To click, or not to click: Why the Fire Service needs Battle Drills
According to Army Field manuals a battle drill is defined as a “collective action, rapidly executed, without applying a deliberate decision-making process.” I remember it as clear as if it were yesterday. We we’re on a foot patrol in Eastern Afghanistan, “POP! POP! POP!” gunshots ring out. I turn, positively identify my target, and return a massive volume of fire achieving fire superiority while seeking cover. All of this happened in a matter of seconds, before I really realized it I was reloading my weapon. You see React to Contact is a battle drill. For five years prior to this I had been trained ad nauseam to positively identify my target, return fire at a rate which would achieve fire superiority, and to seek cover. I had been trained on this so effectively that I was able to conduct these tasks rapidly and without applying a deliberate decision-making process.
It’s 4:30 in the morning and you’re dispatched to a residential structure fire. On arrival you find a heavy body of fire in the front what you assume to be living room. A frantic woman grabs your officer and screams my kids are still upstairs. Vent, enter, isolate, and search or VEIS. Your officer determines which windows on the back of the house are the kid’s bedrooms while you grab a ladder and head to his position. You throw the ladder, your officer heels, but when do you click on air? In the fire service there is a million different ways to do just about everything and I am typically pretty cautious about telling someone the way they do it is wrong. Being honest because there are so many different compliments of staffing levels, equipment types, apparatus types, and each incident is different. Telling someone their way is wrong is sometimes foolish. So you throw your mask on, but you don’t click on air. You climb the ladder take the glass at this point the clock starts ticking. The fire, heat, smoke is coming for that vent you just created, you need to isolate that room. You click on air, sound the floor, enter, and isolate the room. Could you have done it faster if you clicked on air before ascending the ladder? I have heard the arguments against this, “Don’t be a yard breather” and “You need to conserve your air” but realistically think about it. How much air is it going to take for you to VEIS that room? This is supposed to be a rapid action because you do not have a hose line to protect you. So 500psi? I understand it’s different for everyone. So even if you triple that to allow yourself an emergency supply? 1500psi of your 4500psi? The name of the game is expeditiously isolating that room because that is what protects you and any possible victims from the fire. So the question is to click or not to click?
My argument isn’t that you should always do it one way or the other. At what level should we be telling people they have to do it one way? What if your department had “Battle Drills”? They tell you I understand that you like to do it this way, but in the interest of training a collective team these are the steps we are going to use to perform this task. Everyone will ladder the window, put on all of your PPE to include clicking on air, take the glass, sound the floor, enter the room, and rapidly isolate the room. You will then conduct a right hand search, evacuate any victims, then exit the structure. Then you train on this battle drill. Every single guy trains, hard, the exact same way, the exact same steps, as if you were in academy again and that instructor (you know which one I am talking about) is watching you like a hawk waiting to make you do push-ups. You train on the battle drills determined by your department until they become collective tasks, rapidly executed, without applying a deliberate decision-making process. Will this work for every single situation? No. The fire ground is entirely too dynamic to write a book about how we do it every time. What if a specific random situation doesn’t allow me to do the task the way the battle drill says to? Remember, “Doctrine is authoritative but requires judgment in application” that is the difference between you and a robot. I could program a robot to do this job but it would fail. Because it is the firefighter applying judgment and critical thinking to each incident that will achieve the desired end state. All that said, as the United States Army has demonstrated for decades battle drills work. It is time that the fire service made them work for us.
Originally published in Firehouse Magazine:
https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/training-drills/article/21007039/when-to-click-on-air-firefighter-scba-training-firehouse-magazine
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