Greenline Structure Ops

At the last Night Operations Summit in Dilley, Texas, Don Edwards announced that he’d be teaching a five-day Structure Ops class at The Ranch in Dilley, Texas, in April 2025. My response was, “Shut up and take my money.”

Gear

I have a rifle set up for non-lethal training ammunition that I’ve run in previous CQB classes with Greenline and Kinetic Consulting. In those classes, it had a UTM bolt in it. For this one, I bought a Simmunitions bolt and some Force on Force ammo. This was my first time using Sims rather than UTM. The gun is set up the same way as my live fire rifles, with an Aimpoint CompM5, an offset RMR, a MAWL IR laser/illuminator, and a Modlite weaponlight.

Recently, I got a Glock 17T that fires Simmunitions and Force on Force ammo to use as a secondary. It’s set up with an RMR optic and a Modlite PL350 weaponlight.

For support gear, I brought my war belt with pouches for a couple of pistol and rifle mags, a dump pouch, and a Safariland pistol holster. The gear list for the class included armor, so I brought a Velocity plate carrier with some Hesco plates in it.

While this is not exclusively a night class, it is a Greenline course, so some sort of night vision is required. As usual, I brought my GPNVG panos. However, I’m testing a Chimera bridge in this class, which allows articulating the GPNVG pods up individually. I also brought along an Optics1 TAD thermal clip-on. To mount all this, I brought an Ops-Core FAST Carbon SF bump helmet with some AMPs electronic ear protection.

Before the class

I’d recently returned from a three-week river trip in the Grand Canyon, so I didn’t have much time before the class. I packed my gear on Friday afternoon and drove to Las Vegas. Saturday, I flew to San Antonio. On Sunday, I hit Walmart and then headed out. I grabbed some food at HEB in Persall, the last large town near The Ranch. At The Ranch, I grabbed a room in the bunkhouse and settled in.

Day 1

We headed over to the shoot house at 9am. The house at The Ranch is fantastic: 10,000 square feet with many rooms of different sizes. We took over a large room right at the front of the house as our team room/classroom, where we stored our gear, did lectures and debriefs, and hung out between runs.

We led off with waivers and a round of introductions. In addition to Don, we also had the benefit of Greenline instructor Jon Jeu. I knew some of my fellow from previous classes, including previous Night Operations Summits. Don started with some lecture. He talked about the principles of CQB before covering the basics of room clearing in great depth. This was a lot of lecture material, but CQB is a subject with enough depth that even an understanding of the fundamentals requires quite a lot of knowledge. In this case, Don explained these fundamentals very clearly and concisely.

Don and Jon demoed clearing corner-fed and center-fed rooms with two people, then had us run them dry. Once everyone had a few reps to demonstrate the most basic entry and clear possible, they kicked us out of the house and set up for a longer run.

This run incorporated three rooms with a couple of targets each. We went ‘live’ with the non-lethal training ammo in pairs and hit it.

I had a Sims round fail to extract. This is a lot messier than live ammo, because when the bolt tries to drive the subsequent round into the chamber, it mashes the paint in the marking round into the barrel extension. Clearing it required knocking it out with a rod.

This brought us to our mid-afternoon ‘siesta’ break. I ran into town to get some additional food from HEB, then cooked some hamburgers for an early dinner.

When we reconvened in the shoot house, Don and Jon talked about door stuff: opening them, pieing the room through them, etc. After they set up the house, we launched on several long, two-man clears. Don and Jon set up a course that ran us through every ‘simple’ rectangular room in the shoot house.

At the end of my run, I realized that while my gun was cycling, it wasn’t putting any rounds into the targets. One of the earlier rounds failed to make it all the way down the barrel, and subsequent shots were stacking up behind it. When I got back to the team room, I found it was very hard to drive the stack of rounds out with a cleaning rod. It ended up taking a hammer and quite a bit of tapping. When all was said and done, about 10 rounds popped out of the muzzle.

Eventually, the fading light meant the last team had to use their weapon-mounted lights to discriminate targets. We broke out the night vision and did another 2-man run with our NODs.

In many ways, the NODs runs were the simplest and best runs of the class so far. Don said this was pretty typical, as the limited input through your night vision tends to mitigate most people’s most obvious problem: going too fast.

We finished up in the shoothouse and headed back to the bunkhouse area. There we enjoyed some libations and sat around talking until the wee hours.

Day 2

We started today with a review of yesterday’s lecture, with a particular emphasis on 4-man room entries. This naturally led to runs with larger teams. Today’s runs were even longer than yesterday’s, using almost all of the house. Doing the full clear generally took us about half an hour. We’d do a run, debrief it, then Don and Jon would reset the house. Lather, rinse, repeat.

As the day went on, they added new elements. First, loud music to make it difficult for us to communicate verbally. Then, a fog machine to limit visibility in certain rooms.

After our siesta, we were able to squeeze in an additional daylight run. At twilight, we broke out the white lights for a low-light run. We finished out the night with a couple of runs under NODs.

During one of the NVG runs, I had another malfunction. I transitioned to pistol and shot the target I was dealing with. I was unable to clear it (it eventually required a cleaning rod to knock the stuck case out ), so I just continued with the pistol. Interestingly, the Simmunitions pistol rounds were significantly louder than the rifle rounds, though still much quieter than real ammo.

On the last run of the night, I had some trouble positively identifying a target at the end of a long hallway. When looking through my NVG wasn’t enough, I tried adding IR illumination and then using white light. I wasn’t able to ID the gun she was holding until we got closer. This may lead me to put a magnifier on my Sims rifle.

Once again, we were up late talking and enjoying some drinks well past midnight.

Day 3

When we reconvened this morning, Jon noted that on yesterday’s runs, we’d been kind of sloppy after we’d cleared the house and were moving out. He showed us some techniques to mitigate this, like plugging doors as we go by. We practiced these a bit.

We had access to some training flashbangs. While not as loud as the real thing, they give a sense of what it might be like to use them. Jon explained a bit about how to employ them and popped one for demonstration purposes.

Next up was some lecture on mission planning. Jon talked through the planning process, from a warning order, to intelligence gathering, to making and executing the plan itself. We’d be doing some of this later in the class, so I took copious notes.

Last up, we talked a bit about comms before Don and Jon passed out some radios. I hadn’t brought my own radio, but I had a boom mic, downlead, and push-to-talk switch for my electronic ear protection, so I was able to plug in one of their radios pretty easily.

After our first run of the day, we talked a bit about marking cleared rooms. The shoot house is big enough that it was entirely possible to forget which rooms we’d cleared, especially if you weren’t the one who actually went in the room. Jon and Don covered several methods. We ended up adopting a SOP of dropping a mini-chem light at the threshold to indicate a cleared room.

We continued making runs until our afternoon Siesta.

Convening back at the shoothouse, we did a low-light flashlight-based run in the fading light. In the very last room, we were confronted by a vertaible forest of targets: some shoots, some no-shoots. I’ll admit that this threw me for a second, but after a moment, I decided this was like eating an elephant: do it one bite at a time. I collapsed my sector, working through the array and discriminating each target, shooting those that needed to be shot while taking care to avoid shoot-throughs.

For our last run of the day, we broke out the NODs. This time, to beef up the OPFOR, we drew straws to see which student would play a bad guy alongside Jon. I drew the colored chemlight. To make things interesting, on the OPFOR, we didn’t have NODs, while the team did.

To replace me, Don stepped in to play a role on the team. Jon and I set up the house, adding some problems we hadn’t seen before, like immediate threats very close to the door and blocking certain hallways.

I did a pretty good job harassing the team as they went through. I knew where they’d be going, to a certain extent, based on how we’d set up the house. I was able to lay four or five nice ambushes for them. It was all shoot and scoot, just enough to test their long security. Towards the end of the run, I risked getting a little closer as they were exfiltrating with the paper “hostage,” hitting them first from one side, then running around and hitting them from the other.

I was pretty beat from running around the house, so it was a good thing this was our last run of the day. We headed back to the bunkhouse and enjoyed some beer, whiskey, and nice conversation.

Day 4

Owing to our late night, Don let us sleep in for an extra hour this morning, gathering at the shoot house at 10am. Our first order of business was talking about exterior movement. Thus far, the class had focused exclusively on what happens inside the building, but “Structure Ops” also focuses on moving in and around buildings as well. This is basically what the military refers to as MOUT: Military Operations in Urban Terrain. It’s kind of a blend between more rural patrolling and CQB. You’re working angles and threat areas like in CQB, but the more open areas allow patrolling-style formations like the wedge.

By this point, we’d covered CQB pretty thoroughly, so Don and Jon gave us a lecture on the more rural patrolling aspects. They emphasized the wedge and staggered column formations.

The other major subject for today was mission planning. Jon walked us through the process. He and Don did a good job covering various considerations that might come up.

After the lecture, we drove to another part of The Ranch where they’ve got a MOUT village. It’s mostly shipping containers with doors and windows cut into them, along with a pair of plywood shoot houses. There are four large buildings, plus some individual containers scattered about. I’d been in one of the plywood shoot houses in Duffy’s NVG CQB class last fall, but the rest of the complex was new to me.

For our first run, we approached and cleared the smaller of the two shoot houses, followed by several CONEXes. I’ve done both patrolling and CQB but never combined the two in this sort of context. Trying to cover all of the angles and danger areas that a couple of buildings with doors and windows represent is pretty challenging.

We followed this up with a much longer run, clearing more than half of the complex, including three major structures. One of these, built with CONEXes, was a bit of a bear to clear, with multiple stories and many locations with multiple directions to cover.

After our afternoon siesta, we reconvened in the team room at the shoot house. It was time to put our mission planning skills to work. We were tasked with rescuing a hostage from the big CONEX building at the MOUT site. We worked the planning process, coming up with a fairly straightforward approach.

This would be our first time doing “hostage rescue” in the course, so Don and Jon discussed how this differed from the slower, more deliberate clearing we’d done previously. The requirement was to reach the hostage within 90 seconds of the execute command being given.

We drove to a staging point near the MOUT site in a student’s pickup truck and waited for the “execute” command. When it came, we drove to the target building, stopped right in front of it, hopped out of the truck, and started clearing. We did a ‘dirty clear’ to the part of the structure where we’d been told the hostage was, plugging doors and racing past rooms rather than clearing them. Once we approached the hostage site, we slowed down a bit, dumping guys into every room until we found the hostage. We didn’t quite meet the 90-second requirement, but we only missed it by about 10 seconds.

Once we had the hostage (a paper no-shoot target) we dirty cleared our way back out, hopped back in the truck, and drove back to base.

The owner of The Ranch, Chad, had watched us do this run and asked if we wanted to do it again, this time on video, using a pair of HMMWVs. This was an easy yes. He brought the Humvees over, and we prepped for the mission again.

I’d heard that despite being large vehicles, military Humvees do not have very generous seating, especially for big dudes like me. I was definitely able to confirm this on the ride over.

The second run went smoother than the first. This time, we were able to hit the 60-second timeline.

VIDEO?

We debriefed both runs back in the team room.

By now, it had gotten dark enough for a NODs run. Rather than repeating the hostage rescue mission, we were told to clear the MOUT village. We developed a plan to clear it systematically. To add a bit of realism, rather than driving right past the MOUT village on our way to the starting point, we decided to change our avenue of approach, using the driving track to circle around to approach from the north.

Clearing rooms under NODs was kind of old hat by this point in the class, but doing the MOUT stuff in the dark was pretty cool. We put a lot of effort into trying to be stealthy, and afterwards, Don and Jon told us we’d done a pretty good job at that. Certainly, anyone who was not already very alert wouldn’t have been alerted to our presence. We snuck through the entire village, taking out targets along the way. Our briefing implied a big group of targets that we were supposed to eliminate. We didn’t really find anything like that, so in search of our objective, we ended up clearing more than we’d initially intended, including several outbuildings (Don said afterwards that he may have overpromised on the concentration of bad guys).

While we were working against paper targets, Don and Jon were hanging out next to the MOUT area, which gave me a chance to see how the TAD helped with target acquisition. It definitely made it much easier to pick out a living target at distance under NODs.

After the debrief, we headed back to the bunkhouses for some well-earned drinks.

Day 5

For our last day, we went back to kicking things off at 9am. Today, our first missions emphasized exterior movement. Unlike yesterday, when we were mostly moving up to buildings in order to clear them, today our task was to move through the MOUT village, as if we had an objective beyond it. We were to move down the north side of the village, swing around the end, and move back on the south side.

To spice things up, they pulled one team member to act as OPFOR and harass us as we moved through the area. They also had some paper targets strewn around to keep us on our toes. The first time through went pretty smoothly, save for an instance when one team member entered a building while the rest of us started to circle around outside. We pulled back and bundled in after him. For our second run, we upped the pace a bit and got into some pretty spicy gunfights with the student acting as OPFOR.

For the final set of runs, they split us up into three-man elements. Three guys would act as OPFOR, defending a pair of buildings, while the other three would assault the buildings. The OPFOR would be out of the fight after one hit, while the assault force would carry on even after getting tagged. I was on the attacking force the first time around. We quickly found that three guys were not really enough to clear a house that had a circular arrangement where the bad guy could always circle around behind you.

During this scenario, I shot my rifle dry. After switching to my pistol for a bit, I actually picked up one of the bad guy roleplayers’ guns and finished the scenario with his rifle.

We switched roles, with our three-man team defending and the other team making the assault. Rather than going back for more ammo, I opted to just go with my pistol.

I was in the building nearer the start point, so I expected they’d come after me first, but they switched things up by circling around to the second building. This was a viable tactic with the limited range of sim rounds, but they probably would have had a harder time of it with real ammo (or a longer-ranged training system like MILES).

I got one guy in the arm when he extended his rifle past the doorframe. To take some advantage of my one-handed weapon, I grabbed a target to use as a ballistic shield/hostage. It was to no avail, though. The assault force avoided shooting the hostage and hit me in the leg, finishing me off.

That finished up the class. We held a debrief back in the team room. After packing up all our kit and cleaning up the shoot house, we headed back to the bunkhouse.

We headed over to a local Mexican restaurant for a nice dinner, then sat around chatting late into the evening.

After the class

The next day, I repacked all of my gear and headed to San Antonio for my flight.

Conclusions

This was a fantastic class. In prior team CQB classes, both with Greenline and others, my main complaint has been that by the time you get the basics down and start to gel as a team, the class is over. The five-day format solves this problem. We had a lot of time after learning the basics to get in run after run, putting those skills to use and honing them to a higher level.

The exterior movement piece in this class was new to me. The way Don and Jon presented it both gave me an appreciation for the complexities of urban movement and helped apply existing skills in managing angles to this context.

The Simmunitions Glock 17T functioned well, but I had some trouble with the AR with the conversion bolt. This included both projectiles stuck in the barrel and failures to fire that left rounds stuck in the chamber. If you’re going to be running non-lethal training ammo through an AR, definitely bring a one-piece cleaning rod to knock projectiles out of the barrel (do it back to front). The stuck cases also left a bit of a mess in the barrel extension when the subsequent round mashed up against the rear of the stuck cartridge, leaving a residue of the marking material. A chamber brush to help clean this out would have made things easier.

If you’re looking for a chance to take your team CQB skills to the next level, I’d highly recommend Greenline’s Structure Ops class.