Early on in the mission, I heard from a number of guys fresh back from Afghanistan and the opinions a lot of them that the weapons training in the CF is way behind the curve, a lot of the training that has been taught for years was dangerous and in fact getting more troops killed or wounded than it was saving.
In the late 90's - early 2000's (and probably even to this day, I'm not sure) we were taught when doing section attacks that any exposure of your body would result in you "being dead." So on Basic, when we had fire teams manning C9's, the section commander would come by, smack you on the helmet, say "you're dead" if you had your ass up an inch too high.
This model made sense with the Cold War model of battling Soviet hordes in the planes of Europe, but fast forward to Afghanistan, where FIBUA is the name of the game. Outside the wire, you have troops in CQB, kicking down doors and doing dynamic entries. The same troops taught "to be dead" are put into situations where they are deliberately exposing themselves to enemy fire. They take a hit to a peripheral or in the body armor and their training of "I'm dead" kicks in - and they freeze like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car. Suddenly, your chaulk is down one troop and the insurgent with an AK is able to put down an extra 5-10 rounds.
Towards the end of my career, more emphasis was being put on violence of action and "you're not dead until you're dead." And when we did CQB, we were trained to keep fighting, even if we had sustained a hit from enemy fire unless you take a hit to the head - you still would have 5-10 minutes of bleed out time before you were rendered ineffective (or dead), and in that time you still can operate your weapon or be a weapon yourself and until all opposition was neutralized, you don't come into a relaxed or complacent state.
As for the original post, I did one competition with the military (before they changed the regs to dissallow it) that was pseudo IDPA style. That was enough to turn me into a gun owner.
I never took gunfighter, so I don't know what the training is like - but I will say after being out from the military, I've come to realize that the military does put more emphasis on safety than on practical application, but when you think about it, that makes sense. Soldiers, for the most part, are just people off the street put into a uniform and given specialized training. Not very many civilians come in with any sort of firearms experience (I sure didn't) - and you have to be extra safe with them, otherwise you'd see a lot more troops killed in training than on deployments.
As for the original post, I did one competition with the military that was more like a multi-gun IDPA competition, and it was enough to turn me into a gun owner
