|
In today's society, most of us have come across this familiar name, SWAT. Originally, the term SWAT stands for Special Weapons Attack Team, however after sometime, a new term was introduce and now, SWAT is known as the Special Weapons and Tactics. The SWAT team is actually a specialized paramilitary police unit found in most of the major city police departments located at around the United States. The main purpose of the SWAT team is to perform dangerous operations such as countering heavy armed criminals, recapturing dangerous criminals, rescuing hostage, suppressing riots and many other dangerous opts.
The SWAT team was first established in the 60s when a farm worker riot broke out in the city of Delano, California. Soon after that, with the continuing success of the SWAT teams, more and more SWAT teams were created within the major cities of the United States. Generally, the SWAT team members will undergo rigorous trainings particularly physical fitness trainings and close quarters battle trainings. In addition to that, SWAT team members will also be trained in different areas such as marksmanship, sniping, first aid, negotiation, explosives and other areas.
Most of the weapons used in SWAT are specially manufactured equipments where the main emphasis of the weapon is close quarters combat (CQC). Although the equipments may vary from team to team, the standard equipments used by SWAT are still the same where some of these standard equipments include the fire-proof Nomex coveralls, a body armor vest, an outer tactical vest for carrying ammunition and other gear, Nomex gloves, balaclava, protective eye goggles, Kevlar helmet or gas mask, flashlight, soft-soled urban boots, flexi-cuffs, and thigh ammo pouches.
Although SWAT focuses more on the weapon side, they still use various tactics or strategies during each operation. The common tactic of SWAT is to first review every aspect (kind of mission, layout of the location, intelligence information on the target and others) of the situation. Most of the time, the general tactic used by SWAT is a quick and stealthy method. However, depending on the situation, they may need to change their methods to dynamics entry tactics.
|