Should you use Airsoft for realistic training?

um [Music] [Music] [Music] on a gun [Music] go are you ready yeah all right standby super intense bb wars guys bb war is a serious business and you know what very recently we went to an airsoft event and this was of course milsim west what is milsim west nilsson west is 40 continuous hours of the most intense airsofting you could ever possibly experience you of course fall into two factions nato and russian forces russian forces also have militia with them and you can be asleep and you can be assaulted it is some good fun out there the question is can anything be gleaned from this that can be useful to actual training out there let's talk about it today let's talk about airsoft in general and what do i think about its application to training now before we get into we of course have to thank the biggest sponsor of this channel the biggest sponsor this channel is the sonoran desert institute big thank you to them if you're looking to get your start in gunsmithing they are the way to go we can't think of them enough and of course zx computers a big thanks to them gaming channel is starting soon we've said it forever but it will and then of course we can't forget what micah patreon patreon patreon is busting busting it's always busting and uh micah posts everything that i don't want to have post did and uh it's very upsetting for me it gives me a lot of anxiety uh a little bit of eczema but you know it's good we have fun i answer questions get in there you of course get exclusive first access to a lot of our new products that we're coming out with from onward research go check it out and of course for this particular video we have to thank evik and graceshop.ru they both provided a lot of stuff to us question was why did i go as russian forces well i've served over 10 years as active duty in essentially nato so i didn't want to be what i am in real life because i'm larping let's make believe let's just pretend so big thank you to them ladies gentlemen forgotten most certainly not by me hardcore milsim larpers welcome to the channel so airsoft bb wars is it good training so we're gonna cut right to the chase right off the bat what is the best and the worst part of airsofting the worst part of airsofting in my mind is actually the airsofting itself in every way i think there are a lot of bad training scars that can be had from airsofting and let me explain it to you because in many ways these airsoft guns can get really good for those of you who have seen the really high quality ones they can be one-to-one one-to-one weight and in fact the recoil can get very close but inherently there are just issues with airsofting mostly in terms of the speed of the bb because the bb has to be slow enough to not kill you kind of makes sense so because of that things that could be done in airsofting could not be done in real life so let me give you a small example here so we have an lct rpk from evike big thank you to them uh what's funny about this to me is that drums in real life kind of rattle and then the airsoft one also rattles very realistic in any case we have charlie charlie has two covers he needs to run between and uh i'm gonna treat it as if i had a real weapon and somebody were to run from cover to cover in terms of my uh site placement so we're gonna go ahead and get this ready make sure that's firing oh very scary bbs alright charlie go go so of course i could have hit charlie with this particular airsoft gun all i would have had to have done was to lead him as you would need to lead somebody with an airsoft weapon my problem comes into this is with a real weapon you wouldn't lead like that so there could be problem with sight pictures now i will be very quick to mention that there is certainly application in airsofting in terms of cqb airsoft does have good application when you know the speed of the bb isn't as much of an issue so certainly it's as good as utm or simunitions in those cqb environments but at the same time you're still not getting that kind of perfect feel because as good as airsoft guns get and micah and many people that we've worked with have really souped up these airsoft guns where everything feels really good but the triggers are still not triggers and the recoil as close as it can as it can get to a real weapon is still not real recoil so i still do prefer things like utms and simunitions where you can actually just swap a bolt and fire those rounds and you have your actual weapon you have the same recoil that feels like much better training to me of course it does cost a lot more money what i will say is that if you're in a country or in a position maybe because you're too young to own a firearm stupid by the way then airsoft certainly does have application right just realize that there are limitations both in terms of the shooting as well as in the manipulation of the weapon because even the way the magazines lock in on these airsoft guns is not like the real thing so don't get too cocky there there's nothing like real steel but airsoft does get close now i want to point something out that being said because i i feel like i'm being too harsh am i being too harsh mike i'm a little too harsh let me say this airsofting is hella fun i have a really good time going out there with the boys and shooting bbs at each other and although there are a little bit of training scars i put it in the same realm as paintball but probably better because this is easier to deal with airsofting is just fun and that is okay to have fun i don't know if you guys know that but that is that is okay charlie is it okay to have fun airsofting no there you have it because there is nothing like pretending to be a russian running through an open field and watching your best friend administrative results get gunned to the ground brutally by a bb gun [Music] [Music] so it's good fun but the question is are are there any good takeaways now when we talk about an airsofting event like milsim west which is has those continuous 40 hours of play there are some really good lessons that you can pull to be clear milsim west is not a training event nelson west is an airsofting event don't take it too seriously but there are many good things that we can glean from it that we can possibly use in our own training so let's talk about what those are in many ways when i got to milson west it really reminded me of a military training event that is except that everybody wanted to be there by choice and nobody was sad unlike ntc and immediately probably one of the first issues that everybody ran into which is really typical of any type of gathering or military event was comps so one of the really good points and really good takeaways was comms how were coms runs and what comms problems did you run into because many people came with bail things some people came with other things some people came with atac the point is there was a lot of different stuff that was running and that needed to be integrated together that sounds like a really good training opportunity to me and it was so something as simple as getting everybody on the same freaks and for those guys out there who are running encrypted comms trying to make those work together was awesome not just due to trying to communicate with other people but also in terms of communicating with each other and knowing the range of the radios as well as the amount of battery life because one thing that you kind of learn really quickly in the military is how quickly does your radio drain your battery and that is a really good thing to know so that you know how many batteries you need to carry with you this of course became an issue for many people and it was i'm doing the gabagoo was a good training and for many people when comms failed the question was what do you do well of course pace plan primary alternate contingency emergency it was really good training and that also moves into hey me and the boys are moving the squad is stepping off about eight to ten guys and we start moving through a field how do we communicate to each other so micah you're out there you haven't served however you've done a lot of bb wars but we took it pretty seriously we went out there so something as simple as learning hand and arm signals how was that for you uh hand in arms it was really nice because our platoon leader nick yep blue jean operator operator really briefed us all um so i i it was good to like actually apply those but as far as calms i was so scared to even use them because i'm like man i sound like an idiot i don't know radio etiquette i don't know any of this but at least i was listening to people talk you know they call it a push to talk and a lot of times uh early in your military career they call it a push to think because you press it and you're just like now once we're moving through the fields what was really good is a lot of people know what a wedge formation is a lot of people know what a file formation is but actually moving between those two and exercising that in a large kind of squat formation or even working with two squads or three squads made it a much more dynamic event and a hundred percent we can go off into mount rainier right back there and we could do this right we could go practice this on our own but it's just a little bit more fun when you're out there and you know that there's somebody with their own little bb gats going and trying to hunt you down adds a little bit more spiciness to it and makes it just not realistic but makes you take it a little bit more seriously and for that reason i found wilson west to be really good because again at any time when our squad was moving we could be attacked there is no safe area there is no safe zone you could just always die you could be taking a [ __ ] and you could die by bbs so that was really good training there talked about it a lot but one thing that a lot of people realized was that not being fit really sucks because when you have all of your kid on and ensure the bb wars loadout is going to be a little bit lighter than a real loadout but it is still weight on your back and weight on your body for my military guys out there guys who have gotten good training you know that as you move you move you will take cover you will pause you will do sills stop lookless and smell you take a knee you get up off that knee you move you take a knee you get up off that knee you learn really quickly that a you're not fit because squats suck and that two equipment can be a very real problem for you mike i know you ran into an issue with equipment yeah no i some of my pouches just dangled in the wrong spots gave me blisters headache uh from honestly the lack of use under nods uh just suffering yeah just pure suffering and it reminds me you know when i was going through selection um to become a seer specialist one of my buddies uh we went on like i think like an eight mile rock uh during training he didn't have his alice pack adjusted properly and it ended up rubbing like an open sore on his back over like one day and so we still had two weeks left of training that thing ended up being super painful and getting super bad and infected because he kept sweating into it the sweat would crystallize and just open it up and it sucked and it was simply because he didn't know how to adjust his kit so although this isn't a training event you're still out there with your kit on and you're going to learn what desert doesn't work just like micah did just like my buddy did so that is one thing that i really loved about it daytime was kind of a wash me i really didn't care for it that much because you're watching bbs fly at like 20 feet and you're like whatever but when we got into night some very interesting things occurred the reason night was so important was that living under green light living under blue light and actually going a full 8 to 12 hours at night running nods that entire night was a real game changer for a lot of people if you've been to a flat range you've gone in you've turned on your knots i say flat ranges we're talking about bb wars you turn on your nods and you shot you flip up your knobs you turn on your red lamp and you kind of do your stuff cool is that good realistic training i don't think so when we get out to milson west we practice full light discipline that meant once the night set in and we put nods on we were 100 light discipline that meant no red lights no lights of any kind so things like simply drinking water become an issue simply finding the correct pouch become an issue so for a lot of people this was a really good event to get really good under nods really quick mike i know you didn't have a whole lot of times under nods virtually none virtually none and then you ran a full eight hour night and this was my first pair of nods that i had acquired a week before the event big things big thank you to discrete ventures yes great ventures um and i just got thrown into the fire i was bumping into people i would get snagged on branches i started to learn proximity and all that very quickly how many times did you knock nods with somebody when you're trying to talk to them probably like seven people in one night stop so nods became really important now something as simple as your nods die you need to change your battery this happens all the time can you do that at night sure you can pull unscrew the cap but can you do you know where your battery is located in your pack can somebody get that for you so something as simple as i have my pack on i need to change my nods and i need to tell somebody to grab batteries out of my pack do they know where my batteries are so this also came down to gear standardization and this is a very common issue that the military runs into as well is if i need to grab something off my buddy a little bit of standardization can go a long way especially when it comes to night vision you had to see once we got out there people quickly realized was their gear actually up to snuff so does your gear glow under night vision because some fabrics just don't work really well and are super bright in night vision so you learned very quickly what your gear did what your gear didn't work and that was really good training for a lot of people another simple thing to think about was light emissions um people are like okay cool i'm not turning on my red lamp therefore my light emissions are zero well then people had a garmin watch but they didn't have the tactics model so they actually couldn't turn off the light on it and so it ended up glowing that can be spotted for miles easily i got a radio transmission and you're getting my radio lit up [ __ ] bail fangs dude every time so seeing what's going to give you away at night it might not always be the things that you think it is one thing that i had was we had guys take camo paint and smear it over any reflective surface that's going to be vitally important not just during the day but also at night when it comes to any type of light that's going to be coming in easily spottable there are some teams whether they were running nods but they didn't know where their gear was or whether they didn't have knobs and they were running red lenses even if they turned them on momentarily that was like an instant beacon like in battlefield like we just knew precisely where they were and a lot of people just don't realize how bright a red light is under night vision that can be seen for thousands of meters and it just goes to the point you need to have that red light discipline or if you're going to turn on your red lens i know from my military guys throw a poncho over you cover it you need to stop that admission because it is so so bright during the night and for those guys who didn't have night vision again this talks about what we've always talked about but it's not fair because night vision is super expensive but if you don't have it you're gonna die to people who do have it so for those teams who didn't have night vision if they were at such a massive disadvantage that it wasn't even fair at that point we could walk right up to him and just bb wars them to death and it just wasn't fair but it was also really good training because you got really good at very quickly identifying who did and didn't have nods which also brings us to something as simple as aiming when you aimed did you use your ir laser or did you not most people learn to not use their ir laser because that thing would give you away so damn quick it is so bright especially for people running modern night vision it was just a really bad idea and don't that thing should not even it's not even fair oh my god so you can come in here uh we're not paid by these guys or anything like that this is an ira micro uh mh25 just a little thermal unit and um what do you want to say about it micah it's literally a like not a game changer is an understatement so like we said before um there's nothing fair about how you fight and i know we're talking about bb wars but again we're trying to get the translation going across but thermals 100 made everything um unfair uh as we can see from this footage that we're going to pop up right here because you can actually record through this unit i ended up running it as a standalone that's not how i would typically run it but that was simply due to the ranges that we were shooting with our bb gaps i really didn't need any magnification on it or anything like that but i was easily spotting people at a thousand meters plus so when it comes to actually conducting an ambush this thing made it stupid easy so once we started using this and uh i mean for people who've used thermal you know it already but it literally dictated how we would conduct our ambushes how we conduct our patrols because we could easily spot sentries we could easily spot anyone so night vision is really good i was running uh current gen gen 3 pbs31 alphas which are a current military issue in use and these are awesome they're they're very good but uh there was no illumination we it was a completely cloudy mostly raining event uh it's very hard to see stuff under night vision even with as good as night vision can be with thermal it was just stupid easy so in many cases we were able to spot sentries take them out spot people trying to flank on us take them out simply by me relaying their positions with my thermal unit because it also gives me exact bearings uh via an internal compass so it was very much so cheating in one case and you can see the video right here we began to move on the main nato base and uh they had one or two guys maybe with pvs sevens and uh you can see from the footage i could see them in the tree line from a solid 400 away we kind of knew where their position was because we could see the glow from one of fire great job on that one it was raining so they got a little snively so they had to start a fire uh don't start a fire at night if you're fighting against people with night vision that's a terrible idea i know it's bb wars but in any case it was simple we were we wanted to see how close we could get and as you can see um i'm continually like raising my gun i'm like i feel like we're way too close because i think of it in terms of a real gun because we got to within about 15 feet of these guys you can see administrative results was right in front of me and uh we just ended up taking the shots took out everybody at the fire and completely decimated the base completely wiped them out it was just unfair and that was due to a combination of night vision and thermals of which they had very few and the fact that they posted very minimal security and had very poor light discipline again lessons learned for many people in many different aspects and to be clear blue jean operator actually committed war crimes by shooting people in their sleep after they tried to surrender don't want to talk about a little bit of ptsd so one really good thing that came up was how do we communicate under night vision was it hand and arm signals was it use of ir light was it use of radio transmissions what do we do when we get close because as you know the focal length on uh nods are a little bit thin and narrow so it can be hard at times to see this came down to training this came down to many things which we will talk about in future videos but the point is these are important things to figure out and that can be figured out in a fun little bb wars game like this i don't want to harp on it too much other than to say that night vision thermals are kind of going to be the future in many ways nothing about the price but the capabilities is fair um but nobody cares so you'll probably have to get used to him at some point and that's just the way the conflict goes i'm sorry guys just kind of sucks suffering another thing that was really important to learn was to suffer because lucky for us we had really bad weather there which is perfect that's what i want to see we had constant rain constant near freezing temperatures and what this made people realize is that one they were completely unprepared in terms of their clothing in terms of their boots mica were your boots adequate for the weather no they were soaked they said gore-tex but nope nope nope friendship ended with gorgeous friendship ended with gore-tex so i ended up going with leather that was um i treated my boots with snow seal and they lasted the entire time through of course if you haven't used you will learn to use merino wool socks and you will learn to love them because they are the only way to go but the point was is that for many people who hadn't they had to learn to just suffer through the weather uh we didn't make giant fires at night we didn't try to get warm at night we simply went and patrolled as a squad and went in as our little russian death squad and all that kind of stuff why that's good is it's good to get used to that feeling of being wet of being cold but kind of warm enough to still function because you're moving these are good things get used to the fight typically isn't going to happen at a time when it is convenient so to quote a dumb term that we use all the time get comfortable being uncomfortable and this was a great opportunity to do so even though it was simply bb wars you can take make it as good or as bad as you want to uh because in our case there's a point at in our ao area of operation bbwars where we had like a solid 700 meters of open field and i have a little video right here and you can see that it's just completely open and we're just walking in it and that's not realistic right because in real life uh a weapon like this if it were real an ak-105 could easily make a 5 600 meter shot and could put it straight into the dirt so in reality we'd want to take that route way differently we'd want to use micro train actually navigate belly crawl use what we can and move at times that makes sense how much you're going to get out of an airsoft event like nelson west is completely predicated upon you about how you as a squad as a team handle it how seriously you take it and how much fun you have with it because no matter what have fun doing this but the point is there's a lot of good things to glean from it so before i go i do want to talk a little bit about some of the kit that we use we used from evike the lct sr-3m ran semi-okay i would probably go with the 105. we use the onward research recce rig which is our rig it's pretty pretty awesome and i used a sword dump pouch and of course i was using my normal three-day assault pack from mystery ranch as well as atax from grayshop so a big thank you to them for sponsoring that again we just wanted to do something a little bit fun uh point is i had a great time and uh for a lot of the people that i typically associate with it was a really good event to be able to kind of get them closer to a level that i needed them at while also having fun so in conclusion should you be wars i think so i think it's really fun and i also think there are a lot of great things to pull from it so for my bb wars guys keep being cool for my gun guys get out there and do a little airsofting it's actually a lot of fun and there are some good things to pull out of it and let's bridge that community because a lot of the bb wars guys that i talked to if they were of age owned guns and said hey i watched channels and channels like yours and it got me into airsoft because i was too young to own a gun and then once i was old enough i bought a gun and i love this stuff now cool and for guys who are too young to own guns they're like hey i watch your channel i love it i can't own a gun yet so i airsoft and i have an airsoft gun i'm like cool that's awesome keep training keep getting out there because the point is we're going to live and we're going to die based on how we hold together as a community let's be inclusive and not exclusive ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for watching get out there have fun have a good time make this community stronger and i've got nothing else for you so why don't you say that i started out as an air softer way before did you really like i literally i didn't give a [ __ ] about guns until airsoft became my life pretty much you know what i mean look at that my camera guy michael mayfield started airsofting and now he is a savage shooter and just shoots all the time and helps grow the community all because of airsoft inclusiveness that's my final message to you guys nothing more get out there and have fun

Channel: Garand Thumb

Views: 2,725,530

Keywords: Airsoft, milsim airsoft, airsoft gun, tactical training, airsoft training rifle, liku tactical, airsoft gameplay, airsoft training, airsoft used for training?, should you use airsoft for training, force on force, training with airsoft, force on force training, airsoft war, airsoft battle, airsoft rage, realistic airsoft, real airsoft, real training, milsim west, milsim loadout, milsim games, milsim west blank fire, milsim airsoft gameplay, milsim west loadout

Id: ECGxVlh4kFY

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 12 2022