Abstract: All federal and state government agencies, as well as many private corporations, have initiated various safety campaigns that try to prepare its employees to react on the occasion of a violent threat/force episode. Preparation usually focuses on two important domains: readiness and resilience. Using a static, standard operating procedure, or home grown scenarios, will not sustain life and property. Maintaining a three stage default binding model of safety practices in combination with OODA training can push against strikes by violent entities. Sustained training reduces pre-wired behaviors and facilitates positive responses, increasing knowledge of how perceptual defense mechanisms operate.

Vocabulary: cognitive activation – individual and group characteristics and strategies employed to solving problems and to promote solutions to vegetative fear states; factor of subordination – an indicator (known or blank) taken by a perpetrator that causes intrinsic weaknesses in the planning or execution of a VTFE; Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) – a framework that investigates human activity in order to identify causes for and mitigate the impact of human error; kinetic expression – using physical violence as the only fundamental method for change or power; Insult Development – the application of an insult,to cause a specific physical or mental injury, by harsh, eclectic, authoritarian control in the learning process and development of human individuals, from an hyper-sourced entity; OODA Loop – a formal system (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) that reaches an end point when executing countermeasures to an adversary’s cognitive activation; readiness – the ability to accomplish assigned tasks or missions through resilience, individual and collective team training, and leadership; violent threat/force episode (VTFE) – an entity indicating a high probability to use violence that includes verbal and mechanical threats and/or force upon a person, persons or property.

Stage I – Preliminary configuration
Planning safety and awareness elements means coordinating the schedules of multiple stake holders, those most likely facing violent threats and physical trauma. In order to protect, restore and provide (PRP) for specific demographic factors, leaders will execute consequence and composite risk management (CRM) models. Providing a holistic model integrates a response to behaviors during “industry-assignment-performance” and during “pastime-idleness-attribute” modes, instituting full spectrum analytics (FSA) that connects every person involved in an organization.

Application of the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS), a forensic tool in air operations, staff will embed this domain in order to detect and reduce the direction of causal-based errors. Correlations found during preparations can benefit supervisory processes, validate procedures that overlap from other industries and influence the requirement to expedite new cognitive operations.

Readiness means “the ability to accomplish assigned tasks or missions through resilience, individual and collective team training, and leadership.” Resilient means having “the mental, physical, emotional, and behavioral ability to face and cope with adversity, adapt to change, recover, learn and grow from setbacks.” Undergoing various economic pressures, adapting to changing political circumstances and perceiving environmental events, having known or blank properties, shapes the resolve of the organization.

Adapting to change includes not only directed training in order to meet essential training objectives within the organization. It includes home-based training. FSA directs personnel to review online resources to locate immediate hazards off site, which can cause injury and death. Compare examples of military, law enforcement, and security methodologies when securing and eliminating potential causes of accidents. Observe possible defects at home and in the geographical neighborhood. To enhance neurological and physiological processes, cross-discipline training limits the effects of distractors and inattention and promotes transformational leadership.

Stage II – Reduce Structured Models
A serious, violent incident can happen without warning, putting a demographic group in jeopardy. Without delay, activation of the “Fight or Flight” response occurs. Effective communication and a keen, situational awareness can alert individuals to a solitary, or to multiple, domains of violent threat/force episodes: active shooter, blunt and edged weapon, CBRNE, cyber hacking, improvised explosive device, or transport attacks (air, ground, rail or sea).

If training does not operationalize lessons learned, the things that lead to insights due to an analysis of failures, movement to protect life and limb can hazard oneself, one’s family and others. Bringing this knowledge into an organization’s culture will act as a force multiplier, developing enhanced procedures and best practices.

Preparing how to react during an unexpected and frightening incident transforms the field of operations security (OPSEC). Focused, directed training helps to transform adaptive reactions and enable social interactions, especially within groups undergoing stressful situations. Within the rearranged “Run-Hide-Fight” sequence of behavior, maintenance of situational awareness ensures dominate reaction to threat levels based on best practices. Maintaining a high level of performance (readiness and resilience) can have a profound impact in threat acquisition and recovery. Military units train using the standard: alert, lockdown, inform, counter, and evacuate (ALICE).

The immediate objective of VTFE training means – make certain that everyone matters, whether in a tactical or accidental situation. Individuals must handle conflict together. Training means embracing problem-solving techniques which focus a group in recognizing how to escalate and modify the “Run-Hide-Fight” and ALICE sequences.

Effective training directs participants to know how and where to run, how and when to hide, and, how and when to fight. Directing associates to develop skills based on what they can control will deconflict the fear generated from a potential threat. Countering a VTFE immediately with opposing force can reduce and/or eliminate the entity before others fall to victimization.

Stage III – Combine OODA Loop
Leaders need to recognize the degree to which human entities internalize their reasons to display a singular, violent episode. In fact, perpetrators, and specifically those who have undergone an Insult-Development approach, whether latent or actual, join their intentions to a gestalt of pain, “letting go” during their own, absolute, self-judgment. Self-awareness descends into atheistic hatred, making others suffer their unhappy choices. This factor of subordination postpones its intrinsic weaknesses. Once the violence concludes, a notice of assignment usually follows from an hyper-sourced entity, indicating what organization has supported the episode.

Given the exhibited behavior of potential perpetrators, combining the potential values of the OODA Loop will support situational awareness and resilience, even during VTFEs. It also advances participants in adapting to change. This approach, developed by Colonel John Boyd, a brilliant U. S. Air Force pilot, promotes immediate analysis of facts and evidence as a means to an endpoint, through the implementation of decisive, responsive options.

In short, OODA means: observe the perpetrator’s behavior, orient to the choices, decide on a course of action based on observation and orientation, then act, by using controls or other materials, as the process causes an effect on the perpetrator, that one can observe. Although observation alone of effects can not provide a subjective feeling of expertise, sustained training will reduce stress responses and promote readiness.

Situational awareness includes cognition of the individuals’ basal reactions to conditions that cause fear. Whether those conditions have real or imagined causes. OODA operations allow continuous opportunities for the selection of criterion that can eliminate VTFEs. Perpetrator behavior, when agitated and under duress, move in specific directions, either gaining interactions and collisions or not. OODA training establishes a wall of evasiveness to change the trajectory of the attack and a wall to repulse the attack.

Conclusion – Systems with high interactions sustain reliability
Evidence-based data has made the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security urge all State and local agencies to review and implement protocols in their emergency planning operations. As keeping VTFEs in mind, agencies need to include mitigation, preparedness, and recovery. No “one size fits all” relationship exists. Employ a focused configuration, reduce structured models and combine OODA Loop methods to decrease intractable obstacles to performance. In fact, FBI data indicates that when personnel had prepared for VTFEs, their expected responses did indeed stop perpetrator(s).

Finally, introducing these three stages into an agency’s standard operating procedures will add strength to the readiness and resilience of everyone, reinforcing expectant outcomes. It will alleviate misunderstandings, provide sustainability and add transformational safety models.

In that concern, appropriate agencies and NGOs must commit to developing the necessary language that defines the archetype which tells the reason to potential perpetrators not to accept a violent kinetic expression as the only, fundamental method for change or power. Tuning into the relationship between potential perpetrators and constructive, archetypal forces, broadens the requirement to connect and deploy positive, intervention guidance.

R. Alexander Ph.D.