That doesn't mean surveiling the convenience store for five minutes from behind the front wheel-well of your truck before infill, moving in a crouch between the aisles to keep your head below the level of the shelving, or launching into a "tactical shoulder role" when you finally make a move to the cooler door to grab a Gatorade. Despite what the guy at the other table said, situational awareness is not paranoia; it's just awareness.
About to go off on a long but related tangent. Today is the 10th anniversary of Jeff Cooper's death (RIP, Colonel) and this discussion has had me doin' a bit of thinking. And I'm much more dangerous than TAM when I think out loud at the keyboard because I'm less coherent and less well-written...though can be just as lengthy.
What's really scary to me is on the other end of the spectrum. Take the opportunity sometime to sit in your car for a while in the parking lot of a large grocery store, Sam's Club, or shopping center. Watch the awareness level of 95% of the people as they go about their daily business. Pretty amazing. I've convinced the advent of 'net connected mobile devices has done more to degrade individual awareness than anything else in the last decade or longer. Jeff Cooper never saw that coming. Maybe we need a "Condition Transparent" before "Condition White" to indicate that not only is one unaware of and paying no real attention to his surroundings, but is actively distracting himself by tunnel-visioning his attention to that fascinating 3"x4" screen in his hand.
Colonel Cooper really had no intention of his Color Codes being applied specifically to tactical situations. He presented it as representing a state of mind, a fluid dynamic where your state could change depending upon your environment and the things happening in it. After DHS was formed and issued the color-coding of the nation's threat level, Cooper wrote:
Though I don't know and don't have any references to support that the two are directly related, I've always viewed the Color Code as having a descendancy from John Boyd's OODA Loop. Boyd first talked about the Loop around the time of the end of the Korean War, but never wrote a book on military strategy and, to my knowledge, never codified it for the public until a 1976 essay titled "Destruction & Creation." Cooper's Color Codes began being taught in the '70s, precisely when I don't know. And Cooper never claimed to have invented anything with regard to the Codes; for him they were simply a representational way present state-of-mind conditions.There is a problem in that some students insist upon confusing the appropriate color with the amount of danger evident in the situation. As I have long taught, you are not in any color state because of the specific amount of danger you may be in, but rather in a mental state which enables you to take a difficult psychological step. Now, however, the government...is handing out color codes nationwide based upon the apparent nature of a peril. It has always been difficult to teach the Gunsite Color Code, and now it is more so.
Colonel Boyd took the basic physiological-level Stimulation-Integration-Response up a notch into cognition, and decided that decision making of an individual (or, by extension, any organization) could be boiled down into a recurring, even overlapping, series of steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Observation includes external information, developing circumstances, unfolding interaction with the total environment. Those data get filtered during the Orient phase by things like your previous experience, traditions and training, and analysis of the observations (data). A decision is made, and action is taken. That also dovetails into the Plan, Do, Check, Act quality improvement cycle for those familiar with W. Edward Deming...although offset by a notch: Deming's "Plan" corresponds to Boyd's "Orient," "Do" to "Decide," and so forth. (If you really want some fun, you can crack open a few sources that Boyd used as bases for OODA: Kurt Godel's first Incompleteness theorem; Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; and the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy of a system increases over time: nothin' ever stays the same.)
That data processing delay is why we say the defender is always behind the aggressor in their OODA Loops: the aggressor has already stepped through Observe, Orient, and Decide, and is taking action. There are essentially three things you can do to improve the odds.
The first is directly tied to Cooper's Color Codes: shorten the time for the Observation phase in OODA. This is directly under our control. We have five senses, and we use at least a few of them all the time to tell us about our environment. Learn to use them more effectively and efficiently. No, not by trying to go all Sherlock Holmes and deducing that a strand on the pants-leg of the person sitting next to you is of canine origin, but is a hair fiber, not fur; knowing that fewer than two-dozen breeds fit that classification and, given the length and color of the strand, you then decide he owns or has recently encountered a bearded collie.
Ahem. Simply being constantly observant is 80% of the battle (and lets you appreciate all the wonders happening around you all the time)...and failed by probably 95% of the population. There is a reason that "crimes of opportunity" really boil down to a predator selecting the easiest victim.
There are two main things you can do to improve the speed of the Orient phase. Recognizing that little mini-OODA Loops are constantly running, feeding into one another, use what you observe to make better decisions about your interaction with your environment. Check reflections; know where the exits are; know where the closest cover may be; don't check your smartphone while walking to the car; sit where you can see the entrance; in stop-and-go traffic, leave yourself enough room to pull around the vehicle in front of you; lock your doors and windows; when you park, take a moment to look around before unlocking the door and exiting the car. No-brainer stuff, but simple preparational steps interact with your environment, change the input coming in about it. And preparation extends to your equipment. Have a good gun that you trust and shoot well; decide if you need to carry a blade; decide if you need to carry a light; decide what you'll keep in your vehicle and how you'll stow it.
The second shortening of the Orient phase is conditioning. For us, that primarily means training and continual, perfect practice. Ideally, there are some basic things you want to develop into a conditioned response. A reflex is physiological--a hand encountering a hot skillet; you'll never get anything to that level of reaction time. But almost any physical skill can be developed to a state of "unconscious competence." Professional athletes display this, and so do high-level USPSA and IDPA shooters. But it's earned only by thousands of repetitions of doing the correct things the correct ways.
This is where I sometimes I get myself into trouble. My mindset about it has mostly been as a defensive shooter. I don't shoot skeet or trap; I don't hunt (with any frequency); I'm not a long-range or benchrest shooter. All those have different skillsets and requirements. I've talked to many folks who have their LTC and consider most of their focus to be defensive pistol, but the predominance of their practice is slow-fire at 15 or 25 yards. And by predominance, I mean virtually all, and that only every couple of months or so.
But if you ever actually need to use a gun in a defensive situation, you're already way behind the predator's OODA Loop and you'd better have a conditioned response to do the correct things well and do them quickly. A nickel-sized group at 20 yards with three seconds between shots likely ain't gonna be in that mix. When I ask how often and how much they practice their drawstrokes, the answer is usually, "Once in a while." When I ask how often they practice EQCB pistol work, the answer is almost always pretty much, "What's that?"
I break it down into three things: Avoid, Evade, Defend. The only fight that can be won is one that is avoided entirely. For day-to-day activities, though, think logically about how it might go down if effluvia ever comes into contact with an air agitation apparatus. That will almost certainly begin with movement, the aggressor's and yours. As we'll touch on in a moment, one of the most important things you can do is get off the "X". If you've taken any defensive handgun courses in the past decade, that was likely a point of emphasis. But few of us make that element number one in our practice, and fewer incorporate movement of the entire body as an integral part of the drawstroke. Not to beat this to death, but I also feel the drawstroke should incorporate a "close contact ready" position indexed against the rib cage or base of the pectoral muscle for bad-breath distance engagements, as well as incorporating some basic form of hand-to-hand combatives even if it's simply movements to block or fend-off blows and retain the handgun. I put practice emphasis there, and do far more dry-fire and Airsoft than live-fire range time. I also think IDPA is great practice because it stresses a balance between speed and adequate combat accuracy, multiple targets and the transitions required, and administrative handling of the gun (you gotta do reloads and you will, inevitably, have to do some clearance operations).
Which brings me to the third thing you can do to improve the odds: disrupt the bad guy's OODA Loop. Boyd's nickname was "40-second" because he said, as a pilot instructor, that he could out-maneuver any opponent in air combat in under 40 seconds. His claim was based on his OODA Loop theory and that any significant disruption of the opponent's Loop caused it to reset: he started back at Observe and Orient. Turning the aggressor/defender advantage tables, if you will.
One of the easiest ways to do this is not to be where you're expected to be. Get off the "X". Even rapid movement of a few feet can make a difference. Your average bag guy probably does not go shooting with Doug Koenig or Rob Leatham on the weekends and probably ain't as good moving his point-of-aim somewhere else. But you need to understand why, where, and how to move.
Another key point--that we witnessed in the recently-posted video of an attempted home invasion in Georgia--is that once once use of deadly for is required, you need to be 100% committed. The woman in Georgia wasn't very effective in the way she performed, but she was committed and aggressive, which disrupted the invaders' OODA Loops and sent them way off of Plan A. I believe this is more applicable to women and us...more mature guys. If a predator's mark is a healthy male in his late 20s, he's likely going in expecting the possibility of physical resistance. Less so with a female or a graybeard. That makes decisiveness of action even more important in Loop disruption. If the bad guy is expecting--consciously or unconsciously--a soft target, and that soft target suddenly moves aggressively and decisively and presents a firearm in an obviously practiced and competent manner, the neurons will scramble and the OODA Loop will have to reset. You've bought yourself precious milliseconds.
There's an element of lifestyle to all this and I'd be preachin' to the choir going further into it. But it ain't paranoia; it's pragmatism. And it has nothing to do with carrying a gun. It's no different than having fire extinguishers in the house, or wearing a seatbelt and being a careful driver, or keeping a hurricane preparedness kit, or having life insurance to help take care of your family. You hope for and expect the best, but you prepare for the worst; you take steps to mitigate risk for you and your family.
Besides, I'd much rather go through life actually living in the moment, being aware of and appreciating what's around me, than keeping my nose buried in my iPhone with a pair of earbuds in place to help shield me from that quite interesting little place I like to call the Real World.