to die inside the building, and will keep killing innocents until police kill them.  Before that, the assailants will attempt to drag the standoff out for a period of days.  Al Qaeda and related groups know all about Active Shooter responses of American LE agencies, and will ensure that the first cop to arrive on scene will be confronted with a cold, dead, quiet building.  There will be none of the indicators of an Active Shooter situation.  What hostages were going to escape will have already done so.  All of the others will be controlled in a single collection point, most likely a gym, auditorium or cafeteria. 

The first officer on site will see several large vehicles, with engines running, parked just outside the front doors.  Most likely this will include at least one school bus.  If there is an SRO in the building, they – like all of the Low and High Multiple Student Shooters, Young Adult and Adult Shooters – will have to eliminate that officer first.  They know that if arriving officers hear a single gunshot, the police are going in, and will keep pouring cops into the building until the battle is over.  In that event, American LE would effectively be following the Israeli model for dealing with mass hostage takings: Attack right away no matter what.  This means SROs must be sufficiently armed with both weapons and ammunition, equipped with adequate body armor, and trained, to stay alive to keep firing so that arriving LE assaults immediately.  To wait until the terrorists want the assault to come, is to ensure a greater body count of hostages and police.    

From the arrival of the first officer on scene, throughout the days of the siege, they will make it easy for American LE to not attack; until the terrorists are ready for the battle.  They will negotiate until all of their goals have been met, which will not include a peaceful surrender.  The earliest point at which negotiations will end, however, will be when fortifications have been completed.  At that point, if SWAT has not already launched a rescue operation, the terrorists will begin the mass execution of hostages, compelling police to attack.  When the rescue comes, police should anticipate a large number of explosives fortifying the building, in addition to heavy firepower.  Be ready for them to wire bombs to hostages, and even to place young females wearing suicide belts or vests, in among the hostages.  When it is over, all of the terrorists will be dead; they will allow no other result.  Some of the hostages will have died.  As well, tragically, some of the police will likely not be going home that night. 

Whether al Qaeda ever attempts to attack U.S. schools, we have not seen the last of the schools shootings and hostage takings in this country.  It is due to the broad spectrum of extreme tactical threats to schools – and the varied tactical hurdles that LE confronts – that SROs, patrol and SWAT teams must develop tactics that will be used in tandem during an actual attack.  Schools must be taught what is expected of them, including what intel must be communicated to police immediately.  Tactics must be developed, or modified, to deal with these various scenarios.  Knowledge is, indeed, power.  But it is only powerful when used to prepare for the problems that American law enforcement will continue to face in her schools.

The following are the phases of a terrorist Mass-Hostage Siege

1. Attack on the building;
2. Submission and Control of Hostages – may include some initial murders to stun hostages;
3. Fortifications – will begin early on and may continue throughout Negotiations;
4. Stabilization – will show LE a stable scene so that they do not attempt rescue right away;
5. Negotiations – used by terrorists to gain time for both media access and to fortify building;
6. Rescue – may be forced by terrorists at time of their choosing through the beginning of the mass execution of hostages.

This article was published in JEMS (Journal of Emergency Medical Services) Supplement to its Oct 2008 issue.  The supplement was entitled:  “The War on Trauma: Lessons Learned From A Decade of Conflict.”

 

The article, in unedited form and written by John Giduck, was published under the title:  “Terror In America’s Schools: The Need To Prepare First Responders To Defend Our Nation’s Children.”

 

America is a nation at war. That is a reality, not political rhetoric. And some of the battles in that war are going to be fought on American soil—in our communities, among our homes and loved ones. Our enemy has promised us that some of those battles will be fought in our schools as our children are captured, tortured and even killed.

Yet for all their courage and desire to be at the forefront of every battle, such battles will not be fought exclusively by our brave men and women in military uniform. As I explained in my book, “Terror at Beslan,” most, if not all, of these battles will be fought by our law enforcement officers in conjunction with fire/rescue and EMS personnel willing to throw themselves into harm’s way.¹ Thus, we must not delude ourselves when asking just where those battles will take place, or what they will be like when they occur. We must be prepared.

Terror targets can be categorized in a number of ways. There are high-, medium- and low-value strategic targets; high-, medium- and low-value tactical targets; critical infrastructure targets; government, law enforcement and military targets; psychological and emotional targets; financial and economic targets; and even symbolic targets. Though they had tremendous psychological and economic side effects, the Twin Towers were primarily symbolic targets to the enemy, representing American economic hegemony throughout the Muslim world.

            There are countless terror targets in America. For this reason, we must understand the targets terrorists are most likely to strike, and develop plans to respond to those attacks. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiled a list of 7,000 of the most “high risk” sites for terror attack.² But even that does not begin to acknowledge the many thousands more that are not only predictably attractive to terrorists, but are the very types of targets that have been attacked by this same enemy countless times around the world. Indeed, in developing its 7,000-site terror target list, DHS included merely 100 of the nation’s 3,400 drinking water facilities that store large amounts of chlorine gas; if any of these facilities were attacked, the gas stored could result in harm to, or the deaths of, 1,000 or more people.² Worse still: There isn’t a single elementary, middle or high school on that list.

 

Why Schools?

When anyone with a terrorist mindset is deciding what type of attack to launch, they typically have two essential options: Decimation Assault or Mass-Hostage Siege. Decimation Assaults are much more frequent, easier to plan and execute, and can usually yield all the results the terrorists seek with the majority of targets. That is, they need only send suicide bombers into a site, or plant explosives in advance of actual detonation. By simply bombing most physical targets, they accomplish this objective. By blowing up innocent people on streets, in transportation hubs and modes, and small-to-medium-size public venues (e.g., bars, restaurants and markets), terrorists achieve some terror, but it doesn’t have a long-lasting impact.

In Israel, for instance, when these attacks occur, they are cleaned up immediately. Within hours, damage to buildings is repaired, streets are scrubbed clean, sidewalks are bleached and the bodies are buried by nightfall. For the enemy, the terror impact isn’t significant, largely due to the fact that the body count is not high.  The attacks on 9/11 were a Hybrid or Synergistic Attack, as weaponized aircraft became the terrorists’ explosive devices. They needed only to deliver those weapons to their intended targets, but to accomplish that, they had to take, hold and control a relatively large number of hostages, along the lines of a mass-hostage siege.

However, when seeking to cause the greatest psychological, emotional and lifestyle impact on an entire nation, through the deaths of large numbers of the most innocent, no target offers terrorists as much impact as the killing of children. Terrorists have learned that when you first take and hold large numbers of children hostage, you, in fact, hold an entire nation hostage. Should terrorists come to America and take more than 1,000 of our children and women hostage as they did at Beslan Middle School No. 1 in southern Russia in September 2004, all of America would hold its collective breath through the days of that siege, terrified of the end they knew was certain to come. Holding innocents hostage over long periods of time exponentially increases the terror impact on not only the target government and the citizens of that country, but of that nation’s allies.

Whether Decimation Assaults or Mass-Hostage Sieges, children and schools rate high among the most prolific terror targets in the world. Israel first experienced its own Beslan over the night of May 15 to 16, 1974, when terrorists took and held 105 children and five adults in a school in the town of Ma’a lot, near the Syrian border. When the battle to retake the school was over, 26 children were dead and 56 others wounded. Another school was taken in Bovennsmilde, Holland, in May 1977. Between 1984 and 1993 more than 300 schools were attacked in Turkey, ultimately resulting in that country having to close down more than 3,000 schools. In the first six months of 2006 alone, 204 schools were attacked in Afghanistan, at a time when U.S. and NATO troops were at their peak control of that country. Many more have been attacked since then. The number of schools being attacked in Pakistan is rising, as well as in Indonesia and Iraq. All of the schools in three southern districts of Thailand have been closed due to Syrian-trained terrorists attacking them, children, teachers and principals in recent years. When I was working there in early 2008 they held a conference for all teachers and administrators in an effort to get the schools reopened.  More than a half dozen bombs were detonated at and around the hotel, and eight of those attending murdered within two weeks of its conclusion.  The list goes on.

Famed military and law enforcement trainer Lt. Col. Dave Grossman stresses repeatedly that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. From its own past behavior, our enemy has not only learned the great value of children in schools as an optimal terror target, but has told us what they may yet do to an America that has gone back to sleep since 9/11. Usama bin Laden has stated on prior occasions that before this jihad is over he will see to the deaths of four million American citizens, including two million American children, and that they are not only viable but noble targets.  This exists on Web sites to this day, including the following statement by bin Laden spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith in May 2002: We have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many, and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.  Today, as a result of U.S. conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports have been received that the terrorists have increased those numbers as high as 15 million Americans including 10 million American children.

For this reason, there is much to be gained from studying previous attacks. Anyone with a terrorist mindset sees the value in attacking children in schools. Whether dealing with a strategic-level attack by al Qaeda or similar international terrorist groups, or our own terror-minded citizens who crave revenge on an uncaring society for all the wrongs done them in their lives—real or imagined—they all come to recognize the value of attacking children.

When you must hold and control an exponentially greater number of hostages, no one is easier to do it with than children. And when terrorists ultimately seek to kill a large number of hostages, no one is easier to kill than children. No segment of society would have the emotional and psychological impact on all of America as dead children, for no culture can withstand the decimation of its young.

And there is no other place in America than schools where large numbers of children can be found, relatively unprotected, through long periods of the year and where schedules are easy to obtain through even rudimentary intelligence gathering efforts (most are on school Web sites).

 

Learning from the Past

In examining just the most recent significant school attacks in America, we can glean valuable lessons. Though the attack on the school in Beslan may well be the worst thing imaginable, right now our enemy is imagining an attack quite a bit worse than even that.

Attacks on schools can and will take place on a variety of levels for both our tactical operators and medic/rescuers. For instance, lower-level school attacks by our own student shooters and adults in recent years may well approximate the homegrown, individually motivated terrorist attacks al Qaeda is seeking to inspire in every one of the 2-plus million Muslims in America. Therefore, it is important to look at some of the more significant recent attacks that our enemy is even now studying, and looking to outpeform.

I have encountered many school administrators who say that they don’t have to worry about Beslan happening at their schools. They point out that there were more than 100 bombs there and that was only possible because Beslan sat on the edge of a war zone. In reaching such a conclusion, however, they are ignoring the intel on one of the more devastating attacks America has already experienced.

Most people in our country are familiar with some aspects of the attack on Columbine High School in Colorado, committed by Dylan Kleibold and Eric Harris on April 20, 1999. What many do not know: In that attack, two untrained teenage assaulters manufactured and dragged more than 90 explosives to the school. The majority of the bombs did not explode, due to an error they made in the use of a certain type of watchface as a timed detonator.

And while most school administrators and teachers do not know what that mistake was, they must recognize that all students who have ever contemplated launching a Columbine-style attack—and all of the terrorists considering the same thing—do know what Kleibold and Harris did wrong. Each of them will ensure that mistake is not repeated.

The body count at Columbine resulted in modifications in law enforcement response tactics throughout the country. “Active Shooter” responses by police since that time have resulted in many school attacks being quickly stopped before the shooters could amass a Columbine-level toll in human life. But nothing about Active Shooter response addresses the holding of children hostage.

In two of the more recent attacks in America, we have seen adults entering schools, intent on holding hostages, sexually assaulting young girls and ultimately killing students in buildings that should be sanctuaries from harm. On Sept. 27, 2006, Duane Morrison entered Room 206 in Platte Canyon High School in bucolic Bailey, Colo. He held hostage seven young ladies, brutally sexually assaulting all of them over a 4-hour period, before his threats to blow up the building forced a law enforcement entry that resulted in the death of 16-year-old Emily Keyes and himself.

Just five days later, on Oct. 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts walked into a one-room Amish school building in tiny Nickel Mines, Pa. He drove everyone out of the building but 10 young girls, all of whom were bound by their feet and made to lie shoulder to shoulder beneath the blackboard. He, too, had come to sexually abuse children before killing them. Shortly after the arrival of the Pennsylvania State Police, he began shooting into those defenseless girls. At the sound of the first shot, police raced to the building and attempted immediate entry, where they encountered lumber Roberts had nailed over the doors and windows. The police fought desperately to gain entry; one state trooper tore out all his fingernails trying to rip wood away. Breaching the building took a little more than 2 minutes—rapid entry in light of the fortifications encountered. But Roberts needed merely 8 seconds to discharge 13 rounds into the 10 girls, killing five and leaving one brain damaged.

Seung-Hui Cho had the advantage of seeing all of this in the half-year prior to his attack on the Virginia Tech campus. In each attack, the tactics and fortifications of the assailant were better than the ones that had come before. At the Bailey, Colorado school, Morrison had packed the space between the door and himself—30 feet across the room—with all of the desks and chairs. He held Emily Keyes in front of him as a human shield while police fought their way through the jumbled furniture, not daring to take a thin-margin shot from such a distance. One week later, Roberts’ fortifications were even better. Cho improved on them both.

At Virginia Tech, Cho selected Norris Hall in part because it was one of the few remaining buildings whose doors had the old-style swing bars, rather than the solid push bars found in buildings today. This enabled him to simply loop chain through the bars and secure them with locks, thereby easily trapping his prey in the building, as well as fortifying it against law enforcement entry.

As with the two prior school incidents, law enforcement fought to gain entry, ultimately blowing the deadbolt lock out of another door with a shotgun slug. Contrary to news reports, from the moment of the breaching round, it took the entry teams merely 28 seconds to maneuver through a large and complex machine shop, race around a corner and down a short hall into a recessed staircase (while a second team raced all the way down a 40-yard corridor to the next set of stairs), and reach the second floor, forcing Cho take his own life.

Even then, the carnage was so great the police would not initially accept that there had been only one shooter. While attempting to secure the students against further attack, they and two tactical medics began providing medical care to the dozens of affected students and teachers. In all, 30 innocent people perished, with another 25 suffering wounds and injuries. This, in addition to the two lives Cho took earlier that morning in a distant dormitory.

 

Beslan Stands Alone

My own experience with school attacks is greater than I would like it to be. Two of our organization’s founding directors led the investigation into Columbine; I know dozens of the police and SWAT team members and leaders who responded to that attack. I was asked to the Bailey, Colorado school to conduct an assessment of the law enforcement response immediately after the siege ended. I know two of the Pennsylvania State Police SRT team members and leaders at Nickel Mines, and had coincidentally been nearby training the York City SWAT team when the shooting took place, enabling me to contact the operators to understand what they had confronted. And when Virginia Tech happened, I was asked to travel there immediately with a small team of top law enforcement professionals to begin an in-depth assessment. I was inside Norris Hall; I saw the remnants of the damage Cho inflicted.

But as bad as Norris Hall was, it was not the worst either I, or the world, had ever seen, for the tragic title of “the worst school attack” belongs to Beslan, Russia. In fact Virginia Tech was exactly one-tenth of the devastation of Beslan.  The time I’d spent working and studying in Russia every year for almost two decades—including annual time spent over 13 years with Russian Special Forces units (spetsnaz)—proved invaluable to helping me gain entry into the school immediately after the battle ended. I debriefed dozens of soldiers, government officials and townspeople.

 

Beslan Facts

At Beslan, 49 terrorists took more than 1,200 mostly women and children hostage at approximately 9:00 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2004 (the first day of school in Russia). Hostages were brutalized in ways that are almost unspeakable. Children were beaten savagely; older teenage girls were raped, some repeatedly, through the days of the siege. Several fathers were murdered immediately in the gym where the hostages were originally massed, and another 21 of the largest adult males and older teenage boys were shot to death. Many of their bodies were dumped out a second-story window to rot in the sun.

The Beslan terrorists brought upward of 200 explosives into the school. Many were placed in the gym where the majority of hostages were held throughout the siege. Others were spread throughout the school, with numerous booby traps set in the hallways. Other groups of children were held in separate rooms amidst bombs designed to kill them when a rescue attempt ultimately came. Three belt-fed machine guns (two PKM 7.62mm machine guns and one PKT (7.62mm) free standing tank turret machinegun) were set up in the 80-yard-long main corridors on the first and second floors. These corridors were barely 8 feet wide, similar to the tight confines of the hallway in Norris Hall at Virginia Tech.

When exploding bombs in the gym forced the rescue 2 ½ days later, terrorists were standing children up in windows as human shields while they fired indiscriminately into both fleeing hostages and rescuers racing in the other direction, toward the school. The spetsnaz couldn’t fire at the terrorists for fear of hitting the children. This was repeated inside the building throughout the 10-plus-hour gun battle to retake the school. In the northern courtyard, the military moved up two BTR 80s (wheeled armored personnel carriers) into the northern courtyard to provide cover for advancing teams, and to protect wounded and rescued hostages while being evacuated.

Avenues into the southern courtyard were too narrow to permit vehicles large enough to have provided any benefit at all, leaving hostages and soldiers alike to fend for themselves out in the open. Inside the building, the special forces had to contend with several series of fighting positions staggered throughout the long corridors, tripwires and booby traps, and the three belt-fed machine guns in hard fighting positions with children stood up before them to slow down the attack of the soldiers.

Even as the battle raged in different parts of the school, many of the more than 700 wounded hostages were evacuated under fire. With more than 300 additional hostages ultimately dying, the demands were overwhelming on the soldiers, medics and even townspeople to provide critical lifesaving care to all of those affected by bullets, bombs, ceilings collapsing in several places including the entire gym roof caving in, and fire. In addition, 21 elite special forces soldiers were killed and more than 60 wounded.

 

Preparing for the Worst

The mass chaos and tactical needs presented by major incidents of this type has yielded a valuable model for preparedness and training. If studied and applied, it should ultimately ensure that those lives were not lost in vain. Certainly, the recent attacks on U.S. schools have provided important realizations about the need to prepare for such attacks.

The one consistency with all people possessed of a terror mindset is the desire for attention, the need to be made famous as a result of the horror they perpetrate. To become famous they need the news media to splash their names, faces and accomplishments throughout the world. To garner that level of devotion by the news media, they need accomplish only one thing: exceed the last, biggest body count of innocent victims.

That means that the next Kleibold and Harris are putting a plan together to kill more people than died at Columbine. To achieve that, they need better fortifications in order to slow the police response and entry into the building. They are all studying the attacks that have come before, and are devising tactics they believe will be impossible for law enforcement to overcome. The next Cho on a college campus is attempting to devise a plan and fortifications that will allow him to exceed Cho’s numbers of killed and wounded. And terrorists both within and without the United States are attempting to devise plans that will exceed the numbers the terrorists achieved at Beslan.

For that reason, it’s important that all of those professionals America turns to in times of crisis recognize the value in preparing for the worst thing that could happen, making the Beslan model of tremendous value. In looking at both Beslan and the recent attacks on American schools by our own socially manufactured predators, the conclusion is inescapable that there are only two things that will stop the next attack and save the lives of the targeted victims: brave men and women with guns, and brave men and women with the medical skills to save the wounded under combat conditions. Thus, the single most crucial aspect of preparedness for all of America’s tactical operators, firefighters and paramedics is the need to train to kill and to rescue.

At Beslan, teams spent all day racing toward the school, across open ground, to bring stretchers full of much-needed re-supplies of bullets, weapons, water and medical kits to the beleaguered troops inside, only to turn around and race back out across those same killing fields carrying the wounded on stretchers their hands could barely hold. Many just carried children in their arms, or dragged adults by limbs across the yards to safety. Exhausted, many of these teams needed others to step into their role while they sought brief respite. Others were simply shot down trying to shield children with their bodies.   

All of our personnel must not only hone their abilities to take life to save the innocent, but also save life and rescue the wounded under fire. Just as importantly, our fire/rescue and paramedic personnel must go into these battles with a tactical mindset and knowledge to ensure not only the safety of the wounded, but of themselves and those around them. 

 

New Skills Needed

To deal with both the tactical (combat) and combat casualty care (first aid under fire) aspects of the battles yet to come to America, law enforcement operators and tactical medics alike must possess the same capabilities. If they don’t, people will die. Medical professionals must realize the differences between first aid and tactical combat casualty care (TCCC). In a combat environment, priorities change. Stopping hemorrhage through the use of clotting agents and tourniquets is critical. The first personnel on scene to assist victims of gunshots and bombs must be able to invasively open breathing passages, treat collapsed lungs and evacuate the wounded, often through walls and out windows. The same “tactics” can benefit law enforcement operators who may have to advance down hallways, straight into the face of automatic weapons fire.

Police must be able to use these same skills to treat the hostages, their teammates and themselves, because TCCC is all about staying in the fight. Though the combat capability and synergy of actual tactical medics will have to be substantial, both fire/rescue and EMS, must also be able to pick up any weapon and either load or unload it, relieve a jam and return it to combat effectiveness. In a gun battle with a committed enemy and innocent victims in between, no one can afford the luxury of job specialization. Both groups must be able to deal with re-supply and evacuation of wounded; and must be able to use the same devices and tactics to do both while keeping hands free to provide their own suppression fire.

In short, tactical medics, EMS, fire/rescue and law enforcement personnel alike must be able to shoot their way into and out of a building, and across open ground. Police must not be afraid to break traditional rules of emergency care. Lt. Anthony Wilson, commander of the Blacksburg, Va., SWAT team—who along with Virginia Tech PD SWAT commander Lt. Curtiss Cook led the assault on Norris Hall—says: “When it comes to kids, the rules all change. No matter what you’ve been told as a cop, if it’s a child and you have to stick your gloveless hands into that little body to stop bleeding, you’re going to do it. If you have to put your mouth on that little kid’s mouth to breathe life into him, you’ll do it without hesitation.”

 

This necessary skill set will require three essential evolutions in the training of those we will ask to go into the next Columbine, Norris Hall and Beslan.    But the wheel need not be reinvented as we can look to the model that already exists in both America’s conventional combat arms units, and its Special Operations Forces.  At the top would be the medics assigned to SWAT.  Just as our most elite counter-terror hostage-rescue units have highly trained medics deploy with every one of their entry teams, so too must specialized tactical medics undergo substantial training with the SWAT teams they are assigned to.  These will be the elite of the on-site medical professionals assigned to assist police.  In order for them to operate dynamically, and under intensely violent situations, they must train with – and be trained by – the teams they will be entering buildings and battle with.  This will actually cost very little in the way of money.  Medics must be willing to undergo SWAT training with their assigned units, and maintain themselves to the same physical standards.  They will need similar equipment to their police teammates in the way of body armor, uniform and clothing, but little else.  They may even be able to be an added resource for extra ammunition, as they can carry heavier loads than the operators who must move at lightning speed in tight confines.  Whether these medics would – or should – be armed would be a matter for the individual departments, and may be determined by pre-existing policies, and in some cases state law.  Having at least one sidearm for each medic, however, would likely result in the lives of police, medics and innocent victims being saved at some point.

 

The next level of advancement in training and ability would be seen in increased tactical awareness and understanding in all fire/rescue and EMS personnel.  Though these individuals would not need the expertise of the tactical medics, some increase in their knowledge of how patrol officers respond, what tactics they employ in entering a building, clearing and securing of areas, handling of hostages, wounded suspects, withdrawal under fire, small team formations and the like would greatly enhance the ability of the two groups to operate together in active shooter situations, particularly in those jurisdictions where it is likely patrol will arrive ahead of SWAT.  These medical professionals would function on the level of standard military medics assigned to infantry platoons.  They will not require the extreme tactical knowledge of their counterparts with units like Delta, SEAL Team Six and Army Special Forces, but they will need sufficient knowledge to ensure they can get their medical expertise to where it is needed, while under fire, and without interfering with those engaged in combat.  These professionals can, as well, receive all of the training they need from the very departments they will be assisting. 

 

Just as the medics will have to be trained in combat tactics by the police, so, too, must the police be trained in superior first aid by the medics.  This is the third aspect of the new evolutions in capability.  They must be better at rendering aid to their law enforcement comrades, themselves and the victims.  In a battle environment where police can expect to suffer casualties at the rate of one cop for every five terrorists shot (as the Russian special forces do), in addition to dozens (and even hundreds) of dead and dying victims, even those medics assigned to police will be overwhelmed.  At Norris Hall there were two tac medics, and they would have had to treat 55 people if the police had not been sufficiently trained.  Ultimately, when the killing of the bad guys is over, it’s all about being able to save the lives of the good guys.

 

To develop this ability in our brave men and women who will be called into dangerous and violent situations again and again, does not require large budgets for equipment or six-figure DHS grants.  What it does require, however, is a willingness to train and a desire to be better than we are now.  In advancing the skill level in the two critical areas of tactics and medicine-under-fire, we can, once again, turn to the model of the Army Special Forces.  In SF, each ODA 3 is comprised of two specialists in each of the five SF MOS’s 4, and the first duty of each specialist is to teach his expert skill set to all of the other members of the team.  In this way they are always working hard to make each other better, so that any one team member can step in and do another’s job if that person is wounded or killed.  Our police, medics, EMS and firemen can ill afford a different attitude in the battles America is yet to fight on her own soil.  While some advances in equipment will be helpful, the real requirements are dedication, discipline and a willingness to commit time and effort. 

For these reasons, the Asymmetric Combat Institute, the International Tactical Response and Medicine Society (ITRAMS) and the Archangel Group, Ltd., have been working to prepare America’s warriors to be able to do these very things: kill and rescue. Since 9/11 Archangel has trained thousands of police, soldiers and state and federal agents in unprecedented and innovative ways to conduct these battles against a committed, well prepared and deadly enemy. At the same time, ACI and ITRAMS ahve been working with the most elite Special Operations soldiers and sailors who are conducting operations in our overseas combat zones to provide the most advanced, efficacious casualty care and extraction techniques for combat at home—techniques that represent an enormous evolution in casualty care from early conventional first aid and CPR.

Together, these organizations have forged a tactical skill set that no police officer, SWAT operator, SRO, firefighter or paramedic can be without.  A program of common skills that have joint tactical and medical applications has been developed.  New, and inexpensive, evacuation and medical equipment is now available that every police officer, soldier, medic, ambulance driver or firefighter can benefit from.  And cutting edge training in TCCC is now available to everyone.  No longer is this equipment and training limited only to our elite military Special Operations Forces.  Nor can we afford for it to be, as the police, medics and firefighters are the ones we will be turning to when this enemy returns.  They have promised us the deaths of millions of American citizens—including our own children—before this war is over. The only way to prevent them from reaching that goal is our ability to kill them and rescue and resuscitate our own; for our enemy will allow us no other solution.

 

 

John Giduck is a senior consultant with the Archangel Group (www.antiterrorconsultants.org), an agency that provides training to U.S. law enforcement, government agencies and military. He has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian studies, and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies and has worked with several Russian special forces units. He has authored “Terror at Beslan” and co-authored the newly released “The Green Beret in You: Living with Total Commitment to Family, Career, Sports and Life.”

 

Editor’s Note: The author’s book, “Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools,” provides a detailed account of the events at the Beslan school siege. Learn more at http://www.archangelgroup.org

 

 

REFERENCES

1. Giduck J: Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools. Archangel Publishing Group, Inc.: Golden, Colorado, 2005.

 

2. Ahlers MM: “Agency says 7,000 sites at ‘high risk’ of terrorist attack.” CNN.com News Report, June 21, 2008.

 

3. Operational Detachment – Alpha, or A-Team as it is commonly known to the public, is the foundational unit of Army Special Forces.

 

4. An MOS is a military occupational specialty. While the conventional military has hundreds, the Green Berets have only five, called the 18-series designations, as each begins with the number 18.

 

Below is an article I wrote and that was published in the law enforcement magazine, BLUE, for its December 2024 issue. 2024 marked 25 years since the mass attack at Columbine High School. I interviewed former VA Tech Police SWAT leader, Lt. Curtis Cook, who in 2007 led his team into the worst mass-shooting murder at a school in US history. Curtis provides a retrospective of what American police needed to learn from Columbine, through VA Tech and up today, in addition to what they have learned and what they yet need to learn.

Also, here is the link to the complete Dec. 2024 edition of BLUE Magazine, free for anyone wishing to download and read:   

https://www.thebluemagazine.com/s/BlueV15_I5-final-web.pdf

 

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

25 Years after Columbine - A SWAT Retrospective on School Incidents

By: Dr. John Giduck

In the morning of Monday, April 16, 2007, 23-year-old Seung-Hoi Cho shot two students in a dormitory on the Virginia Tech (VT) campus. Several hours later he walked into Norris Hall, chained the three sets of doors shut, then proceeded to mow down students in classrooms on both sides of a second-floor hallway. In all, he killed 32 students and professors. Another 27 were wounded or injured.

When the call came out that there was an active shooter in the building, SWAT teams from Blacksburg and VT police departments went racing there. Arriving in only two minutes, they fought their way into the building, then raced up two sets of stairs at either end of the hallway forcing Cho to take his own life. Lt. Curtis Cook led the VT SWAT operators into Room 211 where the killer was found. It remains the greatest mass shooting murder at a school in US history.

This year marked the 25^th anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Since that seminal event, the nation has endured hundreds of other school shootings. Lessons that America believed police had learned at Columbine in how to respond to attacks in our schools have sometimes been ignored. It seemed an appropriate time to gather the thoughts and reflections of the man who led a rescue team into the worst one of all, as he looks back over a quarter century of mass killings in our schools.

Beyond providing a few briefings for other SWAT teams and having taught ALERRT classes at VTPD as a certified instructor, Curtis has seldom spoken publicly of his experience. This year he agreed to sit down and answer questions on the lessons American police should have learned from these horrors and what they need to be prepared for in the future.

Prior to joining VTPD, Curtis was a Navy Surface Rescue swimmer, then a deputy sheriff with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia, where he served as a patrol sergeant and SWAT team Entry Leader. He joined VTPD in 1997 and became the SWAT commander in 2007 as a lieutenant. The attack at the school happened shortly after that. Curtis retired from law enforcement in 2014 with 28 years’ service. When Columbine happened, Curtis was a patrol officer at VTPD and had just started instructing officer survival at the police academy.

 

BLUE: What were your thoughts on Columbine, how it was handled and what law enforcement (LE) needed to learn?

CURTIS: I think most everyone in LE had the same thoughts after Columbine: the police did what they’d been trained to do, but there was also the realization that people are going to die if you wait on SWAT. It was apparent after Columbine that the traditional response wouldn't work in that type situation. New techniques and procedures had to be developed for active shooters.

 

BLUE: Do you believe that LE nationwide learned what it needed to from Columbine?

CURTIS: I think it got the attention of law enforcement, but I'm sure a lot of departments struggled with how to task patrol officers with a response that SWAT would normally handle. In addition to just the tactical side involving entry and movement, the new issues were how to deal with explosive devices and mass casualties. If they weren’t going to be able to wait on SWAT, patrol officers had to be trained to respond and eliminate the threat.

 

I attended several presentations on Columbine that taught me and a lot of officers important information. But there were other events outside of school shootings that everyone needed to learn from and incorporate. For that, I also attended debriefs on the North Hollywood shootout and even the Texas Tower shooting. Columbine footage was being shown as part of our Immediate Action Rapid Deployment (IARD) training, and the Hollywood shootout identified the need to have specialized training and place rifles in police vehicles to respond to heavily armed suspects. But in the end, you can give police all the training in the world, equip them with better body armor and weapons, but none of that will ever make a difference if they aren’t doing everything they can to get into a building and move as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat and save innocent lives.

 

BLUE: Is it your impression that LE nationwide did adopt the tactics it was obvious were necessary for responding to active shooters in schools?

CURTIS: Yes and No. I know that many departments were adopting the LAPD – IARD training and techniques post-Columbine, and many departments were using their SWAT teams to train patrol officers in building searching and room clearing. But even after VT, I was shocked to learn that some departments had still not conducted any formal active shooter training. I think it was clear, however, that you not wait on SWAT to arrive at a school shooting. ALERRT has since become the standard for LE active shooter training across the US, butI have no idea how many departments have received that training.

 

BLUE: What are your professional thoughts on the responses to school shootings like that at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, FL in 2018, Uvalde, TX in 2022 and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN in 2023?

 

CURTIS: In Florida, I understand that the school resource officer (SRO) thought the shots were outside because shots sometimes don't sound like shots. However, it’s at that time, just like VT, when you have to quickly identify where the shots are coming from and relay that information to all responding officers. Once he learned the shots were inside, he should have entered. I believe he failed to act and failed to protect. What seemed to make that worse were flaws in the school’s lock-down procedures, which caused a serious delay in the code-red activation.

 

I think the deputies that arrived and took cover behind their vehicles, instead could have formed a contact team and entered the school. From what I understand, they had active shooter training and not immediately moving into the building was contrary to that training. So, at least the training was correct. But that’s been the problem at times. We all know what must be done in these situations, but it’s not always being done.

 

I believe departments should be putting their most highly trained officers in schools. I fear that many departments feel the uniform presence alone, or parking a police vehicle in front of a school, will deter a shooter. It may, but that SRO inside needs to be highly trained and equipped for active shooters. 

 

As to Uvalde, I don't even know where to start. After Columbine and VT, it’s hard to understand how this could happen. It was without a doubt a total failure of LE until the Border Patrol guys went in. It’s another clear case of failure to act to save lives and protect, and poor or untrained supervision and management. If the officers had active shooter training, why didn't they utilize it? I hate to hear things like: “the officers got shot at, so they stopped and left the building.” Yes, you may get shot at, and you may get hit, but in that circumstance, in my opinion based on my training and experience, they needed to try to fight their way in to save those children.

 

In the Covenant School shooting, the officers did what they were supposed to: they made entry, moved rapidly to the shooter and eliminated the threat. Despite the tragic loss of life, it was a success for LE. But there are still lessons to come from it. If the school would have had trained, armed police or security, they may have stopped the shooter much earlier, just as happened in the Apalachee School shooting in Georgia in September of this year. Despite the outcome of the Parkland, FL shooting, there really is no substitute for having armed, trained police or even security inside a school.

 

BLUE: In looking at all this over the years, how do you see the events at VT in April 2007 and how you/VTPD and Blacksburg handled everything that occurred that day, including your response to the Norris Hall shooting? In hindsight, if the same attack happened today would you do anything different?

 

CURTIS: I think Cho made a horrible error when he committed the first murders. Although it did create somewhat of a diversion, he didn't anticipate the activation and deployment of two SWAT teams. It was clear that command from both BPD and VTPD were actively assessing everything together and making critical decisions. Like Columbine, we encountered something different, a new tactic, something unique in the doors chained from the inside of a building with limited access points and small windows. Responding officers did what anyone would have: they tried to enter through the doors, then changed tactics and found a different way in.

 

As far as actions in Norris Hall, everyone on the teams did exactly what they were trained to do: go directly to the sounds of gunfire, gather intel while moving, and when no shots are being fired, slow down, communicate, search for the gunman, identify and eliminate the threat, then treat and evacuate the wounded.

 

Like so many other cowards, he chose not to engage our team and took the easy way out. I have to remind myself often that the actions of those teams did contain him and forced him to stop shooting. That saved lives.  Many more people were in the building and he had plenty of ammunition. We were fortunate in that we had command staff from both departments that worked well together, we had officers from other departments that trained and worked together. The teams had a mutual understanding of tactics and procedures for dealing with active shooters. As far as what I would do different, I've spent many sleepless nights since 2007 asking myself that same question. Basically, I would have used any means necessary to create an entry point, most likely utilizing a truck or vehicle to try and ram the doors. With the design of the doors and frames at Norris Hall it may not have worked, but looking back, it might have been another option.

BLUE: What should police officers nationwide learn from all of this?

CURTIS: I think what should be learned from VA Tech is when responding to an active shooter, you have to expect the unexpected, and you have to anticipate that you may encounter something that you have never trained for in the past. Departments need to do regular joint training and “what if” the scenarios to death. It needs to be understood that these killers study each other; they study police tactics and responses, and try to find ways to defeat those tactics. Police should be doing the same thing with the attacks that have come, to include terror attacks like the Bataclan Theater shooting in Paris in 2013 or even the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016. The Pulse Nightclub shooting may not have been an actual terror attack, but those two events saw a similar tactic used that police weren’t ready for. But who on the LE – or even government – side is paying attention, studying these things and advancing our training ahead of the next attack? I can tell you, though, that there are a lot of bad guys out there doing that very thing.

While there are many things we should have learned from Columbine and the many school attacks that have happened since, the single overriding lesson is that police cannot delay a single second. Each second lost is a bullet that didn’t have to go into the head of a kid. Though it may be controversial still, that even includes a solo officer going in if backup is not arriving immediately. Under no circumstances can you wait minutes or an hour, as happened with Uvalde. You are a trained, armed adult and this is the calling you answered in life. You may get shot and you may die, but you can fight back. For children inside, they have nothing to fight back with and them dying is a 100% certainty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curtis Cook

 

In addition to his navy and law enforcement service, during his police career Curtis served as an instructor, both in-house and at the police academy, in Firearms, Defensive Tactics, Active Shooter response, Chemical Weapons/OC Spray, SWAT, CQB, Advanced Patrol Tactics and Homeland Security. He has also taught Citizen Emergency Response Team courses and women’s self-defense. After retiring from law enforcementin 2014 with 28 years’ service he worked another two years at the VA Tech Department of Emergency Management.

 

 

 

John Giduck

 

Dr. John Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. His dissertation was on the evolution of jihadist terrorist mass-hostage siege tactics throughout the world. He has trained police departments and SWAT throughout the US. He is the author of Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools; Shooter Down! The Dramatic, Untold Story of the Police Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, along with co-author Police Commissioner Joseph M. Bail; and When Terror Returns: The History and Future of Terrorist Mass-Hostage Sieges. He can be contacted at john@circon.org.

 

 

The Horror of Real Hand-to-Hand Combat

A Case Study From the Ukraine War

By Dr. John Giduck, JD, PhD

All the tactical professions need to enter a new era of reality-based close-quarters battle preparedness. Nowhere is that truer than with American police. Every day police must put their hands on often-resistant suspects, far more than the military does. This translates to the necessity that current defensive tactics (DT) training abandon systems that are more fashion than effectiveness. To not do this, risks the safety and lives of our officers. This reality is a focus of my just-released book 1500 Years of Fighting: The Complete Book of Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet Martial Arts From Cossacks to Spetsnaz and Beyond. It includes a critical analysis of the fighting training of US military, Special Forces and law enforcement (LE) relative to the peerless ability of the Russians who employ systems that began to be developed 15 centuries ago and have been evolved for modern policing and military operations.

On 2 Jan 2025, SOFX posted video footage from a GoPro camera mounted on a Ukrainian soldier’s helmet that documents a hand-to-hand engagement between he and a Russian soldier that concludes with the Ukrainian’s death (https://www.sofx.com/graphic-helmet-footage-captures-intense-hand-to-hand-combat-between-ukraine-and-russian-soldiers/). It reports that this occurred during Ukraine’s autumn offensive against Russia’s Vostok (East) Group in an effort to recapture the village of Trudovoye. The Ukrainian soldier was participating in a clearing operation in the area. There are two video versions on the site. One is 15 minutes long and the other 8:04 in length.

The longer footage begins with Ukrainian drones striking targets in the area that was later cleared by ground forces. The Ukrainian soldier engaged in a firefight, then encountered the Russian combatant. The ability to discern everything that occurs is difficult. I viewed this tape at least a dozen times, slowing it down to quarter-second increments and freezing the frame continuously to determine what exactly occurred in each moment. This is the very combat reality that I address in-depth in 1500 Years of Fighting. In the book I critically examine the most popular martial arts today, and assess the US Army’s adoption of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) techniques vis-à-vis their efficacy in real world hand-to-hand combat scenarios. However, the same is needed for many police departments’ and SWAT teams’ defensive tactics training programs.

Points that are emphasized in the book include never going to your back with an opponent pulled on top of you., unless absolutely necessary. This technique has come to be known as the Gracie Guard and is a favored move in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. With it, you lie on your back with your legs wrapped around a person on top of you. It has proven to be an adequate sport technique seen in the UFC and other MMA events, but it has little application in a true fight with no rules. In that position, as you hug your opponent to you, he is perfectly situated to bite your nose and ears off, amputate your fingers with his teeth, take out pieces of your face and even bite your throat out. The Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) call this “tactical biting”. They are the only people I ever trained with who teach biting as a combat discipline. It is also a position you never want to be in if your opponent might be armed, which is something police must always assume. You also lose the ability to observe or control his access to a knife or gun. He has the advantage of using his bodyweight and gravity against you. Again, this is a fine technique on a flat mat with no obstacles impeding your movements and when rules are being followed. But in battles in war and on the street, there may be debris, rubble, obstructions, other people in your way, cars and the real possibility of your opponent’s friends coming up and joining in, even shooting or stabbing you. All of this happened in this battle. In real life, there are no rules. Fighting is not an “art”, it is all about survival. Another point I make is that if you are training for art, but your enemy is training for war, you are going to lose.

Some of these important lessons can be gleaned from studying the YouTube videos of such events as Officer Karli Travis being attacked by a hammer-wielding man on 12 Aug 2023 and the 27 Jan 2024 Times Square attack on two NYPD officers by a gang of illegal immigrants. The “Russian” hand-to-hand systems have reality-based principles and techniques for dealing with all such violent assaults. Most LE DT systems do not. Although this battle between the two soldiers goes on for a long time relative to most hand-to-hand encounters, or even real-world street fights, it presents a valuable case study for preparing police and soldiers for the worst type of combat.

The following is a step-by-step analysis of this close-quarter fight in the Ukraine War from the eight-minute tape. It is a tough film to watch, even for hardened police officers and combat vets. The audio is garbled and unclear. It took former Soviet Spetsnaz Sergeant Igor Livits using a hi-tech set of headphones and many times through it to be able to report what is said.  I offer this breakdown to help focus everyone’s viewing of it, so no one needs to watch it repeatedly, trying to figure out what is actually taking place. For ease of reading, I will refer to the Ukrainian as Yuri and the Russian as Ruslan.

1:01  Yuri enters through the gate into a rubble-strewn yard.

1:05  Gunfire erupts, Yuri returns fire on the small building he is approaching.

1:34  Yuri has moved up on the building. His right hand is already bloody.

1:37  Yuri is against the building moving to his right. He turns the corner to the left and encounters Ruslan standing on the other side of the corner, who grabs Yuri’s AK, pushing it to his right.

1:38 Ruslan’s helmeted face is clearly seen for the first time. Yuri strikes Ruslan in the face with a left hook.

1:40 - 1:48 The two continue to grapple on their feet. Ruslan appears to bend over and take Yuri to the ground. At 1:47 The two are on the ground. Yuri is on his back with Ruslan on top of him. Whether he fell to his back intentionally, pulling Ruslan on top of him as BJJ trains people, fell  unintentionally or Ruslan pushed him to the ground cannot be determined. Yuri appears to bring his right leg over the back of Ruslan, putting him in at least a half-guard position. When he first hits the ground. Yuri yells, “Baza, Gargon, help!” Baza means ‘base’ and he is clearly calling his command for assistance. Gargon is Yuri’s codename which is Russian/Ukrainian for Gargoyle. No one ever answers or comes. From the beginning of the video to the end the two are saying sexually graphic and profane things to each other. Many cannot even be translated to English.

1:48  Ruslan raises a knife in his left hand and stabs Yuri in a downward arc that appears aimed at Yuri’s neck.

1:49 Yuri attempts to block more knife strikes with his right hand.

2:01 Yuri has something in both hands he appears to be trying to block Ruslan with. From the shape, it could be a canteen, though it is impossible to tell.

2:03 Ruslan’s face appears again. He looks Asian and speculation of some has been that he might be one of the 11,000 North Koreans sent to support the Russians in the war. However, the speech of the two combatants indicates that he is not. Roughly 15% of Russia’s 146 million people are Asian and Russia, itself, straddles Europe and Asia, even sharing a border with China to the south.

2:04  With Ruslan on top of Yuri, the knife is now in his right hand and he raises it then drives it downward. Someone says “Nyet, ne Pravda” which means “No, not true” or “not right.”

2:07  Yuri now has a knife in his right hand and his right leg is again brought around Ruslan in what appears to be a guard or half-guard position.

2:10  Yuri grabs the blade of Ruslan’s knife with his left hand while trying to stab Ruslan with his right-handed knife. Ruslan blocks it with his left hand, grasping Yuri’s wrist.

2:12  Yuri now has a knife in his left hand and raises it to strike. Where that knife came from is not shown.

2:13  Yuri continues to try to stab Ruslan with the knife in his right hand, raising it high in front of the camera to bring down.

2:14-2:15  Yuri raises his knife to stab downward again but his right arm is moved across to his left with Ruslan seemingly blocking the strike. It appears that Yuri has knives in both hands at this point.

2:16 – 2:17 Yuri’s right hand knife moves across his body to the left and attempts to stab Ruslan on his right side.

2:20  Yuri’s right-handed knife appears again, raised up at the far right edge of the screen and stabs downward and slightly to the left.

2:23  Ruslan appears to have his left hand grasping Yuri’s right fist holding the knife, with Ruslan’s right hand holding Yuri’s right wrist. With both of his hands on Yuri’s right knife-hand, he is pushing it away to Yuri’s right.

2:25  Yuri manages to push his right hand over toward his left.

2:26  Ruslan has disarmed Yuri’s right-hand knife as the hand is now empty. Ruslan now raises a knife in his own right hand, and Yuri attempts to block it.

2:27 – 2:28  Yuri grasps the blade of the knife in Ruslan’s right hand with his own left hand, cutting his palm.

2:29  Yuri pushes the knife back and away to his left.

2:33  Yuri continues to hold the blade of Ruslan’s knife.

2:33 – 2:34  Yuri appears to attempt to bring his right leg across Ruslan’s face, possibly attempting an arm bar, but immediately withdraws it. Ruslan raises his knife high and stabs downward.

2:35  Ruslan stabs Yuri again. Yuri grabs Ruslan’s knife hand with both of his own hands.

2:39  Yuri grasps the blade of the knife with his left hand while maintaining hold on Ruslan’s wrist with his own right hand.

2:39 – 3:01  Driving downward with the weight of his body behind it, Ruslan thrusts his  knife into Yuri repeatedly. Struggling continues with Yuri trying to block the knife.

2:46  Ruslan’s knife is pushed down toward Yuri’s left side, his bloodied left hand is clearly visible.

2:49  While continuing to grasp Ruslan’s knife and knife hand, Yuri is repeatedly stabbed by Ruslan using his body weight to drive the knife downward.

2:50 – 4:05  Ruslan breaks free of Yuri’s grasp and continues to stab downward as Yuri attempts to block the strikes. Throughout this time, Yuri continues to yell “Baza” repeatedly in a loud but fading voice.

4:06  A large spurt of blood lands on the ground to the left of Yuri.

4:16  Ruslan reaches out and picks up a sharp pointed pane of glass or thin piece of broken ceramic tile, and begins to stab Yuri with it in his side. At this point, it is presumed Yuri has disarmed the knife from Ruslan’s right hand.

4:27 Ruslan drops the shard to the left of Yuri, as Ruslan says “You fuck me, off with your fingers” and locks his teeth into the right hand of Yuri that is now holding a knife. Both combatants’ hands are bloody. Yuri says, “I hate you.”

4:57 The two are talking to each other, but Ruslan continues to raise his knife high to drive down into Yuri.

5:13  Yuri tries to reach his right hand across his body toward the ground on his left side. What he may be reaching for is not in view.

5:20 – 5:50  Yuri continues trying to block the knife in Ruslan’s hand.

5:56  Ruslan is stabbing Yuri again.

5:57  Ruslan plants his right foot out to Yuri’s left side, securing better leverage for stabbing.

6:00  Ruslan moves into a side mount position on Yuri’s left side. From the audio, another Russian appears to move up behind Ruslan, though the video does not show him. A third voice says, “Let him go, I want it too.”

6:20  Yuri’s left hand is holding Ruslan’s right arm with a grip inside his elbow.

6:45  In the final minutes of the video, he continues to yell: “Base, base, base, base.” Yuri says, “That’s all, Mama, goodbye.”

6:48  Ruslan sits upright, disengaging. Yuri’s left hand is grasping the top (collar) of Ruslan’s tactical vest, while they continue talking. The fight appears to be ending.

7:17  Yuri lets go of Ruslan’s vest, dropping his hand.

7:19  Ruslan stands up and walks away. Yuri’s breathing is labored.

7:58  Yuri’s head falls to the left.

8:04  Video ends.

In the verbal exchange between the two combatants after the fight, Yuri told Ruslan, “Don’t try to help me, let me die quietly, please leave. Thank you.” Ruslan responded, “You fought great,” to which Yuri replied: “Thank you. Goodbye. You were the best fighter.” 

The fight went from 1:37 to 6:48, fully five minutes fourteen seconds.

In sum, the hand-to-hand battle begins with both on their feet, just as all fights typically start. One person goes to – or ends up on – his back. But he is close to a wall, with debris all around making maneuvering difficult to impossible. Both opponents draw knives and stab the other, though the top person has the advantage of bodyweight, gravity and leverage. The bottom person uses the Gracie Guard, but it is not sufficient to overcome the top man’s advantages. Contrary to BJJ principles, Russian hand-to-hand experts do not believe the bottom person utilizing the guard is in the superior position. They say that it is still an inferior or defensive position or, at best, a neutral one. The attempt at an arm bar from the bottom is unsuccessful. The top person utilizes an improvised weapon with which to stab his opponent when he loses his knife, demonstrating another main tactic of Russian training. The top person also uses Russian tactical biting and at one point a second threat appears (although does not take a role). In the end, far too many stabs from the top person results in the death of the bottom man.

The reality of this and other situations prove the vulnerability of the popular BJJ technique of fighting from one’s back. Mike Scales, a former US Army NCO and black belt, who is also Jiu Jitsu-trained, says, “When you have gear on and in a situation like that, there are a whole lot of things that are going to trip you up and get you caught on. From the top position, you have greater ability to move and can use your bodyweight and gravity against your opponent.

Retired Virginia Tech SWAT leader Curtis Cook, who led his team into the massacre in Norris Hall in 2007, concludes by saying this film clearly demonstrates “the will to fight to survive.” When he was SWAT commander, he “saw the need for more advanced training beyond basic defensive tactics that were being taught in the academy. I wanted our team to be able to fight in full gear, with a weapon and against multiple attackers. This included weapons retention and delivering strikes and kicks while moving through a target. I also stressed if you are knocked to the ground, you fight to get back up. I’m not a fan of wrestling in full gear with weapons to try and get an arm bar on a suspect, but I do see a need for some practical ground fighting techniques.”

Matt Adams is a career SWAT leader and trainer, but also holds multiple black belts and is a former international bare knuckle karate competitor. He observed:

Once the Ukrainian winds up or goes to his back, he cannot get out of the position. One, he can't slide across the ground like you can on a mat which is making it difficult for him to pull off an escape. Two, he's fighting a real person that's trying to kill him. It's great to know how to counter an attack on the ground but it isn't so simple as BJJ people want to believe. It's not as easy as securing the weapon, slide out and reverse. The guy is actually trying to kill you while you're doing this. Three, the Russian does the unthinkable as far as sport combatives: he bites. And draws blood while doing it. The Ukrainian stayed in the fight. He never gave up, but exhaustion and blood loss were taking their toll as it wore on. Neither could get a grip on anything because the blood was making everything slick.

Retired Marine and former Penn State wrestler Lt. Col. Joe Bierly adds: “Just note the ‘terrain’.  Not a flat gym floor….piles of rubble everywhere. Your stance becomes even more critical.” Russian Systema master, Jiu Jitsu black belt and trainer of two European Special Forces groups, Kevin Secours agrees with others in saying:

I don’t know that he so much went to his back as fell on his back. Ground fighting is a reality. I’ve been on both sides of this before, sometimes against multiple attackers. The Ukrainian had a lot of gear and the ground was terribly cluttered. That is why the old combat-oriented Japanese Jiu Jitsu material had less hip escapes and movement than BJJ depends on. Sad reality of war. This fight could have gone either way. It definitely reinforces why we don’t want to volunteer for the ground, but also shows the necessity of training it because it happens. Most importantly it shows how long these encounters can last.

Police Chief Dr. Ron Camacho, a former SWAT leader and Russian hand-to-hand combat practitioner, agrees, adding: Often “there are still rules to street fights here in the US. The exception is when someone goes overboard. There are often people around trying to break up fights or running to call the police. So, while seeing BJJ successfully used in a war zone would be incredibly rare and possibly foolish, there is a place for it where ‘rules’ still hold true. It is easy to learn and especially valuable with this new crop of officers, many of whom have never been in a fight. It is an expedient method to give our new officers some tools for their toolbox. The best practice is to combine BJJ with other techniques, such as disarms, strikes, and other defensive moves.” 

 But there are times when, for many reasons, it is not going to work even in a civilian environment. That dictates not having an over-reliance on grappling, and definitely not fighting from one’s back. As emphasized in 1500 Years of Fighting, in my Russian martial arts gym we used to train this very situation a lot, including having someone in your guard or in the mount on you, with one or two others coming to kick you in the head or stab you, even as the person in your guard stabbed you. Another point I stress in the book, was that in my time in Russia they taught great grappling skills, and then trained you to use those skills to avoid ever ending up on the ground, especially on your back. Australian security professional Simon Luciow, another Russian hand-to-hand expert who trained extensively with the Spetsnaz in Russia, agrees with the vulnerabilities of being on your back. “Going to your back in a real conflict, just guarding up someone for a long time, isn’t going to work when everything bad happens in the first minute, and the other person has something to cut you with.”

A currently serving Green Beret who reviewed this video, said to me that BJJ might be the best sport fighting style, but has little application in real-world hand-to-hand. Part of that is due to their lack of focus in dealing with knives and handguns. He explained:

Many of those who carry knives don't understand that people don’t die after one stab and are seldom even incapacitated. Knife fights can go on for a surprising amount of time. Here, they stabbed the absolute shit out of each other and still had the strength and will to continue on. When we teach the ‘kill class’ and explain the anatomy of how to kill someone we explain ‘switches’ and ‘timers’. Switches turn things off immediately (whether it is life, paralysis of parts of the body, or sight) and then timers are strikes that bleed the enemy out (whether slow or fast bleed out).

Medical research shows that even if a heart is completely cut out, the person can continue to function for some time. The brain continues to think and act. This can go on for up to a few minutes even, until the brain and other organs finally lose all oxygen due to the lack of blood circulation. However, this elite soldier echoes the others in saying: “While I do agree that going to your back should be avoided during hand-to-hand combat (especially in a CQB situation), it is a reality that you may end up on your back and need to figure that problem out, so it should be trained but not be considered the standard.”

Former Spetsnaz, Igor Livits, says that the problem with applying modern Jiu Jitsu to combat, is that they do not effect offensive takedowns followed by controlling the opponent on the ground and only then look to eliminate him through submissions, chokes or the use of a knife or handgun. This is the tactic of Russian SAMBO, but he points out that even sport wrestlers are more capable at this than Jiu Jitsu practitioners. This is also exactly what the Russian did in this fight with the Ukrainian. All of this is as true for police as soldiers in combat.

This gets us to two sets of principles for combat the Russian Special Forces reinforce relentlessly, and that American police can benefit from keeping always in mind. The first are the psychological commitments needed to survive a fight to the death:

1. Comfort with pain;
2. Comfort with proximity;
3. Commitment to total violence; and,
4. Commitment to total victory.

In this instance, the Russian appeared to have all four. The second set articulates the assumptions you must always make when engaging in a reality fight:

1. Assume your enemy is stronger, faster and better trained;
2. Assume your enemy has multiple weapons hidden on his body;
3. Assume you must deal with more than one attacker; and,
4. Assume that there are witnesses and at least one person has a camera (today everyone does).

These are all important rules for American police to keep in mind and apply at all times to ensure they get to go home at the end of the day. Beyond that, videos of this fight and other events are crucial to study to focus police officers’ training for realistic battle and survival.

Postscript: It was later learned the Russian soldier was Andrey Grigoryev from Yakutia. He was awarded the Gold Star - Hero of the Russian Federation, Russia's highest award for valor. The Ukrainian soldier has not been identified. 

Dr. John Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. His dissertation was on the evolution of jihadist terrorist mass-hostage siege tactics throughout the world. He has trained police departments and SWAT throughout the US. His latest book, 1500 Years of Fighting, can be found on Amazon. He is also the author of Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools (listed by Police1 as one of the top 15 all-time must-read books for police); Shooter Down! The Dramatic, Untold Story of the Police Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, along with co-author Police Commissioner Joseph M. Bail; and When Terror Returns: The History and Future of Terrorist Mass-Hostage Sieges. He can be contacted at john@circon.org.

The officer can feel the adrenaline racing through his veins at the same time his patrol car races toward the school, lights and sirens slicing the previously peaceful morning.  The dispatcher had struggled to keep her voice steady, telling him they were receiving numerous reports of gunfire in the hallways, of children lying in pools of blood.

The young cop runs his response through his head, trying to calm himself, ready himself for battle.  He had been well schooled in Active Shooter protocols.  But what would he confront?  What must he be ready for, and did his training adequately prepare him for the broad spectrum of possible tactical threats to the children he swore to protect?

Make no mistake, America’s schools are under siege.  But few realize the entire spectrum of extreme tactical threats that they face, and that our law enforcement officers must be prepared to respond to.  Simply teaching schools to “lock down” in response to every threat is insufficient.  As well, the tactical spectrum is so wide that merely offering our rescuers the two options of going in (Active Shooter), or holding and securing (Stable Barricade Scenario) are just as insufficient.  As with any problem, the key to not only preparing for it, but resolving it when confronted, is knowledge.  With this knowledge comes the recognition that all three levels of LE-school response – SROs, patrol and SWAT – must develop joint tactics, as they will all be involved.  Anyone with a terrorist mindset understands the value of attacking kids in schools.  Whether our own homegrown child shooters, adults or trained al Qaeda terrorists, they all understand that nothing brings more fame, or devastates a community and a nation better, than the killing of its children.

Single Student Shooter.  The lowest level of extreme tactical threat (X-Tac) to schools is the single student school shooter.  This applies to high school age children and below.  With this age group, the shooter will only attack his own school, or schools below his grade, but never above.  You will not see a high school student attacking a college, nor a middle school age kid attacking a high school.  Though the variables in human nature ensure exceptions to any rule, the lack of maturity and sophistication of shooters at the different levels of the X-Tac Spectrum provide a fairly predictable model.  At these ages, children are too intimidated by older kids, and nature’s rule of child socialization would render it almost impossible psychologically for a child to attack a school full of older students.  That, coupled with the fact that few children would have a reason to attack a higher school, allows officers to presume that lone kids in a school are attacking their own, or a lower grade school; most likely one they left the year before.

At this age, the student shooter may have put together some rudimentary explosives, but will not have the resources to carry many into the school.  He will be heavily armed, however.  Due to his status as a lone attacker, he will not be able to control his target victim population, but will move through hallways, engaging targets of opportunity.  Where he can breach a room, he will do so and engage what targets present themselves before moving on.  Given the option of schools to attack, he will have perfect intelligence on the emergency response plan, and will have factored that response into his attack.  Though no one has yet attacked a school with an armed police officer present, at some point a student will decide to increase his fame by doing so.  He will know the SRO is the first tactical hurdle he must overcome.  He will likely have made a recent attempt to develop a relationship with that SRO, so that his approach will not alert the officer to possible danger.  The same will occur in the next two higher levels of the tactical threat spectrum.  Though the recent example of Virginia Tech (VT) will have left this shooter wanting to fortify the building prior to his attack, his solitary status, size of the school, and ubiquitous presence of students, will make that difficult, allowing easy entry by police.

Low Multiple Student Shooters.  The next more difficult X-Tac will involve only two or three shooters at the high school level and below.  Their target selection will be limited in the same way as the single shooter.  Due to age, immaturity, psychological co-dependency and limited numbers, these shooters will not separate.  They may use their numbers to better control and assail groups of victims in rooms, but will otherwise fail to control their target population, moving through hallways and delighting in the predatory response to fleeing prey.  At this X-Tac level, the presence of numerous explosives is greater, as happened at Columbine where Kleibold and Harris had built 90 devices.  Also, with these numbers, and with the example of Cho at VT to guide them in tactics, they may attempt to secure major points of egress (main external doors), and drive their victims in that direction.  At this level, as with the single shooter, LE can employ Active Shooter responses, and with the exception of concern over IEDs, move quickly past rooms and areas that are unsecured, in the direction of the gunfire.

High Multiple Student Shooters.  These attacks will be launched by kids in the same age groups, but will involve four to eight shooters.  This was seen in 2006 in Kansas where an attack was prevented involving five kids; and one week later in Alaska, where six teenagers were prevented from assaulting their school.  It is highly unlikely that LE would ever confront more than eight.  Due to maturity levels and typical group dynamics among children and teenagers,  at numbers above eight, one will be ostracized by the group, or will otherwise get cold feet and report the planned shooting.  The greatest tactical hurdles for LE at this level, however, are the presence of significant numbers of IEDs, efforts to secure and fortify major points of egress (external doors), and, most importantly, the recognition of the advantages of dividing their forces.  With Low Multiple Shooters, they cannot split up without at least one youth being on his own, which is unlikely. 

With numbers of four and above, our own teenagers will eventually recognize that separating into two or three teams will yield them a substantially increased body count.  They will follow a standard military hammer and anvil attack plan, or as is often described, having the hounds move to the hunters, with the quarry driven ahead of them.  At this X-Tac level, they may also use one team to ambush arriving police officers. It is here that standard Active Shooter doctrine increases the threat to the first entry team, and they must be careful of moving past areas that have not been cleared and secured.  For any Hasty Team that is assembled, the rear guard position becomes critical to the team’s survival.  If intel on the shooters is sparse en route to the school, all LE must assume that they are confronting this number of attackers in responding to any school assault and maintain excellent rear security. 

Young Adult Single Shooter.  Here the attacker would most likely be a college student, a recent college dropout, or possibly a recent high school dropout, as with the killer in Erfurt, Germany who killed 17, including a law enforcement officer.  Though the number of assailants is dramatically reduced at this X-Tac level, the threat to victims and LE may actually be greater.  At this age the attacker benefits from increased maturity, greater intellectual sophistication, and better tactical planning.  Statistically, this is also the age where increasing numbers of Americans begin exhibiting symptoms of severe depression and paranoid schizophrenia, and evidence indicates that may have been the case with Seung-Hui Cho at VT; just as thousands of students at colleges across the country suffer from the same mental afflictions.  Shooters at this level will be very well planned, armed, trained, and emotionally disengaged from their victims.  As young adults living away from home, they will have had enhanced opportunities to purchase any manner of weapons and ammunition, train at gun ranges, and use their increased sophistication to research and develop tactics and fortifications that will make rapid LE response almost impossible. 

By this age the shooters may have had a decade of immersion in violent video games; excellent training for an attack (see Dave Grossman’s books On Killing, On Combat and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, along with his Bullet Proof Mind series.).  Coupled with their likely mental illness, police will be confronted with a cold, well programmed, killing machine, whose only emotion may be rage.  The main advantage with these shooters, is the fact that due to their disenfranchisement with society and even others their own age, it would be unlikely they would team up with anyone.  At none of the X-Tac levels up to and including this point, would it be likely that the assailants would take and hold hostages.  At these levels arriving officers will be confronted with indicia of an Active Shooter scenario: they will hear gunshots, see students in windows calling out to them, students jumping from windows, and other victims streaming out of doors.  But at this level, if a college age student chooses to attack his former high school, or a high school student or dropout chooses to attack his former middle school, holding hostages for a short time before “going active” is possible.

Adult Single Shooter.  As the age of attackers increases, so does the planning and preparation.  As well, so does the ease of taking life.  For LE, this means the level of threat, and the tactical difficulty they confront, will increase proportionately. Here, as with the Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado, and Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania in 2006, you have an increased probability of older attackers holding hostages for a time before going active.  At this level, and that of the college age shooter in a high school, responding officers cannot ever afford to believe that they have a stable barricade situation.  Officers and commanders must understand that they are responding to a Pre-Active Shooter scenario.  It will go active at any time, often with no warning, just as happened at Nickel Mines.  Keep in mind that this will not be similar to a bank or convenience store robbery: where the robbers were only there for money, but rapid police response upended their plan.  In the vast majority of those situations, the presence of SWAT and negotiators result in the robbers surrendering with no one getting hurt.  But when these adults go into schools with guns, there is no reason for them to be there but the deaths of children. 

In Adult Shooter situations, the assailant will go through all six phases of the Islamist Mass Hostage Siege Model,* though they will move through them very quickly.  Fortifications will have been quickly assembled, but sufficient to make many standard LE and SWAT entries difficult, if not impossible, given the short period of time they will have to enter with hostages being shot or blown up.  After chaining the three public entry doors to Norris Hall, Cho managed to discharge 204 rounds in approximately nine minutes, killing or wounding 55.  Only a high speed police response prevented him from firing the other 174 rounds he had in magazines on his person.  At Nickel Mines, Charles Carl Roberts needed only seconds to pull the trigger ten times on little girls, compared to the rapid two and one-half minutes it took Pennsylvania State Police SRT teams to breach a heavily fortified building.  Even Duane Morrison’s threat that he had a large bomb in the Bailey school, and the stacking of chairs and desks between himself and the classroom door, making it difficult for the entry team to move quickly toward him while he used 16-year old Emily Keyes as a human shield, constituted sufficient fortifications to make a rescue difficult. 

No matter how fast LE is responding or breaching, you can anticipate one round being discharged by the Adult Shooter every second or two (three at the most) into the controlled hostage group.  The reality is that innocent people are going to be killed, or at least wounded.  Whether you wait until the attacker begins shooting hostages to initiate your rescue, or dictate your own assault schedule, you must expect that there are going to be victims.  The only advantage, is that at this level you will not see more than a single adult assailant, unless part of a trained terrorist team, as described below.

Multiple Terrorist Decimation Assault.  This will be tactically identical to the High Multiple Student Shooter scenario, with the exception that it will be conducted by a coordinated team of better trained, better armed, adult attackers.  The “active” assault against the students and teachers in the building will dictate an immediate attack by arriving law enforcement.  The terror team will have prepared ambushes for arriving officers.  This attack will only end when the terrorists have been killed by police.  An attack of this nature in America is less likely than a Terrorist-Mass Hostage siege stretched out over days.

Multiple Terrorist-Mass Hostage Siege.    This is the worst and, therefore, most tactically difficult.  Here you will be dealing with a team (anticipate at least ten) of well trained, heavily armed adults who will have been conditioned to not only kill as many innocents as possible, but as many cops as they can.  They will intend to die inside the building, and will keep killing innocents until police kill them.  Before that, the assailants will attempt to drag the standoff out for a period of days.  Al Qaeda and related groups know all about Active Shooter responses of American LE agencies, and will ensure that the first cop to arrive on scene will be confronted with a cold, dead, quiet building.  There will be none of the indicators of an Active Shooter situation.  What hostages were going to escape will have already done so.  All of the others will be controlled in a single collection point, most likely a gym, auditorium or cafeteria. 

The first officer on site will see several large vehicles, with engines running, parked just outside the front doors.  Most likely this will include at least one school bus.  If there is an SRO in the building, they – like all of the Low and High Multiple Student Shooters, Young Adult and Adult Shooters – will have to eliminate that officer first.  They know that if arriving officers hear a single gunshot, the police are going in, and will keep pouring cops into the building until the battle is over.  In that event, American LE would effectively be following the Israeli model for dealing with mass hostage takings: Attack right away no matter what.  This means SROs must be sufficiently armed with both weapons and ammunition, equipped with adequate body armor, and trained, to stay alive to keep firing so that arriving LE assaults immediately.  To wait until the terrorists want the assault to come, is to ensure a greater body count of hostages and police.    

From the arrival of the first officer on scene, throughout the days of the siege, they will make it easy for American LE to not attack; until the terrorists are ready for the battle.  They will negotiate until all of their goals have been met, which will not include a peaceful surrender.  The earliest point at which negotiations will end, however, will be when fortifications have been completed.  At that point, if SWAT has not already launched a rescue operation, the terrorists will begin the mass execution of hostages, compelling police to attack.  When the rescue comes, police should anticipate a large number of explosives fortifying the building, in addition to heavy firepower.  Be ready for them to wire bombs to hostages, and even to place young females wearing suicide belts or vests, in among the hostages.  When it is over, all of the terrorists will be dead; they will allow no other result.  Some of the hostages will have died.  As well, tragically, some of the police will likely not be going home that night. 

Whether al Qaeda ever attempts to attack U.S. schools, we have not seen the last of the schools shootings and hostage takings in this country.  It is due to the broad spectrum of extreme tactical threats to schools – and the varied tactical hurdles that LE confronts – that SROs, patrol and SWAT teams must develop tactics that will be used in tandem during an actual attack.  Schools must be taught what is expected of them, including what intel must be communicated to police immediately.  Tactics must be developed, or modified, to deal with these various scenarios.  Knowledge is, indeed, power.  But it is only powerful when used to prepare for the problems that American law enforcement will continue to face in her schools.

The following are the phases of a terrorist Mass-Hostage Siege

1. Attack on the building;
2. Submission and Control of Hostages – may include some initial murders to stun hostages;
3. Fortifications – will begin early on and may continue throughout Negotiations;
4. Stabilization – will show LE a stable scene so that they do not attempt rescue right away;
5. Negotiations – used by terrorists to gain time for both media access and to fortify building;
6. Rescue – may be forced by terrorists at time of their choosing through the beginning of the mass execution of hostages.

This article was published in JEMS (Journal of Emergency Medical Services) Supplement to its Oct 2008 issue.  The supplement was entitled:  “The War on Trauma: Lessons Learned From A Decade of Conflict.”

 

The article, in unedited form and written by John Giduck, was published under the title:  “Terror In America’s Schools: The Need To Prepare First Responders To Defend Our Nation’s Children.”

 

America is a nation at war. That is a reality, not political rhetoric. And some of the battles in that war are going to be fought on American soil—in our communities, among our homes and loved ones. Our enemy has promised us that some of those battles will be fought in our schools as our children are captured, tortured and even killed.

Yet for all their courage and desire to be at the forefront of every battle, such battles will not be fought exclusively by our brave men and women in military uniform. As I explained in my book, “Terror at Beslan,” most, if not all, of these battles will be fought by our law enforcement officers in conjunction with fire/rescue and EMS personnel willing to throw themselves into harm’s way.¹ Thus, we must not delude ourselves when asking just where those battles will take place, or what they will be like when they occur. We must be prepared.

Terror targets can be categorized in a number of ways. There are high-, medium- and low-value strategic targets; high-, medium- and low-value tactical targets; critical infrastructure targets; government, law enforcement and military targets; psychological and emotional targets; financial and economic targets; and even symbolic targets. Though they had tremendous psychological and economic side effects, the Twin Towers were primarily symbolic targets to the enemy, representing American economic hegemony throughout the Muslim world.

            There are countless terror targets in America. For this reason, we must understand the targets terrorists are most likely to strike, and develop plans to respond to those attacks. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiled a list of 7,000 of the most “high risk” sites for terror attack.² But even that does not begin to acknowledge the many thousands more that are not only predictably attractive to terrorists, but are the very types of targets that have been attacked by this same enemy countless times around the world. Indeed, in developing its 7,000-site terror target list, DHS included merely 100 of the nation’s 3,400 drinking water facilities that store large amounts of chlorine gas; if any of these facilities were attacked, the gas stored could result in harm to, or the deaths of, 1,000 or more people.² Worse still: There isn’t a single elementary, middle or high school on that list.

 

Why Schools?

When anyone with a terrorist mindset is deciding what type of attack to launch, they typically have two essential options: Decimation Assault or Mass-Hostage Siege. Decimation Assaults are much more frequent, easier to plan and execute, and can usually yield all the results the terrorists seek with the majority of targets. That is, they need only send suicide bombers into a site, or plant explosives in advance of actual detonation. By simply bombing most physical targets, they accomplish this objective. By blowing up innocent people on streets, in transportation hubs and modes, and small-to-medium-size public venues (e.g., bars, restaurants and markets), terrorists achieve some terror, but it doesn’t have a long-lasting impact.

In Israel, for instance, when these attacks occur, they are cleaned up immediately. Within hours, damage to buildings is repaired, streets are scrubbed clean, sidewalks are bleached and the bodies are buried by nightfall. For the enemy, the terror impact isn’t significant, largely due to the fact that the body count is not high.  The attacks on 9/11 were a Hybrid or Synergistic Attack, as weaponized aircraft became the terrorists’ explosive devices. They needed only to deliver those weapons to their intended targets, but to accomplish that, they had to take, hold and control a relatively large number of hostages, along the lines of a mass-hostage siege.

However, when seeking to cause the greatest psychological, emotional and lifestyle impact on an entire nation, through the deaths of large numbers of the most innocent, no target offers terrorists as much impact as the killing of children. Terrorists have learned that when you first take and hold large numbers of children hostage, you, in fact, hold an entire nation hostage. Should terrorists come to America and take more than 1,000 of our children and women hostage as they did at Beslan Middle School No. 1 in southern Russia in September 2004, all of America would hold its collective breath through the days of that siege, terrified of the end they knew was certain to come. Holding innocents hostage over long periods of time exponentially increases the terror impact on not only the target government and the citizens of that country, but of that nation’s allies.

Whether Decimation Assaults or Mass-Hostage Sieges, children and schools rate high among the most prolific terror targets in the world. Israel first experienced its own Beslan over the night of May 15 to 16, 1974, when terrorists took and held 105 children and five adults in a school in the town of Ma’a lot, near the Syrian border. When the battle to retake the school was over, 26 children were dead and 56 others wounded. Another school was taken in Bovennsmilde, Holland, in May 1977. Between 1984 and 1993 more than 300 schools were attacked in Turkey, ultimately resulting in that country having to close down more than 3,000 schools. In the first six months of 2006 alone, 204 schools were attacked in Afghanistan, at a time when U.S. and NATO troops were at their peak control of that country. Many more have been attacked since then. The number of schools being attacked in Pakistan is rising, as well as in Indonesia and Iraq. All of the schools in three southern districts of Thailand have been closed due to Syrian-trained terrorists attacking them, children, teachers and principals in recent years. When I was working there in early 2008 they held a conference for all teachers and administrators in an effort to get the schools reopened.  More than a half dozen bombs were detonated at and around the hotel, and eight of those attending murdered within two weeks of its conclusion.  The list goes on.

Famed military and law enforcement trainer Lt. Col. Dave Grossman stresses repeatedly that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. From its own past behavior, our enemy has not only learned the great value of children in schools as an optimal terror target, but has told us what they may yet do to an America that has gone back to sleep since 9/11. Usama bin Laden has stated on prior occasions that before this jihad is over he will see to the deaths of four million American citizens, including two million American children, and that they are not only viable but noble targets.  This exists on Web sites to this day, including the following statement by bin Laden spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith in May 2002: We have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many, and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.  Today, as a result of U.S. conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan, reports have been received that the terrorists have increased those numbers as high as 15 million Americans including 10 million American children.

For this reason, there is much to be gained from studying previous attacks. Anyone with a terrorist mindset sees the value in attacking children in schools. Whether dealing with a strategic-level attack by al Qaeda or similar international terrorist groups, or our own terror-minded citizens who crave revenge on an uncaring society for all the wrongs done them in their lives—real or imagined—they all come to recognize the value of attacking children.

When you must hold and control an exponentially greater number of hostages, no one is easier to do it with than children. And when terrorists ultimately seek to kill a large number of hostages, no one is easier to kill than children. No segment of society would have the emotional and psychological impact on all of America as dead children, for no culture can withstand the decimation of its young.

And there is no other place in America than schools where large numbers of children can be found, relatively unprotected, through long periods of the year and where schedules are easy to obtain through even rudimentary intelligence gathering efforts (most are on school Web sites).

 

Learning from the Past

In examining just the most recent significant school attacks in America, we can glean valuable lessons. Though the attack on the school in Beslan may well be the worst thing imaginable, right now our enemy is imagining an attack quite a bit worse than even that.

Attacks on schools can and will take place on a variety of levels for both our tactical operators and medic/rescuers. For instance, lower-level school attacks by our own student shooters and adults in recent years may well approximate the homegrown, individually motivated terrorist attacks al Qaeda is seeking to inspire in every one of the 2-plus million Muslims in America. Therefore, it is important to look at some of the more significant recent attacks that our enemy is even now studying, and looking to outpeform.

I have encountered many school administrators who say that they don’t have to worry about Beslan happening at their schools. They point out that there were more than 100 bombs there and that was only possible because Beslan sat on the edge of a war zone. In reaching such a conclusion, however, they are ignoring the intel on one of the more devastating attacks America has already experienced.

Most people in our country are familiar with some aspects of the attack on Columbine High School in Colorado, committed by Dylan Kleibold and Eric Harris on April 20, 1999. What many do not know: In that attack, two untrained teenage assaulters manufactured and dragged more than 90 explosives to the school. The majority of the bombs did not explode, due to an error they made in the use of a certain type of watchface as a timed detonator.

And while most school administrators and teachers do not know what that mistake was, they must recognize that all students who have ever contemplated launching a Columbine-style attack—and all of the terrorists considering the same thing—do know what Kleibold and Harris did wrong. Each of them will ensure that mistake is not repeated.

The body count at Columbine resulted in modifications in law enforcement response tactics throughout the country. “Active Shooter” responses by police since that time have resulted in many school attacks being quickly stopped before the shooters could amass a Columbine-level toll in human life. But nothing about Active Shooter response addresses the holding of children hostage.

In two of the more recent attacks in America, we have seen adults entering schools, intent on holding hostages, sexually assaulting young girls and ultimately killing students in buildings that should be sanctuaries from harm. On Sept. 27, 2006, Duane Morrison entered Room 206 in Platte Canyon High School in bucolic Bailey, Colo. He held hostage seven young ladies, brutally sexually assaulting all of them over a 4-hour period, before his threats to blow up the building forced a law enforcement entry that resulted in the death of 16-year-old Emily Keyes and himself.

Just five days later, on Oct. 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts walked into a one-room Amish school building in tiny Nickel Mines, Pa. He drove everyone out of the building but 10 young girls, all of whom were bound by their feet and made to lie shoulder to shoulder beneath the blackboard. He, too, had come to sexually abuse children before killing them. Shortly after the arrival of the Pennsylvania State Police, he began shooting into those defenseless girls. At the sound of the first shot, police raced to the building and attempted immediate entry, where they encountered lumber Roberts had nailed over the doors and windows. The police fought desperately to gain entry; one state trooper tore out all his fingernails trying to rip wood away. Breaching the building took a little more than 2 minutes—rapid entry in light of the fortifications encountered. But Roberts needed merely 8 seconds to discharge 13 rounds into the 10 girls, killing five and leaving one brain damaged.

Seung-Hui Cho had the advantage of seeing all of this in the half-year prior to his attack on the Virginia Tech campus. In each attack, the tactics and fortifications of the assailant were better than the ones that had come before. At the Bailey, Colorado school, Morrison had packed the space between the door and himself—30 feet across the room—with all of the desks and chairs. He held Emily Keyes in front of him as a human shield while police fought their way through the jumbled furniture, not daring to take a thin-margin shot from such a distance. One week later, Roberts’ fortifications were even better. Cho improved on them both.

At Virginia Tech, Cho selected Norris Hall in part because it was one of the few remaining buildings whose doors had the old-style swing bars, rather than the solid push bars found in buildings today. This enabled him to simply loop chain through the bars and secure them with locks, thereby easily trapping his prey in the building, as well as fortifying it against law enforcement entry.

As with the two prior school incidents, law enforcement fought to gain entry, ultimately blowing the deadbolt lock out of another door with a shotgun slug. Contrary to news reports, from the moment of the breaching round, it took the entry teams merely 28 seconds to maneuver through a large and complex machine shop, race around a corner and down a short hall into a recessed staircase (while a second team raced all the way down a 40-yard corridor to the next set of stairs), and reach the second floor, forcing Cho take his own life.

Even then, the carnage was so great the police would not initially accept that there had been only one shooter. While attempting to secure the students against further attack, they and two tactical medics began providing medical care to the dozens of affected students and teachers. In all, 30 innocent people perished, with another 25 suffering wounds and injuries. This, in addition to the two lives Cho took earlier that morning in a distant dormitory.

 

Beslan Stands Alone

My own experience with school attacks is greater than I would like it to be. Two of our organization’s founding directors led the investigation into Columbine; I know dozens of the police and SWAT team members and leaders who responded to that attack. I was asked to the Bailey, Colorado school to conduct an assessment of the law enforcement response immediately after the siege ended. I know two of the Pennsylvania State Police SRT team members and leaders at Nickel Mines, and had coincidentally been nearby training the York City SWAT team when the shooting took place, enabling me to contact the operators to understand what they had confronted. And when Virginia Tech happened, I was asked to travel there immediately with a small team of top law enforcement professionals to begin an in-depth assessment. I was inside Norris Hall; I saw the remnants of the damage Cho inflicted.

But as bad as Norris Hall was, it was not the worst either I, or the world, had ever seen, for the tragic title of “the worst school attack” belongs to Beslan, Russia. In fact Virginia Tech was exactly one-tenth of the devastation of Beslan.  The time I’d spent working and studying in Russia every year for almost two decades—including annual time spent over 13 years with Russian Special Forces units (spetsnaz)—proved invaluable to helping me gain entry into the school immediately after the battle ended. I debriefed dozens of soldiers, government officials and townspeople.

 

Beslan Facts

At Beslan, 49 terrorists took more than 1,200 mostly women and children hostage at approximately 9:00 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2004 (the first day of school in Russia). Hostages were brutalized in ways that are almost unspeakable. Children were beaten savagely; older teenage girls were raped, some repeatedly, through the days of the siege. Several fathers were murdered immediately in the gym where the hostages were originally massed, and another 21 of the largest adult males and older teenage boys were shot to death. Many of their bodies were dumped out a second-story window to rot in the sun.

The Beslan terrorists brought upward of 200 explosives into the school. Many were placed in the gym where the majority of hostages were held throughout the siege. Others were spread throughout the school, with numerous booby traps set in the hallways. Other groups of children were held in separate rooms amidst bombs designed to kill them when a rescue attempt ultimately came. Three belt-fed machine guns (two PKM 7.62mm machine guns and one PKT (7.62mm) free standing tank turret machinegun) were set up in the 80-yard-long main corridors on the first and second floors. These corridors were barely 8 feet wide, similar to the tight confines of the hallway in Norris Hall at Virginia Tech.

When exploding bombs in the gym forced the rescue 2 ½ days later, terrorists were standing children up in windows as human shields while they fired indiscriminately into both fleeing hostages and rescuers racing in the other direction, toward the school. The spetsnaz couldn’t fire at the terrorists for fear of hitting the children. This was repeated inside the building throughout the 10-plus-hour gun battle to retake the school. In the northern courtyard, the military moved up two BTR 80s (wheeled armored personnel carriers) into the northern courtyard to provide cover for advancing teams, and to protect wounded and rescued hostages while being evacuated.

Avenues into the southern courtyard were too narrow to permit vehicles large enough to have provided any benefit at all, leaving hostages and soldiers alike to fend for themselves out in the open. Inside the building, the special forces had to contend with several series of fighting positions staggered throughout the long corridors, tripwires and booby traps, and the three belt-fed machine guns in hard fighting positions with children stood up before them to slow down the attack of the soldiers.

Even as the battle raged in different parts of the school, many of the more than 700 wounded hostages were evacuated under fire. With more than 300 additional hostages ultimately dying, the demands were overwhelming on the soldiers, medics and even townspeople to provide critical lifesaving care to all of those affected by bullets, bombs, ceilings collapsing in several places including the entire gym roof caving in, and fire. In addition, 21 elite special forces soldiers were killed and more than 60 wounded.

 

Preparing for the Worst

The mass chaos and tactical needs presented by major incidents of this type has yielded a valuable model for preparedness and training. If studied and applied, it should ultimately ensure that those lives were not lost in vain. Certainly, the recent attacks on U.S. schools have provided important realizations about the need to prepare for such attacks.

The one consistency with all people possessed of a terror mindset is the desire for attention, the need to be made famous as a result of the horror they perpetrate. To become famous they need the news media to splash their names, faces and accomplishments throughout the world. To garner that level of devotion by the news media, they need accomplish only one thing: exceed the last, biggest body count of innocent victims.

That means that the next Kleibold and Harris are putting a plan together to kill more people than died at Columbine. To achieve that, they need better fortifications in order to slow the police response and entry into the building. They are all studying the attacks that have come before, and are devising tactics they believe will be impossible for law enforcement to overcome. The next Cho on a college campus is attempting to devise a plan and fortifications that will allow him to exceed Cho’s numbers of killed and wounded. And terrorists both within and without the United States are attempting to devise plans that will exceed the numbers the terrorists achieved at Beslan.

For that reason, it’s important that all of those professionals America turns to in times of crisis recognize the value in preparing for the worst thing that could happen, making the Beslan model of tremendous value. In looking at both Beslan and the recent attacks on American schools by our own socially manufactured predators, the conclusion is inescapable that there are only two things that will stop the next attack and save the lives of the targeted victims: brave men and women with guns, and brave men and women with the medical skills to save the wounded under combat conditions. Thus, the single most crucial aspect of preparedness for all of America’s tactical operators, firefighters and paramedics is the need to train to kill and to rescue.

At Beslan, teams spent all day racing toward the school, across open ground, to bring stretchers full of much-needed re-supplies of bullets, weapons, water and medical kits to the beleaguered troops inside, only to turn around and race back out across those same killing fields carrying the wounded on stretchers their hands could barely hold. Many just carried children in their arms, or dragged adults by limbs across the yards to safety. Exhausted, many of these teams needed others to step into their role while they sought brief respite. Others were simply shot down trying to shield children with their bodies.   

All of our personnel must not only hone their abilities to take life to save the innocent, but also save life and rescue the wounded under fire. Just as importantly, our fire/rescue and paramedic personnel must go into these battles with a tactical mindset and knowledge to ensure not only the safety of the wounded, but of themselves and those around them. 

 

New Skills Needed

To deal with both the tactical (combat) and combat casualty care (first aid under fire) aspects of the battles yet to come to America, law enforcement operators and tactical medics alike must possess the same capabilities. If they don’t, people will die. Medical professionals must realize the differences between first aid and tactical combat casualty care (TCCC). In a combat environment, priorities change. Stopping hemorrhage through the use of clotting agents and tourniquets is critical. The first personnel on scene to assist victims of gunshots and bombs must be able to invasively open breathing passages, treat collapsed lungs and evacuate the wounded, often through walls and out windows. The same “tactics” can benefit law enforcement operators who may have to advance down hallways, straight into the face of automatic weapons fire.

Police must be able to use these same skills to treat the hostages, their teammates and themselves, because TCCC is all about staying in the fight. Though the combat capability and synergy of actual tactical medics will have to be substantial, both fire/rescue and EMS, must also be able to pick up any weapon and either load or unload it, relieve a jam and return it to combat effectiveness. In a gun battle with a committed enemy and innocent victims in between, no one can afford the luxury of job specialization. Both groups must be able to deal with re-supply and evacuation of wounded; and must be able to use the same devices and tactics to do both while keeping hands free to provide their own suppression fire.

In short, tactical medics, EMS, fire/rescue and law enforcement personnel alike must be able to shoot their way into and out of a building, and across open ground. Police must not be afraid to break traditional rules of emergency care. Lt. Anthony Wilson, commander of the Blacksburg, Va., SWAT team—who along with Virginia Tech PD SWAT commander Lt. Curtiss Cook led the assault on Norris Hall—says: “When it comes to kids, the rules all change. No matter what you’ve been told as a cop, if it’s a child and you have to stick your gloveless hands into that little body to stop bleeding, you’re going to do it. If you have to put your mouth on that little kid’s mouth to breathe life into him, you’ll do it without hesitation.”

 

This necessary skill set will require three essential evolutions in the training of those we will ask to go into the next Columbine, Norris Hall and Beslan.    But the wheel need not be reinvented as we can look to the model that already exists in both America’s conventional combat arms units, and its Special Operations Forces.  At the top would be the medics assigned to SWAT.  Just as our most elite counter-terror hostage-rescue units have highly trained medics deploy with every one of their entry teams, so too must specialized tactical medics undergo substantial training with the SWAT teams they are assigned to.  These will be the elite of the on-site medical professionals assigned to assist police.  In order for them to operate dynamically, and under intensely violent situations, they must train with – and be trained by – the teams they will be entering buildings and battle with.  This will actually cost very little in the way of money.  Medics must be willing to undergo SWAT training with their assigned units, and maintain themselves to the same physical standards.  They will need similar equipment to their police teammates in the way of body armor, uniform and clothing, but little else.  They may even be able to be an added resource for extra ammunition, as they can carry heavier loads than the operators who must move at lightning speed in tight confines.  Whether these medics would – or should – be armed would be a matter for the individual departments, and may be determined by pre-existing policies, and in some cases state law.  Having at least one sidearm for each medic, however, would likely result in the lives of police, medics and innocent victims being saved at some point.

 

The next level of advancement in training and ability would be seen in increased tactical awareness and understanding in all fire/rescue and EMS personnel.  Though these individuals would not need the expertise of the tactical medics, some increase in their knowledge of how patrol officers respond, what tactics they employ in entering a building, clearing and securing of areas, handling of hostages, wounded suspects, withdrawal under fire, small team formations and the like would greatly enhance the ability of the two groups to operate together in active shooter situations, particularly in those jurisdictions where it is likely patrol will arrive ahead of SWAT.  These medical professionals would function on the level of standard military medics assigned to infantry platoons.  They will not require the extreme tactical knowledge of their counterparts with units like Delta, SEAL Team Six and Army Special Forces, but they will need sufficient knowledge to ensure they can get their medical expertise to where it is needed, while under fire, and without interfering with those engaged in combat.  These professionals can, as well, receive all of the training they need from the very departments they will be assisting. 

 

Just as the medics will have to be trained in combat tactics by the police, so, too, must the police be trained in superior first aid by the medics.  This is the third aspect of the new evolutions in capability.  They must be better at rendering aid to their law enforcement comrades, themselves and the victims.  In a battle environment where police can expect to suffer casualties at the rate of one cop for every five terrorists shot (as the Russian special forces do), in addition to dozens (and even hundreds) of dead and dying victims, even those medics assigned to police will be overwhelmed.  At Norris Hall there were two tac medics, and they would have had to treat 55 people if the police had not been sufficiently trained.  Ultimately, when the killing of the bad guys is over, it’s all about being able to save the lives of the good guys.

 

To develop this ability in our brave men and women who will be called into dangerous and violent situations again and again, does not require large budgets for equipment or six-figure DHS grants.  What it does require, however, is a willingness to train and a desire to be better than we are now.  In advancing the skill level in the two critical areas of tactics and medicine-under-fire, we can, once again, turn to the model of the Army Special Forces.  In SF, each ODA 3 is comprised of two specialists in each of the five SF MOS’s 4, and the first duty of each specialist is to teach his expert skill set to all of the other members of the team.  In this way they are always working hard to make each other better, so that any one team member can step in and do another’s job if that person is wounded or killed.  Our police, medics, EMS and firemen can ill afford a different attitude in the battles America is yet to fight on her own soil.  While some advances in equipment will be helpful, the real requirements are dedication, discipline and a willingness to commit time and effort. 

For these reasons, the Asymmetric Combat Institute, the International Tactical Response and Medicine Society (ITRAMS) and the Archangel Group, Ltd., have been working to prepare America’s warriors to be able to do these very things: kill and rescue. Since 9/11 Archangel has trained thousands of police, soldiers and state and federal agents in unprecedented and innovative ways to conduct these battles against a committed, well prepared and deadly enemy. At the same time, ACI and ITRAMS ahve been working with the most elite Special Operations soldiers and sailors who are conducting operations in our overseas combat zones to provide the most advanced, efficacious casualty care and extraction techniques for combat at home—techniques that represent an enormous evolution in casualty care from early conventional first aid and CPR.

Together, these organizations have forged a tactical skill set that no police officer, SWAT operator, SRO, firefighter or paramedic can be without.  A program of common skills that have joint tactical and medical applications has been developed.  New, and inexpensive, evacuation and medical equipment is now available that every police officer, soldier, medic, ambulance driver or firefighter can benefit from.  And cutting edge training in TCCC is now available to everyone.  No longer is this equipment and training limited only to our elite military Special Operations Forces.  Nor can we afford for it to be, as the police, medics and firefighters are the ones we will be turning to when this enemy returns.  They have promised us the deaths of millions of American citizens—including our own children—before this war is over. The only way to prevent them from reaching that goal is our ability to kill them and rescue and resuscitate our own; for our enemy will allow us no other solution.

 

 

John Giduck is a senior consultant with the Archangel Group (www.antiterrorconsultants.org), an agency that provides training to U.S. law enforcement, government agencies and military. He has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian studies, and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies and has worked with several Russian special forces units. He has authored “Terror at Beslan” and co-authored the newly released “The Green Beret in You: Living with Total Commitment to Family, Career, Sports and Life.”

 

Editor’s Note: The author’s book, “Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools,” provides a detailed account of the events at the Beslan school siege. Learn more at http://www.archangelgroup.org

 

 

REFERENCES

1. Giduck J: Terror At Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools. Archangel Publishing Group, Inc.: Golden, Colorado, 2005.

 

2. Ahlers MM: “Agency says 7,000 sites at ‘high risk’ of terrorist attack.” CNN.com News Report, June 21, 2008.

 

3. Operational Detachment – Alpha, or A-Team as it is commonly known to the public, is the foundational unit of Army Special Forces.

 

4. An MOS is a military occupational specialty. While the conventional military has hundreds, the Green Berets have only five, called the 18-series designations, as each begins with the number 18.

 

Below is an article I wrote and that was published in the law enforcement magazine, BLUE, for its December 2024 issue. 2024 marked 25 years since the mass attack at Columbine High School. I interviewed former VA Tech Police SWAT leader, Lt. Curtis Cook, who in 2007 led his team into the worst mass-shooting murder at a school in US history. Curtis provides a retrospective of what American police needed to learn from Columbine, through VA Tech and up today, in addition to what they have learned and what they yet need to learn.

Also, here is the link to the complete Dec. 2024 edition of BLUE Magazine, free for anyone wishing to download and read:   

https://www.thebluemagazine.com/s/BlueV15_I5-final-web.pdf

 

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

25 Years after Columbine - A SWAT Retrospective on School Incidents

By: Dr. John Giduck

In the morning of Monday, April 16, 2007, 23-year-old Seung-Hoi Cho shot two students in a dormitory on the Virginia Tech (VT) campus. Several hours later he walked into Norris Hall, chained the three sets of doors shut, then proceeded to mow down students in classrooms on both sides of a second-floor hallway. In all, he killed 32 students and professors. Another 27 were wounded or injured.

When the call came out that there was an active shooter in the building, SWAT teams from Blacksburg and VT police departments went racing there. Arriving in only two minutes, they fought their way into the building, then raced up two sets of stairs at either end of the hallway forcing Cho to take his own life. Lt. Curtis Cook led the VT SWAT operators into Room 211 where the killer was found. It remains the greatest mass shooting murder at a school in US history.

This year marked the 25^th anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Since that seminal event, the nation has endured hundreds of other school shootings. Lessons that America believed police had learned at Columbine in how to respond to attacks in our schools have sometimes been ignored. It seemed an appropriate time to gather the thoughts and reflections of the man who led a rescue team into the worst one of all, as he looks back over a quarter century of mass killings in our schools.

Beyond providing a few briefings for other SWAT teams and having taught ALERRT classes at VTPD as a certified instructor, Curtis has seldom spoken publicly of his experience. This year he agreed to sit down and answer questions on the lessons American police should have learned from these horrors and what they need to be prepared for in the future.

Prior to joining VTPD, Curtis was a Navy Surface Rescue swimmer, then a deputy sheriff with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia, where he served as a patrol sergeant and SWAT team Entry Leader. He joined VTPD in 1997 and became the SWAT commander in 2007 as a lieutenant. The attack at the school happened shortly after that. Curtis retired from law enforcement in 2014 with 28 years’ service. When Columbine happened, Curtis was a patrol officer at VTPD and had just started instructing officer survival at the police academy.

 

BLUE: What were your thoughts on Columbine, how it was handled and what law enforcement (LE) needed to learn?

CURTIS: I think most everyone in LE had the same thoughts after Columbine: the police did what they’d been trained to do, but there was also the realization that people are going to die if you wait on SWAT. It was apparent after Columbine that the traditional response wouldn't work in that type situation. New techniques and procedures had to be developed for active shooters.

 

BLUE: Do you believe that LE nationwide learned what it needed to from Columbine?

CURTIS: I think it got the attention of law enforcement, but I'm sure a lot of departments struggled with how to task patrol officers with a response that SWAT would normally handle. In addition to just the tactical side involving entry and movement, the new issues were how to deal with explosive devices and mass casualties. If they weren’t going to be able to wait on SWAT, patrol officers had to be trained to respond and eliminate the threat.

 

I attended several presentations on Columbine that taught me and a lot of officers important information. But there were other events outside of school shootings that everyone needed to learn from and incorporate. For that, I also attended debriefs on the North Hollywood shootout and even the Texas Tower shooting. Columbine footage was being shown as part of our Immediate Action Rapid Deployment (IARD) training, and the Hollywood shootout identified the need to have specialized training and place rifles in police vehicles to respond to heavily armed suspects. But in the end, you can give police all the training in the world, equip them with better body armor and weapons, but none of that will ever make a difference if they aren’t doing everything they can to get into a building and move as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat and save innocent lives.

 

BLUE: Is it your impression that LE nationwide did adopt the tactics it was obvious were necessary for responding to active shooters in schools?

CURTIS: Yes and No. I know that many departments were adopting the LAPD – IARD training and techniques post-Columbine, and many departments were using their SWAT teams to train patrol officers in building searching and room clearing. But even after VT, I was shocked to learn that some departments had still not conducted any formal active shooter training. I think it was clear, however, that you not wait on SWAT to arrive at a school shooting. ALERRT has since become the standard for LE active shooter training across the US, butI have no idea how many departments have received that training.

 

BLUE: What are your professional thoughts on the responses to school shootings like that at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, FL in 2018, Uvalde, TX in 2022 and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN in 2023?

 

CURTIS: In Florida, I understand that the school resource officer (SRO) thought the shots were outside because shots sometimes don't sound like shots. However, it’s at that time, just like VT, when you have to quickly identify where the shots are coming from and relay that information to all responding officers. Once he learned the shots were inside, he should have entered. I believe he failed to act and failed to protect. What seemed to make that worse were flaws in the school’s lock-down procedures, which caused a serious delay in the code-red activation.

 

I think the deputies that arrived and took cover behind their vehicles, instead could have formed a contact team and entered the school. From what I understand, they had active shooter training and not immediately moving into the building was contrary to that training. So, at least the training was correct. But that’s been the problem at times. We all know what must be done in these situations, but it’s not always being done.

 

I believe departments should be putting their most highly trained officers in schools. I fear that many departments feel the uniform presence alone, or parking a police vehicle in front of a school, will deter a shooter. It may, but that SRO inside needs to be highly trained and equipped for active shooters. 

 

As to Uvalde, I don't even know where to start. After Columbine and VT, it’s hard to understand how this could happen. It was without a doubt a total failure of LE until the Border Patrol guys went in. It’s another clear case of failure to act to save lives and protect, and poor or untrained supervision and management. If the officers had active shooter training, why didn't they utilize it? I hate to hear things like: “the officers got shot at, so they stopped and left the building.” Yes, you may get shot at, and you may get hit, but in that circumstance, in my opinion based on my training and experience, they needed to try to fight their way in to save those children.

 

In the Covenant School shooting, the officers did what they were supposed to: they made entry, moved rapidly to the shooter and eliminated the threat. Despite the tragic loss of life, it was a success for LE. But there are still lessons to come from it. If the school would have had trained, armed police or security, they may have stopped the shooter much earlier, just as happened in the Apalachee School shooting in Georgia in September of this year. Despite the outcome of the Parkland, FL shooting, there really is no substitute for having armed, trained police or even security inside a school.

 

BLUE: In looking at all this over the years, how do you see the events at VT in April 2007 and how you/VTPD and Blacksburg handled everything that occurred that day, including your response to the Norris Hall shooting? In hindsight, if the same attack happened today would you do anything different?

 

CURTIS: I think Cho made a horrible error when he committed the first murders. Although it did create somewhat of a diversion, he didn't anticipate the activation and deployment of two SWAT teams. It was clear that command from both BPD and VTPD were actively assessing everything together and making critical decisions. Like Columbine, we encountered something different, a new tactic, something unique in the doors chained from the inside of a building with limited access points and small windows. Responding officers did what anyone would have: they tried to enter through the doors, then changed tactics and found a different way in.

 

As far as actions in Norris Hall, everyone on the teams did exactly what they were trained to do: go directly to the sounds of gunfire, gather intel while moving, and when no shots are being fired, slow down, communicate, search for the gunman, identify and eliminate the threat, then treat and evacuate the wounded.

 

Like so many other cowards, he chose not to engage our team and took the easy way out. I have to remind myself often that the actions of those teams did contain him and forced him to stop shooting. That saved lives.  Many more people were in the building and he had plenty of ammunition. We were fortunate in that we had command staff from both departments that worked well together, we had officers from other departments that trained and worked together. The teams had a mutual understanding of tactics and procedures for dealing with active shooters. As far as what I would do different, I've spent many sleepless nights since 2007 asking myself that same question. Basically, I would have used any means necessary to create an entry point, most likely utilizing a truck or vehicle to try and ram the doors. With the design of the doors and frames at Norris Hall it may not have worked, but looking back, it might have been another option.

BLUE: What should police officers nationwide learn from all of this?

CURTIS: I think what should be learned from VA Tech is when responding to an active shooter, you have to expect the unexpected, and you have to anticipate that you may encounter something that you have never trained for in the past. Departments need to do regular joint training and “what if” the scenarios to death. It needs to be understood that these killers study each other; they study police tactics and responses, and try to find ways to defeat those tactics. Police should be doing the same thing with the attacks that have come, to include terror attacks like the Bataclan Theater shooting in Paris in 2013 or even the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016. The Pulse Nightclub shooting may not have been an actual terror attack, but those two events saw a similar tactic used that police weren’t ready for. But who on the LE – or even government – side is paying attention, studying these things and advancing our training ahead of the next attack? I can tell you, though, that there are a lot of bad guys out there doing that very thing.

While there are many things we should have learned from Columbine and the many school attacks that have happened since, the single overriding lesson is that police cannot delay a single second. Each second lost is a bullet that didn’t have to go into the head of a kid. Though it may be controversial still, that even includes a solo officer going in if backup is not arriving immediately. Under no circumstances can you wait minutes or an hour, as happened with Uvalde. You are a trained, armed adult and this is the calling you answered in life. You may get shot and you may die, but you can fight back. For children inside, they have nothing to fight back with and them dying is a 100% certainty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curtis Cook

 

In addition to his navy and law enforcement service, during his police career Curtis served as an instructor, both in-house and at the police academy, in Firearms, Defensive Tactics, Active Shooter response, Chemical Weapons/OC Spray, SWAT, CQB, Advanced Patrol Tactics and Homeland Security. He has also taught Citizen Emergency Response Team courses and women’s self-defense. After retiring from law enforcementin 2014 with 28 years’ service he worked another two years at the VA Tech Department of Emergency Management.

 

 

 

John Giduck

 

Dr. John Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. His dissertation was on the evolution of jihadist terrorist mass-hostage siege tactics throughout the world. He has trained police departments and SWAT throughout the US. He is the author of Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools; Shooter Down! The Dramatic, Untold Story of the Police Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, along with co-author Police Commissioner Joseph M. Bail; and When Terror Returns: The History and Future of Terrorist Mass-Hostage Sieges. He can be contacted at john@circon.org.