NVG CQB with Jon Dufresne

I just finished Kinetic Consulting’s NVG CQB class taught by Jon Dufresne. The class was at The Ranch (a super generic name for a pretty cool facility) in Dilley, TX.

Gear

My kit for this class was very similar to the TNVC course I took last month. I ran my GPNVG on an OpsCore bump helmet kitted out with a strobe, helmet light, and ear pro.

This class uses only nonlethal UTM training rounds, so I brought my 16” AR with a UTM bolt. It has an Aimpoint CompM5 on top with a Trijicon RMR in an offset mount. Up front, there’s a MAWL and a Modlite to provide IR and visible light illumination.

This is probably the first night vision class I’ve attended where nobody was running a PVS-14. One other student had panos; the rest were all running duals. There was a good number of MAWLs and a smattering of other lasers, including a full-power PEQ-15.

Before the class

Since I’d be attending both this class and the Greenline Tactical Night Operations Summit the following weekend, I decided to drive out from Utah so it would be easier to bring all my gear. I left the Sunday before the class, stopping at Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Park on the way. I rolled into the area late Thursday afternoon, did a Walmart run, and started prepping for the class.

Friday

While this is a night vision class, CQB is complex enough that Jon spends the first day teaching the basic concepts in daylight. We convened at 8 am in the classroom.

First up was a round of introductions. These included the students, a few of whom I’d met before, and Pat, Jon’s assistant instructor. Pat and I were pretty sure we’d met somewhere before, but neither of us could figure out where, which is vexing.

We segued into the safety and medical briefs before starting on a lecture block introducing basic CQB concepts. The style of CQB that Duffy is teaching in this class leans more towards deliberate clearing than the dynamic hostage-rescue style CQB I’ve learned in previous CQB classes.

He went through some underlying principles and priorities of CQB before turning to communication methods (mostly nonverbal). Turning to tactics, Jon divides things into “door stuff,” “room stuff,” and common problems like hallways, intersections, etc. He illustrated each of these with a mix of videos and animated diagrams.

The Ranch is quite an impressive facility. Another unit was using the main shoot house, so we started at a secondary shoot house in their MOUT village (Military Operations in Urban Terrain). This was mostly a collection of CONEX boxes with a plywood shoot house in the middle. This “small” shoot house would have been big enough to teach a pretty good CQB class on its own. It was definitely big enough to get us started.

After Jon and Pat demonstrated some of the “door stuff” live, we broke up into pairs and practiced for a while. After a bit, Jon grouped us into larger four- or five-man teams. We rotated through three stations set up in different parts of the house, where we could practice some of the common problems (a hallway, an L-shaped problem, and a T-intersection).

With these basics under our belt, Jon and Pat set up the house for a longer run that chained different problems together. Each of the three teams would run the drill. After you were done, you could go up on the catwalk and observe the other teams’ runs. The first run was rough, with lots of coordination problems. The second time through (with a different setup) was a bit better.

After our second runs, Jon got word that the group using the big shoot house was finished for the day. We headed over there. This is a truly impressive facility: 10,000 square feet, with concrete block walls rated for live fire.

Jon and Pat set up our last run of the day in the big house. We started these runs about sunset, and my team went last. It was starting to get dark enough that we had to use our weapon lights in some of the darker corners of the house. The scenario was the largest and most complex we’d done, even though it only used about a quarter of the shoot house. It also included my longest-distance shot with UTM (about 25 yards).

That wrapped things up for the day. We packed up our gear and the targets and headed out. I joined Jon, Pat, and some students for dinner at a local Mexican restaurant.

Saturday

I slept in as late as I could, to prepare for staying up until the wee hours tonight. I spent the morning working on this write-up and doing some programming work for my job. After a late lunch at the same Mexican place we went last night (the quesadillas were delicious), I headed out to The Ranch.

We started around 4 pm with a cold run in the small shoot house. Duffy is a big advocate of cold drills in all sorts of contexts, from rifle and handgun practice to team-based classes like this. How you perform cold is a better representation of your on-demand skills.

In my team’s case, there was definitely some rust to knock off, but we did all right. We also had one additional team member, Greenline Tactical instructor Sam Houston.

One of the interesting points that came up was the importance of the #1 man having unambiguous body language. If he’s going right but glances left when he enters the room, the #2 man may be momentarily confused. You want that second guy in the room as quickly as possible; any confusion or delay on his part could be fatal for #1. Pick a direction and drive that way from the moment you enter the room.

After the first run, Jon and Pat went over some calls that we could make in the house in response to specific situations. “Dump” to signal to go into a room dynamically rather than pieing, “Plug” to step into the door of a room that we wouldn’t be entering and block it while other team members pass by, “Shot” for everyone to freeze while you take a shot where team members might move into the foreground, and “Bump” to bypass a closed door.

At about sunset, Jon had us break out our helmets and NODs for a lecture on helmet setups. This segued into a discussion of how to properly focus NODs, including options for focus caps or focusing one tube for close distances and the other further out. We finished the gear-focused portion of the class with a lecture on lasers and a chance to cycle through the different modes on our own IR illuminators. We also went on a short walkabout through the MOUT site to get people used to moving under NVGs.

We did our first run in the house under night vision. Our team had some communication issues this time, but we got through the house okay.

After all the teams finished their night vision runs, we moved to the big shoot house. There, we started by repeating the run we had done yesterday: same layout, pretty much the same targets, just under NODs.

The big shoot house also has overhead lights. Jon flipped them on for a block of instruction on four-way intersections. This led to a conversation about choosing routes through large, complex structures like this shoot house. That led nicely into some lecture on deconfliction: making sure you don’t pop out into a hallway another team member is covering and get shot.

This all led to our last run, which used almost half of the house. This was a large, complex problem that required good decision-making and sound tactics. I think the team I was on did pretty well.

There was a desire to get in more runs tomorrow, and we’d have the use of the whole shoot house all day, so Duffy set the start time for 2 pm.

We packed up and headed out.

Sunday

Despite not putting head to pillow until 2 am, I got a surprisingly good night’s sleep. I rolled out of bed about 10 am. Last night, all the students wanted to get in as many runs as possible on the last day, so Duffy set our start time at 2 o’clock.

Once again, we jumped right in with a cold run using the same teams from last night. Then, we shifted to two larger teams. Jon jumped in with one team, and Pat did the same with the other. The larger teams allowed us to take advantage of the size of the house. Duffy soon established a pattern where one team would help set up the house and observe from the catwalk while the other team worked through the problem. Afterwards we’d debrief the run and the teams would switch roles.

Before long, we were using pretty much the entire 10,000-square-foot shoot house. Seven guys are enough to take the house in many configurations, but only just. It’s very easy to get thin, leaving guys holding doors and hallways and not having enough people free to actually take territory.

We were able to get several daylight runs in before sunset, then broke out the NODs.

The shoot house is mostly single-story (with a catwalk for observers), but over in the corner, there is a set of stairs and a one-room second story. Duffy gave us a short lesson on clearing staircases, and from then on, the stairs and second story were in play when clearing the house.

While I’ve done some CQB classes before, this was my first class with a proper catwalk. It’s an invaluable learning tool. You can get as much out of watching someone else run through the house as you can from running it yourself. However, there were unforeseen consequences for me. While the GPNVGs weigh a lot, my helmet setup is well-balanced, and I can usually get through a class without much neck strain. However, spending a good chunk of the class looking down from the catwalk was hard on the muscles at the back of the neck. My neck definitely took more of a beating in this class than in most others.

We kept doing runs, alternating between teams. After a while Duffy shuffled up the teams a bit so we weren’t always running with the same people. We kept at it until about 1:30 am. At the very end of the last run of the class, I screwed up coordinating a deconfliction, which was a bit of a frustrating note to end on.

We debriefed the class, cleaned up the shoot house, and headed out.

Conclusions

I came into this class with pretty high expectations, primarily because Duffy’s single-man CQB class, Weaponized Geometry, is so good. NVG CQB more than met these expectations. As always, he did a great job explaining these things and guiding students to understanding by letting them experience these problems.

In addition to Jon’s performance, I also have to give props to Pat. He did a great job providing his perspective, coaching and giving feedback, and jumping in on runs.

I like that this class explored a more deliberate style of CQB compared to the more dynamic hostage rescue speed I’ve seen in previous classes. I think deliberate CQB is, in some ways, a better learning environment for the fundamentals. Now that I’ve seen this approach, I’d like to take a class that does dynamic CQB and see if I can apply some of these lessons at a faster pace.

Many CQB classes have a lot of standing around between runs. However, the way Jon had us alternating between doing our own runs and setting up runs for the other team and then watching from the catwalk meant there was always something to be doing.

NVG CQB is a great class and an excellent way to get introduced to the fundamentals of CQB.