I attended the 2024 Greenline Tactical Night Operations Summit the weekend before Thanksgiving. I’ve been to every Summit since they started doing these in 2022, and it’s one of the highlights of my training year.

This time, it was held at The Ranch in Dilley, TX. The Ranch has multiple square ranges, a 10,000-square-foot shoot house, a sniper range, and on-site lodging. It’s an excellent facility for an event like this.

Gear

This would be my first year driving to the Night Ops Summit rather than flying, so I took advantage of this and brought quite a bit of gear (perhaps too much).

As usual, I ran my GPNVGs on an OpsCore FAST SF Carbon bump helmet with an array of accessories, including strobe, helmet light, and hearing protection.

I brought three carbines, two 12.5” SBRs for live fire, and a 16” gun for UTM. All are set up similarly, with a MAWL IR laser/illuminator and a Modlight weapon-mounted light. The two live-fire guns have OSS/Huxworx suppressors. One gun has a Leopold 1-6x LPVO with an offset red dot, while the other live fire gun and the UTM rifle have an Aimpoint CompM5 for the primary optic and an offset RMR for the backup. I brought my full war belt setup for support gear, but since neither of the carbine classes I was taking involved pistol transitions, I ended up just running slick, with a couple of mag pouches.

In addition to the gunfighting rifles, I brought a 6.5 Creedmoor gas gun for my one night of long-range shooting. Accompanying this are a couple of clip-on night vision scopes: a CNVD-LR for the gun and a PVS-30 for my Leopold Mark 4 spotting scope.

Before the Summit

The previous weekend, I had taken Jon Dufresne’s NVG CQB class at The Ranch. To fill the time between that and the Summit, I drove to Corpus Christi, where I relaxed and played tourist at the Texas State Aquarium and the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. On Thursday, I returned to Dilley, checked in for the on-site lodging, and spent some time hanging out. This being the third year of the event, there were plenty of folks I knew from previous iterations to catch up with.

Day 1

Activities during the day on Friday included talks by the Vice President of the American Suppressor Association and an NRA board member.

As an option for chow, they had a food truck that served specialty egg rolls (filled with brisket and mac and cheese, for instance).

That afternoon, they opened up a range for people to check their zeroes. I’d just put a new can on my 6.5 gas gun, so I took advantage of the opportunity to zero and tweak my gas block settings.

Night 1: Night Structure Ops

This class was taught by Josh Kent. He’s a new instructor with Greenline who I hadn’t trained with before. We met at The Ranch’s shoothouse, which is a fantastic facility—10,000 square feet, live fire rated, and with a full catwalk.

We started with a safety brief, one which included safety considerations for IR lasers and the nonlethal UTM training ammunition we would be using in the house. Josh moved on to some lecture on CQB fundamentals. CQB is a vast topic; even a 2-3 day class can feel rushed. With only about seven hours, this class was, by necessity, very abbreviated.

With the lecture out of the way, we swapped our bolts for dedicated UTM bolts. Then we paired up and went into the house. We started out just doing dry runs, entering and clearing rooms in two-man pairs.

Once everyone had familiarized themselves, we did a live run against some paper targets in a different part of the house. Josh was up on the catwalk to provide feedback and talk us through unfamiliar problems as they arose.

After doing some runs in pairs, we combined two pairs of two in the same run. Initially, this involved two-man clears, with the second pair leapfrogging the first and clearing the next room after every engagement. This segued into full four-man runs, where we could use the additional guys more flexibly.

Our last instruction before turning off the lights was a block on various types of intersections: Ls, Ts, and four-ways.

With that, we broke out the NODs, and Josh flipped the lights off. For our initial NVG runs, we went back to two-man teams. The bar for coordination is much higher in the dark, with most folks limited to a 40° field of view. After a run to help everyone get grooved back in, we moved on to 2+2 and four-man runs.

That wrapped things up for the night. There are only so many things you can do in a one-night CQB class, especially if you want to integrate NVGs, but Josh got a surprising amount in without it feeling too overstuffed.

We adjourned for the night. The food truck we’d had for lunch was back in, serving a very welcome late dinner. I stayed up another couple of hours chatting with folks before turning in for the night.

Day 2

Today, there was an interesting talk by one of the guys from Nightforce who was at the Summit as a sponsor. One of my takeaways was that it was a surprisingly small operation for being such a well-known brand.

I also had a long conversation with a guy there representing Aether Optics, a company producing their own panoramic 4-tube NVGs. I’m not in the market for another set of panos, but I get asked about them a lot, so it was good to learn about one of the other options.

They had lunch catered by a local Mexican restaurant today, which was very tasty.

Night 2: Sniper NightFighter

My second night class was Sniper NightFighter by Eric Vargas. Two years ago, I took this class (under the name Clip-On DMR) at the first Night Operations Summit. Since then, I’ve acquired some new gear and wanted to take it again.

The class was held on The Ranch’s long range. Unfortunately, due to a dispute with a neighboring landowner, we were limited to 450 yards.

We assembled around 5pm. After some introductions, we started out at 100 yards, confirming our zeros in the fading light. After everyone had a reasonably good zero, we worked steel targets out to 450 yards to confirm (or, for some people, establish) our dope.

At this point, it was coming on twilight and getting difficult to see the targets. We took a break from shooting for some lecture until it got dark enough to break out the clip-on night vision. Eric had some units available for students who didn’t have them, but I ran my own.

In addition to the clip-ons on people’s rifles, we also had some on some spotting scopes. I put my PVS-30 on my Leupold Mark 4, and Eric had a similar setup on his. He also had a couple of loaner spotters from Nightforce that he put some of the extra rental clip-ons on. These were quite nice because they could crank all the way down to 6x, as opposed to the 12x on the Mark 4s.

With everyone’s rifles all NV-ed up, we shot the zero again. This would establish if the addition of the night vision optic had shifted anyone’s zero. I didn’t have to shift mine, but some people’s shifts were substantial.

Once everyone had established their shift and dialed in any corrections, we engaged targets out to 450. Picking out some of the small steel plates at longer distances is much more of a challenge under night vision than during the day.

We had a guy who was a rep for FLIR there. He’d brought out some high-end, actively cooled thermal imagers that were pretty awesome. Unfortunately, the prices on these units put my GPNVGs to shame.

To add yet another level of challenge, Eric had us drag out some obstacles to shoot off of (a VTAC barricade, a tank trap, and some tow straps simulating a method of shooting from a helicopter door). Although I was frustrated at times, I was actually pretty pleased with my performance.

Once everyone had their fill of shooting from the obstacles, we decamped from the tower, debriefed the class, and headed back.

Tonight, they brought in some excellent barbecue for our late dinner. Again, I was up until the wee hours talking with folks. We talked about night vision, of course, but also about academia and industrial psychology.

Day 3

Based on my experience the previous night, I ordered the Nightforce CFS spotting scope. After spending all that money, I spent the rest of the day hanging out and talking with folks.

Night 3: NV Performance Rifle

For me, the final class of the Night Ops Summit would be Jon Dufresne’s NV Performance Rifle class. He started the course off with some introductions and a safety brief.

We jumped right in with a cold drill: 5 shots to the A-zone as fast as possible, followed by a quick but more accurate, five-shot group. After giving us another shot at the drill (a “lukewarm run”), Duffy launched into an abbreviated version of the opening hours from his Rifle Mechanics class. As the light faded, we stepped through a series of drills designed to explore some of these concepts. These culminated with some white light shooting drills.

Now fully dark and under NODs, we really started getting into the meat of this course with some multiple target engagement drills. We started with three dots on a single target, then moved on to doing drills going from target to target. In addition to standard multiple target engagement material, Duffy also talked about some night vision specific issues, like putting the target you’re shooting off-center in your tube so you can see the edge of the target you’re transitioning to.

The drills grew increasingly complex, incorporating wider transitions between targets, varying distances, and movement. For most of these drills, Duffy set up three separate stations at different points on the range, allowing multiple shooters to run different drills at the same time.

We had one interesting incident where a student had a badly stuck bolt carrier. After futile attempts to mortar it and pound it out using a multitool and a magazine, I got my big tool bag out of my car and pounded it out using a mallet and a punch. The case in the chamber was basically pristine, so evidently, there was something somewhere else jamming up the bolt carrier group.

We wrapped up with a series of movement-focused drills, where we slalomed between barrels, moved among cones laid out in a square, stopping and shooting, and so on.

We wrapped things up about midnight.

Fewer people were hanging out after the classes tonight, thanks to early flights and long drives the next day. Perhaps unwisely, I stayed up until about 3am, talking training with another participant.

After the Summit

The next morning, I had an online meeting for my job, so I couldn’t sleep in as much as I would have liked. After my meeting, I hopped in the truck and drove to Van Horn, TX, where I stayed at the Hotel El Capitan. My late friend John Chambers had recommended the El Capitan to me, and it more than lived up to his recommendation.

From there, I drove the rest of the way home, enjoying the New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah scenery along the way.

Conclusion

As always with the Night Ops Summit, this was a fantastic event. Set the awesome training aside, where else can a night vision aficionado hang out with dozens of similarly afflicted individuals? The fact that three years in, I’m getting to know many of the regulars makes it even better.

The classes were excellent, as usual. Shooting long distances in the dark is an awesome experience. Duffy’s class pushed my NVG carbine shooting skills to a new level. If there was one shortcoming, it’s that one night just isn’t enough for NVG CQB.

The Ranch is a fantastic facility, and the Night Ops Summit really took advantage of it. From the multitude of ranges to the shoot house to the on-site lodging, it was a great place to hold this event. I’m stoked that Greenline has already announced that they’ll be back here next year.

The Greenline Tactical Night Operations Summit is the premier night vision event of the year and worthy of a trip from anyone interested in fighting at night.