AAR: Combat Rifle / Contact Drills (CRCD) 3/4 May – Jack

I have read many of the CRCD AAR’s, that is what convinced me to come to MVT. What I am trying to do is to possibly give a different perspective to why MVT is the place to train.

I did tactical pistol training last year at a name brand tactical facility. The price was $500 for a two day session, it was great training. The facility was about 5 acres, flat, a dirt bank with stationary targets. Some simulated concealment and cover, otherwise very similar to ranges I have been on all my life.

Fast forward to MVT Tactical range in West Virginia. 100 acres of mountainous terrain with all of the dips, lumps and obstructions you would expect. MVT also employes electronically controlled pop up targets that momentarily drop when hit with a bullet, you know if you have a hit or not instantaneously.
Here is why that is all so important.

In, I believe, our first live drill, Reaction to Contact, Ivan (targets nick name) pops up and you go into the drill. This includes yelling contact front, shooting Ivan twice while standing, move off of the X, looking for cover, going prone, using cover and shooting Ivan again and the drill continues on. This should be no problem right? My rifle is zeroed, the target is pretty close, it’s pretty big I should hit him first shot. He pops up, I shoot him he drops, I move left, drop prone into cover, I put the Aimpoint dot on his chest, take a breath, exhale, squeeze the shot off and Ivan is sitting there looking at me. I repeat the same thing and Ivan is still looking at me, now I am not sure, is he malfunctioning, has something gone wrong with my gun, it can’t be me, right? I fire again, this time I see a dirt clod fly up about 10 yards in front of Ivan, impacting a dirt bank I didn’t notice. Shit, I am shooting into the dirt. I am in prone so I lift my rifle up, line him up, squeeze one off, down he goes. Lets stop here and analyze.

If the target was stationary I would have happily went along thinking because my dot was on him when I squeezed a shot off I was hitting him. This would have robbed me of very valuable information, information I could have only gained in the actual wild.

In the wild just because your dot is on something does not give you the automatic hit.

When you are on uneven ground, and prone, other things get in the way. I saw plenty of tree branches flying around while I was shooting with resulting misses and had to adjust accordingly.

After this I was now watching for obstructions between me and my target. On the flat range that would really not have ever come into play. If we put this into a real life situation, and this was my first real contact, I may have never gotten the chance to figure this out.

As we moved further along in training new drills came up that included Ivan popping up and you were not told where this was going to happen. This was fabulous training. I hate to admit it but I had to be told more than one time that Ivan was up and I had not seen him. Put that into a real life situation. Stationary targets are stationary targets, even I can see them coming. Add the element of surprise and that is an entirely new level of difficulty.

MVTs’ CRCD class cost less than what I paid for my previous training. The facility at MVT is massive and very sophisticated. I am sure there is a very sizable investment there not to mention what it cost to maintain the entire thing. You throw in that Max is a Master at his craft and has an amazing staff, the training at MVT is vastly under-priced. I am a business person and I know what it cost me to run my little business, these classes are a bargain.

The following is just my opinion. I feel safe in saying training with Max will vastly increase your chances of survival when SHTF. Also if I encounter you somewhere and I see you are wearing a MVT patch I know you are someone I have common knowledge with and are probably on the same page as me.

As a side note, about the people you meet at MVT. The people I encountered at Max’s were by far the brightest bunch of people I have met in a very long time. These people did not come to MVT on a whim, you can bet they all did their homework and came up with the same answer. Just getting to talk to my class mates, staff and assorted others at MVT was worth the price of the class to me. I got a real education on a lot of different subjects this weekend.

I hope this was of some help to you in making a decision about training with MVT?

Jack