About the Reality Based Training Association

The Reality Based Training Association was initially formed in an effort to address issues specifically related to Reality Based Training safety. As the mission of Law Enforcement, the Military and various segments of the Emergency Services has evolved, training for these missions in many ways has not. In some instances the direction that has been taken by some organizations or individual trainers has been misguided, dangerous or deadly.

Part of the mission of the RBTA is to examine training systems as well as overall system designs in an effort to move training in the most effective direction. The cost of ineffective training systems in terms of money and loss of life has been immense. Much of the discussion that led to the formation of this association was due to the number of serious injuries and senseless killings of military and law enforcement personnel during training exercises. In many instances of near tragedy, the trend has been to bury the incident and attempt to ensure it is not repeated. Sadly, this is exactly what NOT to do. Once such incidents are uncovered it is possible to understand the root cause of the system failure so that it can be repaired or replaced.

Upon a more thorough examination of various tragedies, dangerous training trends and paradigms were discovered. In many cases, where certain training practices did not lead to the injury or death of training participants, such practices had the propensity to programme participants for future failure during dangerous encounters.

Due to the deep entrenchment of many of these trends and philosophies inside the cultures where they were developed, it has been determined that the faulty architecture of many of these systems or the individual training philosophies of certain trainers is not easily changed. The RBTA was founded as a means to an ongoing investigation into how such systems CAN be changed so that personnel can be trained in the safest, most cost effective manner possible. To that end, the RBTA is an organization dedicated to the unification of the trainers and organizations tasked with supplying the soldier on the battlefield, emergency services worker or officer in the street with the most current information availble with regards to training philosophies, systems and products.

Where systems, organizations or individual training practices are found to be defective or dangerous, the RBTA will direct its resources to the correction of those defects. Where defects are not correctable, it will inform its membership of the perceived dangers so that such systems can eventually be corrected, removed from service or avoided.