Dalai Lama Tactical Tip Tuesday

"The practice of patience guards us against losing our presence of mind. It enables us to remain undisturbed, even when the situation is really difficult. It gives us a certain amount of inner peace, which allows us some self-control, so that we can choose to respond to situations in an appropriate and compassionate manner, rather than being driven by our disturbing emotions." - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

The ability to practice patience and presence of mind, and consequently to control ourselves in moments of great disturbance and emotions, is perhaps the greatest tactical tip His Holiness can impart. And practitioners of defensive gun have no greater need for calm responsiveness to dynamic situations then when executing room clearing drills.

To 'slice the pie' is a game of inches and nerves that challenges even the most experienced shooter. To slowly, cautiously, view an uncleared area ... turning the corners degree by degree ... silently edging forward while maintaining a margin of safety ... revealing as little as possible of your presence ... considering all angular obstructions where a perpetrator might be hiding in ambush. That is truly a situation where self-control is vital to achieving happiness and avoiding unhappiness.

Is it any surprise that HH would excel at that technique?

Most Honest Movie Trailer Ever

So I gather that in this latest sequel Bourne will meet the asset, who was warned to come alone, equipped only with a tactical monocular and a GoPro strapped to his turtleneck, have a cool car chase, crunch bones, bribe the crooked government guy who is a just a puppet for someone else, and walk through train stations looking worried, all the while being surveilled by a control room full of grumpy old men on computers with old-ass monitors. Plus, there will be lots of guns and weaponized office products.

And some people say Hollywood has exhausted the spy-triller genre.

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week

A cop for 11 years and she didn't recognize a doughnut???

"Cops mistook Krispy Kreme doughnut glaze for meth" - Orlando Sentintel

That's when she spotted "a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were," she wrote.

"I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic," she wrote.

"I kept telling them, 'That's … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, 'No, it's meth, crystal meth.'"

The "M" Stands For Machiavelli

Foreign Policy magazine has a profile of Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy: The Bureaucrat at the Center of Hillary’s Scandals.

A few snippets:

"The guy has nine lives" a former diplomat said of Kennedy, who has spent more than 40 years at the State Department. "Everything just bounces off him."

-- Snip --

He's also able to block initiatives he doesn't like through his mastery of the arcane rules and regulations that govern everyday life at the department - some of which he drafted himself.

“Like Stalin, his power comes from his understanding and control over the bureaucracy,” said a former State Department official.

“In dealing with him or his office, they are always presenting you with rules but you don’t know where they come from: some previous secretary, the president, the Congress and so you don’t know how to figure out what would need to be done to get exceptions,” added the official.

I've never been a fan, but this kind of profile is making me warm up to the U/S for M.

Dalai Lama Tactical Tip Tuesday

“I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance, selfishness and greed.” ― Dalai Lama XIV 

"Attachment to what appears real is what keeps us from clear-mindedness." - Dalai Lama XIV

By all means, let us eliminate ignorance and keep to clear-mindedness on the subject of stopping power, the fabled unicorn that leads so many handgun users into self delusion.

Science, experience, and human reason all tell us that there is no particular stopping power in any cartridge that can be fired from a handgun. Unless struck in the head or spine, an assailant can continue to act and threaten others after being hit with multiple rounds.

We know this. And yet, how much marketing, questionable statistics, ballistic gelatin, internet arguments, and cash have been expended to make us believe that which only seems real? All that is ignorance, selfishness, and greed.

His Holiness would have us reject that which is not real, and instead modestly cultivate the fundamental skills of defensive gun use. Mastering those basics is a surer route to inner peace and contentment. 
   

FBI = Folks Barging In

I posted something about stopping truck attacks just yesterday and, what do you know, today someone ran a dump truck through the front gate of the FBI field office in Pittsburgh. See this local TV news report for what sketchy details are available now.

From the photo above we can see that the FBI facility had a proper perimeter fence, swinging gates, and operable vehicle barriers consisting of rising metal plates. I assume the FBI complied with all the applicable Interagency Security Standards for a federal facility of its type. So, what went wrong? Because, as you can see from the photo below, the dump truck crashed right through that vehicle barrier and ended up inside the FBI's protected perimeter.

What happened, simply, was physics. The FBI's vehicle barrier appears to be of an intermediate-grade type, too low (only around 20 inches high) to engage the truck at its center of gravity, and merely bolted to the surface of the roadway rather than installed in a deep pit. That barrier was overmatched by a medium-size dump truck moving at - I would guess - 30 to 40 miles per hour. The truck brought more kinetic energy than the barrier was capable of withstanding, and ripped it right out of the road surface.     

Eyewitnesses told the local news media that the truck launched into the air momentarily when it ran over the barrier, so I'm sure the driver must have been banged about and possibly he was stunned. However, the truck looks intact. If the driver had been better prepared, he might have been able to keep driving all the way up to the FBI's front door.

Apparently there was no terrorist motive, and the driver seems to be a random nut. Nevertheless, this is a bad day for the FBI, and for any other USG agency that is using similar vehicle barriers. It's always a bad day when security vulnerabilities are exposed. Oh, the Congressional oversight ... the OIG reports ... the security surveys.

My heart goes out to them, so here are a couple free tips. First, reassess the sizes of truck your perimeter anti-ram designs are based on. Today's driver just invalidated any design basis threat less than a medium dump truck. Second, before you overreact and replace all of your intermediate-level barriers, consider using chicane approaches to slow traffic down to speeds that can be handled by the barriers you have now.

After the Nice Attack, Will Cities Place Vehicle Barriers in Public Spaces?

The Bastille Day truck attack in Nice was the latest in a rather long list of vehicle assaults as a tactic for terrorism. One consequence of the attack, we may be sure, will be a new wave of streetscaping to introduce anti-ram barriers into the built environments of cities.

Some news media have been asking the question "can a lorry attack ever be stopped?" Of course it can be stopped. There is nothing new about anti-ram vehicle barriers, even ones that are effective against large trucks. The only question is whether governments will resort to large and obvious barriers of the sort that we have at our Fortress Embassies, or whether they take the trouble to go discreet and subtle with some more architectural options.

Here's an example of large and obvious:



Subtle is better, especially in cities. One commentator is using the term "crisis architecture," which is a new one on me, but I like the idea.

As a matter of fact, my good friends in the Office of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) a few years ago published a whole handbook full of EPIC ideas for architectural designs that protect against vehicle ramming attacks but hide in plain sight. Please browse it to get a glimpse of what I think we'll be seeing a lot of in our public spaces pretty soon.

There's more where that came from. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has its own handbook of barrier designs, some of them quite innovative. Check out, for instance, the TigerTrap:

A collapsible sidewalk and planting system designed to reduce the impact of force protection on public space while maintaining a high level of security. The TigerTrap employs a sub-grade collapsible material, installed below at-grade paving or planting. The installation is designed to withstand pedestrian traffic but fail under the weight of a loaded vehicle.

Like something out of a Road Runner cartoon, only it's real.

You've probably already seen examples of anti-terrorism architecture that blended into the landscape so well that you didn't realize what they were. Like this excellent one, for example.

And, there are also rapidly deployed and temporary barriers, like this one. The French Army could have placed that system around the Nice promenade in an hour or two, and picked it up again after the Bastille Day crowd had gone home.



Coming to a city near you.