Advanced Room Clearing for Close Protection
This short article is adapted from our new VIP Protection Room Clearing Tactics book and discusses our new “advanced” series manuals and provides some examples of common situations when protective details might need to use room clearing tactics. We welcome your reactions, comments and ideas on our Facebook page and if you like the article, click below to check out the book on Amazon.
Advanced Protection Room Clearing Tactics (PRCT)
Our latest book focuses on room clearing tactics (RCT) as they apply to VIP protection work. Special Tactics prefers the term “Room Clearing Tactics” (RCT) over “Close Quarters Battle” (CQB) since RCT is more descriptive of the specific skill set commonly referred to as CQB. By definition CQB would include hand-to-hand fighting, trench assault tactics and jungle warfare since combat in all of these cases is in close quarters. On the other hand, RCT specifies that tactics involve clearing rooms and interior structures. However, in common usage, the terms RCT and CQB are talking about the same thing.
About the Special Tactics “Advanced Series”
VIP Protection Room Clearing Tactics (PRCT) is the first volume in Special Tactics’ new advanced series. The term “advanced” does not necessarily mean that the techniques themselves are more advanced. Most elite units often do not employ more advanced techniques. Instead, they employ basic techniques much more effectively, having achieved true mastery of the basics. Therefore, this book still focuses on basics and fundamentals but instead of covering individual techniques, it focuses on providing more real-world, scenario-based examples of how to combine various techniques to solve tactical problems. Hence, this book assumes the reader is starting with a background in RCT/CQB and protection tactics since the specific steps for various clearing mechanics are not covered in detail.
While the book focuses on realistic examples and scenarios, note that it would not be possible to cover every scenario a protective detail might encounter. Therefore, while our advanced series books are roughly twice the length of our other open-source books, there are many gaps that are left out and many questions left unanswered. Examples in the book were chosen to help readers learn how to better think about tactical problems in protection work. By studying the examples, the reader should be able to apply similar concepts and thinking patterns to solve new, unexpected problems in real-world operations. Also, the examples in the book are not intended to provide the “right way” to solve a particular tactical problem. Our examples are intended to be realistic, not perfect.
Common PRCT Scenarios
The PRCT book is organized somewhat differently than other Special Tactics books on CQB or RCT. In other books we break techniques down into their smallest possible components or building blocks. For example, we give instruction for how a single person might clear a single center-fed room using a clear-from-the-doorway, reverse-180, or deep penetration technique. The idea of presenting individual techniques in isolation is to give the reader maximum flexibility to combine the various building-blocks to fit specific situations. However, our other books don’t spend much time showing how to put the different building-blocks together, they just focus on providing the building blocks themselves.
The PRCT takes the opposite approach and focuses not on individual techniques but how to combine different techniques to solve tactical problems with a VIP in tow. The art of PRCT is less about how to clear an individual room and more about how to get the VIP from point A to point B through multiple rooms to a safe location or evacuation point, with threats coming from different directions. The way a protective detail decides to clear a specific room depends on what they expect to find in the next room or what threats are pursuing from the rear.
In a real-world protection mission, there are a variety of reasons why a detail might actually be executing the techniques in the PRCT book. The detail might come under attack while escorting the VIP at the venue and need to quickly move the VIP to a pre-planned or improvised safehaven while waiting for support to arrive. Alternatively, the detail might have to use PRCT to get the VIP back to the motorcade and evacuate.
Details might also need to use PRCT if the motorcade is attacked and the there is no option but to evacuate to a nearby building. Since a motorcade can be attacked at any point along its route, you may be completely unfamiliar with the area you find yourself in after evacuating your vehicle. This situation will require additional vigilance and sound tactics in order to ensure the VIP’s safety.
Ultimately, in order to be truly effective, a tactician needs to have mastered the basics and exposed himself/herself to so many different scenarios and contingencies that it is possible to make critical decisions instantly through an intuitive “game sense” that often operates faster than the speed of conscious thought. It is impossible to gain that level of mastery just by reading a book. However, the PRCT book will point the way for how to develop increasingly challenging scenarios and practice those scenarios in realistic training exercises. In the next article we will draw a selection of diagrams and scenarios from the book to give examples of techniques for different sized details.
We hope you found the short article useful and once again we welcome your reactions, comments or suggestions on our Facebook page where we frequently hold constructive discussions on tactics with people from various tactical backgrounds and experience levels. Also, click below if you would like to check out the full book on Amazon.
