There’s a military aphorism “Train as you fight, fight as you train.” I was recently reminded of this by a friend mine and a reader of my blog. We’ve shared a mutual interest in the space program for decades. He mentioned this last week (though I can’t seem to find the post) in response to something I wrote and it got me thinking.
When we teach cave rescue, we almost always use a real patient in the litter. There’s a couple of reasons for this. For one, it ipso facto recreates the actual mass and weight distribution of a real patient. Now, there are training dummies that are similar in weight and mass, but they can be a pain in the neck. For one thing, ever try to move an inert body? That’s what a training dummy can be like. Sure it’s great once it’s IN the litter, but getting it into position deep inside a cave can be almost impossible.
For another, it gives our students a chance to experience what being a patient feels like. This gives them a deeper appreciation for what it feels like to be moved through a cave. For example, you quickly realize that perhaps being dragged over the floor is less than ideal. Or, you learn as a patient what it feels like when your rescuers become nameless and faceless behind the glare of a dozen headlamps; next time you’re you’re a rescuer, you tend to keep in mind there’s an actual patient there and talk to them and treat them like an actual person, not a lump you’re moving through the cave.
And this leads to one of the biggest reasons: we don’t want our students to get in the habit of treating a patient like a lump in a litter. We want them to realize there’s an actual person in there.
I once did a practice rescue with a local sheriff’s department. Since it was their exercise, they set the rules. They elected to use a straw dummy as the patient. They congratulated themselves on a successful rescue at the end of the exercise. I saw a disaster. For one thing, the litter was so light, they could have probably had one person pick it up and carry it out of the cave. This may sound like a minor or even funny nit to pick. But, it can lead the Incident Commander to misjudge the crew size that may be necessary in a real rescue. (We had a cave rescue here in New York State about 20 years ago where the patient was only 300 feet into the cave. It was so arduous that we ended up having to fly in cavers from West Virginia; all the local cavers who could fit were completely exhausted.)
Because of the lightness they were practically bouncing the litter off the ceiling and walls because straw dummies don’t scream in pain when they hit rock. If they had tried to move an actual patient in that manner, they’d might have been surprised by the patient’s expressive vocabulary.
Training as one fights, or training as one rescues doesn’t necessarily mean that every scenario exactly recreates what you expect to happen. As another adage says, “no battle plan encounters the first contact with the enemy.” So you might train with a mock patient who is 180lbs and has a broken leg. And then in a real event, the patient is 240lbs, diabetic and has a broken pelvis, twisted ankle and dislocated elbow. So no, you’re not going to practice every scenario. But you’re going to practice the general concepts and understand the ideas behind them. You want an effective fighting force, you put them in the field. You have explosions, gunfire, smoke, rain, mud, etc. You don’t simply sit them in a classroom and discuss these points.
The flip side, fight as you train is important too. When the fighting or rescuing begin, you can draw upon your experience in training and will be far less panicked. I know at the few rescues I’ve been involved in, that once I’m on site, I’ve become very calm. The training clicks. You can usually tell the untrained folks at an accident because they’re either panicking or have no idea what to do. The trained folks tend to react much more calmly. Also, trained people can act with a sense of urgency that doesn’t look like panic. Untrained people often move quickly, but without a sense of purpose. Don’t confuse moving quickly with moving urgently.
And all this applies to IT. I’ve said again and again that IT departments need to exercise their disaster recovery plans. It’s great to discuss them in a meeting and have a senior manager sign off on them. It’s another thing to actual practice mock disasters. This is when you realize that “oh Shelly is out on Wednesdays afternoons and only her computer has the phone numbers of the building manager.” Or “Oh, we were sure that the batteries were in good shape, but turns out they’re getting old and we only had 1/2 the runtime we expected.” Or, as has happened too many times, “oh we thought we had good backups, until we went to restore them.”
And practicing your DR plans means you’ll be far less pressured when you execute them and as a result will make far fewer mistakes.
Today’s take-away: practice until it becomes second nature so that when you need to act for real it is second nature.
greenmountainsoftware 
I believe it was on FB, and the correct quote is: “You fight like you train, so train like you intend to fight”.
You’re correct about the scenarios… We only had forty or fifty approved hardware faults available in the trainer (compared to an essentially infinite ways for an actual system to break). But the point wasn’t to train on fixing every possible fault – it was to pound the philosophy, principles, policies, and procedures into our head until they became as automatic as your heartbeat.
Once the basics are reflexive – everything else flows from that.
Had a fun example of that a few months back… My wife and I were talking about her day at work and she expressed frustration with troubleshooting a network connectivity issue back in the parts dept. (She’d been working on it for a month.) Without conscious thought I gave her a troubleshooting plan. When she asked how I came up with that, it took ten minutes to explain the logic behind each step… (Epilogue: The third step solved the problem.)
I thought it was Facebook also, but couldn’t find it. And yes, that’s what you wrote, but there are various versions around, so I used the one I could source 🙂
Gene Kranz talked about this (and I think I mention it on my book or in another post) is they didn’t train for multiple failures for the most part, simply because if they trained for 1000 possible failures and then tried to train for 2-depth failures, it became 999*1000 possible training scenarios. And 3 deep were obviously impossible given the time constraints. BUT, buy being able to handle each failure individually, when something like Apollo 13 came up, they were able to cope.
Which reminds me, I need to expand something I wrote on SCE to Aux on Quora and make a post about it.
You could have asked me! 🙂 🙂
We did a little multiple failure training, but it was basically just enough to familiarize us with the general principles of resource management and prioritization. The actual mechanics of troubleshooting was pretty simple and I could train you to follow the fault isolation procedures in monkey mode in a week or two… So our schooling concentrated on the principles, etc… that I mentioned in our first reply.
NASA’s training is much more specific for many reasons… We weren’t working out mission rules for example. Our crews were also much more stable, it took four patrols and eight training cycles to fully replace the crew I came out of the shipyard with. (And fully two thirds of the replacements had identical experience on a different hull.) So while some of the principles transfer, the details are wildly different.
And thanks for the follow back, though I’m not sure how interested you are in anime… 🙂
True. But the general concept was more important than the actual quote. Besides this is a bit more succinct 🙂
And yes, the NASA training was often more in depth, in part I suspect because each mission was essentially a one-off. I suspect they too probably did a few multiple failures, but yeah, the general idea was get the principles in. Hmm, don’t we know a few folks who used to work in the trench? albeit the Shuttle era.
And I’m probably not too interested in anime, but figure anyone willing to support my writing, deserves my support in return.
A thought/question occurs to me… Do you mix up your cave training scenarios or insert faults/unexpected problems?
A variety. For our weeklong class, each day tends to focus on a specific set of skills and we’ll try 3-4 evolutions on each one. So it might be something like, “patient raise and lower”.
So first evolution is done w/o a patient, since the focus at that point is just refreshing skills from previous year and gelling as a team.
Second will be the same as the first, but with a live load.
Third might be the same as the second, but with different anchors, or a different haul system.
We’ll continue like that.
If we have a large enough group we might break them into two groups, have both do set up the rigging, and then, have them swap stations and operate the other teams rigging.
At the end of the week, we have a mock rescue. We’ll develop a scenario with 3-4 patients the entire set of classes have to rescue. Apparently years ago they used to toss in “faults” but soon learned that the students would create their own problems.
Truth is, our total hours of training in a year is probably far less than you’d do in a month of patrol. But then again, we don’t involve nukes 🙂
For our two day training we do locally, we do mix up the scenarios so that the locals don’t outsmart the scenarios.
BTW, just found a blog post from one of my Level 2 students this past summer: https://migratorycaving.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/ncrc-national-seminar-2018/ if you’re interested in reading it from the student perspective.
That was interesting, thanks!
What’s the point of the silent drill?
Multi-fold (and now I’m giving away secrets to future classes 🙂
1) To show how teamwork can succeed without verbal communications. By this point hopefully they’ve gelled as a team and can read each others body language and know what needs to be done and work in an efficient and orderly fashion. Often it’s one of the fastest evolutions because there is no idle chit-chat.
2) Caves can be very noisy environments, so sometimes being able to communicate via hand-signals, or written note, or other methods can be more effective.
3) It’s a great feeling of accomplishment when they’re done. They feel great that they’ve really risen to the challenge.
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