I recently took CQB Entry/Breaching with Eric Pfleger. I’ve been encouraging Eric to teach a breaching class ever since we did a bit of shotgun breaching work in the Total Gunfighter class a few years ago. When Eric announced this class, I was all over it.This class isn’t as gear-intensive as some of the sniper classes I’ve taken from Eric. However, I’d be doing a six-day backpack in the Bob Marshall Wilderness after the class, which meant I needed all of my backpacking gear in addition to the gun stuff. Fortunately, I had stashed some of the gear I would need for the backpack with Eric after the sniper class earlier this summer. This allowed me to get everything into two big suitcases and a carry-on.I brought my 10.5” SBR AR with a Gemtech GMT-556LE suppressor. This gun is set up with a carbon fiber handguard extending over the can so that you can get the benefit of an extended handguard with a short overall length. I’m running an Aimpoint Micro T-1 on a riser. This is the first rifle class in a couple of years that I’ve shot with a red dot rather than a low power variable optic.As my secondary, I brought my Roland Special Glock 19X with a Mayhem Syndicate comp and Trijicon RMR optic. For the class, I’m running a Surefire X300 rather than the Crimson Trace Lightguard I’ve had on there in the past because that’s what’s compatible with the holster I’m using. This was also my carry gun on the trip; this is the first time I’ve carried this pistol as my primary self-defense implement. I also brought along a 10mm Glock to carry on the backpacking trip after the class.If I’d been driving to this class, I probably would have brought a plate carrier, but since I flew, I kept it simple and just went with a belt rig. In this case an AWS Light Assaulter belt with a couple of Tyr Tactical mag pouches, a Safariland ALS holster, a dump pouch, knife, multitool, and some medical gear.I bought a set of Mechanix breaching gloves that offer a bit more protection than the Overlord gloves I usually wear. I ran Multicam for the class (in part because I love the Crye combat pants).My flight to Montana on Friday went smoothly (though I think I shocked the lady at the check-in desk when she asked me to open up my rifle case). Eric picked me up at the airport in Missoula. After hitting some stores and grabbing dinner, we headed out.Eric and I left for the range about 7 am. The venue for this class is a private range. Eric had mocked up a wall with a door in it out of some 2x4s and an old door. This morning he immediately got busy sketching out a floor plan in orange paint on the ground for us to do some tape drills on later that day.Everyone else in the class rolled in before the start time, and we began with the usual waivers and a medical brief. Eric went through the safety lecture, though for this class in addition to the standard gun stuff (the four rules) he also spent some time on the hazards created by breaching, like broken glass and crushed fingers. Eye protection and gloves are essential in this class.Eric talked a bit about what we’d be covering today and tomorrow. The class would mostly concentrate on CQB for the solo operator and 2-man team, though we might touch on larger teams a bit. He emphasized that this would be a class that required using our brains much more than our trigger fingers.That said, we started out exercising those trigger fingers. Eric had us do some pistol work, emphasizing the accuracy standards required in a CQB environment. We started with some one-hole drills, then move on to controlled triples, then three-round bursts, followed by a cranio-ocular shot.As mentioned earlier, gloves are essential in breaching and the CQB environment in general. However, most of us don’t spend a whole lot of time shooting in gloves (and if we do they’re usually thin, dexterous gloves rather than well-armored breaching gloves). Eric talked a bit about the kind of gloves he likes. As it happened, every single student in the class brought the same Mechanix Impact gloves. We put these on and went through the same shooting drills as we’d done earlier. The gloves definitely added to the degree of difficulty. Eric gave us the option to continue shooting gloved up or to go back to shooting barehanded until we got to the breaching stuff. I decided to take on the challenge and shoot the class gloved.Next up, Eric had us practice turning and addressing targets to our 3 o’clock, 9 o’clock, and 6 o’clock directions. Thus far we’d been shooting at roughly “halfway across the room” type distances. We stepped it back to across the room distance and practiced maintaining the necessary level of accuracy at the longer distance.We had some rain on and off, ranging from light sprinkles that weren't even worth breaking out the goretex for to a slow drizzle.With the review of shooting fundamentals out of the way, we moved on to room entries. Eric started by talking about doing this solo versus a two-man team. The solo operator faces the challenge of trying to cover the entire room. However, he also has the freedom to maneuver any way he wants. In a two-man (or larger) team, you have help covering other sectors. However, your movement is restricted by the need to keep lines of fire clear. Essentially, team CQB has a lot more rules. Everyone needs to be on the same page and follow these rules to avoid friendly fire or situations where a teammate can’t shoot a bad guy because a team member is in his line of fire.As a solo operator, you probably want to seek out a wall or corner as your position of domination. This restricts the area you need to cover to 180 or 90 degrees, rather than 360.In a two-man team, your points of domination are defined for you: the corners of the room closest to the door. This gives each man a sector of fire that extends from his corner to the back of the room to one meter off of his teammate.Eric talked a bit about static entries versus dynamic entries. In a static entry, you’re doing more of a search; nothing is pushing you to move faster like there would be in a hostage rescue or active shooter situation. In a static entry, you conduct a slow, deliberate angular search from outside the doorway (slicing the pie). See as much of what you can see from the outside before going through the door.Once you’re ready to enter the room, however, you always do it dynamically. No inching your way in the door, move quickly through the fatal funnel.While we were still doing these as one-man entries, Eric did introduce an element of team operations into it from the very start: announcing that you were coming out of a room rather than just stepping through the door weapon-first and potentially triggering a friendly fire incident. He had us do this by sticking our hand through the door, giving a thumbs up and announcing “one coming out.”We ran some one-man room entries dry. Eric had a freestanding doorframe (without any door in it) and used some cones to mark out the corners of the room. We practiced going through the door and heading to each of the corners nearest the door, either cutting through the doorway diagonally and going to the corner on the far side (an “X” entry) or pulling a U-turn and going to the corner back on the same side we started on (a buttonhook).x-entryButtonhookOnce everybody had a grasp of the fundamentals, we went live fire. Eric set up a nice progression, gradually increasing the complexity of the problem starting with one target in one of the rear corners, then moving on to two targets in the back of the room, then one target in one of the front corners and one target in the rear of the room.Thus far we’d been dealing with an open door (well, actually, no door in the doorframe at all). At this point, Eric introduced the problem of a closed door. The first order of business with a door is to figure out whether it’s inward opening or outward opening (looking for hinges is a good way to do this). All things being equal, it’s better to work a closed door from the knob side of the door rather than the hinge side, so you don’t have to reach across the door to open it. That said, it’s not always possible (the knob side might require exposing your back to a potential threat, for instance).You can quietly wiggle the knob to do a “soft check” to try to tell whether the door is locked. Since breaching was a subject for the second day of the class, today we would always be finding the door unlocked.If you’re doing a slow methodical clear (a static entry), you can throw the door open and back off a few steps, then start conducting your angular search. There’s a bit of an art to throwing open a door like this. You want to shove it hard enough that it will swing all the way open, but if you swing it too hard, it will bounce off the wall and close itself. If you’re doing a dynamic entry, on the other hand, you’re going through that door the moment it opens.We practiced opening doors and did some live one-man entries.Next up was two-man team entries. As with any team CQB, this is much less free-form than solo CQB. Instead, you’re executing predefined roles and following the “rules” of team CQB. The most important rule is “The #1 man is never wrong.” The first guy through the door is going to have to choose a direction, whether he’s going to go to the corner to his right or the one to his left. Regardless, the second guy’s job is to go in the opposite direction. #1 goes right, #2 goes left, and vice versa.With a two-man entry, you can either position yourselves on either side of the door or stack up with both of you on the same side, one behind the other.We did two-man entries dry until everyone was comfortable with it, then went live. Again, Eric had a nice progression. Starting with each student just shooting their “own” target (the one on their side of the room), then progressing to putting rounds into both targets one after the other.Eric talked a bit about three-man entries, where the #3 man moves just inside the doorway, out of the fatal funnel but staying along the wall rather than going to the corner like the #1 and #2 men do.Next, we moved out of the “shoot house” area Eric had set up to the floor plan that he’d marked out on the range with paint. Eric talked about how to handle corridors and hallways. In something like an active shooter situation where you have a compelling motivation to move quickly, you’re not going to be entering rooms or even conducting a detailed angular search. You’re just moving towards the sound of gunfire and directing your attention (and gun muzzle) towards potential threat areas as you pass. If you’re doing this as a solo operator, it will almost certainly mean leaving yourself exposed to potential danger areas and relying on movement to provide some measure of security. Eric had each of us move down the corridor at “active shooter speed,” addressing the danger areas as we moved.In a situation where you’re conducting a more deliberate search, you can pie corners and clear rooms as you go. Still, if you’re a solo operator, this will involve exposing yourself to areas of unknown danger. When you can only look one direction at once, there’s not really any alternative in a complex environment.When moving down a wide hallway in a two-man team, it’s best to have one guy on each side of the hallway providing cross cover. This means each man’s primary sector is actually along the opposite wall since this allows them to get a better view into rooms and side corridors.