The last one from Mr. Darryl Davis
The military does not teach rifle marksmanship. It teaches equipment familiarity. Despite what the officer corps thinks, learning to shoot a rifle is not like learning to drive a car. Instead, it is like learning to play the violin. You can have coherent-appearing results after equipment familiarity training, but to get the real results, you keep plodding on. The equipment familiarity learning curve comes up very quick, but then the rifle marksmanship continuation of the curve rises very slowly, by shooting one careful shot at a time, carefully inspecting the result, and the cause.
Darryl Davis – On the subject of Marksmanship – Military Magazine, Feb 1998 – pp 19
Tomorrow we’ll have proof of this from an RNS reader.
In both the Army and Marine Corps marksmanship is taught. Marines are taught to shoot out to 500 yards in boot camp. Soldiers are taught how to shoot out to 300 meters with a “battlesight zero” out to 300 meters.
Bastic training graduates of both the Marine Corps and Army are trained to engage and kill the enemy from a length over three football fields away.
Now comes the kicker, you never have to hit the 300 meter target to qualify on the M16/M4, in the Army you just have to hit 23 out of 40 targets on a popup range. I do not know what the Marine Corps qualification standards are, but I have been told they are “dismal” compared to what they were a few decads ago.
The training is their, but the ammo budget and training facilities make it impossible to turn every Marine or Soldier into a crack shot. What we do is turn them over to their units and let the NCO’s of their gaining unit continue their training in marksmanship.
At the unit level soldiers don’t get as much ammo or range time that we would like, but they do get LOTS of fundamentals training. Those soldiers that shoot well may be picked up for the Designated Marksman program and be taught to shoot out to 600 meters, or may be picked up for a Sniper slot and get sent to school to earn their B4 designator.
Also the Army has gotten very smart with training CQM, close quarters marksmanship. How to engage enemies at “halitosis identification range”.
All in all the success of our marksmanship training rests on dedicated NCO’s and junior officers to continue the refining process started in basic training. The system works, the qualification process requires hits on target at distance, and more shooting positions are being required by qualification tables.
Jimro