Training to Lose: Why Cops and Medics Need No-Win Scenarios
I spent 21 years in law enforcement, almost 16 of them on a SWAT team. Today I'm a flight paramedic. Across both careers, I've noticed the same blind spot in how we train our people: we never let them lose.
I don't mean we never let them make mistakes. I mean we never build a scenario where losing is the outcome, where the team takes casualties it can't save, or where the patient dies no matter what the clinician does. And I think that's a problem, because the job doesn't work that way.
We Train Our People to Always Win
Think about the last training scenario you ran or sat through. Odds are it ended well. The hostage was saved. The bad guy was taken care of. The arrests were made. The barricaded subject was talked out peacefully.
On our SWAT team, we did train for downed officers. Three operators would be clearing a building, and an instructor would walk up, tap one of them on the shoulder, and say, "You've just been shot. Go down." The other two then had to decide what to do: push on the threat, or evacuate their teammate. They'd make the call and move forward.
But nobody on our team ever died. The downed officer was always someone to be rescued.
I brought this up again and again, in training and with my team. We need scenarios where teammates die, because that can happen in the field.
What Happens When Your Partner Is Gone
Picture an entry. The operator next to you takes a round to the head. He is immediately and obviously dead.
What do you do? Are you ready for that moment? Or has every rep you've ever run taught you that a downed officer gets dragged to safety?
If your partner is dead, evacuating his body may not be the best move. There may be nothing left to do for him, and other things that urgently need doing. Every second and every set of hands you spend on him is time and manpower taken away from the hostage, the threat, and the rest of your team.
That's a brutal thing to think about. It's much worse to be thinking about it for the first time with real blood on the floor.
The Hallway at Beslan
There's a harder version of this problem, and American law enforcement almost never talks about it: the mission where you know, going in, that people will die.
I'm not talking about running toward danger. Cops do that all the time. They go into situations knowing they might be badly hurt or killed, and some of them don't come out. That's real courage, and it happens often.
What I'm talking about is different. It's sending your people into a situation where you're fairly sure, maybe completely sure, that some of them will die, because the objective has to be taken. We think of that as a military problem. It has happened to law enforcement and counterterrorism forces in other countries, and it is the reason I keep coming back to Beslan.
On September 1, 2004, terrorists seized School Number One in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia in southern Russia. They picked the first day of school on purpose. In that community it's a holiday, the "Day of Knowledge," and whole families turn out to see the kids off. The attackers took more than 1,100 hostages, most of them children and parents. Survivors later said they were forced to help dig weapons out of caches hidden inside the building, and it was widely reported that the weapons had been smuggled in during summer renovations. (Russian authorities later disputed parts of that account.) By the time it was over three days later, 334 hostages were dead, 186 of them children.
One piece of that fight speaks directly to my point. According to accounts from the Russian assault teams, the terrorists had a machine gun set up at one end of a long upper-floor hallway, covering the only route to their position. The commandos at the other end knew they could not get down that hallway without losing people. There was no clever way around it.
So the plan was to keep sending people down that hallway until someone lived long enough to end it, whether by getting a clean shot, waiting for the gunner to run dry, or catching the weapon when it jammed. They were willing to spend lives to give the next man a chance.
The cost was real. Ten members of Russia's elite Alpha and Vympel counterterrorism units were killed at Beslan, the heaviest loss in those units' history.
We don't train for that in the United States, and we don't really think about it. So here's the question I want every tactical leader to sit with: if we ever face that hallway, do we have leaders willing to send their deputies, their patrol officers, their detectives down it, knowing some of them will be shot so the next one has a chance to finish it? And do we have officers who've ever rehearsed being the ones who go?
We need to train for losses. That means training leaders to make the decision to knowingly lose people. It also means training everyone for what comes after: how to keep functioning in the moment when it happens. When a situation is unfolding tactically, nobody gets to stop and work out what to do about the dead friend on the floor beside them.
The Same Problem in EMS
EMS is less dramatic, but it's the same issue.
In my work as a flight paramedic, our training patients don't die. Sometimes the debrief tells you that your patient wouldn't have survived because you did this or missed that. But usually, if a scenario is going off the rails, the instructors stop it. They reset, or they step in and walk you through where the call went wrong. They don't let you kill your patient.
Do this job long enough and you will lose a patient to your own mistake. That's a hard truth, and we should be preparing people for it.
The other side is just as important. Sometimes you do everything right. You're on top of your game, you follow the right procedures, you give the right medications, and the patient still dies, because the injury or the illness was too much to overcome. You can't save everyone.
We almost never put clinicians in that situation during training, one where all their skill and knowledge simply doesn't matter. We should. Every medic should face a Kobayashi Maru they can't Captain Kirk their way out of.
"That Would Be Demoralizing"
Whenever I've raised this, in both professions, I've gotten the same answer. We can't build scenarios our people can't win. It's demoralizing. It sets a tone of loss. We want them to persevere, to believe they can overcome anything, and to have the confidence that when things go bad, they'll come out on top.
I understand the impulse. Confidence matters. But I think it's the wrong lesson.
We're not living in a Hollywood action movie, where the plucky hero wins no matter what. Where at the eleventh hour they pull something out of thin air that saves the day. Where they suddenly remember the thing in their pocket, or the trick they picked up two hours earlier in the movie.
In real life, nobody turns to their partner and says, "Wait, what did you just say? Say that again," and finds the answer hidden in the dialogue that saves everyone. That doesn't happen. We lose patients. We lose people.
A trainee who has only ever won hasn't learned to persevere. They've learned to expect a happy ending. Grit is what you have left after things go wrong, and you can't build it in people who have never been allowed to fail.
Losing and Still Doing the Job
In these careers, we will lose. Sometimes it won't be our fault. Sometimes it will. We have to be able to handle both, at least in the moment, because in that moment other people are still counting on us. They still need us to finish the mission, push through the worst moment, and keep working.
In a mass casualty incident, there's no time to stop and mourn the patient you couldn't save. There's certainly no time to dwell on the mistake that may have cost them. There's another patient, and another after that.
In law enforcement, you may have to step over your friend's body to reach the hostage. You may have to leave your friend in the hallway because there's no saving him. He's already gone. If you go to him anyway, you may end up right beside him, and the person behind you may fall going for you, and so on down the line.
The grief is real, and it has to be dealt with. But it has to wait until the work is done, and that's a skill we can practice.
What This Could Look Like
I'm not suggesting we make every scenario a bloodbath or set people up to fail for its own sake. No-win scenarios should be a deliberate part of the training cycle:
- Teammates who can't be saved. Tell an operator, "You're dead," not "You're down." Make the team decide on the spot what that changes, and what it doesn't.
- Objectives that will cost lives. Give tactical leaders a problem with no clean solution and make them choose. Then debrief the decision, not just the execution.
- Patients who die despite perfect care. Let a well-run scenario end in a death, and tell the clinician afterward that they did everything right.
- Losses caused by our own mistakes. Let the scenario run all the way to its consequence instead of stopping it to rescue the trainee.
- Keep working after the loss. Put the loss in the middle of the scenario, not at the end, so people have to keep performing with it on their minds.
- Debrief the human side. Talk through the decision, the emotion, and how people coped afterward, with the same seriousness we give to the tactics or the medicine.
Train to the Reality of the Job
We owe our people training that matches the job they're actually going to do, including the emotional reality of it. That job includes losing, sometimes through no fault of our own and sometimes because we got it wrong.
The first time someone watches a partner die or loses a patient they did everything right for shouldn't be on a real call. Let it happen in training first, where they can make the decision, feel what it's like, and learn to keep moving.
It's time to start building no-win scenarios into our training.
Jay Korza, NRP
Flight Paramedic
Sergeant (Ret.), Pima County Sheriff's Department
Pima Regional SWAT Team (Ret.)
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