Mission Centric Training™ is a term I coined a few years back when training civilians, law enforcement, and military personnel. It became clear that each of these groups of people had different goals, operating rules, equipment, training levels, etc. Training them all the same way is a mistake.

Let’s look at goals: Civillians goal in self defense is to survive an attack, disengage, and get to a safe place. Law enforcement officers (LEOs) job often involves facilitating a safe arrest while mnimizing potetntial of injuring a suspect. Military personell have a variety of tasks, without the liability issues of law enforcement.

Given the time for training anybody is essentially limited, where should one focus their training? Civillian programs need to focus on prevention, survival and assault neutralization. LEO programs focus on arresting and weapon retention tactics. Military programs should focus on threat neutralization, and may have to be further specialized for the mission and terrain at hand.

No matter where you fall on the continuum, self defense situations rarely arise in well lit gyms, on mats, wearing swetpants and sneakers. Terrain, weather, lighting all change strategy and tactics. Some amount of environmental training and simulation is always a good thing. The military does a stellar job with this.

The doctrine of mission centric training says that you practice your most likely attack vectors first and most often. As a civillian living in Boston, I am more likely to encounter a pistol or knife-wielding attacker than one with an assault rifle. It could happen, I can’t ignore that vector, but I should get really good at the things I’m most likely to face.