Maintaining the Initiative

Military strategists have a term for who in a conflict is acting, and who is reacting, who is currently in control of the conflict, and they call this the initiative. If you have the initiative, you are choosing what you want to do; if you’ve lost it, then you are often limited to reacting to your opponent’s actions until you can enact a reversal and take it back. The initiative is not the same as winning, but if can be thought of as the first derivative of winning. If you hold the initiative long enough, you will almost certainly win.

A very concrete example of this is in chess. If you have a piece that threatens your opponent’s king, you’ve put him in check. His options are very limited to what immediately gets him out of check. The same applies on a smaller scale throughout the game: if you are constantly advancing in a way that threatens your opponent, he spends all his time reacting to your moves instead of creating a strategy of his own.

It turns out that this concept also applies to action pistol shooting. As the shooter, you have the initiative in most stages. The inanimate cardboard targets aren’t going anywhere, they aren’t ducking for cover, and they aren’t changing position. They just sit there and wait for you to come perforate them.

The exception to this is the moving target. The purpose of moving targets is to rob you of the initiative and force you to shoot reactively. Incidentally, this is why they are great tools for testing your skills under pressure, since it is very possible you won’t have the initiative in a self defense scenario (see also: knockout game).

At the H2O Fowl Farms IDPA match this past Saturday, there were six stages and exactly one moving target: a swinger on the second of the six stages. Stage 2 was actually a very straightforward stage: starting sitting in a chair facing uprange, and at the buzzer, get up, run around a big cable spool to take cover, and shoot the swinger and five other targets that were mostly in the open. It was not a complex stage, and required very little movement with no complex footwork. The swinger was set so that it slowed down fairly quickly, making it an obvious first target so that you’d get the maximum time to shoot it on each exposure. Here’s my stage video, with commentary on my performance later.

This stage was masterfully built to rob the shooter of the initiative. First  by starting with the targets to your back, their positions weren’t quite as concrete in your mind. By the time you got to see them for the first time after running around the spool, you were in a hurry and wouldn’t take a good second look at them. Of course, running around the spool was designed to make you start rushing because if you’re not shooting, you feel like you’re wasting time. And starting by moving uprange makes you impatient because you can’t draw your gun immediately. So by the time you get to the swinger, you’re already in overdrive mode and ready to start slinging lead. So it’s very tempting to double or triple tap that swinger as soon it appears.

But then the really interesting part of the stage begins: a dead simple, right-to-left (since the swinger was the rightmost target) shoot-em-up. Five targets, two or three shots each, at your leisure. But most shooters, including myself, totally failed to slow back down. Looking at the scores for the match, you can see that stage 2 was by far the stage where the most points were dropped. Some shooters dropped more points on stage 2 than the other five combined! After spending the whole first half the stage shooting reactively, most of us totally failed to re-establish the initiative once we were shooting the static targets. We kept shooting at the swinger’s pace instead of at our own. This shows itself in the accuracy numbers.

As an aside, I also committed a cardinal sin and didn’t give the stage the respect it deserved. I saw a wide open shooting gallery of targets during the stage brief, said “Ok, cool.” and walked off to get lunch. I came back just in time to be the current shooter, so I hadn’t watched anyone shoot it, which might have jogged my memory and made me think I should plan where my reload should come. Since I didn’t, I did the planning on the fly (i.e. while shooting) and reloaded after shooting 8 rounds from my 1911 like I would in a USPSA match instead of shooting to slide lock as required by IDPA. This mandated me picking up and stowing an empty magazine.

That, combined with ceding the initiative and shooting reactively meant that I was hurrying through the entire stage and threw away entirely too many points. But you can bet the next time I shoot a stage that tries to hurry me up, I’ll be sure not to let it take away my biggest advantage, the initiative.