The OODA Loop: A Closer Look At the Kenosha Shooting

Introduction: This episode of the Gunslingers USA Podcast features a frank conversation I had with Iowa resident Jake Pries, owner and lead instructor of a firearms training program in Iowa. Our topic of discussion: the firefight between Kyle Rittenhouse and three armed combatants on August 25 during the Kenosha riots.

Ian: All right everyone, welcome back to our podcast here at Gunslinger USA. I am here with Jake Pries, who’s the owner and lead instructor of Distributed Security Quad Cities, an ambitious training program in Eastern Iowa and Illinois. Jake, tell us a little bit about yourself before we jump into this.

Jake: Yeah, again, my name is Jake Pries and I have a 15 years of law enforcement experience, spent 20 years in the National Guard on combat deployments, and as a small arms instructor, small unit tactics instructor, and combatives instructor for the National Guard. And then with Davenport [Police Department] I spent the majority of my time on patrol. I left the department as a sergeant spent the last five, six years of my career on the department as a supervisor in one capacity or another one on the street. So that’s me.

Ian: So now that we’ve introduced our wonderful guest speaker who I’ve worked with a lot since he’s we’re right here next to each other in the same backyard, same little pond. We’re going to we’re going to hit really briefly the Rittenhouse shooting. There’s already a million stories about it. So the rights and wrongs, the legalities, the morality of it will lead to other people we’re going to touch on the decision making process and how incidents like that, regardless of what led to them or what put that person in that situation plays into your decision making process and how you can apply the lessons of the OODA Loop into those what’s your like when you first when this news first broke, what was your first impression, the first thought to cross your mind?

Jake: So I think, initially it was just a bad situation, right? Like overall, a no win situation. And you know, does anyone ever really win in a shooting? No. No one ever really wins. Somebody usually gets to go either home or jail, or the other party goes to the morgue or they go to the hospital with everlasting injuries.

Ian: All of your classes, you have a pretty good selection. You have your combative handgun course and, you know, you got smaller, shorter ones. You have a pretty good selection and the ones I’ve attended you, and I’ve heard you bring it up multiple times, the famous are probably the most famous ends the first decision making cycle, the OODA Loop: Observe, Orient Decide, Col. John Boyd’s brainchild, which he himself took 20 years to develop. It was not a simple thing he rolled out of bed and came up with one day.

Jake: The OODA Loop is – and let me back up a little bit just to kind of go over what the OODA Loop really is. And you mentioned it, it’s the situation, decision making process, right? And put this in perspective, people do this every single day while they’re driving, right? You’re driving on the road, you’re constantly getting input of information from either vehicles around you, the radio, what you see what you hear what you smell, what you feel through the steering wheel, you feel through the pedals. Even the most basic driver does things within the OODA Loop every single day.

When we talk about the application, the use of force or whether it be in defense or anything else, the big thing we have to remember is action versus reaction. And the action versus reaction within the OODA Loop is something that the reactionary gap will always be longer than the action gap. And what I mean by that is, when you decide it takes about for the average person and it takes about point 0.6 seconds to actually see and understand what it is using, right for your brain to process that information and that’s usually for somebody that’s relatively locked in. And that’s usually on a, in a relatively calm environment. Okay, from there it takes about another point to 0.3 – 0.5 seconds to put whatever action you decide to do in the in the play.

So if we, if we equate this to like on the range, if I’m using a shot timer, right? Even if I’m on target, my finger on the trigger and as soon as that shot timer goes off, it still takes me about 0.31 seconds you have to process what is happening. Even if I’m on the trigger right there that beep go off, that point six or 0.6 [seconds] is my brain processing time to understand “Okay, he went off knowing pull a trigger that point 0.53 seconds is actually my brain telling my finger “That trigger,” right? So at a minimum, I’m at a 0.31 0.36-ish seconds on a shot timer, already pointed in, [and] that’s not including the draw. That’s not including the finding the threat, orienting to the threat, and deciding what I need to do to the threat, and then actioning whatever my decisions are.

When it comes to the Kyle Rittenhouse thing, I mean this thing was all over the map. He’s got multiple adversaries that are aggressive, he’s been hit in the head and Molotov cocktails thrown at him [After this interview was already recorded, the alleged Molotov Cocktail was identified as a harmless plastic bottle in a bag. However, this still is battery and it is likely that Rittenhouse didn’t know it was a bottle either – IK]. Again, I’m not glorifying anything that he did. I’m not condoning anything that he did. I’m simply explaining from an overall perspective, what kind of chaotic situation that is.

Ian: It’s interesting to really look at it as you are, you know, and it’s good, you know, and I do want to say that, you know, you do bring up the OODA Loop a lot. A lot of people bring up the OODA Loop videos. Practically every firearms instructor on earth brings it up, but 99% present it wrong. You actually, as you said, it’s a continuous cycle. You present correctly.

Jake: Yeah, it’s something that builds on itself, right? So if I’m on the line, and I’m teaching somebody how to pull the trigger, let’s say, they have to observe what it is I’m actually telling them, right, they have to observe what the target is they have to observe all the things around them, they then have to orient the brain towards what they’re actually going to be doing. Right, they have to make the decision, hey, this is I’m being told I got to pull the trigger, right, and that’s all I got to do. Then they have to decide to pull the trigger and then they have to pull the trigger.

But even in that process, they’re going to have to do that over and over and over and over again. And the minute that they stop observing what it is that they’re doing, the whole OODA Loop gets thrown out the window. So then you have to restart at the beginning. And that’s why in a defensive situation, it’s so important to get inside your adversaries OODA Loop and to make them do what you want them to do, and instead of reacting to what they’re doing,

Ian: I really can’t you know that that was spot on, it’s almost hard to, like, add to that, except maybe they’re reacting and they’re also getting isolated from each other, from their environment, from you. They’re not only reacting to everything you’re doing, they’re getting confused or losing sight of each other. If your adversary happens to be an individual, he’s still getting isolated and disoriented and losing sight of what’s happening in front of him.

With that said, you know, especially as an instructor where you know, you have potentially you might see a person’s face one time and you’ll never see him again. So it’s got your one chance to instill whatever you can in them and you might have a longest time right you know, see your combative handgun course you have, you know, 16 hours plus whatever interface you have with them in between. But on the other hand, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you might just have an hour with somebody. So it’s a bit of a dilemma, you know, how to emphasize to someone how important it is to really do that, to really continue honing your skills.

Jake: And that’s why we, you know, we try to put it into that practical application of, you know, if you look at, if you look at anything that anybody does, whether it’s playing sports, or driving, or just moving through their normal day, every single time every single day, and usually within a couple of minutes, you know, they’re making decisions within that OODA Loop constantly, constantly constant, constantly.

So that’s one of the things we get on in the class is that yes, we are talking about Specifically, as it applies to self defense and as it applies to the defensive use of a firearm, but to make them understand it, it is using their everyday activities and showing them that they use that OODA Loop within their everyday activities as is. And you know, during that it’s very important to show them that if you are deciding to do something, and I am your adversary, I need to get inside your OODA Loop to change that so that I give myself the best advantage to win. And the person that understands the advantage usually wins the conflict.

Ian: Now what’s interesting too, is again a feed off of what she said in my earlier point about you know, you can teach him about the OODA Loop and I had to do it yourself. You know with Boyd’s initial Air Force application, his earlier studies on aerial combat, which lead to what we use today. The F-15 and F-16 airframes all are basically modeled around in large part what he envisioned modern aerial combat to be.

But with that said, pilots are less than 4% of the total Air Force. And if you look at the population as a whole, I don’t – I don’t know the real number, but I guessing it’s a very tiny percentage of the population who are even capable of being combat pilots who can sit there and sit there in a very complex aircraft. You have a map on your lap have a compass or you know, [instruments], it can be a mess in that cockpit.

Jake: Yeah, you got a multitude of inputs all at once, and you have to process that information. But again, it’s it. The OODA Loop speaks to what is important right now, what do I need to concentrate on right now and What can be white noise? And what can be set sat on the side? Or what can go on the back burner for a minute? And again, I’m not a combat pilot, but I can tell you from operations, it’s what is what is the most important or most deadly threat to me right now? What do I need to work at? What do I need to observe? And how do I need to defeat that threat right now, the rest of it as you go through training, and as you go through all kinds of other stuff, you learn what we call rack and stack that information in your brain, right?

So after you deal with the most lethal, or most dangerous, then you move on to the next one, and that just goes all through your OODA Loop, and you can observe, you know, multiple threats at once, but you’re going to have to orient to one threat, you’re gonna have to decide to deal with one threat, you’re gonna have to decide to act on one threat. And you can do that in a very quick fashion. If you train it, and if you understand what it is that you’re doing.

You we see a lot of what I call vapor lock. You see people get vapor locked on different scenarios because their OODA Loop gets stuck right there. They’re stuck in this. They see what the threat is they oriented towards the threat, but they cannot decide what to do. And it as soon as that decision is broken, it goes right back to observe, orient, observe, orient, observe orient, and that’s where we have to train them on how to break that vapor lock, make it to the decision phase of the loop, and then enact that decision.

Ian: And what you just said there, it does remind me of a historical example going back to the American Civil War, that was big in Gettysburg and other battles as well, you know, they would look at soldiers, warfare rifles, and they would find that that person had fired a single shot, he was literally stuck loading and loading and loading and loading like six to seven balls stacked on top of each other, he’s just stuck in that one phase of the drill without even being aware of it.

Jake: And some of that goes into, you know, the, the human instinct of not wanting to kill another person. You know, we talk about, we see all these different instances of, you know, homicides and all this stuff. It’s a very unnatural act to kill another human being, right? So, in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, in many of the early conflicts, you’re right, they found a lot of, you know, load or barrel loaded rifles that had multiple shot in them.

Those guys go through the process of loading come up on shoulder and they would not they just wouldn’t pull the trigger, you know, because they could see that that was another person across the battlefield from them. The idea behind those pig battle formations was just to create a wall of humanity. And, you know, it’s kind of dehumanized your opponent, right? Especially when they’re all wearing very same uniform, they all work together, they all look alike. So it enabled soldiers to be able to do what they need to know.

That’s why, you know, even back in the really early ages [of massed formations using firearms], you had to train your body and train your mind to overcome that natural instinct of not wanting to hurt somebody else. And that’s why you know, guys in your martial arts or hand to hand combat and stuff like that, they’re able to do what they do because they legitimately go black, and it is just a straight up, fall back on instinct and fall back on trading. It’s not a conscious decision sometimes that they are going to do the most violent things they possibly can.

Ian: A section in Dave Grossman’s book, On Killing, which, piggybacking off what you just said, what I found really interesting; there is the stereotype that these weapons were incredibly inaccurate when really the opposite was true quite early on, even early 18th century. Maybe even earlier than that. You’d take soldiers out on the range and they could get bull’s eyes on circular targets. But then you take those same soldiers and take them out ballfield, they’re shooting over people’s heads. Even with a firing squad you got to get a whole group of people. If you get one guy, it just be too much pressure.

Jake: Well, and you know, the firing squad mentality we can go into on a whole [different] discussion. But yeah, it’s much easier for me to train someone how to shoot bull’s eyes than it is for me to teach somebody how to instinctively put rounds into a humanoid target. You know, as soon as you start putting faces on it, as soon as you start putting characteristics to it, people tend to kind of freak out a little bit and rightfully so. You know, those people that have not been around that for very long, or it’s new to them or whatever the case may be. Yeah, I mean, it’s something that definitely takes, it takes a lot of training to train that out of your mind takes a lot of training to put it into your OODA Loop, right? Reaching back to the topic at hand, to make that decision to put rounds into that adversary that is a human being.

Ian: Anyway, it comes to, as we’ve touched on a couple, you know, factors that go into freezing up or just your OODA Loop breaking down, all of which is especially hard on individual because you, if you look at his OODA Loop model, you know, you can have the best of the best the pilots, the best trained soldiers out there, who can do it naturally just from a huge amount of training. And we look at a command staff situation you have a whole huge number of people all filling, like, a giant brain. And it’s like you have each of those steps that, like you said, are continuously feeding information back as a whole group of people even then they don’t get it right a lot of time. And the OODA Loop, in his famous Patterns of Conflict slide deck, his presentation he gave to very high level people like Dick Cheney even, that’s 12 hours, and that’s just introducing it to you. And we have so little time to get that message across to students.

Jake: And that’s why, you know, the dry practice is so important. That’s why I follow up with these charges are so important. That’s why the model that we have, which is [Jake Pries’ instruction model for his company, Distributed Security Quad Cities (DSQC).] So it’s important when you have the constant ability to reach back to your instructor and not just on a one-off.

Say you drive to Des Moines for a two-day course, and you may or may never talk to that instructor ever again. Whereas, what we offer it’s more of we’re here locally. If anyone ever has a question or a concern, if they ever want to get more range time, we always have the ability to say to them, yeah, we can do that. Let’s schedule something, let’s do this and the other, even if it’s just on a on a visual platform like this or you know, a meeting platform like this where if, if I need to punch up a video, I can show them you know, certain techniques, I can show them certain dry practice drills and show certain things, talking back and forth, see what they’re doing. And you know, if I can see anything from the video, I could correct it right then and there. They don’t need to spend time on a range. You don’t need spend money on ammo. They can do it right in the comfort of their home, there’s a multitude of advantages to do it like that.

Ian: Yes, and there’s a lot, and you know, it’s kind of a godsend that we do have these tools that just did not [used to] exist, not even that long ago, too. As weird as it is, as terrible as the virus is, it’s kind of forced us to look at the tools we had in front of us and realize why we could we could we already had these things and didn’t fully realize it. If it was a perfect world, you were just ruler of the universe is there – and you could just do anything – is there something to make that just magically make [your] training program as perfect as possible?

Jake: I mean, really, you know, outside of the ranges [available] 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has, you know, the perfect target retrieval systems, bullet trap systems, and I think having the ability to have a range open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of, you know, pandemic or any other restrictions, that had the perfect lighting, the perfect distances, the perfect bullet trap in and was perfect for what we wanted to do. And being able to do it anytime that we wanted to. I think the system that we have right now is pretty good. But really, it’s, you know, if ammo is, is unlimited, and firearms are relatively inexpensive and affordable, and you have the ability to access the range at any given time that you wanted to. And I had, you know, a couple hundred instructors that could do the same thing I could do at any given time. That would be a perfect world.

Barring all of that, you know, dry practice really is the least expensive way to do what you need to do. And you can always get good reps, you know, and you can always on any of these platforms reach out to you know, me or any of the other instructors that work with us to get answers and to get pointers and that kind of stuff to be able to be a better shooter and be a better defensive firearms handler.

Ian: So I’m actually going to take what you said, literally, hundreds of instructors is not an easy thing [to accomplish], and even the armed forces who, well, do have literally hundreds of people, and many of whom are experts and all in just a full range of you know, firearms handling and tactics, individual tactics, group tactics, and it’s a tough nut for crack to crack even for professionals to have that time management and depth. Just that huge organizational skill necessary to avoid the pitfall of “Okay, we are not when you’re not in the field, you’re in your barracks room playing video games.” It’s unfortunate how many units fall into that when there’s so many ways they could train and don’t really even need the facilities. I mean, you could get some, I mean, is that perfect be? So throw some rocks out there and do [room clearing exercises].

Jake: We see that in law enforcement as well, right? Like, the biggest budgets within law enforcement are usually your equipment budget, your training budget, because you have to buy rounds, you have to spend time on ranges, you have to do all these things. You have to budget time to get guys, to get the officers on the range. So even in a perfect world, within law enforcement, it’s hard to get good training, it’s hard to get consistent training.

Now, that being said, there’s a lot of departments that do it a lot better than others. You know, at Davenport [PD], we’ve been fortunate to have some really good training officers that have the ear of the administration and really put forth a lot of good training. But all of that is budget dependent. So as soon as they want to start pinching pennies, the first thing to go is training, as we see across the country.

I wish every department had umpteen billion dollars to be able to train at any given time, right, but, but at the end of the day, not only do the agencies and training, civilians in training as well, like the civilian population needs to be trained on what the hell they can and can’t do, what the hell they should or shouldn’t do. The bottom line here is that the OODA Loop plays into everything you do during the day, all of your training. And with the business model that we have we are available almost 24 hours a day. I’m very reachable by text. I know a lot of my guys are reachable by email.

If you know somebody wants to go out to a range, we’ve got not only shooting sports, but we can do things at other local ranges and some other local areas. And even if it’s like [COVID-19 quarantine], if they can’t go anywhere, and they don’t have a lot of ammunition, then we can talk over video. I can diagnose stuff from there. And it’s pretty nice to, you know, have this kind of technological platform to be able to do that. Necessity is the mother of all invention.

Ian: Yes. And when it comes to the OODA Loop, we can take it up to an institutional level because notice an interesting thing about our group is that you can apply in so many different ways here. What you and our other partners are trying to do, [is to not have] a stale program, and not run it the same way for 20 years. I know from the classes I’ve participated in with you in various capacities, like every single one, you have one, or even more than one, you have After Action Reviews. Could you know where can we improve this? How can we make that make it even better for the next step students and adding new features adding?

Jake: Yeah, that constant evaluation process and constant improvement process I think is very important. And, like you said, in all the classes that I do, in any block of instruction that I give, it’s almost never the same twice. The topics are the same. Some of the key points are the same. But a lot of the information that I bring into the class I try to keep it relevant. I try to keep it very recent. But if there are good examples that I can pull from, from my personal life, or from my professional life, I do that. Whereas you know, sometimes you get these classes [always taught] in exact same way, the exact same words and nothing ever changes. I think a little bit of an ad lib and improv is necessary in these classes, to keep it relevant and keep it entertaining.

Ian: You’ve got your training course and I do love how it’s not about you. You’ve never made it all about you. you give praise to other instructors and other courses that you yourself have learned from. So as part, you know, as a student, what would you say about you know, as far as continuous training, seeking diversity of training, any thoughts on that?

Jake: I think the old saying is if you’re not growing, you’re dying, right? And I think that’s the same way in anything that you do. If you’re becoming a student, the best instructors are the best students.

Ian: Yeah, I think that’s a really good note to, you know, to conclude this on, you wrapping up how you can learn it, how you can improve it and, just again to emphasize that point, I think it’s important. I think that’s also good at you know and what you’re saying is constant learning. When I got out of the military my weapons knowledge began and ended with those basic things they teach about, you know, your M-16, your M9, a couple crew-served weapons if you’re lucky.

When I got into the civilian firearms industry it really, you know, expanded that knowledge and it’s one thing I appreciate, and I honestly want to emphasize to people because people just don’t know. Training programs are good and also something where you can start at the absolute basics and then just continue growing and growing growing. The NRA does have the Personal Protection Series, which is [a training program] that I do like the USCCA, but I personally – have you ever taken any training with the USCCA? I don’t want to speak about something I don’t know about.

Jake: No, but I’m a member and I carry their insurance.

Ian: I am a member too. I mean, I wouldn’t drive around my car without insurance, and so same philosophy there. So there’s a lot out there. And yeah, anything else you want to throw into that besides what we’ve hit?

Jake: No man, I think we’ve covered the topic that needs to be covered. I appreciate you having me on.

Ian: Yeah, absolutely. All right. We’re gonna go ahead and close this up, check out the comments and give us a subscribe on our YouTube Channel and on our newsletter!

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