Left of Bang by Patrick Van Horne & Jason A. Riley

• Most success stories should be understood as a combination of mutually supporting factors, two of which are hard work and opportunity.
• What is also a stumbling block for many people is that, once a person has learned about combat tracking and combat profiling, it doesn’t seem complicated. It seems obvious.
• Another problem is that most people can’t articulate what they see, and they can’t say anything about the meaning of other people’s behavior.
• Getting left of bang requires two things. The first is a mindset and mentality to actively search your area for people that don’t fit in. The second is the knowledge to know what causes someone to stand out from the crowd.
• The preparation for an attack leaves behind cues a trained observer can pick up on to provide an early warning.
• Being left of bang means that a person has observed one of the pre-event indicators, one of the warning signs, that most occur earlier on the timeline for the bang to happen.
• Most of the training that military operators and law enforcement personnel receive is reactive.
• Whenever a person is operating right of bang, it means that the enemy has the initiative and controls the situation.
• From the perspective of combat profiling, a basic mental preparedness to take lethal action may be the difference between life and death.
• Cooper’s Color Code posses four levels of awareness: White, Yellow, Orange, and Red.
• Condition White means being unprepared and unready to take lethal action.
• Condition Yellow means that the person understands that his or her life is in danger and is therefore psychologically prepared to do something about it.
• Condition Orange is the mindset in which a person is focused on a specific threat and is prepared to take action against that threat.
• Condition Red is labeled the “lethal mode”--it is the psychological willingness to kill if circumstances warrant that action.
• In the Marine Corps’ system, another color condition exists: Condition Black. Condition Black is characterized by when a person’s heart rate reaches a point that is counterproductive (above 175 beats per minute) and that person begins to lose awareness of the surroundings. A person in Condition Black can no longer cognitively process information and may completely shut down.
• Combat Profiling rests on the assumption that being proactive, being left of bang, requires continuous awareness and alertness. It requires that the combat profiler always be psychologically prepared to take action.
• Regardless of whether one knows danger is present, one should be ready to take action and be looking for indicators of a threat.
• Intuition is a powerful force; however, it is poorly understood. Intuition is not black mage or some inexplicable force of nature. Intuition is nothing more than a person’s sense about a situation influenced by experience and knowledge.
• Intuition is the way the mind picks up on patterns and uses experiential and learned knowledge to guide a person during a given situation.
• Three specific skills were identified and focused upon: enhanced observation, combat tracking, and combat profiling.
• The foundation of every hunter is the ability to see his prey.
• Combat tracking teaches Marines how to read and understand the physical terrain and identify the physical evidence individuals leave behind as they move through an environment.
• While combat tracking is focused on the physical terrain, profiling teaches Marines how to read the human terrain through an increased understanding of human behavior.
• The goal of Combat Hunter is to teach Marines how to separate the “sheep” (the unarmed civilians that populate the battlefield) from the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” (the enemy).
• Combat profiling is universal and applicable anywhere in the world.
• Combat profiling is a practice based on a proactive mindset that incorporates many specific skills. Four of these are situational awareness, sensitivity of baselines and anomalies, critical thinking, and decision-making.
• To have situational awareness, you must be able to read both the environment and the people around you. However, you must also be able to separate important from unimportant information. Not everything you see is relevant for identifying threats.
• The second skill in combat profiling is the ability to determine what indicators are important and directly related to your safety.
• Heuristics are ways of making a decision with limited time and information.
• Whether you are in the military or law enforcement, you will never have all the time or information you need to make the perfect decision. So you must make the best decision with what you have.
• The first, and primary, difference between criminal profiling and combat profiling is that criminal profiling is reactive, while combat profiling is proactive.
• Throughout life, people are expected to simply learn through trial and error how to make a decision.
• Marines learn two lessons early on that give them a false sense of decision-making ability: BAMCIS and OODA.
• BAMCIS is a Marine Corps acronym for the six troop leading steps:
• Begin the planning
• Arrange the reconnaissance
• Make the reconnaissance
• Complete the plan
• Issue the order
• Supervise
• The second acronym, OODA, stands for:
• Observe
• Orient
• Decide
• Act
• This is a very helpful way to envision how people observe their surroundings (Observe), make sense of what they see (Orient), decide what to do (Decide), and then execute what they’ve decided (Act).
• Just because a person uses analysis does not guarantee that the decision will work, be right, or even be good. Analysis is often wrong and in many cases ends up with less accurate decisions than either intuition or heuristics.
• The amount of information that Marines must try to process at any given time is overwhelming.
• Marines never have enough information to make a perfect decision.
• Perfect decisions aren’t possible.
• One of the Marine Corps’ own doctrinal publications sat; Many military problems simply cannot be solved optimally, no matter how long or hard we may think about the problem beforehand. In many cases, the best we can hope for is to devise partial, approximate solutions and refine those solutions over time, even after execution has begun.
• The goal is to act violently and quickly to drive the tempo of battle and cause the enemy to react.
• Heuristics is nothing more than a way of making decisions with little time and information.
• Often, just one piece of information, one cue, is important. A heuristics focuses on the important cue or cues and ignores the rest.
• Thin slicing means making a determination about a situation or person with a thin slice of information, often with just seconds of observation.
• When a person encounters something that innately or through earning has emotional significance, they automatically experience an emotional response.
• Intuition is best used when a person has significant experience and knowledge, which guides that person's subconscious thought process.
• The front parts of our brains, above our eyeballs, defines the modern human. The frontal cortex is the place where thoughts, emotions, and senses are experiences and recorded.
• All our gestures, postures, and expressions result from the way our brain identifies and perceives threats, consciously or subconsciously.
• The most important part of the brain that directly affects nonverbal behavior is the limbic system.
• The body will react to a threat by stopping in place and halting all movement, moving away from the threat, or preparing to physically engage the threat. These three responses are often referred to as the “freeze, flight, or fight” responses.
• The freeze response is an early survival mechanism that is hard-wired into the brains of most creatures.
• By simply halting all movement, humans and animals increase the chances of not being seen and therefore increases the chances of survival.
• The flight response is the second option the limbic system considers regarding survival. The purpose of fleeing is to create a physical separation from the predator or threat and thus avoid injury or death.
• The greater the distance from the attacker, the fewer options the attacker has to do harm and the more time the victim has to respond to further movements by the attacker.
• The fight response is the last option considered by the limbic system because of the inherent potential for harm or death.
• The potential for harm makes fighting the least preferred response.
• Before engaging in a fight, most creatures will attempt to persuade the other combatant to back down without physical confrontation. This is called posturing and is an attempt to win a fight without fighting.
• Posturing involves trying to appear larger and more dangerous and includes shouting, spreading the arms or other appendages wide, puffing up the chest to look larger, or moving around and taking up more space on the ground while appearing unpredictable.
• When we feel threatened, we will attempt to distance ourselves from that threat, even if it is only a few inches or feet.
• Understanding the limbic system and its core freeze, flight, or fight response is the first phase in detecting a threat.
• Combat profiling is heuristically and intuitively driven.
• The basic foundation of combat profiling involves quickly establishing a baseline and determining anomalies, as well as quickly identifying threat indicators. Establishing a baseline involves observing only certain types of information, the information that comes from the six domains. Once an individual reaches the threshold of decision--identifying a certain number of anomalies or certain types of indicators--the individual must make a decision.
• Combat profiling drives individual to have a bias for action.
• Before the combat profiler can act and destroy the threat, he needs to detail and profile his target to support and determine his action. But for a combat profiler to identify the anomalies that influence his decision, he needs to establish a baseline of behavior.
• When something isn’t normal, watch out.
• Identifying threats means establishing a baseline and looking for anomalies. A baselines is what is normal for an environment, situation, or individual.
• Generally, every environment, type of situation, or individual exhibits normal patterns: patterns of movement, emotion, behavior, and interaction.
• An anomaly is any variation form the baseline--and what we are primarily searching for is anomalies. Anomalies are things that either do not happen but should, or that do happen but shouldn’t.
• Anomalies indicate something has changed in the situation. Often they are indicators that something is awry.
• Another way to classify an anomaly is based on the presence or absence of something. When something (or someone) is not present when it should be, or is present when it shouldn’t be, this is an anomaly.
• Another way to describe the relationship between anomalies and the baseline is that anomalies are things that rise above or fall below the baseline.
• The physical environment, like the social environment, has a baseline.
• Nothing in nature looks like a human footprint.
• Thankfully, humans act in predictable and usually ways that can serve as a starting point for observing human behavior and establishing baselines.
• The founding principle of combat profiling is that beneath the differences and idiosyncrasies of varying human cultures there remains a universal constant we call human nature.
• Honest signals are biology-based cues that animals and humans demonstrate that can be used to reliably predict behavior.
• Humans are creatures of habit.
• Not only do people follow patterns, but also humans are reluctant to change those patterns until the behavior becomes unproductive. In fact, even if faced with clear failure, people often follow the same behavioral patterns in the hopes they will work again.
• Humans are lazy.
• Humans are generally lazy and will take the path of least resistance. Faced with two or more options, the human will generally take the easiest.
• Humans are lousy liars.
• Humans have significant cognitive limitations. It has been shown that imposing cognitive load can help uncover liars.
• Humans cannot divide their attention well. The more tasks a person divides his attention between, the poorer he will perform any of those tasks.
• Humans can only remember, on average, between five to nine items using their short-term memory.
• Humans will run, fight, or freeze.
• Humans telegraph their intentions.
• Humans are predictable.
• Humans are not generally spontaneous or random.
• Once we know the enemy's pattern, we can practically predict his next move. Unfortunately, this also means that we are not as random as we think and that the enemy can identify our patterns to predict our next movements and actions.
• Humans are not good at multitasking.
• People can only do one thing at a time well; when they attempt to do more than one thing at a time, focus, ability, and productivity suffer.
• Humans are generally clueless.
• Humans in general lack situational awareness.
• Humans can’t do very many different things.
• Kinesics is the domain that involves people’s conscious and subconscious body language. This is important because humans give off signals through their postures, gestures, and expressions that communicate their current emotions and possibly their future intentions. Being able to pick up on these signals is critical to proactively identifying threats.
• Biometric cues is the term we use to describe the uncontrollable and automatic biological responses of the human body to stress. These physiological responses are key to understanding a person’s emotional states and changes.
• Proxemics is the domain that allows us to understand groups of people by observing interpersonal distance and identify an individual’s relationships and intention based on how they use the space around them.
• Geographics is the domain that involves reading the relationships between people and their environment. This helps us to understand and identify who is familiar or unfamiliar with the area they are in and how people move around their surroundings.
• Iconography is the domain that allows us to understand the symbols people use to communicate their beliefs and affiliations. Gangs, insurgents, terrorist groups, and individuals use iconography as a symbol of group unity, for rapid recognition of other members, and to communicate their beliefs to the larger populace.
• Atmospherics is the domain focused on the collective attitudes, moods, and behaviors in a given situation or a place.
• Kinesics is the study of body language and accounts for a significant part of all interpersonal communication.
• Most gestures, in and of themselves, are not important. What’s important to the combat profiler is a gesture in the context of the baseline.
• Combat profiling focuses on clusters of behavior, or multiple cues, rather than single gestures.
• To identify facial expressions accurately, you must be relatively close to the person you are observing.
• Clusters are based on a person’s perception of threats and how they are preparing to deal with them. They are:
• Dominant vs submissive
• Uncomfortable vs comfortable
• Interested vs uninterested (in the person or object they are interacting with)
• By ensuring that everyone is using the same terminology and language to describe and communicate their observations, we can also ensure quick, concise, and accurate discussions and decisions between everyone involved.
• Dominant behavior is an expression of the limbic system’s fight response. Even in situations in which physical aggression is inappropriate, people often use dominant behaviors to intimidate, bully, and assert control over others.
• Generally speaking, authoritative people seek to establish ownership over people and objects in their immediate vicinity, and this begins with taking ownership of the space around them.
• Dominant behavior includes gestures and postures that make a person look larger to intimidate “smaller” people into submission.
• The submissive cluster is the opposite of the dominant cluster and is characterized by the absence of the fight response.
• Submissive behavior is identified by the types of behavior that causes a person to take up less space.
• The important of putting observations into the context of their surroundings can’t be overstated.
• Oftentimes people display submissive behavior when they are feeling non confrontational.
• When a person feels threatened, scared, nervous, or begins to experience some other negative emotion, that person will display discomfort.
• Distancing behaviors, using barriers, and pacifying behaviors are clear indicators that someone is uncomfortable.
• The use of pacifying behaviors is an immediate sign someone is uncomfortable. A pacifying behavior is any act or gesture used to calm or comfort oneself when experiencing the body’s autonomic responses to stress.
• Because a person cannot experience both a fight and flight response simultaneously, a person can only display one cluster at a time.
• The guiding principle for identifying a person’s interest is assessing where the person’s attention is focused, whether on the subject with whom they are interacting or elsewhere.
• Being able to determine who is interested or uninterested can provide a significant advantage when determining who to contact and engage in conversation.
• Emblems are hand gestures that can replace words. Gestures used to communicate messages such as “stop” or “come here” are emblems.
• Many emblems are displayed subconsciously and are very reliable indicators of the person’s emotional state, particularly in settings in which a person must conceal his or her emotions.
• The first area of the body Marines should observe on a person is the hands. Checking the hands of a person enters that the person is not holding a weapon and is not preparing to strike.
• Hands can often times betray where a person’s attention is. If a person has something concealed they don’t want discovered, such as a gun, a knife, drugs, stolen items, etc., that person will often tough or pat that area on the body where the object is concealed, as if to ensure the object has not been lost and it is still hidden from view.
• Repeated patting can indicate that the person has a weapon or something else worth identifying concealed on his or her body.
• Another indicator to look for is people who are “checking their six”. This is when a person looks over the  shoulder to see who is around or behind them. Only people who are aware of their surroundings conduct this behavior, and since most people do not bother to search for threats or bother to be aware of their surroundings, this is an indicator that demands further observation.
• Any person checking his or her “six” is immediately an anomaly and deserves further observation.
• A kinesic slip occurs when a person’s nonverbal behavior betrays the person’s words. Nonverbal communication should complement and supplement verbal communication, either adding emphasis or illustrating a point, but can also contradict the words used. So when the nonverbal communication contradicts the words used to communicate the same point, combat profiles should be altered that something might be awry.
• One of the principles of human nature that combat profiling is based upon is that people only look natural when they are naturally doing something.
• Time spent developing the ability to read and understand body language, both quickly and accurately, will provide much insight into other people’s intentions and emotions.
• One gesture is insufficient to make an observation; always form a cluster of three indicators leading to the same conclusion.
• Threat indicators include smuggling behavior (patting an area on the body), situational awareness (checking their six), and attempting to act natural.
• When a person experiences some type of stress, a threatening situation, or a strong emotional response, that person’s body experiences certain physiological changes--mostly caused by the response of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and by the release of certain hormones such as adrenaline.
• Anger is the most common dangerous emotion since the motive of anger often is to harm the target.
• An angry person may flare their nostrils and become red in the face. Anger is associated with increased heart rate, increased respiratory activity (faster breathing), and facial flushing.
• Fear is an emotion that is closely related to anger. Fear is caused by events or situations that signal danger as well as the threat of physical or psychological harm.
• Evolution has predisposed humans to a few main responses to a threat--freeze, flight, or fight.
• Pupil dilation has often been shown to be associated with both anger and fear.
• A normal person blinks thousands of times each day and rarely notices it; however, blinking is an incredibly reliable indicator that a person is undergoing stress.
• A person’s normal blink rate is between six to ten times per minute, but blinking increases when a person is under stress, emotionally aroused, or when a person attempts to mask emotions.
• For a combat profiler, any significant change in a person’s pupil size should be taken as an indicator that something has aroused that individual, whether positively or negatively, and that person has experienced some type of emotion.
• Attempting to suppress an emotion is physiologically taxing, and a specific indicator of someone attempting to suppress an emotion is increased blinking.
• Tunnel vision is the extreme loss of peripheral vision. It is an automatic response that happens as a result of severe stress and an excessive heart rate.
• The key is that any significant color change in a person’s face is a clear indicator that the person is experiencing a significant emotional response.
• Dry mouth is often associated with increases activity of the autonomic nervous system.
• Biometric cues are the uncontrollable and automatic responses to stress.
• The way humans use space to communicate is called proxemics. Like other animals, humans move toward what they are attracted to and move away from what they fear.
• Status is significant in how people use space to communicate, as subordinates rarely initiate contact with someone of higher social rank.
• Relationship affects the distance at which two people will stand.
• How people interact with the space around and between them is a significant dynamic and predictor of human behavior anywhere in the world.
• People move for a purpose, and the way a person moves can reveal that person’s intentions.
• Combat profilers classify movement into three categories: movement toward, movement away, and idle movement.
• A foundational dynamic of human nature is that people will approach things they like and which they expect will deliver pleasure and avoid things that are unappealing or could cause them pain.
• The first principle of Geographics is that human beings act with greater confidence in areas with which they are familiar. Home field advantage is real.
• In any environment, humans and animals will seek the path of least resistance.
• An anchor point is a home base. It’s the place from which a person or group operations.
• An anchor point may be identified by the volume of traffic coming and going--and by the emotional attachment it evokes in those who belong.
• Anchor points are identified based upon the behavior of the people at that location.
• Human beings are territorial. Groups take possession of space.
• Whenever we observe behavior characterized by identification with a geographic area in a way that indicates ownership, we also expect that ownership to involve defense of that territory against perceived invaders.
• People are always more vulnerable on the move, and if we continue to eliminate safe havens and anchor points for criminals, our ability to neutralize and eliminate them will increase exponentially.
• Buffer space is another characteristic that can help us locate an anchor point. A buffer zone is the demilitarized area surrounding an anchor point.
• The combat profiler should look for areas that, though surrounded by instances of criminal activity, remain remarkably immune to attacks and crime. This may be an indicator of an anchor point surrounded by a buffer zone.
• People act differently in an area depending on whether they are familiar or unfamiliar with the environment.
• Iconography is visual language.
• An icon is any symbol used to promote a person’s or group’s presence, beliefs, or affiliations.
• Iconography often communicates complex messages through simple pictures, symbols, and writing.
• Because tattoos are permanent, they often possess extremely significant meaning for the wearer. The location on the person’s body may be meaningful as well.
• Individuals select clothing and other artifacts to communicate messages to others.
• Iconography is not an uncontrollable element of human behavior, so it can be easily masked or concealed, and sometimes requires significant interpretation.
• Combat profiling is about having situational awareness and proactively identifying threats.
• Atmospherics can be defined as the collective mood of a situation or place.
• Moods and emotions are also contagious. They pass from one person to another subconsciously through mimicry and other means.
• Every place or situation possesses an emotional atmosphere. This atmosphere will be a true indicator of the emotions and attitudes of the people in the situation.
• Interpersonal distance can be a key clue to the atmosphere in a situation.
• Silence may be explained by two phenomena: lack of noise or auditory exclusion.
• Auditory exclusion occurs when your brain begins to shut down or reduce your ability to hear any sound or certain sounds in stressful situations.
• True silence can occur because people in an area have fled or hidden themselves because of fear or because tension or dread has caused people to become silent.
• Positive atmospherics indicate a sense of security.
• Negative atmospherics are often a “left of bang” indicator of a threat.
• The process for making decisions is simple: Establish the baseline, identify anomalies, decide, and act. The key to any decision-making is when to decide--the combat profiling heuristic says that three anomalies are enough to decide.
• Any effective method of decision-making should have a threshold of decisions. This is the point at which, no matter what, you must make a decision. A threshold of decision guards against hesitation and indecision due to overanalysis or waiting for additional information.
• In combat profiling, we look for a cluster of cues. We advocate making decisions based on three cues. Once three cues are identified, a decision must be made.
• The three decisions that a combat profiler may make are: kill, capture, or contact--in that order.
• In any given situation, in a potentially hostile environment, the first decision that combat profilers should make is to kill or prepare to kill.
• Humans have an internal reluctance to kill.
• The second, and more important, reason the decision three begins with the most violent option is that, in combat environments, to not be prepared to take the most violent course of action is to put oneself at risk.
• In hostile situations, it is much easier to back down from a decision to kill than it is to ramp up to a decision to kill.
• Decisions are situational. There are no decisions that will absolutely apply to all situations.
• Getting left of bang requires identifying a potential threat before something happens.
• The key is to observe pre-event indicators, and to do this it is necessary to be in Condition Yellow: aware and observant.
• Ultimately, the combat profiler is attempting to determine the large-scale behavioral patterns in order to establish a standard against which to judge anomalies.
• The first indicator for identifying key leaders is an entourage. In fact, it’s a necessary indicator, since it’s difficult to identify a key leader of a group without a group. An entourage is obvious because the well-established fact in leadership research is that interaction is one of the main activities of leaders.
• The second leadership indicator is direction--the leader provides direction for the rest of the group. A leader who is significant will be in control of his subordinates.
• The FBI suggests that one way to survive workplace violence is having a “survival mindset”. This means being aware, prepared, and having rehearsed the actions you will take during a workplace violence incident.
• Those who prepare and train themselves for the possibility of violence will react differently than those who do not.
• Attacks do not happen “out of the blue”. Even what may be considered spontaneous violence is almost always the result of a gradual progression of aggression and precursors to violence.
• The key to preventing many attacks is identifying the pre-event indicators.
• The combat profiling heuristic requires that when you observe three behavioral indicators that someone is an anomaly, you act. However, sometimes it may be necessary to act on one or two indicators, provided those indicators are clear and obvious in communicating a person is a threat.
• Learning is impossible without humility. We encourage confidence, not cockiness.