Singleton CQB

Picking up where we left off, we are now going to cover the coveted singleton CQB. If you have not read The Basics of Team CQB, I highly encourage you do that before proceeding forward because it covers principles that are foundational to fully understanding CQB. Below, you will find a few crucial bullet points. If even one of them seems a little fuzzy or unfamiliar, please go back and brush up.

To recap, you now understand the following aspects about CQB:

Even to the most elite units on the planet with unlimited budgets and access to cutting edge technology, CQB is an inherently dangerous endeavor that must be avoided when at all possible.
Structures can be broken down into their fundamental layouts and are treated accordingly. Rooms are either center-fed or corner-fed (the most common). Hallways are either standalone, turn, or intersect (4 way or T-intersection).
Dynamic and Deliberate entry are different and must be applied intelligently depending on the situation.
For maximum security, CQB requires multiple sets of eyes to cover all flanks and avenues of approach.

With that said, we will dive into the contexts, mindset, and tactics behind singleton CQB. The good news is that it is remarkably simple conceptually. The bad news is that simplicity comes at a cost – the lack of available options one has when performing it.

Contextually, there are not many instances where performing singleton CQB makes sense. The risk to reward ratio is not in your favor, so the situation should dictate the objective is worth more than your life. Generally, there is only a couple of situations where this makes sense – protecting your family or dealing with an active shooter. Before the Instagram commando diatribes commence, please know that I do not encourage people to be heroes. Ignoring the personal safety concerns, there are significant tactical and legal considerations in these scenarios. Getting involved to protect loved ones or others is a personal decision where context matters – a lot. I will not encourage or discourage your behaviors or thought processes. Your decisions are yours to make alone.

If possible, it’s best to be the defender in a singleton CQB scenario. Defenders always have the advantage, especially if they know the layout of the structure and the attacker does not. They can setup choke points and fatal funnels, which almost always work in their favor. Remaining static and in a good defensive position is the best call when the option is available. Knowing the area around you is secure and only having to worry about one or two avenues of approach is much easier to address than the uncertainty of clearing all directions. Roaming only increases your exposure to flanks, which is something bad enough in team environments, but is borderline suicidal in scenarios by yourself.

However, you aren’t always dealt an ideal hand. Some scenarios, uncommon as they may be, may leave you no choice but clear something by yourself. Whatever your reason may be to perform singleton CQB – it’s critical to get onboard with a couple of facts. First, CQB often deals dilemmas instead of problems. What is the difference? The MIT Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing sums it up beautifully by saying, “A dilemma is a difficult choice between unattractive alternatives. A problem is a situation that must be resolved somehow.” Singleton CQB is full of dilemmas that may result in your demise regardless if you are making the best possible decisions. This leads to the second point, which was mentioned earlier, but I am reiterating to make a point. You better be willing to die for whatever is in that structure you’re clearing, especially if you are doing it by yourself. If you are not, then it is not worth clearing and you should come up with a better solution.

With that said, we’ll get into the specific tactics of singleton CQB. Many of them are the same but are performed with a more focused effort on deliberate versus dynamic entry. Dynamic entry is quicker but relies a lot more on speed and the necessity for multiple teammates – a recipe for death if you’re doing it by yourself. Deliberate entry is slower paced and more methodical, being more cognizant of overexposure by taking smaller angles at a time and subscribing to a limited penetration mindset when possible. Keeping the deliberate method in mind, we’ll dive into clearing rooms, opening doors, addressing a few dilemmas along the way, moving down hallways, and providing a perspective rarely talked about.

Just like in team CQB, there are two types of rooms to clear in singleton CQB: corner-fed and center-fed. Corner-fed rooms are the easiest to address because 90% of them can be cleared by pieing the doorway prior to entry. The remaining 10% (referred to as dead space by some) must be cleared with an entry but it’s easier because you know where to immediately focus your attention. Luckily, most room layouts fall into the corner-fed category.

Center-fed rooms are more difficult because there are two sides that must be cleared at once. Like the corner-fed room, most of it can be cleared by pieing from the outside first, but you’ll only be able to clear 80% of it since there is that 10% dead space on both sides of the doorway. Since you do not have a teammate, this means you can only clear one side at a time, leaving the opposite side exposed.

Here is where we run into our first dilemma. How do we know which side to clear first? The short answer is: you don’t know with 100% certainty. The best way to know is based on educated guesses. As you are pieing the doorway prior to making entry, examine the layout and flow of the room. Is there furniture that blocks your flow into it, forcing you walk a certain direction? What about walls? This is called funneling. Pay attention to where ambush points could be in relation to that. If the room is a simple layout absent of many distractions, then look for other stimuli. Is a shadow of a silhouette being cast from a backlight? Are they breathing heavily? Can you smell them (blood or sweat)? Are there footprints or marks? Has the furniture or trash in the room been disrupted to where you can see a trail, kind of like an animal trail out in a field?

There are many variables that could influence your decision to clear one side over the other first. The best advice I can give is twofold. Slow down. This is not dynamic entry where freezing in a doorway will kill the entire team. In these scenarios, you are using the geometry of the doorway to your advantage. Take your time (within reason) and take only as many angles as you can fully process when possible. The other piece – and I think this is very important – is to follow your gut. If something doesn’t feel right, stop what you are doing to think about it for a second. It’s called a tactical pause (a pause, not a cowardice-backed freeze) and it’s a real thing. To quote Sherlock Holmes, “Intuitions are not to be ignored… They represent data processed too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend.” We have very evolved threat sensors, so take time to listen to them.

This segues great into our second dilemma, which is choosing how to open a door when clearing a room. This invariably comes up when talking about center-fed rooms, in part from the room layout and exposure concerns, but also because I think this type of room gets the juices flowing to think more tactically. It actually applies to both types of rooms when applicable.

The picture below from Special Tactics beautifully illustrates how to deal with this. I highly recommend buying their books if you do not have a MIL/LEO background. They condense the material down into manageable bits and have fantastic graphics to illustrate points. Years ago, I learned a lot about CQB prior to enlisting because of their books. They are not perfect because so many opinions vary on this topic, but they are damn good for what they are, especially at their reasonable price point over a $500 class.

For a door that opens inward, opening it from the doorknob side helps with a couple things. It helps conceal you while opening the door toward the bad guy if he is on that side since the door obstructs his view. It also prevents your arm from being in the doorway while opening the door, potentially giving away your position. Once the door is opened (if it stays open or the bad guy doesn’t slam it) you will pie the door as hard as possible before making entry. Worth considering, if you know the bad guy is on the side behind the door, either from hearing him or seeing him move between the door hinges, it may be better to just make entry then and focus on him, the known threat. Could someone be on the opposite side waiting to shoot you? Possibly, but then they would be lining up their buddy in a crossfire. Anything is possible, but sometimes it’s better to focus on the known versus all the potential unknowns. Of course, if this is a situation void of consequences, you could just shoot him through the door hinges and focus on the other side while making entry. Every situation is different. Decide and roll with it.

Doors that open outward suck a little bit more. You are using the same principle of concealment with the door but more of your view is getting blocked versus the bad guy’s. Your best course of action is to immediately move back after opening so your field of view isn’t as diminished and you can hold the door back to pie the room tighter. Like the other scenario, opening it from the opposite side will expose more of yourself in the doorway for longer. At least with the door covering you, you have a degree of concealment.

This brings up our third dilemma. “The bad guys know you are opening the door or are right outside. Can’t they just shoot you through the door, the hinges, or the wall?” Absolutely, they can. Of course, not letting them know you are there in the first place is more ideal. If that isn’t the case, this is your burden to bear while performing singleton CQB. However, immediately stepping back (maybe 6’-10’ or so) after opening a door, regardless of opening direction or room layout, helps mitigate this risk. If they decide to send rounds toward you, it will be at places of last known position. The doorway or the wall right next to it will be the usual spots. They will most likely not shoot down the entirety of the wall like a machine gunner would in a war zone. This is for more practical instead altruistic reasons or concerns of collateral damage.

People tend to shoot at what they can see, generally. This is not to say they never shoot through concealment to get someone, but that is relatively rare and reserved for more experienced or aggressive folks. Most of the time, shooters (especially inexperienced ones) don’t shoot through the walls as a first resort. It’s either never done or not thought of until after an engagement has been going for a while. Attacking random spots isn’t as instinctual as people may think because most want to know what they are shooting at. Unless they have a ton of ammo, they may think to preserve it so they don’t run out in the fight. Again, I’m not saying this never happens, but it’s rare. The real question is, would you take some concealment or none? It’s better to have something than nothing.

Usually, new students bring the fourth dilemma into play now. Since getting shot through walls and doors will always be somewhat of a concern, should you pie doorways quickly or slowly? There are many opinions on this, but I’ll give a couple based on the classes I’ve taken, the limited experience I’ve had in the military, and from the much more qualified people who taught me CQB that have real world experience. Pieing a door quickly versus slowly boils down to the speed versus security arguments that can depending on the situation.

Proponents of pieing doorways quickly cite the following pros:

It minimizes exposure time in the doorway.
You can rely on your superior shooting skills and speed since your enemy may not be as good of shot.
The quickness may throw off your enemy’s “OODA loop.”

And here are the following cons for it:

You assume your enemy is not as proficient at shooting, which is a big gamble at close distances where skill disparity matters less.
You may take in more information than you can fully process.
- This may lead to overexposure (like not seeing someone quick enough).
  - At best, this will result in a peek-a-boo back and forth between you the enemy, where the person who wins is luckiest. Ironically, this may lead to them simply shooting you through the wall since this may give them more time to think during the engagement.
  - At worst, this can lead to overshooting (in the figurative sense) your pie, resulting in you needing to re-clear that doorway where the enemy is just waiting for you to come back into their sights.
You are shooting from an unstable platform when you are moving quickly. Accuracy and speed will suffer, even with the best shooters in the world.

Proponents of pieing doorways slowly cite the following pros:

You are taking small angles as they’re presented and processing as quickly as you can shoot accurately.
- This does not mean you are moving slow as molasses. You simply aren’t outrunning your headlights.
Because you are taking smaller angles, your risk of overexposure is minimized.
You are shooting from a more stable platform, which will mean greater accuracy and speed to put the bad guy down.

And here are the cons for it:

It’s slow. If you have an aggressive enemy, they may push to try and overwhelm you.
You are spending more time in the doorway exposed overall, even if you are methodically taking smaller angles that you can better process.

Here are two good examples of Singleton CQB runs.

This first video is from a TRC (The Range Complex) promotion for their open enrollment side. It’s a little too fast for my liking, but it shows examples of center-fed and corner-fed rooms. I can’t vouch for this outfit personally, but a bunch of Delta guys teaching on a 1,000-acre facility can’t be that bad.

Here is a clip from one of John Lovell’s classes and is a bit more my speed. It’s methodical but aggressive when needed. If you’re looking for some training, I can vouch for WPS having taken two of John’s classes all the way back in 2017. Like anything else, there will be things you may not 100% agree with, but his teaching is rooted in experience.

There are certainly pros and cons to both. In my opinion, the warm cup of porridge approach should be taken – not too fast, not too slow. When starting out and practicing, it’s best to go very slow and pay attention to your exposure more. Gain that needed proprioception for your limbs and your muzzle. Your speed will increase naturally with proficiency.

It’s important not to rush to your death and understand your capabilities with realistic expectations. At the end of the day, dealing with the threat in a way that allows you to take the most lethal shots will end the fight quicker, so use the approach that allows you to shoot your best. The old cliches are often true. “You can’t miss fast enough,” and “Speed is fine. Accuracy is final.” – Wyatt Earp

Now that we’ve addressed clearing room types, door openings, and their associated dilemmas, we’ll get into moving through hallways. As mentioned previously in other The Basics of Team CQB, hallways are transitory in nature and should not be used to establish footholds without teammates. The propensity for it to act as a fatal funnel makes it very unfriendly. So, without the security of team formations like the Rolling-T, how does one move safely down a hallway?

Annoyingly, like with many subjects in life, the answer is, “It depends.” If the hallway is more manageable and only has three to four doors (like what you would find in a residential home) then you’ll treat it a lot differently than a hallway in a hotel with fifty different rooms. The situation also dictates the approach.

In a home defense scenario – provided you must clear your house to save loved ones – you will need to clear each room slowly and methodically. There is no easy answer to something like this, but the generally accepted answer is to clear the rooms with open doors first. Rooms with closed doors aren’t necessarily safe, but if there is a bad guy in there, a closed door won’t let him see you. Rooms with open doors allow someone to split the seams. I highly recommend reading Fry the Brain (this is a free copy, you’re welcome) if you don’t know what that means. So, that room must be dealt with first, even if it’s out of order in relation to clearing the hall. Should you find open doors that are directly across from each other and don’t know how to proceed, your knowledge of the home layout, the pros & cons of each room, and examining stimuli in these contexts will determine which room you make entry into first. Again, CQB is lot of dilemmas, not just problems.

For an active shooter type of scenario inside something big like a hotel or corporate office, things get even riskier. While I’m not encouraging or discouraging anyone to get involved with something like this, just understand time is of the essence should you choose to jump into it. Choosing speed to react quickly to the shooter will prioritize saving more lives but at the expense of your own safety and security. There is no way around it. Methodically clearing each room you come across may be the proper textbook answer so you don’t leave any dead space for bad guys, but if there are a lot of rooms then this ask is impossible. To react quickly and save the most lives, you’ll need to depend on external stimuli (gunshots, screaming, people running away, blood trails, etc.) to find your way toward the action. Is there a chance the attack is coordinated where someone else is waiting to ambush you while you try to react to the shooter? Yes. However, this is dealing in the abstract nature of “what-if” instead of the concrete nature of “what is.” When reacting to events like this, it’s the cost of doing business. No one has a guarantee of survival.

Regardless of the scenario, the corkscrew method is the only viable technique for clearing halls alone and addressing open doors. While it isn’t perfect, it’s your best bet. Again, Special Tactics has a great illustration for this:

With this technique, you can pie open doors easier before making entry. You can also simply keep moving if you’re in an active shooter situation where some semblance of security must be maintained but you generally know where the action is. Keep in mind, the corkscrew is a hasty way of pieing doors and dealing with them in a hall. It’s not meant for you to pull security on a doorway because you’re still very exposed in the hall. Also remember to maintain that 1’ or so of distance from the wall, when possible, just like mentioned in the The Basics of Team CQB writeup. You don’t want to give away your position to someone in a room by rubbing up against a wall.

Another aspect that needs to be mentioned is that hallways are never clear. What does this mean? After making entry and clearing a room, you need to make reentry into the hall eventually. At this point, you treat the doorway like a center-fed room, clearing both the left and right sides by moving out.

There is a little bit of a helpful guidance for this, but it isn’t perfect. The first side you need to clear will be in the direction you are going, since you’ve presumably cleared the area behind you. The area behind you isn’t exactly safe since there is still the potential someone could have moved behind to flank, but having just cleared that area it’s still safer than what is ahead. Clear the in the direction you are heading and then make sure to check behind you just in case before proceeding.

Knowing the basics of hallways, it’s time to get into their layouts. There are four main types: standalone (which we just covered), turns (left or right), intersections, and T-intersections. Hallways are dreaded by everyone since they can be dangerous, but like our topic overall, they’re not overly complicated because you don’t have a lot of options.

Addressing hallways that turn left or right is like dealing with a corner-fed room. Your best and only option is to take a step back and cut a wide arc to pie it. Remember that the further back you pie something, the wider your field of view becomes, allowing you to cut tighter angles. Should you find yourself being engaged in this scenario, avoid the typical reaction of trading rounds and playing peek-a-boo. I’m unsure why it happens, but I’ve seen it so often and it’s usually the default, even with highly-trained folks. Switch things up a little. Instead of popping back out exactly where you were, maybe take a knee and lower your elevation. Is it guaranteed to work? Maybe, who knows? It’s better than doing the exact same thing. Ideally, you would just run around somewhere else to flank instead of continuing to shoot at each other with a relative even playing field.

Hallway intersections can get hairy very quickly. 4-way intersections and T-intersections are treated the same way; they are basically a center-fed room. 4-way intersections are obviously the more dangerous of the two, since you are fully exposed in the front. Pie in a wide arc and check both sides, leaving the remaining dead space that can only be cleared by making entry. Like the center-fed room, the side you proceed with first will be determined by known information and whatever stimuli you can gather to decide. If you don’t have any, then it will be a guess. Hopefully, you choose the correct side if there is someone waiting for you. I may be stating the obvious, but not having a teammate to watch your back is really starting to set in, isn’t it?

There is another more Leeroy Jenkins type of strategy to dealing with hallways that I wouldn’t advise using stateside, or really in general. It’s often used overseas in warzones with success by the less trained. After pieing both sides and clearing as best as you can, instead of committing to clearing one side first, simply run as fast as you can across the hall. If is someone guarding it, there is higher chance they miss you as a running target versus a slower one with your back turned to them if you accidentally clear the wrong side first. Of course, whatever shenanigan pursuit commences after that is anyone’s best guess. It could be viable if you notice a piece of cover on the other side you get could behind to wait and ambush them if they chase you. Joking aside, this is not something I would generally recommend.

The last aspect about singleton CQB I would like to discuss is about movement. Am I going to spend the next 10 pages describing footwork inside a doorway? No, don’t worry. This is more about thinking outside the box – quite literally.

Let’s think about something for a moment. What is the worst aspect about CQB? The answer is in the name: “close quarters” battle. It’s dangerous to hunt people down or be hunted with a firearm inside the close confines of a building. We almost fight as much with the building as the enemy. Why not make the building work for us?

Many miss the opportunity to clear a large part of buildings outside before making entry. Clear rooms with their windows from outside if it’s possible. If you receive contact, you can always run away. It’s the safest way to clear a structure. Don’t engage the enemy on an even playing field. Cheat to win.

In my first CQB class we ran a variety of scenarios. The culminating exercise was a 2v1 scenario with opfor outnumbering the student. The objective was to clear your home of bad guys with your family still inside it and you were free to address it however you pleased. Any entry point or technique could be used we were told. So, I opted for the one I never had to use. I pied a few windows until I saw opfor behind a loveseat in a room, trained on the interior doorway, so shot him in the back. An immediate ceasefire and End X was called.

In fairness, they didn’t say I couldn’t do that, so I wasn’t reprimanded, per se. It’s just that what I did went against the spirit of the training exercise, which is hard to argue against. Clearing the structure as the scenario intended would’ve been better from the perspective of getting the reps in and getting more training value out of it. But more importantly, the cadre had to stop anything from going further because the shoothouse was the only safe place to use our UTM rounds. It was more of a liability issue than a training one, I think. Having a student catch a sim round to the face isn’t good PR. While they loved where my head was at, the scenario had to be called for safety.

The point of that anecdotal story was to bring perspective. Structures have fatal funnels that can be used against you, but they can also be used as cages to shoot others easier from the outside. However, there is an important caveat here. Sometimes the more tactically sound a decision is, the more likely it is to be considered excessive force in a self-defense setting. Every situation is different, but keep in mind, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

If a burglar is trying to kick in your front door at 2 AM, which scenario would look more favorable to a jury?

You tell them to leave, call 9-1-1, and guard the door – only shooting them if they make entry to your home with intent to do harm.
You climb out of a side window and run around to flank them.

Notice how the first option is more defensive in nature. The second option is more offensive since you are bringing the fight to them, even if it’s under the guise of defending your home. The second option – while it may be more tactically sound depending on the situation – could be seen as excessive.

The point of this exercise is not to offer legal advice but to give an overall perspective for all the previous information discussed. While you have a responsibility to protect yourself and your loved ones, you also have a responsibility to apply this information wisely and ethically.

With that said, I hope this writeup was helpful and interesting to you. CQB can be very nuanced with lots of opinions and sometimes seeing other perspectives can make you understand concepts better. The goal was to provide something a little different and fun to read. I appreciate you taking the time to read these rants, and maybe in exchange you’ve learned a thing or two along the way.