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I’ve been on a spree of book buying. A lot of the initial knowledge I wrote about on this site came from an early wave of tactical influencers and writers from over a decade ago. Not the internet “influencer” you might think of, but known special operations combat veterans like Kyle Lamb, Larry Vickers, and Kyle DeFoor. Aside from their articles and a wealth of knowledge they left behind on forums during the hey day of the format, I also read a lot from the classics like Jeff Cooper, Rex Applegate, and vintage field manuals. Also in the mix were gun writers and competitors like Pete Lessler, Don Mann, and Brian Zins.
More recently, you know that I’ve been a fan of John Simpson’s work as well as my friend Justin over at Swift Silent Deadly.
All that said, I wanted to make another pass at authors I might have missed. One of them is MSG Paul Howe, who I’ve been familiar with for years but never read into his work. Recently, I purchased and read through his book (twice!): The CSAT Way: Thoughts on Weapons, Shooting, Training and Instruction from a Former Special Operations Soldier and Trainer, and today I’m posting my thoughts on it.
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Bottom Line Up Front
Let’s get this part out of the way: The CSAT Way is probably my all-time favorite book on the topic of carbine and pistol shooting with an emphasis on foundational defensive skills. Published in 2020, long after the initial wave of Special Operations instructors publishing their books and building companies during the height of GWOT (Global War on Terror), MSG Paul Howe’s book come across as far more thoughtful and focused on building excellent fundamentals.
The book is more-or-less an guide for any firearms instructor to pick up and build an effective curriculum the way that Paul Howe teaches it. It’s full of standards, lesson plan sequences, drills, positions, practical advice, and thoughts on configuring weapons.
In short, if there was only one book I’d suggest for your tactical library on this topic, then this would be it.
If I were to focus on the 10 percent to 20 percent of the individuals who want flashy or “Gucci” training, I would be a salesman instead of a professional trainer.
About Paul Howe
If you don’t know of him, MSG Paul Howe retired from US Army SFOD-D, otherwise known as “Delta Force.” Like Kyle Lamb, Paul Howe was there in Mogadishu during the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident. He started Combat Shooting and Tactics (CSAT) in 1999, during his final assignment at at ROTC unit in Texas. He started off teaching local police departments, then state-level courses on hostage rescue and other advanced tactics. Things snowballed from there.
As a personal observation from his book, writings, and YouTube channel, Paul is very much a fan of raw repeatable basics. He keeps his weapons intentionally clean and minimal, often preferring iron sights over optics. When shooting pistol, he typically uses a handheld flashlight rather than a weapon mounted light. The reasoning being that it means he only has to learn and master one way of shooting the pistol versus using multiple techniques depending on if a light is present or not.
As with other former Delta instructors, there is always an emphasis on accuracy. As an aside in the book, he discusses the reality of combat shooting. You might be able to get an easy shot on someone presenting a large target in the open, but once you take that shot their friends will scatter and typically only offer you a head or weapon shot.
The Book Breakdown
I won’t go line by line of the table of contents, but here are the major sections of the book:
- Introduction and Paul’s personal history
- Training and Combat Mindset (AKA: you need to develop aggression)
- Safety
- Handgun training/drills/low light
- Rifle training/drills
- NVG and special equipment
- Developing training courses and instructors
- His personal tools (AKA weapons and configuration)
I’ll go through the sections and summarize the notes that I took for myself.
The Training and Combat Mindset
The foundation of any serious training program isn’t physical, it’s mental. While we live in a culture that frames competition as something between us and other people, the real contest is internal. It’s the struggle to show up consistently, apply the right amount of effort at the right time, and resist the urge to chase the next shiny training method before mastering the basics. Slow, deliberate, and methodical practice will sharpen your skills faster than any shortcut. Find a sound training system and commit to it before going down rabbit holes.
That mental discipline doesn’t develop on its own. It has to be cultivated through activities that demand focus and commitment. Any skill or craft will do.
Physical fitness matters. A strong body supports a strong mind, and both have to be developed in parallel. Everyone also carries their own mental limitations and boundaries. Acknowledging those isn’t weakness; it’s the starting point for working within them and pushing past them over time.
When it comes to combat mindset specifically, passivity is the enemy. Your attitude should not be reactive or neutral, it should be proactive and aggressive. Chaos is a constant on the battlefield, but it affects perception more than reality. The fighter who imposes their own brand of controlled aggression on a chaotic situation is the one who takes the psychological initiative, and that alone can break a determined opponent.
That confidence doesn’t come from wishful thinking. It comes from repeatable drills practiced until they’re automatic. If you don’t genuinely believe in your own tactics when the shooting starts, they will fail you.
Slow, deliberate, and methodical practice will sharpen your skills faster than any shortcut.
Pistol Training
Howe’s approach to pistol training starts with a simple but important distinction: your training system should handle roughly 95% of what you’ll ever encounter: dry fire at home, flat range work, shoot houses, vehicles, and close-quarters environments. The remaining 5% is handled by techniques, which are situation-specific adaptations. The risk most shooters fall into is treating techniques like systems, endlessly collecting them instead of deeply owning a core set of fundamentals.
On the fundamentals themselves, Howe advocates the typical “boxer stance” (firing foot about three inches behind the non-firing foot, knees slightly bent, hips forward of the ankles). The key concept here is natural point of aim (NPOA): where your sights naturally settle when you press both arms out to the firing position. If your NPOA is off, you fix it by moving your feet, not by muscling the gun onto target with your torso.
He also introduces the “Interview Position” as a no-weapon ready stance. Picture your hands up, in front of you, and visible as if in conversation. Your elbows are slightly bent and ready to both deflect/push/punch an attacker and initiate a draw. This is his default rather than hands down at the sides or up in a surrender position.
The draw itself gets two variations: top-down, where the hand goes straight to the grip, and bottom-up, where the hand contacts the holster base first and rides up to the grip. Both are valid. The consistent rule across both is to keep the shoulder neutral without dipping or lifting. Once on the gun, the backstrap should align straight down the firing arm to manage recoil, and two-handed grip pressure should favor the support hand in roughly a 60/40 split.
Howe also prefers more trigger finger contact rather than less, something that I also picked up from legendary Bullseye shooter Brian Zins (and now pull handgun triggers in the crook of my first knuckle rather than the pad of the finger).
For diagnosing and tuning grip, his “Line Drill” is a practical calibration tool: aim at a vertical line on a target or a strip of tape and adjust grip pressure every four shots until rounds consistently track the line. This gives you biofeedback without needing a coach watching over your shoulder.
On gear: reliability matters most in a handgun, but fit comes next. The gun has to match your hand and your carry setup, and you should be thinking about the holster re-draw every time — because you’ll do it many more times in training than you’ll ever do anything else.
The risk most shooters fall into is treating techniques like systems, endlessly collecting them instead of deeply owning a core set of fundamentals.
Where Howe’s pistol section gets particularly useful is in its emphasis on measurable standards. He publishes formal CSAT pistol instructor standards and insists that only shots in the A-zone of an IPSC target count. There are no consolation points for near-misses. For anyone not running IPSC targets, the 8–10″ central zone of a standard silhouette is a reasonable equivalent. His ideas here heavily influenced my own preference for training targets, particularly the classic IPSC turtle and IALEFI-QT.
His broader takeaways are straightforward but easy to skip: get a shot timer, train against defined standards, and work on one or two drills at a time until they’re mastered before moving on. The drills build progressively through barricade work, movement, low light, and one-handed shooting. Always start from the basics and layer complexity from there.
On low light, Howe’s philosophy is simple: your tactics don’t change. Use the same techniques that work in daylight and add a handheld flashlight. He prefers end-switch lights and makes the case for handheld over weapon-mounted in most situations, the tradeoff being that you’ll need to put more work into strong-hand-only shooting, since the support hand is occupied with the light.
If you’re planning on deep concealment, your weapon probably needs an external safety, or maybe a hammerless revolver is what you are opting for.
Rifle Training
Howe opens the rifle section with a few distinctions: rifles (16″+ barrels), carbines (14–16″), and pistol-carbines (under 14″) differ meaningfully in velocity and muzzle concussion, though he doesn’t note significant accuracy differences between them in practical use.
On optics, he’s a believer in learning iron sights first, as they’re still his personal preference, and only adds a red dot for night work. When running both, he wants absolute co-witness. For magnified optics, he favors a fixed 3x as the balanced “do-all” option: capable enough at distance without slowing things down in CQB. He also suggests adding a small tactile reference point to the handguard — even just a screw or bolt — to anchor a consistent grip position every time.
For zeroing, Howe uses a 100-yard zero for point-of-impact/point-of-aim. His reasoning is practical: at no point between 0 and 300 yards does the round rise above the aiming point, eliminating any need to hold under. Out to 300 yards the drop is still manageable against a man-sized target, making this a genuinely versatile zero for field use.
The stance mirrors his pistol fundamental, similar footwork and aggressive forward lean. The low ready is the default carry position in nearly all circumstances. Natural point of aim gets the same emphasis here as with the pistol: get the body aligned to the target first, then confirm with the sights. His rifle standards table mirrors the structure of his pistol standards, running shooters through a sequence of distances and positions from 7 yards out to 200 yards, all against time. The format is the same as the pistol work: measurable, scored, and progressive.
On moving targets, Howe uses a 1-2-3 technique: place the first round at the leading edge of the target, the second six inches ahead of that, and the third six inches further still. It’s a simple rule that builds the right habit of leading a mover without requiring the shooter to calculate anything in the moment.
Everyone and their brother wants to talk about being defensive. Generally, defense does not win personal or collective battles.
Wrapping Up
To summarize, I really like this book. I just skimmed the surface here from my notes, but it is absolutely packed of no-nonsense advice that I wish I could have started with all those years ago. Perhaps it’s just my own bias at work, seeing as I arrived at the whole “tactical minimalist” idea before I ever read MSG Howe’s work, and it’s a bit of reinforcement bias. Despite that, this is a book that I think everyone should have on their shelf and use as a reference.
You don’t have to agree with everything he says. For example, I don’t think iron sights need to be learned first, nor do I particularly care for absolute cowitness with fixed irons, but those are subtle nuances to the discussion based on personal preference. The core philosophy of choosing a primary method to do something and building a cohesive system to train for it is the real value of the book.
