Tactical Tangents

We say that we should put Service before Self, but it's more than just a mantra. Where the rubber meets the road is all in how we develop implicit trust among teammates so that we know where each oth…

Wellness isn’t just a soft and fuzzy term bandied about in the Human Resources department. Healthier, happier employees perform better, and in professions where the rubber meets the road, wellness is…

When drafting players for your fantasy sportsball team, stats provide an easy benchmark. Just pick the ones with the most home runs, passing yards, and the highest free-throw percentage. It’s a littl…

No team in law enforcement is composed of robotic textbook-following automatons, nor would we want it to be, if we’ve ever found ourselves at 2MPH over the limit. But when a worst-case incident unfol…

The downsides of sleep deprivation are legion: irritability, poor judgment, even lowered testosterone. Yet the duties of the .mil and LE career fields are well known for demanding odd and/or long hou…

  In the spring of 2018, the city of Austin, Texas was rocked by a string of package bombs, five in all, that killed two and injured five. The story of how local and federal agencies tracked down the…

Do you know what every great slugger in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown had in common? They all had hitting coaches. Today we have an abundance of riches in the form of internet videos to te…

In the world of ugly warrant execution, there are a lot of bad scenarios that have happened with lessons to be learned for people on both sides of the door. In this episode, Mike & Jim break down a…

If you’re a habitual firearms toter, how do you carry to and from places where you can’t carry? Do you? What if it’s someplace where there’s no provision for securing it at your destination? Whether …

In the pop-culture tactical world today it’s common to see Col. Boyd’s Decision Cycle, the famed “OODA Loop”, applied to individuals and their actions, but indeed it has its origins as an institution…

In any organization it’s almost a tradition to turn and look at the people coming up through the ranks behind you and bemoan how much better things were in the Good Old Days. Of course, things were b…

Mike reminds us that “Responsibility to the Community” is not just a slogan on a squad car door in this episode, where he and Jim talk about the necessity of keeping the public informed in a manner t…

In dangerous career fields like the military or law enforcement, there’s an unavoidable tension of priorities between the mission and the safety of the people on the team who need to accomplish it. I…

Bombs are scary. You can’t shoot back at an explosion or talk it into surrendering or leaving you alone. But you can learn ways to spot the bad guy’s device before it does its thing. In today’s episo…

High-stress jobs, such as those in the military or law enforcement fields, tend to attract mission-oriented people, dedicated to the team and the public, who thrive on stress. Well, plants thrive on …

Part of our mission here at Tactical Tangents is to overcome the “tactical fantasy”, and in this episode, Mike and Jim talk about avoiding one of the most pernicious ones. It’s easy in a world full o…

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be over (for now) but that doesn’t leave us in a world without conflict. While we were hip-deep in the Global War on Terror, major great power competitors have be…

In both the military and law enforcement universes, there’s often an understandable amount of friction between the people out where the action is and those who help them get there and support them in…

In a cool tactical podcast, everybody wants to talk about a gunfight and nobody wants to talk about getting t-boned in an intersection on the way to the gunfight. This episode features Mike & Jim, wh…

The only thing more frightening than being shot at by your own team is finding out you just shot up your own team. The very idea of fratricide…aka “Blue-on-Blue” incidents…is scary, but being a profe…