Originally Posted by law dawg
Well, his data is pretty instructive to me, seeing how it was adapted by the military itself and training regimens adpoted across the board (pop-up targets, stress training, silhoutte targets, etc) in military and LE circles and the results speak for themselves.
I also base my argument on other events (Russian school incident, for incidence) where they outcome is equally pre-ordained (ie-the hostages are pretty sure they will die) and still do nothing. My argument is also based upon a decade and a half of training, observation and work in the field of human violence, having seen the elephant myself.
Of course my argument is much more "quantitative and defendable" than yours, in that yours has happened only one time in recent history and we have several incidents where they did not fight back.
I do hope I am wrong, but the evidence to date does not give me hope.
You have to approach this from a broad perspective and put figures in context. Obviously, you have your experience base which sounds like it's on the pointy end of the spear. That's fine for one-on-one engagements with a bad guy. But, any military planner (including this one) will tell you that one-on-one engagements (soldier-soldier, aircraft-aircraft, ship-ship) is an incredibly inefficient means to prevail in combat. It's all about doctrine and how to employ it.... factors such as mass, concentration of firepower, element of surprise, etc. By the time you get to shooting pop-up targets and executing your capture of the bad guy, all of this has been thought out and tested in simulations and in realistic scenarios and updated as a result of real-world experience...hence my previous comments on various threads about fighting the next war rather than the last one.
You're obviously passionate about your profession and your ability to protect & serve. Most people, I would assume, are grateful. However, don't discount for a nanosecond the ability for the untrained person to do extraordinary things -- even without any formal training. The people on Flight 93, in the 25 minutes before they acted, needed to sort through all of the doctrine and tactics military and police forces take decades to develop and refine. From all accounts, it appears that they effectively executed a couple of the doctrinal fundamentals: element of surprise and concentration of firepower.
On the other hand, a couple of highly-trained FAMs armed to the teeth are no match for an adversary who effectively employs some of the elements of doctrine I noted above.
I won't get into a further discussion about defendable arguments. Our experience bases put us light-years apart on the subject.