Scenario or Force-on-force (‘FOF’) training (sometimes called Simunition training, after the major maker of the marking ammunition used) has become all the rage in the last couple of years, with some instructors making it a hallmark of their courses. Everyone, it seems, is buying Airsoft pistols and touting their FOF credentials. Supporters of the concept have done a very good sales job, as I routinely am asked if my courses have a force-on-force component.

Such questions remind me so much of my college days working in a camera store. People would walk in, look at a lens, and proceed to ask how many elements it contained. That’s a useless bit of information to anyone other than an optical engineer, but these folks had been told by someone, somewhere that it was an important question to ask. They didn’t understand the question, and certainly didn’t know how to interpret the answer, but by golly they were going to ask anyway!

I’ve played with FOF a bit (yes, I bought the requisite gas-powered Glock lookalikes.) Understand that I don’t claim to be guru at FOF, nor am I a super-tactical-high-speed-low-drag-tier-one-operator kind of guy. I am, however, fairly intelligent, reasonably well informed, and possess an inexorably analytical mind. I can truthfully claim to be a good diagnostician – figuring out how things work and, more importantly, why they don’t. I also don’t believe everything I’m told, no matter how well sold it may be.

What I see too often with regard to FOF promotion is a certain lack of critical thinking about the concepts, and it starts with the equipment used. FOF naturally is limited to the ability of the equipment, so it’s important to know what the gear does and does not do.

Whether AIrsoft or simulated munition, FOF guns all do one thing: to the extent that they mimic a gun you actually own, they give you first shot accountability. That’s it. Read that again, because it’s important to the discussion. This is all they do!

When you discharge an Airsoft in a drill or scenario, where the first round hits will probably be pretty close to where it would have hit had you used a real gun (within the range limitations of the pellet, of course.) In other words, if you used a simulated Glock 19 and you regularly carry a Glock 19, you can be reasonably sure that the first simulated round would be representative of a real round.

Understand that this is only true if the guns match. If you use the Glock Airsoft in FOF training, but actually carry a Beretta 92, the value of that first round has been diminished. You don’t know for certain that you would have shot your Beretta just like you shot the Glock simulant.

Beyond the first round, the predictive value drops to near zero. This is because of a lack of ballistic effect, from the standpoint of both the shooter and the shootee. Simulated rounds don’t have the recoil and muzzle rise of a real gun, so each additional shot can be made much faster, with greater precision, than can real rounds; the shooter’s balance of speed and precision is skewed. If the technique you’re learning in FOF only works when you can discharge 10 rounds in under a second, how valid will that be when you’re using a real gun with which you can’t?

Just because a person can land multiple, fast shots with an Airsoft does not mean that he’ll be able to do so with a real gun. At the very least, he’ll shoot a real gun slower and with greater deviation than a simulated gun. Any conclusions drawn from the second, third, fifth, or ninth shot with Airsoft or Code Eagle has virtually no predictive quality with regard to a real gun with real ammunition.

The first time I picked up an Airsoft and started doing drills this became clear. As I was going through the exercises I thought “I’m kicking butt!” I quite literally put down the Airsoft, picked up a real Glock, and tried the same thing on the same target. Surprise! I couldn’t shoot nearly as fast, with nearly the deviation control, that I could with the Airsoft gun. What, then, was the value of those extra simulated shots from the standpoint of the physical shooting skill?

The lack of ballistic effect is important on the other end as well. The pellets – be they Airsoft or paint capsules – don’t stop people. There is no effect on the target other than a small sting (if that), and there is no cumulative damage. This means that where a real bad guy might start slowing down with the first shot and might be on the ground with the third, the simulated opponent can continue full speed, full power charges through the tenth, twelfth, or fifteenth round. The rejoinder, of course, is that one never knows how many rounds it will take to stop an attacker (true), so one should keep shooting until the threat goes away.

This also is true, but we have to go back and reconsider the lessons from the preceding paragraphs: you can’t shoot a real gun that way, and the target won’t react that way, so where’s the learning happening? It’s a vicious circle: with simulated guns, the more rounds you fire in an attempt to be ‘realistic’ the less ‘realistic’ the exercise becomes. Force-on-force drills touted as ‘verifying’ or ‘proving’ specific gun handling or shooting techniques are a joke.

(I once saw a forum post by someone who had “tried” the Center-Axis-Relock shooting technique and proclaimed it “good to go” — no, really, that’s what he said — because it “worked with Airsoft.” Don’t be that guy.)

This is the basis for my belief that, strictly from a standpoint of technique justification, force-on-force drills which continue beyond the first shot are probably not of great value. They may be fun, may be exciting, but one has to critically examine whether they’re really teaching us anything that is relevant.

Next time we’ll look at the structure of FOF drills and scenarios, and some of the issues they raise.

-=[ Grant ]=-