Rifle Marksmanship Matters

[SkipB]

I have never heard of (TEOTWAWKI) can someone please inform me as to its meaning?

[74novaman]

The End Of The World As We Know It

[speedsix]

In answer to the above question, I remember my dad telling me when I was a kid that all Marines are riflemen first, regardless of their MO, and that this applied from the lowest recruit to the Commandant of the Corps.

Interestingly, I am a few chapters right now into my very first reading of LTC David Grossman's book "On Killing." I'm still less than halfway through it, and so I know that I'm not giving the topic full consideration here, but it would appear from what I've read so far that the military really has more than just the task of teaching marksmanship on its hands. What I gather is that:

A) There is the task of both teaching someone who has never shot before how to do so, and also the task of teaching someone who has a lifetime of bad shooting habits how to do it right.

B) Then, it is of little or no value to teach a man (or woman) how to hit a target at 800 meters with consistent accuracy if that man will be reluctant to do so when the target is another human being. So the military has to use a lot of operant conditioning techniques (which came into being after WW2) to teach the soldier how to overcome that reluctance and get comfortable with the idea.

C) ......and this may be the most important one......it has to place controls over the behavior, so that the trained rifleman will do as trained when told to do it, but will not shoot and kill people when he hasn't been told to do it.

This last one is a doozy, because as the effects on the culture of first person shooter video games and other games in which personal violence is rewarded are documented, it appears that kids who learn violence from the games and learn to act that violence out socially are lacking the control piece to only do it when under the command of legitimate authority.........or something like that.

Anyway, I commented earlier that I am a decent marksman with a rifle, but after reading so far in Grossman's book, I wonder if I would hesitate if I found myself in a situation of having to shoot another human being at rifle distances. I don't think this would be so much of an issue at handgun distances, and I long ago reconciled myself to the idea of doing what I must to survive; but the ranges at which rifles are employed—at least as most of us who are not combat veterans would imagine—I would think tend to remove the more intimate "kill or be killed" stressors that one faces with a bad guy all up in your grill at contact distance. I remember the first time I saw a prey animal in my riflescope, about 150 yards out. I thought my heart was going to beat right out of my chest. It was such a distraction that I didn't pull the trigger. I was shaking afterwards.........and the target was a smallish doe—not another rifleman trying to kill me in return. And, I had already arrived at the moral decision to kill an animal with a rifle before I ever hiked out to the blind. I had no idea that I was going to react the way I did until it actually happened. In war, that hesitation might get me killed, in addition to the negative effects of rapid breathing and a trip-hammering heart on accuracy.

Instruction, repetition, drill, with realistic simulacrum targets are what will make for good military marksmen. But that won't happen unless we have a military budget which provides for ample training ammunition as well as the opportunities to use it.

...as to C above, deciding that I could take life to save life just seemed natural...I never bought into the commandment " Thou Shalt Not Kill"...didn't jibe with the rest of the Bible...found out it REALLY says "Do no Murder"...which makes sense...it's a heart thing...to realize that to save some you might have to kill some...and some folks can't be at peace with it...thank God there're some who can...

[SkipB]

Oh OK

[The Annoyed Man]

Instruction, repetition, drill, with realistic simulacrum targets are what will make for good military marksmen. But that won't happen unless we have a military budget which provides for ample training ammunition as well as the opportunities to use it.

I agree. I have read many stories about troops being trained with wooden rifles because there were not enough real rifles and ammunition to provide proper training. I think the days of depending on recruits being from rural areas being able to shoot is a thing of the past. This is something the military needs to address. IMO, substituting automatic rifles with "spray and pray" capability is not a viable alternative to real marksmanship training. Recruits from Texas may be an exception to this rule.

Your comment speaks very much to this part of the OP's linked article:

Wall writes of pre-deployment training, “We are most frequently given one day to present Preliminary Marksmanship Instruction and four or five days on the ranges for all weapons, with one day on the rifle range. According to First Army standards we are to—ideally—train a rifleman going to war with 58 rounds of ammunition— 18 to zero and 40 to qualify on the ‘pop-up target range’.”

The problem is only aggravated by a shortage of facilities or ammunition. In 2005 at Fort Sill, Okla., a deploying helicopter company was unable to qualify with most arms. Said former Warrant Officer Dave Long, “We didn’t have enough pistol ammunition, so we ran around with our Berettas, going ‘bang-bang.’ Although we’re an aviation unit, we had to train for convoy escort but there was no training ammo for the .50 calibers or Mark 19 grenade launchers. So we did like Sgt. Rock, going ‘budda-budda.’ It was laughable and pointless.”

How a military can commit men to the meat grinder of combat with only 58 rifle rounds under their belts (of which 18 were shot to zero), no pistol practice with live ammo, and no live ammo training for M2s or Mk19s is beyond laughable. It is definitely irresponsible, and borders on criminally negligent......and we're talking about the year 2005, just 7 years ago, and already 4 years into the WOT. This ought to be a matter of great concern at the national level. How is it that other news outlets besides the NRA's aren't publishing this story? If the story were that the army didn't have enough field dressings and antibiotics to provide medical support for wounded warriors, or they were sending fresh medical school graduates without any trauma management experience overseas to staff field hospitals in combat zones, you can bet that the NYT would be all over it.

Popular media forget—nor do they like being reminded—that at its most fundamental aspect, the role of the military services is to kill the enemies of this nation and blow their stuff up. Death and destruction is......or should be......their stock in trade. However, if they do not receive the very expensive training in how to do this with maximum efficiency, it is our boys and girls who will be killed, and our stuff which will get blown up. Even more importantly, our capabilities should be so overwhelming and so feared that our enemies will hesitate to ever start something that they know they can't finish, sparing any of our young folks from ever having to go kick enemy butt. It seems to me that, having produced 11 years worth of combat veterans, many of who will stay in the military, we should be in a good position to ensure that new soldiers/marines receive effective training which is relevant to current war-fighting needs. I sincerely hope that they are receiving all the materiel support needed to give these incoming personnel all the necessarily training, and probably most of them are.

I suspect that these kinds of lapses in materiel supply are failures of of individual commands rather than of general military policies issued from the top down. As of 2011, we had a total active duty personnel (all services) of 1,456,862, and total reserve personnel of 1,458,500. Of those nearly 3 million personnel, it is reasonable to assume that most or all of them are required to display at least minimum proficiency with a service rifle. If that were 58 rounds of 5.56 NATO, it would amount to 174,000,000 rounds fired. Total budget for this force in 2011 (per Wikipedia) was $549.1 billion—or an average of about $183,033.33/person under arms. As of 2010, the Department of Homeland Security had approximately 216,000 employees, the vast majority of whom are not shooters and would not need to qualify with a rifle. The 2010 budget for DHS was $55.1 billion—or about $255,092.59/per DHS employee, and quite a bit higher than the military spends per person. DHS has managed to purchase 450 million rounds of 5.56 NATO for the next five years for its shooters. That's a lot of ammo. Surely the military services could do likewise?

So honestly, I don't know if this lack of marksmanship training is pandemic to the military, or is it more localized to just certain units?

[G26ster]

Someone needs to straighten me out, as my memories of the Army seem to be quite different from what I am reading. Don't recruits to the Regular Army attend Basic Training as individuals anymore? Or, are they assigned to a unit immediately and given Basic Training by the unit? How is it done today for the Regular Army, and how is it done for the Guard and Reserve units?

In my day, in a Basic Training Command, we were trained on the rifle, in all shooting positions, with many rounds of practice before the qualification test. At no time did we "zero" any weapons, as that was done by training cadre, and we never saw the weapons we were firing again anyway. You left basic, went to advanced training, and then were sent to a field unit as an individual where you were issued your duty weapon. In my case it was the M1 Garand (old ain't I ) I went to Ft. Carson and joined the 5th Inf. Div, got the Garand, and then 6 months later joined the 7th Inf. Div. in Korea where I was issued a M14 and re-qualified with that. I qualified with the M16 at Ft. Benning years later when I was on orders for RVN.

Something is terribly wrong if today a recruit is immediately sent to a unit, trained by that unit, and only given 58 rounds of practice before going to war!

[Heartland Patriot]

Someone needs to straighten me out, as my memories of the Army seem to be quite different from what I am reading. Don't recruits to the Regular Army attend Basic Training as individuals anymore? Or, are they assigned to a unit immediately and given Basic Training by the unit? How is it done today for the Regular Army, and how is it done for the Guard and Reserve units?

In my day, in a Basic Training Command, we were trained on the rifle, in all shooting positions, with many rounds of practice before the qualification test. At no time did we "zero" any weapons, as that was done by training cadre, and we never saw the weapons we were firing again anyway. You left basic, went to advanced training, and then were sent to a field unit as an individual where you were issued your duty weapon. In my case it was the M1 Garand (old ain't I ) I went to Ft. Carson and joined the 5th Inf. Div, got the Garand, and then 6 months later joined the 7th Inf. Div. in Korea where I was issued a M14 and re-qualified with that. I qualified with the M16 at Ft. Benning years later when I was on orders for RVN.

Something is terribly wrong if today a recruit is immediately sent to a unit, trained by that unit, and only given 58 rounds of practice before going to war!

I'm certain that someone Army can give you a better reply than I, but I'll tell you what I know from my friends who are Army. They still go to Basic Training, and for infantrymen, they transition straight to infantry AIT. They do quite a bit of shooting during all that time. However, later on at their permanent units, they may not get a lot of trigger time to stay proficient in their day-today activities. They end up "re-qualifying" before they deploy to the "Sandbox".

[G26ster]

Someone needs to straighten me out, as my memories of the Army seem to be quite different from what I am reading. Don't recruits to the Regular Army attend Basic Training as individuals anymore? Or, are they assigned to a unit immediately and given Basic Training by the unit? How is it done today for the Regular Army, and how is it done for the Guard and Reserve units?

In my day, in a Basic Training Command, we were trained on the rifle, in all shooting positions, with many rounds of practice before the qualification test. At no time did we "zero" any weapons, as that was done by training cadre, and we never saw the weapons we were firing again anyway. You left basic, went to advanced training, and then were sent to a field unit as an individual where you were issued your duty weapon. In my case it was the M1 Garand (old ain't I ) I went to Ft. Carson and joined the 5th Inf. Div, got the Garand, and then 6 months later joined the 7th Inf. Div. in Korea where I was issued a M14 and re-qualified with that. I qualified with the M16 at Ft. Benning years later when I was on orders for RVN.

Something is terribly wrong if today a recruit is immediately sent to a unit, trained by that unit, and only given 58 rounds of practice before going to war!

I'm certain that someone Army can give you a better reply than I, but I'll tell you what I know from my friends who are Army. They still go to Basic Training, and for infantrymen, they transition straight to infantry AIT. They do quite a bit of shooting during all that time. However, later on at their permanent units, they may not get a lot of trigger time to stay proficient in their day-today activities. They end up "re-qualifying" before they deploy to the "Sandbox".

That tells me nothing has changed since I was an Infantryman. Thanks.

[AlphaWhiskey]

Here is an interesting article about the same thing from the Marine Corps perspective. May still be better/ more stringent than our sister services but still not without concerns. I know I personally shed a little tear of sadness when I heard about the first boot camp recruits who qualified using only optic sights, no irons.

http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/arti ... -standards