A US Air Force Certified Combat Arms Training and Maintenance, (CATM), Instructor, Frank Howell, (MSgt, Ret.) has 27 years of experience teaching small arms safety, operations, maintenance, use and tactics in the USAF and the Colorado Air National Guard.  Throughout his career he has trained over 20,000 service members on nearly all of the small arms types in the Air Force inventory, with primary weapons being the Handgun, and Rifle, both of which he has qualified expert every year of his career, and secondary specialties in belt feed machine guns.  Frank also qualified on and taught shotgun, 40mm grenade launchers, the M-72 LAW, and has experience with the UZI and MAC-10 Sub-machine guns.

Frank Howell is passionate about teaching personal defense, and realizes that no one knows it all.  As such he is continually researching advances in equipment, tactics and the phycology of the fight.  He had first learned handgun shooting through IPSIC and IDPA competitive shooting before he became an AF Instructor.  In these competitions, he learned the use of the weaver stance and roll-over prone positions, and he began teaching these techniques nearly a decade before they were officially adopted by the AF, and as the NCOIC of his CATM unit, he urged all of his instructors to keep an open mind and incorporate anything they believed might give their students and edge, into the approved lesson plans.  In addition to his AF certifications, he has received training from several local police departments, the FBI’s Counter Terrorist Team, and many of his own CATM unit members who’d also taken training outside of the AF.

Frank is a Cold War Vet, and took part in Operation Noble Eagle as a Security Forces Flight Chief, supervising the security of the Buckley AFB flight line for nearly 2 years after 9-11, and spent countless hours training his Security Forces members in every aspect of their mission.