RS³ (RS3-301) Level 2 — The First Five Minutes (RS³-301) | 2 Days Sept 19-20

Two days. Sixteen contact hours. $575. Prerequisite: RS³ Level 1 (RS³-300). DoubleTap Training Grounds · Calera, Alabama

Of the incidents where duration could be measured, the FBI found about 70% ended in five minutes or less.

Level 2 is built around those five minutes. The building is still a problem. The adversary is still making decisions. And the casualty you treated is getting worse.

Level 1 teaches the contact. Level 2 teaches the ground you have to hold afterward, and the trauma protocol you run while holding it.

DAY ONE — TACTICAL

• Door mechanics: control, deny, defend

• Breaking contact and the hallway killing ground

• Building and fighting from a prepared position

• Care Under Fire capstone — self and buddy aid during an ongoing fight

• Extended force-on-force against adaptive role players in a two-story reconfigurable shoot house

DAY TWO — MEDICAL

Taught by Valkyries Austere Medical Solutions.

• Care Under Fire transitioning to Tactical Field Care

• MARCH beyond the tourniquet — airway, respiration, circulation, hypothermia and head injury

• The reassessment loop: recognizing and correcting failed interventions

• Multiple casualties, triage decisions, and moving a casualty to cover

WHAT YOU LEAVE WITH

You leave able to hold defensible ground against a thinking adversary and run a deliberate trauma protocol while still in the fight.

BUILT ON THE SAME COMMAND STRUCTURE THE PROFESSIONALS USE

RS³ is organized on the Incident Command System — ICS — the framework American emergency services use to run every major incident in the country.

If you have not encountered it, here is what it is. The Incident Command System is a standardized, on-scene, all-hazards approach to managing an emergency. It came out of the California wildfires of the 1970s, where the problem was never a shortage of firefighters — it was that agencies arriving from different jurisdictions used different words, different rank structures, and different assumptions, and could not work together fast enough. ICS fixed that by standardizing how any incident gets organized, regardless of size, cause, or who shows up. It is now a core component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), the national framework administered by FEMA, and it is what your local police, fire, and EMS run on. Hospitals, school districts, and utilities use it too.

ICS is not a set of tactics. It is a set of management characteristics — common terminology, management by objectives, manageable span of control, the establishment and transfer of command, designated incident facilities. Those characteristics do not change when the incident is small. They just get performed by fewer people.

In the first minutes of a violent event, that is exactly your situation. You are the entire incident organization — incident commander, operations, and medical branch, all at once — and you are going to hand that incident off to professionals who arrive expecting an ICS structure.

At five minutes, the incident has geography. Level 2 introduces incident facilities and locations — in ICS, a formal incident has designated places where specific things happen, and so does yours. The defensible position you build and fight from is functioning as your incident command post: the place from which you observe, decide, and communicate. The place you move casualties to is functioning as your casualty collection point. Deciding where those are, committing to them, and being able to tell an arriving officer where they are is an ICS skill performed under fire. Level 2 also drills the reassessment loop — ICS assumes an incident changes and requires you to re-evaluate on a cycle rather than executing a plan you made two minutes ago. Interventions fail, adversaries move, and the trained response is to check, not to assume.

Why we built it this way rather than inventing our own system:

• It is the language the people arriving already speak. The most dangerous ninety seconds of an armed citizen's day may be the ninety seconds when law enforcement arrives and does not know who you are. A structured handoff works because it is the format they are trained to receive.

• It scales without changing. The same structure governs one person in a hallway and a nine-person church safety team across a campus.

• It is auditable. Numbered units, published learning objectives, defined contact hours, performance-based evaluation. That matters when a church board, school administrator, HR director, or insurance carrier has to review the training your team took.

• It is not proprietary, so it is testable. We adopted the framework emergency management already uses instead of inventing one and naming it after ourselves.

The curriculum is also NFPA 3000-informed (the standard for Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response) and TCCC/TECC-based.

RS³ is ICS-aligned, not ICS-accredited.

RS³ is not a FEMA course. SierraBravo On Target, LLC is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or accredited by FEMA, the Emergency Management Institute, or any federal, state, or local emergency management agency. Completing an RS³ course confers no FEMA, NIMS, or ICS credential, certification, qualification, or continuing-education credit of any kind. RS³ certificates document contact hours and content covered — nothing more.

If you want actual ICS certification, FEMA offers it directly and most of it is free. ICS-100 and ICS-200 are available online through FEMA's Emergency Management Institute; ICS-300 (Intermediate ICS for Expanding Incidents) and ICS-400 (Advanced ICS for Command and General Staff) are delivered in person through state emergency management agencies. We encourage it, and it pairs well with this program. Start at training.fema.gov.

WHO THIS IS FOR

Level 1 graduates. Church and school safety team members who have completed Level 1 and are responsible for holding ground, not just for themselves. Anyone who finished Level 1 and found the force-on-force block clarifying rather than discouraging.

We do not train civilians to act as law enforcement. We train them to protect people and survive until professionals arrive.

PREREQUISITES

RS³ Level 1 (RS³-300), or an equivalent course reviewed and approved in writing in advance — email training@sierrabravoontarget.comwith the provider, hours, and content. Students must be 19 or older and able to safely and independently operate rifle and pistol, including reloads and common malfunction clearance. All participants sign a liability waiver.

REQUIRED EQUIPMENT

AR-platform rifle with sling; 3 or more magazines; pistol with belt-mounted holster covering the trigger guard; eye and ear protection (electronic muffs recommended); approximately 100 rifle and 100 pistol rounds; hydration; clothing you can kneel and move in; closed-toe footwear with tread; brimmed hat; notebook. Knee pads and your own IFAK — carried the way you actually carry it — are strongly recommended. Protective equipment and marking cartridges are provided.

PHYSICAL EXPECTATIONS

Level 2 is more physically demanding than Level 1: sustained work in a two-story structure including stairs, repeated ground transitions, holding position under load, and casualty movement. Students may opt out of specific movements for injury or medical reasons; modifications preserving the learning objective are provided without penalty, including a standard modification for casualty-drag work. Contact us before class if you have concerns.

CLASS SIZE

Capped at 20. Force-on-force and the instructor-to-student ratio set the cap. When it is full, registration closes.

CANCELLATION AND WEATHER

Full refund 14 or more days out. Within 14 days, the seat transfers to any RS³ course within twelve months. If we cancel, students choose a full refund or a transferred seat. We train in rain; we suspend for lightning and unsafe conditions and reschedule or make up lost blocks.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Level 2 is the prerequisite for RS³ Level 3 — The First Twenty Minutes (RS³-400), which adds managing bystanders and integrating safely with arriving law enforcement.

Capability without discipline is liability.