We were short on the training that makes them good at it. Polaris exists to close that distance.
Polaris Training Group is a veteran owned and operated nonprofit. We provide elite-level vendor training and mentorship to military and law enforcement units that are underfunded, or not funded at all, and we do it at no cost to the people who attend.
I left the Marine Corps a confident, highly experienced combat veteran. Then I entered the special operations community and was humbled almost immediately. The knowledge gap, the budget gap, and the equipment gap were so wide that we did not even know outside vendor training existed.
That is the whole problem in one sentence. The training is out there. Most of the people who need it have never been told it is an option, and could not pay for it if they had.
Our founder, on why Polaris exists
Nothing about that story is unusual. It is the ordinary experience of a competent person discovering how much they were never given. The difference between a unit that has this training and one that does not is almost never talent. It is a line in a budget.
That sentence is the whole organization. Everything below is how we go about it.
We run five-day courses on private ground in New Mexico. Ten to twelve officers, everything covered: travel, lodging and meals through an outside vendor, equipment, and ammunition. We aim to run a cohort every month as funding and seats allow. Nobody pays to attend, and nobody is asked to.
Special operations veterans teach alongside our instructors. This is the part we care about most and the part that is easiest to miss. The lessons we are handing over were paid for once already. Putting the people who learned them in the same room as the people about to need them is how a community stops relearning the same things the hard way.
And it is not only shooting and tactics. Professionalism, leadership, and the network an officer will need twenty years from now are all part of the curriculum, taught early enough to compound.
Cost should never decide who comes home.
Our founders are all military veterans with combat experience. The board is made up of former special operations personnel, senior members of the intelligence community, and veteran law enforcement officers with deep training backgrounds, and senior industry representatives: former USMC Scout Snipers, US Army, FBI, and agency investigators.
We keep names off this site deliberately. Some of the people involved still work in roles where a public profile would be a liability, and several of the units we serve would rather not be identified either. That is not modesty. It is the same operational discipline we teach.
Polaris Training Group is a nonprofit corporation. Our application for recognition of federal tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) is pending with the IRS and has not been determined. We are not accepting donations through this site until it is.
Entirely by donors. Every dollar, every round, and every piece of gear goes to putting people on the line. That is also why we ask: there is no tuition to fall back on, and the size of the calendar is set by what comes in.