Making good decisions in tactical low light situations is about having complete situational awareness. Using that situational awareness and the right tools to overwhelm your opponent and act decisively instead of react to events can mean the difference between life and death. One piece of equipment can give you both the ability to have situational awareness and dominate your opponent in tactical low light situations. Read these three reasons why the right tactical flashlight will give you the tactical edge.
1. Make Great Decisions and Control the Environment
A flashlight that provides an intense beam of light can give you the tactical advantage in low light situations. A powerful LED light, like the Fenix PD35 TAC (Tactical Edition), can deliver 1000 lumens while throwing a beam of intense light up to 200 meters. The strong light will illuminate shadows giving you the standoff and additional time and complete situational awareness needed to make good decisions.
2. Dominate the Physical
The right light will give you the ability to dominate the tactical low light situation by overwhelming the most vulnerable part of the human anatomy, the eye. Light can be used to dominate your opponent in several critical ways. First, the lens of your eye focuses an image of the world on the retina, a dense collection of light-perceiving cells called photoreceptors. Once the image is taken and converted to an electrical impulse, the optic nerve transmits the image to the brain’s visual cortex, which interprets the pictures for decision making. The brain has a limited ability to receive and process visual information. Intense bright light can cause flash blindness where visual information arrives faster than the brain can process it overwhelming the person and causing loss of balance, depth perception, coordination, and the ability to think. The physiological effect of bright LED hits your opponent at the speed of light and in ways the person cannot control.
The second way to dominate your opponent with light is by controlling the person’s involuntary subconscious reactions. A sudden bight light will cause your opponent’s eye to instantly adjust to the food of light. If the light is a strobe, the strobe’s intense flash creates afterimages in the brain that disrupt vision and image processing. Subconscious protection measures will cause your opponent to turn the head to avoid the light. Hands will be brought up to the face in an effort to shade the eyes and the brain will shift all thinking to how to avoid the disorienting brightness. While your opponent is losing control of bodily functions you are gaining situational dominance. If your opponent’s eyes are closed, the head is turned away from you, and the hands are up trying to block the light, he is no longer in the fight.
3. Dominate the Psychological
Intense LED light can give you the advantage by attacking your opponent’s psychological functions. The disorienting effects of powerful white light and strobe features found on many high-performance tactical lights disrupt your opponent’s ability to think causing slow and inappropriate responses. When struck with an intense light or strobe the brain attempts to reconcile the confusing signal sent by the eyes. Reactions slow while the brain tries to process the environment, paralyzing your opponent in observation mode and disconnecting the cognitive decision cycle. Survival process takeover brain functioning and your opponent is no longer thinking about you.
The second psychological effect of a disorienting bight light is that it destroys your opponent’s confidence. Confidence is the X-Factor in any tactical situation. When a person can no longer trust his vision and other senses disrupted by the light he starts to question his decision making. A lack of confidence decreases assertive behavior and makes the person more passive and controllable. Use a high-performance tactical flashlight to gain situational awareness and dominate you opponent in your next tactical low light encounter.
