Drivers Learn to Escape Worst Case Scenarios

By Stew Magnuson

DriversLearn WEST POINT, Va. – A driver in an armored sports utility vehicle pulls up to a roadblock in a spot called Junkers Alley. The flash of a roadside bomb tells him that it’s a trap. Two gunmen pop out from behind a scrap car and open fire.

Their ammo is blanks and paintballs, though. As the windshield is splattered with lime green splotches, the driver throws the car into reverse, and he escapes the mock attack.

“Get off the X” is the main lesson drivers who find themselves in sticky situations need to learn, says Brad Simmons, a driving instructor.

No matter what the situation, you can’t sit still, he says. The average vehicle takes six to 12 rounds in an ambush. If a dozen bullets strike one spot on an armored car or windshield, they will eventually penetrate, he cautions.

Even moving 5 miles per hour will spread the pattern out and allow the armor to absorb the bullets.

“That’s why we don’t sit still,” says Simmons, one of the instructors at ArmorGroup International Training’s Virginia site, which sits on a former World War II auxiliary airfield. All the expensive armoring customers are placing on passenger vehicles is only there to buy drivers a few precious seconds.

Hundreds of U.S. government officials and corporate customers make the two-hour drive from Washington every year to learn how to survive such attacks. The company trains about 6,500 students per year at locations in Virginia, Texas, Great Britain and Iraq.

Rich Weaver, manager of the Virginia branch, says “our focus is not having the experience in the first place. We’d rather recognize the attack and avoid it.”

The first lesson is to spot when others are conducting surveillance. Are there any suspicious looking characters standing around where they shouldn’t be?

Varying routes to work is one of the more obvious tactics. It’s “common sense, but most people don’t think about it because they don’t think it’s going to happen to them,” Weaver says. Of course, a driver can’t vary his or her place of work, or his home. These are spots where they are most vulnerable.

The second lesson is how to quickly recognize when an attack is underway in order to buy crucial seconds that may save a life or prevent a kidnapping. Drivers should be able to tell when a checkpoint is real or fake.

The basic tactics used to conduct kidnappings or ambushes have been around for decades. “They’re not really inventing a lot of new tactics,” Simmons says.

The roadside bomb, as shown in the checkpoint scenario, is one of three basic methods to ambush a car. Also common is the “control point” method, where one or two cars pull out to block the victim.

The third method is driving up and ramming the car, or a drive-by shooting.

Students at the facility learn to lose their instincts. Professional limo drivers who take the course, for example, may worry too much about the expensive cars they’re charged with maintaining, and not their own lives. Ramming one’s way out of a roadblock scenario might mean a dent in a $250,000 car, but it can save lives, Weaver says.

The company constantly analyzes data on attacks gathered from field reports to improve their training, says Simmons.

In the beginning of the Iraq war, the only defensive tactic drivers were practicing was driving 100 miles per hour. TNT explodes at 33,000 feet per second, Simmons says. “You can’t outrun TNT.” Drivers were rolling their vehicles while traveling at unsafe speeds.

“There’s a fine line between preparation and paranoia. If you drive around paranoid all the time, you do not drive effectively,” Simmons says.

Junker Alley is where many of the scenarios involving control points or roadside bombs takes place. Dozens of beat up cars line the sides to give students the closed-in feel where their options are limited. The simulated bombs are loud and smoky.

“We want them to get that sodium dump. We want them to get that muscle tightening,” Simmons says. The company even carries out simulated attacks on the streets of Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Va. Not with real or mock weapons, though. They don’t want to panic the local police.