How to clear a room cqb?

The other reason standard CQB tactics don’t apply in a defensive scenario is that they are offensive in nature. There’s a reason one of the terms used to describe a CQB professional is “assaulter.” A private citizen who has been forced to clear rooms in a defensive scenario has very different priorities of work than an assaulter.

Make no mistake, just as CQB is one of the most dangerous tasks a team can do, clearing rooms as an individual is an extremely high-risk endeavor. There’s no way to eliminate that risk, only mitigate it. Unless there is a legitimate need, you are probably better served by either avoidance or, if necessary, taking up a sound defensive posture. But, we don’t get to always choose the time and place, and definitely not the manner of the fight. Especially not as responsibly-armed civilians. And sometimes the fight chooses us, whether we want it to or not.

So if we aren’t talking about CQB, how should we look at this set of problems and skills? I think we should approach this as fighting inside structures. Once we make this paradigm shift, it’s much easier to make common sense choices about our tactics, techniques, and procedures.

Fighting inside structures is primarily a game of initiative and angles. Let’s discuss angles first. An early CQB mentor of mine called it “the geometry of tactics.” When you’re operating as part of a team inside a structure, you mitigate risk by using angles to create as close to 360 degrees of security as you can, and you increase the effectiveness of your offense by creating interlocking fields of fire, much like small unit infantry tactics. As an individual, neither of those options is available to you.

The other important factor to remember is cover versus concealment. Very little inside a modern home offers ballistic protection from small arms fire. This is why many, although not all, teams prefer dynamic over deliberate CQB. As an individual operating alone however, you have little choice but to use concealment the majority of the time when moving through a structure. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s better than running into gunfire. We’ll discuss the exceptions to this when we begin talking about initiative.

We use concealment by playing the angles. Pretty much everyone should at least have a passing familiarity with “slicing the pie,” where you progressively take small “slices” visually around a corner. With practice, this can be done far faster and much more smoothly than most people think, without losing effectiveness. This can be applied to doorways as well as corners, and even vertically to the landings of stairwells. If you lead with the muzzle and your dominant eye, it is usually possible to see someone on the other side of the corner before they see you.

When done properly at an open doorway, it is possible to clear much of the room except for dead space and hard corners from outside the doorway. As a civilian, whether you enter the room is very contextual, but you have to understand that you cannot completely clear a room without actually going inside it.

And that brings us to the discussion of initiative. If you need to enter that room, you are going to need to seize the initiative in order to mitigate as much of the risk as you can. That’s why no matter how deliberate a clearing speed you are using, crossing a threshold has to be dynamic.

To talk about this in greater detail, we need to look at the two basic types of rooms, corner fed and center fed. These are exactly what they sound like. A center fed room has an entrance in the center of one of the room’s walls, and has two hard corners that are not visible from outside the threshold. A corner fed room has an entrance in the corner of the room, and only has one hard corner not visible from outside the threshold.

When pieing off a corner-fed room from outside, there is only one hard corner remaining to be cleared. If the decision to enter the room has been made, the entry is done dynamically and efficiently. That way the first thing presented to that uncleared corner is the muzzle of the weapon. You then move out of the doorway rapidly and under control. Then any dead space behind obstacles or in closets has to be cleared by pieing them off as well.

A center-fed room presents more danger to the individual than the corner fed. Because there are two uncleared hard corners, whichever one you clear first leaves you vulnerable to an attacker hiding in the other. There is no way to eliminate this risk when operating alone. All you can do is pick a corner, then once it’s cleared immediately and rapidly shifting your attention to the other. The easy mistakes that must be avoided are not finishing the first corner clear before beginning the second, and standing in the doorway. When you enter the room, you have to fully enter it.

There are subtleties and nuances to this that are beyond the scope of a short magazine article. There are also considerations for if and when you are engaged by an attacker while clearing. To truly understand this, seek out valid training from a qualified and vetted instructor. Above all practice on your own until it becomes second nature.

Matt Little, owner of Graybeard Actual Training is a retired Green Beret and Chicago SWAT officer. He is also a master class shooter in IDPA and USPSA, and holds a Turbo Pin from Gabe White Training.

Urban warfare should be completely avoided – a city should be bypassed and isolated – "ripened." Air supremacy including drone supremacy enables supply to bypass city transportation hubs as well.

With Fallschirmjaeger – parachute troops – the Germans could have taken Stalingrad's supply and artillery support source: the eastern bank of the Volga, just as they had isolated and taken similarly situated Kiev.

My edited LinkedIn comment:

Kimmage in War on the Rocks is talking up regime-changing buffer state Belarus – regime change is an Act of War – and now these articles popping up about urban warfare.

In 2016, the Russians put 40 million of their civilians through nuclear war drills, expecting Hillary to win and then WW3 guaranteed. Lately, they've been putting civilians though house-to-house fighting training, presumably including their Stalingrad – Chuikov: first the grenade goes in, after that the tommy gunner – experience, expecting another invasion from the (EU/NATO, this time) West.

At Stalingrad, Stalin refused to allow civilians – women and children – to evacuate. From Iraq, Libya, and Syria, that became a refugee flood. Like those in the Warsaw Ghetto, those in the Gaza Ghetto have no place to flee. And it looks like the Russian (and Belarusan) Slavs will be staying to fight for their towns.

And innocents of Ramadi, Fallujah, et al are being wracked by our permanent gene-damaging – thus literally genocidal – cancer-and-birth-defect-causing Depleted Uranium (DU) ordnance contamination.

In any case, Putin has fairly warned us that if we attack Russia (and we can presume that includes BeloRussia) it will be *total* war, and they will be nuking *our* cities.

Close-quarters combat (CQC) or close-quarters battle (CQB) is a close combat situation between multiple combatants involving ranged (typically firearm-based) or melee combat. It can occur between military units, law enforcement and criminal elements, and in other similar situations.

In modern warfare, close-quarters combat usually consists of an engagement between two forces (typically "attackers" and "defenders") of varying size with small arms within a distance of up to 100 meters (110 yards), ranging from close-proximity shootouts to hand-to-hand combat. In the typical CQC scenario, the attackers try a fast takeover of an enclosed area controlled by the defenders, who usually cannot easily withdraw. Because friendly, enemy, and noncombatant personnel can be closely intermingled, CQC demands a rapid assault and precise fire, and units that regularly conduct CQC—such as police tactical units, counterterrorist units, maritime boarding teams, special forces, and commando units—are often specially trained and equipped for CQC tactics.

Although they have some overlap, CQC is not synonymous with urban warfare, as CQC emphasizes infantry tactics using light small arms in a small area of operations, as opposed to the combined arms and much larger areas of urban warfare. Additionally, CQC is not solely limited to enclosed areas, structure interiors, or tight spaces, and can theoretically occur anywhere, such as in and around a structure, aboard a ship, or in a dense rainforest.

Close-quarters combat has technically existed in some capacity since the beginning of warfare, in the form of melee combat, the use of ranged weaponry (such as slings, bows, and muskets) at close range, and the necessity of bayonets. During World War I, CQC was a significant part of trench warfare, where enemy soldiers would fight in close and narrow quarters in attempts to capture trenches.

The origins of modern close-quarters combat lie in the combat methods pioneered by Assistant Commissioner William E. Fairbairn of the Shanghai Municipal Police, the police force of the Shanghai International Settlement (1854–1943). After the 1925 May Thirtieth Movement, Fairbairn was tasked with developing a dedicated auxiliary squad for riot control and aggressive policing. After absorbing the most appropriate elements from a variety of martial arts experts, Fairbairn condensed these arts into a martial art he called "defendu". The aim of defendu was to be as brutally effective as possible, while also being relatively easy for recruits and trainees to learn compared to other martial arts. The method incorporated both less-lethal and lethal fighting tactics, such as point shooting, firearm combat techniques, and the use of more ad hoc weapons such as chairs or table legs.

During World War II, Fairbairn was recruited to train Allied special forces in defendu. During this period, he expanded defendu's lethality for military purposes, calling it the "Silent Killing Close Quarters Combat method"; this became standard combat training for British special forces. He also published a textbook for CQC training called Get Tough. U.S. Army officers Rex Applegate and Anthony Biddle were taught Fairbairn's methods at a training facility in Scotland, and adopted the program for the training of Allied operatives at Camp X in Ontario, Canada. Applegate published his work in 1943, called Kill or Get Killed. During the war, training was provided to British Commandos, the First Special Service Force, OSS operatives, U.S. Army Rangers, and Marine Raiders. Other military martial arts were later introduced elsewhere, including European Unifight, Chinese sanshou, Soviet sambo, and the Israeli kapap and Krav Maga.

For a lengthy period following World War II, urban warfare and CQC had barely changed in infantry tactics. Modern firearm CQB tactics were developed in the 1970s as "close-quarters battle" by Western counterterrorist special forces units following the 1972 Munich massacre. The units trained in the aftermath of the massacre, such as the Special Air Service, Delta Force, GSG 9, GIGN, and Joint Task Force 2, developed CQB tactics involving firearms to quickly and precisely assault structures while minimizing friendly and hostage casualties; these CQB tactics were shared between these special forces units, who were closely-knit and frequently trained together. The Special Air Service used CQB tactics during the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege. CQB tactics soon reached police tactical units and similar paramilitaries, such as American SWAT teams, by the 1980s and 1990s.

However, CQB was still not taught to regular infantry, as it was considered a hostage rescue tactic. As late as the 1990s, infantry manuals on urban combat described close-quarters room clearing essentially the same basic way it was described 60 years prior: a grenade being thrown into an enclosed area, followed by an infantry assault with automatic fire. The special forces "monopoly" on CQB was broken following the experiences of urban warfare and close-quarters battles in the 1990s, during the Battle of Mogadishu, the Bosnian War, and the First Chechen War.

The First and Second Battles of Fallujah during the Iraq War were the watershed moments for infantry CQB, when U.S. Marines, under pressure to capture the city of Fallujah, Iraq from insurgents, used conventional combined arms and fire support against the city, and lacked proper CQB training and equipment to effectively clear buildings, causing numerous civilian and allied casualties and severely damaging the city. With similar struggles in towns and cities among ABCA Armies during the War in Afghanistan, a proper approach to infantry in urban warfare became crucial, and CQB tactics began to be taught to infantry.

Some special forces units express disdain at regular infantry being taught CQC, especially in organizational politics and internal matters such as securing budgets; a unit with CQC training requires expensive equipment and training facilities, using up funding that could be used for other units or purposes.

Before conducting a CQC operation, the attackers must gather intelligence on the defenders' capabilities and positioning, as well as the presence and position of any noncombatants or hostages; the defenders may do likewise. Methods of intelligence gathering may include negotiations, surveillance, questioning people who may have intelligence (such as escaped hostages), or consulting maps of the target area.

The attackers organize themselves and diagram and discuss the proposed plan, outlining each team and member's actions and responsibilities, location, fields of fire, and tasks (even to the point of a wall-by-wall and door-by-door layout of the objective, where available). Since the attackers usually already have specialized training, the operation is based on well-understood, pre-established standing operating procedure or rules of engagement. When considerable preparation time is available, the attackers may attempt a siege, negotiate a peaceful resolution, or even conduct training exercises in mockups of the targeted area; however, should there be insufficient time or resources, the attackers must use the knowledge they already have.

Before conducting a CQC operation, a perimeter is often established around the area of operations to prevent the defenders from escaping, stop any assistance they may request from reaching them, keep watch of the defenders from multiple angles, and prevent uninvolved individuals from entering the area and potentially being exposed to crossfire. The size of a perimeter may range from the immediate surroundings to several city blocks. However, in some situations, such as active urban warfare, a perimeter may not be possible or may be unfeasible with the available time and manpower.

Sometimes, negotiations may be attempted between the attackers and defenders before or immediately preceding entry, with the intention of coercing the defenders to surrender, whittling their numbers non-lethally, ensuring the safe release of hostages or noncombatants, or at least drawing the defenders out into a disadvantageous position. Though this tactic is often associated with law enforcement, militaries may also do this when faced with an area containing noncombatants: for example, during the raid on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's compound, American Delta Force operators surrounded the compound and ordered those inside to come out in Arabic, successfully extracting and securing a number of noncombatants from the compound and separating them from hostiles before making entry.

The objective of most CQC operations is to complete all offensive action before the defenders can effectively react. To gain this element of surprise, attackers may use stealth movement and concealment to get as close to the defenders as possible without alerting them, and may launch their assault when least expected or when the defenders' combat readiness is low—for example, while eating or sleeping. Diversions and distractions, such as firecrackers or stun grenades, can draw attention away from the attackers to give them time to get close or make entry without initial resistance. Other forms of distractions include cutting the electricity to the area, making entry while the defenders are communicating with someone (like a negotiator or leader), or even deliberately causing a visible or audible incident such as a structure fire or traffic collision to draw the defenders' attention there.

The method of entry used depends on numerous factors, including training, equipment, positioning of enemies and noncombatants, and environmental factors.

Regular doors may be breached using anything ranging from kicks and battering rams to explosive breaching charges and blowtorch cutters; larger or more reinforced doors such as garage doors or heavy armored doors may only be opened by the latter, require dedicated tools to breach, or necessitate opening regularly.

In some instances where ground entry is impossible, such as an entryway being barricaded and guarded, or when attacking from multiple points is possible or preferred, different insertion points may be used where possible, such as insertion by helicopter or boat, abseiling to attack through a window or from above, entering from an upper level using an assault ladder, or even digging a tunnel or using existing tunnels or sewers to enter from below. If feasible and authorized, explosives or battering rams may also be used to breach a structure and create another entry point. The entry method used depends on situational circumstances: the presence of hostages or noncombatants may prohibit using explosive breaching charges, while a structure being mostly underground may disqualify using aircraft or abseiling.

Entry is conducted in two forms: deliberate entry, a slow and methodical entry and search done to maximize communication, identification, and the chance of non-violent resolution; and dynamic entry, a rapid and quick entry where enemies are overwhelmed by surprise, but with an increased risk of misidentification and friendly fire, and increasing the likelihood of a lethal response from the defenders. Deliberate entry is often used by law enforcement during raids against suspects unlikely to resist or when securing an area surrounding a target (e.g. to clear an apartment building to focus on a targeted apartment unit), while dynamic entry is often used by both law enforcement and military to quickly defeat enemies before they can act or react or when time is a critical factor (e.g. to stop terrorists from arming a time bomb).

Once the assault begins, the attackers must gain control before the defenders can understand what is happening and prepare an effective defense or mount a counterattack. The defenders sometimes have a contingency plan that could cause the attack to fail, such as killing hostages, detonating bombs, or destroying evidence. If they can execute an organized plan, such as falling back into a prepared stronghold or breaking through the perimeter, the possibility of friendly casualties increases. Speed is achieved through well-designed tactics, such as gaining proximity with an undetected approach, the use of multiple entry points, and explosive breaching. Note that speed does not necessarily translate to actually running, but rather simply quickly and effectively defeating enemies and completing objectives.

Gaining and maintaining physical and psychological momentum is essential for the attackers to secure the scene and maintain control over the situation. The sensory overload caused by the attackers' entry, weaponry, equipment, force, and aggression may overwhelm or surprise the defenders to the extent that they may surrender without fighting back. Enemies may occasionally hide among the hostages, or surrendering enemies may fight back, so the attackers must continue to maintain control over the situation even after the main action.

The defenders often try to stop enemies close to the entry points. The "fatal funnel" is the cone-shaped path leading from an entryway where the attackers are most vulnerable to defenders (e.g. the doorway to a room), essentially being "framed" by the surrounding walls and lacking both effective cover and covering fire. The attackers are also vulnerable from corners closest to the entry point, from which defenders can ambush them upon entry. If the first attackers cannot clear the corners and get out of the fatal funnel, allowing those behind to move in and help, the attack can bog down. A classic CQC tactic, dating back to World War II and still used today, was the deployment of a grenade into a room followed by entry after it detonated, to kill, injure, or otherwise stun enemies throughout the room, including those in corners. CQC tactics to mitigate these threats include having some attackers secure corners in conjunction with a forward assault force; checking the least visible, most prominent, or tactically sound corners first; or simply not entering until all visible hostiles are neutralized, after which corners are checked on entry.

Military uses of close-quarters battle vary by unit type, branch, and mission. Military operations other than war (MOOTW) may involve peacekeeping or riot control. Specialized forces may adapt CQC tactics to their own needs, such as marine naval boarding teams being trained specifically to search ships and fight CQC within them. Hostage rescue or extraction units may involve even more esoteric adaptations or variations, depending on environments, weapons technology, political considerations, or personnel.

Armies that often engage in urban warfare operations may train most of their infantry in basic CQC doctrine as it relates to common tasks such as building entry, clearing a room, and using different types of grenades.

Police tactical units (PTU) are the primary units that engage in CQC domestically. Situations involving the potential for CQC generally involve threats outside of conventional police capabilities, and thus PTUs are trained, equipped, and organized to handle these situations. Additionally, police action is often within what can be considered "close quarters", so members of PTUs are often well-trained in or already experienced with CQC, to the point that some PTUs may train military service members in CQC principles such as breaching and room clearing.

Police CQC doctrine is often specialized by unit type and mission. Depending on the unit or agency's jurisdiction or scope, PTUs may have different goals with different tactics and technology; for example, prison guards may maintain a unit trained in CQC in compact indoors areas such as cells without using lethal force, while a police anti-gang unit may be trained in CQC against multiple enemies that may be difficult to identify.

Unlike their military counterparts, PTUs, as law enforcement officers, are tasked with ideally apprehending suspects alive; for this reason, they are often trained in arrest procedures, non-lethal takedowns, and standoff negotiation instead of solely combat. They may be equipped with less-lethal weaponry such as tasers, pepper spray, and riot guns to fire tear gas, rubber bullets, plastic bullets, or beanbag rounds.

Private security and private military companies may maintain units that are trained in CQC. These teams may be responsible for responding to an incident at a facility operated by a government agency that has hired their security services, or to provide protection for VIPs in combat zones. For instance, the U.S. Department of State employed such security teams in Iraq.

Private military and security companies known to maintain units that are trained in, or are capable of training other units in, CQC include Blackwater and SCG International Risk.

By Eliran Feildboy, founder of Project Gecko

In today's tactical space, it’s a rarity to come across an empirically valid CQB system—let alone one created with human behaviour and interaction as its guideposts.

One such rarity is the ground-breaking ITCQB system. Unlike most modern systems, ITCQB focuses on real-life scenarios and on the diverse factors found in human-to-human encounters.

You might wonder why this matters if military and LE operators are trained to never be in the position of clearing a room by themselves.

Consider this hypothetical. You and your team just finished clearing a room. Everyone else has already exited and you’re about to do likewise when your eye catches sight of a hidden door in a far corner. No one saw it while clearing the room.

Now the team is tied up clearing the next room, which means the job of clearing whatever’s behind that hidden door falls to you—and it can’t wait because, potentially, the team’s ability to secure the entire structure hinges on you sweeping solo right now.

“Slicing the pie” is a technique for gaining information about what’s inside a room. It entails moving in a cone-shaped pattern around the apex of a room’s thresholds (usually its doors but also its windows).

At the beginning, you have zero visual information about possible threats or civilians inside. Likely all you have is audible intel gained from listening to the sounds and voices inside.

But don’t discount the intel you obtain with your ears: it may be sufficient to help you decide whether to engage or disengage.

A few pointers:

Among the things you control in a room-clearing situation is the angle of entry. This angle is “measured” from the apex of the door to the last visible line into the room.

Different angles present drastically different scenarios. Each scenario affects what you can control and do to the target's mobility inside the room.

The basic definition of angles in ITCQB is:

This is what you call an extremely thin exposure into the room. Typically, you encounter narrow angles first when walking alongside a wall that has a doorway built into it. You’ve entered the narrow angle when you can see the doorframe and slightly inside the room.

Although there may not be much acquirable intel awaiting in the narrow angle, there could be just enough to give you valuable insights as to what you’ll encounter in the remainder of the room.

For example, are there bloodstains on the floor? Is smoke reducing visibility? Are there voices coming from within (and, if so, how many)?

After entering the narrow angle, commence an orientation check.

Align your hips with the wall as soon as you enter the narrow angle and make sure your leading foot points to the door’s apex. Doing so will give you better exposure management, more cover, and enhanced body synchronisation of the door threshold. Most importantly, it will facilitate increased mobility because positioning your body with hips toward the wall allows you to stay fluid so you can move around the narrow angle better and bail out quickly if the situation requires it.

The next relevant angle is 45 degrees. This is your point of contact with the flank of the room even as you’re concealed by the room. You’re still gathering intel about the room—let's say different compartments, multiple doorways, or multiple targets.

Keep your gun down while slicing. This minimizes your exposure to the inside of the room and prevents triggering toe room.

This angle allows you to see the center of the room where people will most likely stand if we’re not engaging with them.

You may be acquainted with the term “fatal funnel” and have heard it used to denote the area between 45 and 135 degrees. But what exactly is a fatal funnel? It’s a term for areas where you are easily seen but cannot easily engage/disengage targets inside the room.

Despite the dangers inherent to the fatal funnel, the 90 degree angle can be a valuable asset in that it allows you to divide the room into two sections—one, the controlled area; the other, the uncontrolled area.

Image source: artofmanliness.com

However, the 90 degrees angle is trickier than the others. Even having your firearm turned down slightly still allows the target to see its muzzle before you enter. Exposure risk is worst when your angle is between 60 and 90 degrees.

A recommended solution is to snap as soon as you start to isolate to 90 degrees. Do this in a single step. It can leave a target who has seen your muzzle significantly less time to react. It can also prevent triggering the room.

In traditional CQB, angles beyond 90 degrees aren’t identified. They’re used in the ITCQB system to highlight the increasing danger of progressively opening the room.

From 90 to 150 degrees, you can reduce the possibility of exposure by compressing the weapon when closing in. Compressing is accomplished by bringing the stock up higher on your shoulder while keeping the barrel pointed down.

Compressing does not impede your reaction time. You’ll still be quick in presenting your weapon and, by keeping the line-eyes/weapon/leading-foot positioning, you won’t find it necessary to use the sight.

This is called the “hard corner.” Here, your goal is to cheat the angle and see as much of the room as you can.

As the final part of the angle approaches, you attack the corner—meaning you quickly step inside with your leading foot (flat and stable so you can bail out if needed) and align your weapon.

One final step: after securing the final angle, look back over your shoulder to make sure no threats are present and able to attack from behind.

Focusing on five key angles as the golden rule allows you to methodically and consistently clear rooms with high emphasis on minimizing your exposure and thus safety.

Strong fundamentals when slicing the pie are a necessity in both solo and team clearing a room. Once you understand angles and their relevance you can better understand what situation you can use for clearing stoppages, bailing out and proactivity.

• Planning and preparation.
• Surprise.
• Entry.
• Violence of action.

Hydra Tactical is here to keep you safe, by providing both the gear and the knowledge to get any job done. Room clearing is an unavoidable part of close quarter battles, and can be the most dangerous part of any operation. Still, room clearing has always been fundamental to urban operations, be it high intensity assaults, precision-clearing operations, or surgical operations.

The fundamental techniques in room clearing have become more central to basic soldier skills than they were in recent decades. The expansion of urban centers makes it more likely that a strategic battle will take place in close quarters city-based combat.

Clearing buildings has been called both Close-Quarters Battle (CQB) and Close-Quarters Combat (CQC) but the truth is that regardless of what you call it, the principles and premises you need to clear a room safely and successfully are pretty much the same regardless of the situation, from the techniques used by elite special operations (like the kind who took down Osama bin Laden) to those of the local neighborhood police drug task force. This is good news for civilian shooters who can acquire effective tactics for indoor defense by adopting the guiding principles of speed, surprise and violence of action.

So, let’s take a look at five fundamentals when it comes to room clearing:

Room clearing should always be done by at least two shooters. Because there are so many unknowns and way too many dangerous angles to be cleared immediately by one person, two shooters are needed, at a minimum. It’s been said that “Two is one, and one is none.” With at least two shooters, you can maintain 360-degree coverage. And remember team trust is absolute so practice, practice and practice, together.

Unless the plan is to breach a wall, the likely place of entry into a potentially hostile room is through the door. The door is referred to as the “fatal funnel.” Anyone expecting an armed intrusion will be focusing attention and firepower towards the place of entry. Getting into and out of the fatal funnel is essential to success so if someone in front of you trips, walk over them.

If there’s time for a plan and rehearsal hours prior to the execution phase, do it; but remember to be flexible. Once inside, things have a tendency to change based on new information and real or perceived threats. Instead of planning on who goes left or right (criss-cross or button-hook) once inside the door, follow this simple rule of thumb: go the opposite way that the person in front of you went. In a hasty entry, you’ll never have time to plan anyway. Again, go the opposite way through the door that the person in front of you went.

Get through the fatal funnel, then clear the near corner. You have to be close on the heels of the guy/gal in front of you or you won’t be able to protect his/her backside as soon as they’re in the building. The key here is to maintain personal responsibility for your area and sectors of fire—the field of vision you can feasibly shoot at accurately. Accordingly, wherever your muzzle goes, that’s where your eyes should be. Think eyes, muzzle, target.

A pair of operators clear a roomIn CQB, speed matters. Get through the door, clear the near corner (or “dig” the corner by walking close to it), walk the walls, and look for the next threat. The greatest threat may be a person, but it’s also any uncleared areas.

Finally, as you’re “running” the walls, it’s really walking. If you have to shoot on the move, only move as fast as you can shoot accurately. Don’t be in such a hurry that you’re out of control. You’re there to control the situation. Be smooth. Here’s an old tactical saying to put in your toolbox: “Smooth is fast and fast is smooth.”

Remember, don’t shoot fast, discern fast and then shoot quickly and accurately if you are justified. Keep shooting until the threat stops.

Hydra Tactical is here to help you hone your skills and keep adding to your tactical toolbox. Shop now for some crucial gear in case you find yourself in an urban combat situation.