I attended the Patrol Officer Counter Ambush course taught at CSAT from 05/02/17-05/04/17. The class was taught by MSG Paul Howe, and his training staff consisting mainly of Nacogdoches PD SWAT officers. The class was a closed enrollment course offered to Sworn Law Enforcement Officers only.
The first day consisted of what MSG Howe called his calibration. Consisting of rifle and pistol drills performed at close range (Mostly 7 yards). The goal of this portion of the class was to allow MSG Howe and his staff to ensure that all of the participants had the necessary skills for the course. There was a great deal of moving around other students while shooting later in the course and any amount of unsafe weapons handling would have been unacceptable. Following the basic shooting drills we moved to a hostage shooting drill using CSATs hostage rescue targets. This drill involved moving around other stationary officers using the Sul position, and knowing what your pistols holdover is at 7 yards so that you are acurately able to deliver head shots to a suspect without injuring the hostage. This was a big part of the theme of the course throughout. The ability to sling rounds quickly is not nearly as important to deliver rounds accurately. Every round has an ending, and police officers are liable for those endings. From there we moved to learning how to effectively use vehicles for cover, shoot from behind barricades while kneeling, standing, and with a partner.
On the second day we covered vehicle bailouts, bounding through an environment with a partner while using vehicles as cover. This was a good opportunity to see that if you did not effectively consider the offset between your muzzle and your optic rounds that were intended for a target would instead find themselves buried in a car hood. We also used CSATs second shoot house to cover scanning the outside of a building and responding to the threats that you find within. For instance if a threat is found in the open garage it can be tempting for a two officers to get sucked into that, but it is important to make sure that the whole front of the building is clear so that a second threat is not missed. We ended the day with medical training. Covering topics like wound packing, and the use of tourniquets while MSG Howe sprayed fake blood on the "wounded".
Day three was more scenario based training covering officer down recovery tactics, directed fire (Think suppressive fire), and the importance of finding work as a shooter responding to critical incidents.
The quality of instruction was fantastic throughout. MSG Howe is a wealth of knowledge and an absolute class act. His assistant instructors are also incredibly knowledgeable and consummate professionals. MSG Howe said repeatedly that he will not be around forever and that retirement is definitely in the future. I would strongly encourage any serious shooter to find there way down to CSAT before Paul goes off the radar, you will not regret it.
The course was absolutely not a shooting course. There was plenty of shooting, but the course was a tactics course. Most of the shooting was done on the first day for the purposes of ensuring that all participants had the safe weapons handling required for the course. Most of the pistol shooting that occurred after the first few hours was at ranges greater than 25 yards. The expectation was that you would not have problems ringing steel at that range. The required ammo was 500 rounds pistol 500 rounds rifle. I shot less than 400 rounds of each over the three days.
I would strongly recommend this course to patrol officers, and those responsible for training patrol officers.
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