"The insight came while Special Operators were training recruits to respond to an ambush.
An ambush is the most shocking event that soldiers can experience. It transitions you, in a flash of terror, from hunter to target. When new recruits are ambushed, they typically run away. Bad move. That exposes your back to the enemy's unchecked gunfire. When new recruits are given time to think about how to best respond to ambushes, they typically say: Drop and take cover. Worse move. That leaves you prone in a curated murder zone.
So what's the smarter move? It is, I am confidently told by the Army's most experienced Operators, to attack into the ambush.
Attack into the ambush? This seems suicidal to me. But the Operators patiently explain that when you attack into the ambush, you achieve two wins at once. First, you regain your initiative, pushing events instead of being pushed. Second, you put your enemy on the defensive, disrupting his planning. With a single maneuver, you thus double shift the odds, pressing your opponent to make bad decisions as you increase your likelihood of acting smart.
This method is so simple and effective that it seems a surefire way to turn any brain into a Special Operator. But as the Army discovered, there's a complication. When recruits are taught to attack into the ambush, they succeed in training — then fail catastrophically in combat…
This happens because recruits who memorize a lesson treat it as a prescribed instruction, aka a program, and programs work only in familiar situations. When the environment shifts — when the ambush is irregular or innovative — the recruits' mental computer can't pattern-match it. Instead of charging forward, recruits freeze in place, run away, or dive for cover. And, in the killing field, they die.
This made the Army realize: To really learn to attack into an ambush, recruits had to discover the lesson for themselves, acquiring it not as a program, but as commonsense. To set the conditions for recruits to do so, Special Ops breaks the lesson into three steps, each based upon a legend of commonsense decision-making."
