Corriodor Combat

An assaulter’s guide on hallways.

- John Chapman

Hallways can be the road to victory or the superhighway to suck.

Hallways are the Autobahn of a building; they allow for movement between rooms and serve to connect portions of the structure to one another. Absent the use of a large team with lots of explosives, moving through them in a tactical situation is an unfortunate necessity. Hallways create channels through which we’re forced to travel, making our position in relation to the enemy predictable. The good news is we can mitigate the risks of moving through them with some simple procedures.

Hallways are best handled in teams. In team CQB, hallways serve as our “home base,” or staging area, from which we assault and reduce individual problems like doors, intersections, and open areas. The quandary for an armed citizen or police patrolman, however, is that they’re sometimes forced by circumstance to deal with hallways by themselves or, at best, with one other person. While this is a challenging and dangerous task, it’s still manageable.

While we sometimes tend to default to complexity in teaching the fighting arts, learning to manage hallways is really a matter of learning to apply three simple concepts: situational awareness, managing shapes, and maximizing the use of space.

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

Fighting inside structures requires intense focus and understanding of your surroundings. This is especially vital when you’re navigating a hallway — the amount of problems that require our attention and prioritization can be overwhelming to the inexperienced, even in a simple residential home. The first step in making good decisions in a hallway is knowing where you are in relation to the structure as a whole.