It’s common on social media platforms to see promotional videos for local and national law enforcement tactical teams and training companies running hostage rescue drills, that might look cool, but in reality, would just get the hostages killed along with multiple members of the tactical teams.

If you check out the videos on social media, they all have a few things in common. Usually, they feature cops, or special (needs) forces dressed up in full tactical gear, all deploying on target and the drills they are running are unopposed. The enemy role players tend to conveniently die on request!

Basic force-on-force training in buildings and rooms that have basic obstacles in place would expose these social media warriors for being the frauds that they are. But these cops and plastic commandos get to dress up, look cool and show the gullible general public how their tax money is being wasted.

Think about a hostage rescue situation from the perspective of the hostage takers. Consider a drugged-up Narco who has five hostages in an apartment all of whom are blindfolded with their ankles and wrists zip tied. The hostages are in an inner bathroom with no windows and there is one door as an entry/exit point. The front door and rear door to the apartment are barricaded to inhibit a tactical team entering. 

Let’s say the Narco is armed with an assault rifle and a few hundred rounds of ammunition. So now consider what actions you think the Narco would take if they saw a tactical team and their supporting services forming up outside the apartment? What would their actions be if they saw the tactical team approaching? What would their actions be when the tactical team were trying to enter the apartment? Would they open fire on the tactical team? Would it be easy to shoot members of the tactical team? Also, how long would it take them to kill the hostages? To expand this scenario how about there are three sicarios, one of whom is sat outside the apartment in a car on guard, how do you think they would react to a hostage rescue attempt?

In my opinion most tactical teams rely too much these days on the intimidation factor when dealing with hostile situations. It’s true most petty criminals and drug dealers will surrender when they see a group of well-armed cops dressed in tactical gear coming to arrest them. But experienced sicarios and terrorists will just see targets that need killing. There would be a lot of street and jail credibility for any gangbangers or sicarios who shot up a SWAT team! The intimidation factor works as long as your opponents can be intimidated, this should be a major consideration in the initial operational threat assessment.

One tactical team we trained in Latin America told us of one operation they undertook that turned into a disaster and almost resulted in the team being disbanded. They were tasked to a domestic incident where a man, most likely drunk, armed with a kitchen knife was holding his wife and daughter hostage in their home.

The tactical team did as they had been taught on previous courses by training teams from various embassies and made an overt entry through the front door and systematically cleared the rooms of the house. By the time they reached the room where the man was holding his wife and daughter captive, he had killed them and himself. I asked the team if they had done a final CTR of the building before making entry, and they told me they hadn’t done so as they had never been shown that before. When I asked them if they thought that if they had done a CTR they would have realized that the hostage taker could have been shot and neutralized through a window, and they said of course they would, and the shot would have been easy to take. But they had previously just been trained to clear rooms in a SWAT fashion by supposed experts and not to think and assess the overall situation before taking direct action.

I also find amusing the videos online of hostage rescue drills of scenarios where the hostages are being held in buses etc. Again, think about this from the hostage takers perspective, let’s say the kidnapper in the bus has thirty hostages and is armed with a pistol and a hand grenade. If the hostage taker heard say a helicopter or saw a tactical team approaching how many hostages could they kill before they were possibly killed by the tactical team? Do you think they would wait for the tactical team to enter the bus, so they could engage in a fair firefight? In reality, it would take seconds for the kidnapper to kill multiple hostages, themselves and members of the assault team. Suicide bombers are also another problem that needs to be considered!

My first question when people mention helicopters for tactical assaults is whether they actually have any helicopters they could use. The reply I get is usually a big no! In addition to a helicopter that could carry a fully armed team they would also need trained pilots. AGAIN, think like the bad guys who are in the bus or building, if they hear a helicopter coming what are they going to do? Escape, prepare a defense, kill any hostages, or open fire on the helicopter as it attempted to land? Note, non-military helicopters tend to be unarmored and very vulnerable to accurate fire. And I won’t even get into the issues of drones being used to counter assault helicopters…

Another thing that to me is practically a complete waste of time is tactical teams that practice abseiling/rappelling for methods of entry. I remember dealing with one team in Latin America who had gone through a two weeklong abseiling/rappelling course with national police instructors from one of the foreign embassies in their country. The funny thing was most of the buildings in their area were no more than two maybe three stories high and the team had no abseiling/rappelling gear of their own. So, the time they spent abseiling/rappelling off a disused railway bridge might have been fun, but it was of absolute zero relevance for them operationally.

 A classic example of how abseiling/rappelling operations can go wrong was the British SAS hostage rescue operation on the Iranian embassy in London in 1982. In those days the British SAS were the best in the business, and they still had problems, so unless you are practicing such skills regularly, in different environments and under stress I would say stick to simpler tactics.

Orlando “Andy” Wilson

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