Intruder with night vision vs. home owner with no night vision

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, say it’s nighttime…and you have an intruder who is geared up with infrared night-vision goggles, armed with a gun, vs. a home owner who has the same gun, but no night-vision gear. Who do you bet on?

Assuming that the following apply:

The intruder has every intention of killing the home owner, and vice versa;

Every room of the house is dark (but not *completely *dark) to begin with;

The home owner has the advantage of knowing the layout of the house;

Calling 911 from a phone will betray the home owner’s position, and the police will take up to half an hour to arrive;

There are no other people in the house;

The home owner can turn on lights (each light switch is in each room’s doorway only, you cannot turn on the living room lights from, say, the basement), but doing so will betray his position;

Intruder and home-owner are both of equal age, strength, health, size, etc.

Intruder and home owner each have only a few dozen rounds of ammunition.

ISTM that this situation yields a slight advantage to the intruder. The intruder can become accustomed to the layout of the house, eventually, through use of night-vision gear. The fight may all come down to how good the home-owner’s natural unaided night vision is. However, if the home owner chooses or manages to wait out the intruder for several hours until sunrise then that negates the night-vision advantage although that merely makes it a 50-50 fight.

A winning move for the home owner might be to somehow get close enough to the intruder to be in the same room as him, then suddenly turn on that room’s lights, thus blinding the intruder through his night-vision gear for a second or two, and in those 1-2 seconds then open fire on the intruder and kill him before the intruder has time to rip off his goggles and adapt to the room’s light.

One thing that could really tip this completely in the intruder’s favor would be the use of infrared flashlights. That could make it nearly impossible for the home owner to hide.

2

Why wouldn’t the intruder see the homeowner immediately?

I suppose you might get some advantage crawling behind sofas, etc., but in my experience, most homes have only very limited occluded avenues of approach of that sort, and they usually don’t obstruct visibility of doorways.

The intruder only has to advance slowly and silently, sweeping each room as he comes to it. The homeowner might as well be holding a candle in one hand.

The homeowner might be able to do something clever, like strewing a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal over the floor, so the intruder can’t move silently any longer. But…

Nah, intruder for the win.

3

Advantage homeowner but the win goes to whoever is smarter about it.

The homeowner knows the terrain and can pick a good spot oriented on the entrance to the room. At that point they can either focus on just hiding/waiting or call the police and put the intruder under time pressure.

The intruder has to hunt on unfamiliar ground. Unless they also happen to be relatively well trained with their night vision system they are dealing with seeing things in unfamiliar terms, loss of peripheral vision, and for many systems a loss of depth perception. Unless they’ve trained on room clearing they may not be good at quickly moving out of the fatal funnel at the door into the room the homeowner is defending. Deal with all that and it’s still one on one between a hiding defender and an exposed intruder.

If the homeowner makes it a meeting engagement rather than a hasty defense they give up their advantage.

4

Advantage to intruder, I think. Unless I misunderstood your scenario, the homeowner won’t know about his opponent’s night vision until it’s too late.

I’ve looked into IR/night vision for myself, but mainly for nighttime boating. It’s surprising how expensive a wearable helmet is (and how ungainly).

5

In real life, the advantage virtually always goes to the attacker in a situation like this.

The reason is that there is no reliable way for the homeowner to detect when the attacker is coming. If the homeowner is warned, they have an advantage because they set up the terrain, but homes have almost no tactical depth and no way to get an advance warning.

So the reality is, the homeowner will be asleep or watching a movie or typing an angry post on this forum and BLAM. They are dead. The End.

The homeowner would need to be in the country, with a large open set of grounds on all sides of the house, with dogs patrolling it who will reliably bark at intruders. One serious problem is dogs are extremely sensitive, but they have a very high false alarm rate. The homeowner would then need to have a true fortress, with armored windows and walls and so forth, so the intruder cannot just snipe him from the treeline or a nearby building.

Basically, if the homeowner isn’t protected by the Secret Service or some similarly credible organization, they are dead. And, to be honest, I’m not really sure the secret service protection is as bulletproof as their public persona is. The President himself (and immediate family) is probably adequately protected from a single intruder who comes prepared with rifles and night vision, but all the other people they protect? Probably vulnerable. A couple agent bodyguards who stay near their principle and guard the doors in an unarmored regular house can’t stop an attacker who has the initiative with a rifle. (while the White House, by contrast, is both armored and there’s a small army to respond to any attack)

6

If the intruder happens to remain silent enough as to not alert me then it doesn’t really matter whether or not he’s got night vision goggles and I don’t. If I believe I have an intruder in my home then I’m probably not going to move from my position. Why would I? I’m perfectly content to take up a defensive position and wait for the intruder to expose his position. The lighting in my house is going to be good enough for me to see an intruder even if I can’t make out any details.

7

That seems to be unclear in the hypothesis: I interpreted it to mean that they both know about each other’s existence, and they both know about the other’s advantages and limitations.

Without knowing of each other’s existence, the outcome is highly random, but the advantage goes to the intruder, because he can guess there might be a homeowner – and thus would move with as much stealth as possible – but how’s the homeowner supposed to guess there’s an intruder?

That’s another hole in the hypothesis: exactly how much light is seeping in through the curtains? Enough to silhouette the intruder? Enough for me to glimpse movement?

But, again, the intruder knows this: he is going to stay low to avoid being silhouetted. He still has all the advantages.

8

Agree with SamualA’s setup & DinoR’s assessment.

The intruder has all the advantages of the offense against a defender that in most situations is unaware he’s defending and may in fact be sound asleep.

If the defender is alerted by, e.g., the intruder kicking in the back door to gain entry, then DinoR’s analysis plays out.

Assuming home alone, the defender just needs to set up his field of fire to cover the door into his room and wait until the intruder shows up. Absent flash-bangs, automatic weapons, and such, the intruder is going to be hard pressed, even if skillful, to get through the door and accurately fire on the defender.

The intruder will not be noiseless as he methodically clears each room until he stumbles on the one with the defender in it. That provides valuable warning to the defender on when it’s getting close to his action time.

Both sides will probably get a shot or two off but my money’s all on the defender to score a good hit.