Do you carry a reload?
Not long ago, nearly all the experts on firearms recommended carrying at least one reload. With the advent of greater magazine capacity and more reliable firearms, the advice on how much ammunition to carry has shifted, some of the current experts don’t recommend carrying a reload at all. However, an experience I had at a recent force- on- force exercise with One Shepherd made me think of a reason for carrying a reload that I had never heard expounded by the experts.
We were one hour into the three day exercise and we were already locked into an intense and brutal firefight. With only a five man team, we were outnumbered almost two to one, and defending a front nearly three hundred meters wide. Fortunately, we had enough depth to fight a delaying action, and that was our patrol leader’s strategy: trade space for time. Our orders were to hold them off for 24 hours. Unfortunately, the opposition was aggressively driving a hard bargain, and although we inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy, we had to fall back much too quickly, and were completely overrun in six hours’ time.
Falling back to lick our wounds and reassess our readiness for the next mission, we found nearly everyone on our team was amber on ammunition. We had started the exercise with seven magazines apiece, now we were down to two. These two magazines per man had to last for the next 42 hours of fighting.
As our team transitioned from the defense to the attack, the entire tempo of the battlefield shifted. We conducted small scale reconnaissance patrols and probing attacks. We waited, gathering intelligence for nearly thirty hours before launching a full assault.
Patrol leader Cole performs an emergency reload behind cover, Photo by Brenda Chaffe
There were multiple considerations that went in to our patrol leader’s decision to proceed with caution, but a large part was our lack of ammunition. Nothing quite saps confidence like going into a fight with a severely limited supply of ammunition.
The situation reminded me a little bit of my youth hunting deer with a flintlock rifle. I would watch, wait, and stalk deer for hours, waiting for that perfect shot, knowing I would only get one chance. Now that I hunt with modern rifles, I am more likely to take that chancy shot, knowing that I can drop the quarry with a quick follow-up, if necessary.
Self-defense is not greenside patrolling, neither is it deer hunting, but I think a lesson can be drawn from these two experiences that applies to a CCW situation.
There are lots of good reasons to carry a reload, but one I have never heard discussed is that it can instill confidence to engage a threat. Most self-defense shootings occur and end very quickly, but some, like active killer and terrorist- type attacks, can last several minutes; moreover, the moment you begin engaging one of these types of murderers, you will draw the attention of a foe who is almost certainly better armed than you will be. Ammunition equals time in a gunfight, and active killers do most of their murdering in the four to five minutes that it takes to mount a police response. Even if you do not manage to kill him, having enough ammunition to keep a villain busy until the police arrive can save lives.
Col. Jeff Cooper was famous for saying: “The only reason for carrying a lot of ammunition is if you plan to miss a lot”. His point is well taken. We are responsible for every round we fire, and every round that does not hit the bad guy has the possibility of hitting an innocent person. What I am talking about here is not having enough ammunition for indiscriminate firing, but having enough ammunition to give you the confidence that you can finish the fight.
If your everyday carry is a Glock 26 with a 10 round magazine, will you feel more confident knowing you have another ten or twenty more rounds in reserve? I’m sure I would.
In the training exercise I relate at the beginning of this article, we were granted an unexpected resupply of two magazines per person. After the exercise was ended, and everyone turned in their left over ammunition to supply, the count showed that we had turned in exactly two full magazines per person. In other words, we’d had enough for the fight all along, but we needed the resupply to give us the confidence to attack.
For more information about One Shepherd go to:https://1shepherd.com/what-is-one-shepherd/
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