MAR 23 Single person room clearing

[Mick-Boy]

On 23 MAR 2025 NSR Training and Consulting ran an Solo Structure Strategies class at our shoot house at Pikes Peak International Raceway. The weather for the class was great and allowed some nice moments of sunshine in between runs in the house.
This was a small class which allowed time for a lot of additional discussions and following several “what if” rabbit trails that we normally wouldn’t have time to cover. The instructors for the class were me and Jeff C. (USMC03)

Equipment – We are using Elite Force airsoft G17s. Students had the option to use pistols equipped with a red dot or with iron sights. One of the students had a dot come loose during a run (accounting for an errant shot). He swapped out for a new gun and I didn’t see any further issues.

POI – The class is intended to be an overview of tactics and techniques that can be used in single person room clearing/building search/CQB. We spent about an hour and a half in the classroom discussing the concepts behind what we’re doing in the house and then spent the rest of the day in the shoot house.

We talked about clearing systematically and hastily and the merits/pitfalls of both. We talked about how to break the house down into manageable shapes and the priorities of work. Students got approximately two hours to practice the various techniques followed by some full runs systematically clearing sections of the house dry. Then we introduced targets.


This is a problem solving/decisions making course much more than a shooting course. Jeff and I want to keep this training as accessible as we can so there are no marksmanship prerequisites or “shoot in” like you often see for live-fire CQB. Overall shooting and gun-handling in the class was outstanding. We had one student engage an unknown on one of the earlier runs.

This is something that’s more common than I’d like to admit for solid shooters when they’re introduced (or reintroduced) to a situation where they have to make decisions on the fly with a gun in hand. The bulk of our training is a linear sequence of events [see target -> shoot target] not a branching decision tree [see target -> discriminate target -> if shoot, where, from where, how fast, how many times etc. if no shoot, do you talk/not talk. If talk, what do you say, how loud do you say it. And on and on and on.

If you’re not training to make decisions with a gun in hand, you’re setting up the possibility of catastrophic failure.

In this case, the student made the error, said his mea culpas and then didn’t repeat the mistake. To quote the warrior poet Pat Rogers, “Learning only occurs after repetitive, demoralizing, failure.” Or, in this case, a single mistake. I guess some people learn faster than others.



We spent the second half of the afternoon working on hasty clearing. This is usually stimulus driven (screaming/gunfire from the end of the hall, moving to a known location responding to a call for help, etc.) and we do this with the understanding that we are absorbing more risk in the interest of speed. How fast you can move, make decisions, target ID, and accurately engage is highly individual but I think everyone enjoyed getting to push their personal envelope in a controlled environment.

We ended the day with some additional discussion followed by a debrief.

Thank you to the guys in the class. You made it a pleasure.