In this video our boy COWAN! dissects the Mozambique Drill, arguably one of the most common drills used on the range anywhere. This ought to make for some interesting conversation.
About COWAN!: Aaron (Breach Bang COWAN!) is an idiot savant of the tactical variety from a little place we like to call Hotlanta (though apparently no one from down there calls it that). COWAN! is the Lead Instructor and HMFIC of program development for Sage Dynamics who believes every article should be roughly the equivalent of a doctoral thesis. To call him thorough would be to damn him with faint praise. We call him COWAN! because anything in all caps with an exclamation point after it must be awesome. A former infantryman turned PSC contractor and LEO, COWAN! has served in several SWAT and training billets. His company, Sage Dynamics, is a reality-focused firearms and tactics training company that provides practical instruction for the civilian, police and military professional. An identical twin whose brother went on to become Agent 47, COWAN! is the author of the novel Rushing Winter and the designated fluffer on the set of numerous training videos, including the really good one here. 
If you can make a headshot first, do it. Once he takes a hit or two, a head shot won’t get any easier. Even with body armor, after taking a hit he’s not going to stand there like a paper target on a square range. I’ve never shot a person, but I know from boxing that hitting someone in the head is really hard if they know it’s coming.
Nice drill!
Cowan obviously knows what he’s doing, so I dont want to take away from anything that he has said, because I agree with most of it. The concept behind this drill, from my training and experience is to signify body armor. In fact, we call it the “body armor drill”. So, I believe the concept behind two chest one head is good. Now, having said all that, I agree slightly with EN. In his posting, a shot to the head in a true gunfight could prove to be very difficult, and with the concern for innocents behind your target, it is a valid concern. So, as a firearms instructor, I teach an alternate Mozambique drill…two chest one groin. The normal vest stops at the belly button region of the body, leaving the groin exposed for the third shot. The area is still large enough to be hittable in a higher stress situation, and contains many blood vesels and arteries to facilitate the needed damage to stop the action of the agressor. Just another thought to ponder.
Thats another head shot …….really. Okay, seriously, not a bad option, however while safer for nearby innocents, the groin stands a much greater chance of being obstructed, and it would not be immediately debilitating. Having said that, application is everything, and everything has its place.You are definitely dealing with a slight off center shot nailing either femoral artery and blowing out the hip, and as “misses” go, that’s better then drilling a bystander. +1 for getting out of the box.
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Hitting the head on the dynamic two way range assumes your opponent won’t be moving. I don’t mind taking head shots, in fact I practice it all the time. However, a couple of things bothered me about this. First and most important, there are no timers in gunfights. I like that he’s questioning accepted dogma, it needs to be challenged from time to time… but then he goes right into new dogma. Timer… dogma… gunfight? Most people move now, particularly the people you have to worry about. Hitting the head in a gunfight, even for well trained outfits like the LAPD (they shoot weekly) the head shot in reality has proved difficult. I bring up LAPD because they have specifically tried to make that an important part of their training. It works fine on the range, but has proved useless in gunfights. This was supposedly tested thoroughly… and it was, range officers came up with the concept and after working on it day after day (which specifically means it was not tested under real conditions) it seemed affective… At least on the range. It never proved itself on the street. That said I do not want to dismiss this out of hand. I’ve made some major changes in how I approach pistol shooting in the last few years based on body armor. I now shoot for the dick/pelvis and if there’s no affect I go for the head. And everyone seems to have body armor these days.
“Why bother with 3 to the chest if you can hit the head” – good point.