Concepts-RAT (C-RAT): Fighting Principles and Precepts

Concepts-RAT teaches the fighting principles and precepts behind every course in the RAT Fighting System, along with the decision frameworks that make each RAT work and carry the skills from RAT to RAT. Techniques change from empty hand to stick, knife, and gun. The concepts don’t. You learn how the brain processes a violent encounter, why people freeze, how trained skills fire under stress, and how to choose the right response in the moment. Concepts-RAT follows the 90% solution: a small set of universal principles that apply whether you avert, talk, fight, or shoot.

What You’ll Learn

• Universal precepts: the core principles that apply to every RAT, including the objective (win the fight) and initiative and committed action.
• RAT-specific precepts: how those principles apply to empty hand, stick, knife, and gun.
• Action options: the Avert or Engage decision, the response hierarchy, and the preclusion standard.
• The OODA Loop: observe, orient, decide, act, and why whoever cycles faster wins.
• The reactionary gap: why action beats reaction, and what that means for your response.
• The body’s alarm response: the startle, the freeze, and how to get through both.
• Behavioral chains: pre-justified decision programs that give your brain somewhere to go under stress.
• The competence model: the four stages of learning, and why only unconscious competence holds up when it counts.
• Training the brain to fight: how skills move into long-term memory and become trained reflexes.

Who Should Attend

Anyone training in the RAT Fighting System, and anyone who wants to understand why self-defense skills work or fail under real stress. That includes civilians, law enforcement and corrections officers, security professionals, and instructors. It is the conceptual foundation for every Kinetic RAT. This is not a technique class. It is about understanding the fight before it happens.

What to Bring

A notebook and pen.