Car Park Gunfight & Hostage Escape: Lynx Brutality 2025 Day 2

Polenar Tactical has done it again, setting the bar for Brutality matches with this year’s Lynx Brutality. Held at the Lynx Pro Training Center outside Kočevje Slovenia, this year’s match was 10 stages over two days. My plan was to shoot the match in a covert sort of rig with a suit from Grayman & Co, but thanks to FedEx the suit never arrived. So I just took the jeans and combat shirt I had and ran with it. My pistol was a P365 with a Gideon Valor Mini fully-enclosed compact red dot and my “rifle” was a Flux Raider with a Romeo4 red dot. Those were definitely handicaps, but made for a fun and interesting match regardless!

19 Comments

    • I think that an exact re-creation of the scenarios would be… Both tasteless and problematic.

      The one time I saw something like that at an IPSC match, people refused to participate out of respect for the victims. Given that it was both local to the match, and recent? I think that choosing not to be involved in that was almost certainly the correct choice. My own participation was stopped by a work-related event, and I felt not a single regret.

      I think you need to train on these things and discuss them, but it should be done in a professional and respectful manner. Recreation of murders in a gamified setting? Oh, hell no… That’s just disturbing.

  1. I could see fully fictionalized stages *informed* by real shootouts, like a “felony stop gone wrong” stage based around a layout of cars, but going for a 1:1 recreation of an actual murder seems rather obscene

    • Pointless too. If one does well in the recreation he’s liable to hubris. “I woulda whupped as at Miami in ’86.” Why? Monday morning quarterbacking. The only training that is useful is when the opponent’s moves are not choreographed for you.

      • It is amazingly easy to “win” when you know exactly what the opposition is going to be doing.

        Which is precisely why you need to ensure actual real-world fidelity to your scenarios, which happens to include “enemies that don’t conform to expectation”.

        Trying to achieve the ideal of accurately replicating what your real opponent is going to do in the moment? That’s the big problem, and where it all falls apart.

        If you look back on the history of it all, you’ll find that the Japanese who wargamed out WWII did not manage the feat; few did. Because of this, they did not discover the flaws in their planning, and wound up sitting on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor at the end of it all. Likewise, the US wargame planners who most recently screwed up by mandating their multi-million dollar exercise be skewed by hand-waving away the very common-sense things that the OPFOR commander did in that exercise…? I’ll leave that as an exercise for historians.

        It isn’t for nothing that Sun Tzu said “Know yourself, know your enemy, and prevail in a thousand battles”; he was absolutely right, in that regard.

        Probably the biggest issue in any training simulation is accurately assessing and then replicating what the opposing side is going to do. You have to get inside their heads, find out how they think, how they look at things, what their worldview is.

        Too often, people create these straw figures, ones that perfectly conform to oppose their own strengths, and then go with that. They fail to recognize that they’re scriptwriting their own idealized scenarios, so that they can be the stars of their very own action movies.

        Utterly failing to recognize that they’re basically conducting an exercise in masturbatory self-insert playacting, which is utterly useless in terms of real training value. Warning signs of this being a problem in your training will be when the participants are standing there going “Oh, I recognize this…” and not “WTF? What the hell are they doing…?”

        I could write a small book on this issue, but I’ll refrain. Simply let it be said that while good training is hard, setting up good training is even harder.

        • Kirk, write the book; the small one, so folk will read it… It will be hard to write, but please try, for everyone.

          • Let’s say that I did that; what do you think should be covered/included, and at what level?

            I mean, I’m not against the idea, at all. But, at the same time, I’m not all that certain that what I have to say isn’t filled with things people already know and witless universal platitudes. Honestly, most of what I’ve always said about “how to conduct training” is just plain common sense, but at the same time… Most of the people I was talking to seemed to be utterly lacking in said common sense. Maybe I do have something to contribute, but I’ve no idea what it is, or whether I should bother saying it.

          • Mini books, Murphys law things, extended… I don’t know, something… Think about it, if you get any ideas, have you ever heard of ladybird books? It could even be satirical “For want of a better word.” practical none the less… Law’s… As oppose a law. Stuff, think.

          • Ladybird book skits… Google it, I think that would be your way into the gun book market to benefit everyone.

          • I’ll give it some thought.

            Issue is, I don’t have a sounding-board for such an endeavor, and I rather think I’d need one.

            I’d probably need to do it as a sort of hypertext spiral sort of affair, with the witless universal platitudes on top, and deeper commentary on it.

            One thing I think lacking in a lot of modern literature and training material… You should have things layered such that your “big picture” stuff is there at the top, and all the “and, don’t forget…” stuff beneath it for later thoughtful perusal.

            Unfortunately, there’s not a lot out there that really fills that sort of niche, in terms of formatting. I mean, yeah… Websites, sure, but how many of them are formatted for actual learning? Damn few of them, from what I’ve seen.

            I think it’s a bit of an undiscovered/underexplored arena, TBH. I’ve never been very satisfied with any of the training materials I’ve ever been handed on anything because they’re all written by the technical writers working for the people who designed and built the equipment in the first place; they already know how it all works and goes together, and it seems that creates a bit of a universal blind spot such that they fail to lay out how the hell they approached the entire problem in the first place; which is kinda critical to understanding how it all works and fits together.

            Consider Word, as an example: Have you ever seen anywhere where the creators and maintainers of that excretionary abomination ever bothered explaining the basis of how they meant for it all to work? Ever wondered why moving one little image can break entire documents? The answer lies in the fact that they never, ever bothered to explain how the hell they worked that bit of magic to even be able to put images into text, or what the basics are behind it all.

            A lot of the problems I see in the modern world relate to this very issue; one, people “think sloppy”, and never explain what they’re doing during a project, and two, nobody demands that they do. If you’ve ever done programming, you’ll know exactly what I mean once you dig into someone’s code and looked at their comments in it. It’s like that everywhere in society; nobody ever explains the critical underlying bits. Often, because they don’t understand what the hell they did or are doing in the first place. Chesterton left fences everywhere, and trying to work out what the hell those fences are there for is nearly impossible because there never was any documentation in the first damn place, or it’s been lost. Another option would be that it was never recorded in the first damn place, because everyone was certain it was obvious at the time, and everyone knew it…

            End result of that? Go look at the arguments over all those Roman dodecahedrons they’ve found scattered across Northern Europe, or the arguments over whether or not the legions marched in any kind of step.

            The whole thing is maddening to someone like me, who basically wants to understand and categorize everything for that understanding to occur. You show me clearly written code, and I’m in love. Show me the typical product of the BS we have in just about everything…? Yeah. That’s why I’m so gods-damned cranky all the time: Too many years trying to bring mindful understanding to the essentially chaotic and idiotic efforts of the usual run of ‘effing morons. I don’t know how many times that the question of “Why in f*ck are they doing that?” has run through my mind like a felching mantra… One that never seems to get real answers when whatever it is immanentizes some seriously stupid BS before my eyes.

            Swear to God, if someone ever presents me with evidence that I’m an alien sent to this planet with a wiped memory in hopes that I could somehow learn everything about it and make sense of it all…? I’d be entirely unsurprised; the rest of you monkeys have kept me puzzled since toddlerhood, and I’m no nearer definitive answers to your various and sundry follies now than I was then…

          • He he… Well, as I say ladybird books for grown ups; it may “Help” the world, he he… Seems like it needs, some help.

        • Another problem beside knowing the enemy is the one Von Clausewitz touched on saying an enemy faced with choosing A or B generally chooses C.

          • Astute point.

            The issue boils down to modeling; if you don’t have a good model of the opponent, how they think, what they’ll do and how they will respond to your own actions… Well, your training is going to suck (in terms of doing you any good), and you’re likely to lose when you do come to grips with the enemy.

            Of course, there have been other occasions where failure to properly model your opponent has led to entirely undeserved and total victory when war came. It’s a crap shoot; I would, however, strongly advise against relying on “luck” as a factor.

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