Two clocks start at the same instant.

You have trained for the first one. Almost nobody trains for the second.

For a window measured in minutes, you are both jobs — the only security in the room and the only medic in the room, at the same time, with no help and no handoff.

Almost all civilian training addresses one clock. You get sent to a range for the fight and, if you are diligent, to a classroom for the medicine — and never taught to run both under pressure, in sequence, as one event.

Bleeding-death window: Stop the Bleed / U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The gap is not an opinion. It is arithmetic.

None of these numbers are dramatic. They are just published, and most people have never stacked them next to each other. An attack is usually over before help exists. A severe bleed kills faster than an ambulance can reach a rural county. Fifty-eight of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties are rural.

Four courses. One expanding clock.

RS³ is not a class. It is a ladder, and each rung is defined by how far into the event it takes you. Each level re-runs the last and pushes the clock further out. You never graduate past the opening seconds — you fight through them again, with more capability and more to manage.

RS³ stands for Respond · Secure · Stabilize · Sustain. That is not a slogan. It is the course architecture — one word per level, in order.

Two days. Two disciplines. Two instructor teams.

Every RS³ course runs the same way. Day one is tactical. Day two is medical — not a module bolted onto a shooting class, a full day taught by people who do prehospital medicine for a living.

Day one ends in force-on-force inside a two-story reconfigurable shoot house, using marking cartridges and certified protective equipment, against role players who adapt. A target that does not shoot back teaches you a comfortable lie about your own performance.

Day two is run by Valkyries Austere Medical Solutions, founded in 2016 and led by Aaron Jamison — retired U.S. Army, NAEMT State Coordinator for Alabama, with more than thirty years in military, law enforcement, wilderness, and disaster prehospital medicine.

The four levels

Built on the Incident Command System.

RS³ is organized on ICS — the standardized, all-hazards framework FEMA administers under the National Incident Management System, and the one your local police, fire, and EMS actually run on. It came out of the 1970s California wildfires, where the problem was never a shortage of firefighters; it was that agencies from different jurisdictions used different words and could not work together fast enough.

ICS is not a set of tactics. It is a set of management characteristics — common terminology, management by objectives, manageable span of control, incident facilities, the establishment and transfer of command. 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.

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

What this is, and what it is not.

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

The core lesson of this program is not to hunt. It is to leave the hallway, take a defensible position, protect the people you are responsible for, and keep them alive. A significant block of the ladder is devoted to giving the scene up safely when police get there — because the moment officers arrive and do not know who you are is one of the most dangerous moments of the entire event.

Structure work is taught for one reason: so you can move to your family, hold a doorway, or recognize a fatal funnel before you walk into it. Every parent who has ever run toward a child’s bedroom in the dark has done CQB. Most have done it badly.

Built for people with someone to protect.

Who this is not for. People looking to play. People who want to be told they are already good. People who think the answer to every problem is a faster draw. Alabama requires no training at all to carry a firearm — permitless carry took effect January 1, 2023 — which means the standard is entirely voluntary. We are here for the people who set one anyway.

Training a team?

We deliver the same curriculum with the scenario context changed to your building — a sanctuary, a campus, an office suite — not a generic one. Group and institutional training includes a documented curriculum with published learning objectives and contact hours, a board-ready summary your leadership can actually review, and a week-long intensive option that runs the full pathway in five days.

Two steps. Browse the class list, find the course your team needs, and request a date that works for your calendar. Then email us for package and group pricing — we will quote against your team size and your building, not a rate card.

Group and package pricing: training@sierrabravoontarget.com. Tell us about your building and your people, and we will send a proposal, not a sales call.