Jay Cunningham
05-05-08, 06:54
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/05/army_marksmanship_050408w/
FORT BENNING, Ga. — Trainers here are testing a new marksmanship qualification course that stresses shooting from behind cover, fixing jams and changing magazines — key skills all soldiers need in combat.
The pilot program is a dramatic shift from the Army’s standard qualification course, an outdated exercise that trains soldiers on how to pass a test rather than how to master their weapons, said Col. Casey Haskins, commander of 198th Infantry Brigade. The 198th, a one-station training unit responsible for Basic Combat and Infantry Training at Benning, is overseeing sweeping changes to Basic Rifle Marksmanship.
Currently in Initial Entry Training, BRM culminates with soldiers taking a timed test in which they fire 40 rounds of ammunition at 40 pop-up targets. Firing from Cold-War-era prone and foxhole positions, trainees must hit 23 to earn a passing score.
“It focuses on meeting the minimum standard — 23 out of 40. Not too good,” Haskins said. “People train to the test ... We believe we need to teach people how to shoot.”
In the proposed qualification test, trainees would shoot a total of 30 rounds at 15 targets. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. The new test requires trainees to shoot from three firing positions — kneeling unsupported, kneeling supported and prone unsupported. They also would use available cover, change magazines, clear weapon stoppages and shoot until the targets are “dead.” Throughout the test, shooters would be required to perform these tasks on their own rather than waiting for commands from their drill sergeants.
“If we train soldiers properly, we should trust them to change magazines when they need to, not just when they are told to,” said Capt. Jeff Marshburn, commander of A Company, 2nd Battalion, 54th Infantry Regiment of the 198th at Benning. “We should trust them to seek cover ... and establish their position based on what they have at hand and the 40-out-of-40 really doesn’t get after that.”
Marshburn, a former Special Forces sergeant, was tasked to develop the proposed new qualification course last fall. Currently, Marshburn’s trainees are qualifying on the Army’s standard course and shooting the new qualification as part of the pilot program.
By late summer, the new course “could actually be used at the IET level and could be exported to the Army if it is deemed viable,” Marshburn said.
But the retooled qualification course is only the latest piece to emerge from a marksmanship overhaul Benning launched last year to transform the way soldiers learn to shoot.
The massive effort is in line with a new concept called Outcome-Based Training, spawned by the research and analyses that led to the new operations doctrine described in the recently revised Field Manual 3-0.
Training officials at Benning said they believe this is the beginning of a cultural shift in the way the Army transforms civilian volunteers into combat soldiers. Outcome-Based Training will replace what has come to be viewed as a strict, by-the-book training doctrine that required “little or no thinking” with a new methodology designed to prepare soldiers for combat by teaching them why things work rather than just how to follow orders.
“It’s teaching, not just training; the difference is soldiers learn why things work the way they work,” Haskins said. “The culture has to change. Our needs have changed.”
Sweeping overhaul plans include future changes to basic training and the physical fitness training, as well as to marksmanship.
Adjusting aim
Perhaps the most significant changes to marksmanship that have come from the program so far deal with weapons zeroing, the process of adjusting the rifle’s sights to ensure that the bullets strike where the soldier aims on the target.
Benning officials are now teaching soldiers to set a 200-meter battle-sight zero rather than the standard 300-meter battle-sight zero, since “98 percent of all engagements” in Iraq and Afghanistan happen at 200 meters, Haskins said.
Between zero and 300 meters the bullet rises and drops six to nine inches, requiring the shooter to aim slightly lower than center-mass of the target for closer targets and slightly higher than center-mass for farther targets.
But with a 200-meter zero, the bullet only rises and drops about two inches, meaning a shooter can aim center-mass at any target out to 200 meters. For 300 meter targets, shooters aim just below the head for the bullet to strike center-mass, trainers maintain.
In addition, trainees learn to zero their weapons without the standard 25-meter zero target, a training tool used for decades that calculates exactly how many sight adjustments they need to make on their weapons to bring their bullets on target.
Instead, trainees are beginning to zero on a special bull’s-eye target and learning how to calculate their own sight adjustments using a formula known as minute-of-angle.
“My soldiers understand minutes of angle,” Marshburn said. For every click of windage on the rear sight on the M16, “it moves the strike of the round a half minute of angle, which is a half an inch at 100 yards or one inch at 200 yards.”
The program also has led to improvements to more advanced ranges, such as a fire-team live-fire course that trainees are exposed to later in training. Sand bag positions have been replaced by realistic walls, old cars and other forms of cover soldiers in infantry training will experience in the urban combat landscapes such as Iraq.
New war, new focus
Last fall, Benning set out to revamp Army marksmanship training with a goal of shifting out of the Cold War mind-set that focused on preparing soldiers for a large-scale, defensive fight against invading Warsaw Pact armies.
“We were still training in very defensive manner and we hadn’t stepped to train in a more offensive or reactionary manner that is required of soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan,” Marshburn said.
In addition to drawing on their own combat experiences, trainers sought help from the Army Marksmanship Unit and the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a special unit established three years ago to help senior Army leaders find new tactics and technologies to make soldiers more lethal in combat.
Many of the changes now in use at Benning come from the training methodology these units have been teaching to combat units for the past several years. BRM for many basic trainees at Benning has changed from high-stress, tightly controlled days to a relaxed regimen that allows soldiers to become comfortable with their weapons.
“They develop a deeper understanding for mastering their weapon,” said Maj. Britton Yount, operations officer for the 198th. “It’s more of a professional instruction — that is crucial; that is a total change from how we used to do business in the past.”
Basic trainees start off “shooting slick,” meaning without combat equipment.
“We begin in a relaxed environment then add stress through more [challenges], not drill sergeants yelling at them,” Haskins said. It sounds like a radically new idea, but the Marine Corps uses a similar approach when it comes to recruit marksmanship training.
The revised Army program puts a strong emphasis on drill sergeants giving trainees one-on-one coaching to catch problems early. This requires extending BRM from 11 days to 13, but drill sergeants take only half a company at a time, leaving the other 100 trainees in the unit to train on other tasks.
The changes to the marksmanship program also require another 152 rounds of training ammunition per soldier. That’s a 32 percent increase over the 341 rounds trainees normally shoot.
Benning officials stressed that the new BRM program can be taught with only minor changes to any of the Army’s existing ranges.
“Our assumption is it can’t require construction,” Haskins said. “If it requires the commanding general to spend $10 million in range improvements, it won’t happen.”
Retraining soldiers
Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Fort Benning’s commander and the proponent for Army marksmanship, is scheduled to decide sometime this summer on whether to adopt the marksmanship qualification test as a new Army standard.
“The hope is to validate it over the next couple of months with different companies shooting it and export it to the Army as an alternative qualification course that can be used in lieu of the 40-out-of-40,” he said.
Unlike the current test — twice a year for most active-duty soldiers, once a year for reservists — the new qualification course moves away from the one-shot-per-target mentality and forces trainees to shoot certain targets as many as three times before they fall.
This is intended to teach soldiers a crucial lesson learned from the battlefield that it often takes more than one shot to “kill a target,” Haskins said.
“Sometimes you have to shoot a guy two or three times before he dies,” he said.
The proposed qualification also forces trainees to fix stoppages on their own, a practice that the current qualification program discourages, Haskins said.
“If you raise your hand and say ‘I have a malfunction and I can’t fix it,’ you get rewarded,” he said. “You get an alibi and you get more targets.”
To ensure stoppages will occur, each of the three 10-round magazines is loaded with one dummy round. It’s “thrown in there anywhere in the magazine to induce a malfunction, so the soldiers have to apply immediate action,” Marshburn said.
“The different focus we have taken with the marksmanship training has provided the soldiers with a much greater understanding of the weapons system and fundamentals of marksmanship.”
But before this marksmanship overhaul could focus on training new soldiers, it faced a bigger challenge: redesigning how it trains the older soldiers who become drill sergeants and leaders.
For the past seven months, a handful of AWG trainers have been running a five-day leader certification course. Students start from scratch and learn in the same environment they will use to instruct their young trainees.
“There is a personal feel to the training,” said 1st Sgt. Steve Walker, who is part of an Indiana Reserve training unit that makes up A Company, 1st Battalion, 198th Infantry, at Benning. “We are not just getting a block of instruction, where we go out and execute it with a bunch of commands. It has that mentor-student feel to it.”
John Porter, a retired Army sergeant major and training adviser with AWG, said the techniques he and other AWG members are teaching at Benning are the same methods he learned throughout his 22 years of service in special operations units.
The training methodology taught in the course goes beyond marksmanship, trainers maintain. It can be applied to land navigation, first aid or any other soldier skill, they said.
“When they walk away from here, they are better shooters, they are better trainers and they are better leaders,” he said.
The soft-spoken veteran wears the expression of a proud teacher when he describes how this new approach to training is forging a more capable breed of soldiers.
“It’s working like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “In the end, with this methodology, they will be more lethal.”
Here are three shooting tips trainers are stressing as part of Fort Benning’s new approach to marksmanship:
1. Rest your magazine on the ground when shooting from the prone. This goes against years of training guidance that said this would lead to ammunition feeding problems. Not true, say professional shooters. If your weapon jams, something else is causing it. Resting the magazine on the ground while in the prone steadies the weapon as well as any sandbag, without harming the magazine or the weapon’s cycling of rounds.
———
2. Practice follow-through and reset. This is the marksmanship fundamental that follows steady position, aiming, breath control and trigger squeeze. After you shoot, hold the trigger to the rear, reacquire your target and reset the trigger by letting your finger come forward until you hear a metallic click.
Why is this important? Accomplished shooters have learned that the recoil of the weapon causes most shooters to let their finger come off the trigger after each shot. This creates a slightly different trigger squeeze every time. A consistent trigger is the key to accurate shooting. Using this technique gives the shooter more consistency and control when taking multiple shots at a target.
———
3. Use a natural point of aim. Don’t twist at the waist when sighting in on a new target from a standing position. It throws you off balance. Instead, pivot at the feet and shift your weight to a comfortable firing position.
FORT BENNING, Ga. — Trainers here are testing a new marksmanship qualification course that stresses shooting from behind cover, fixing jams and changing magazines — key skills all soldiers need in combat.
The pilot program is a dramatic shift from the Army’s standard qualification course, an outdated exercise that trains soldiers on how to pass a test rather than how to master their weapons, said Col. Casey Haskins, commander of 198th Infantry Brigade. The 198th, a one-station training unit responsible for Basic Combat and Infantry Training at Benning, is overseeing sweeping changes to Basic Rifle Marksmanship.
Currently in Initial Entry Training, BRM culminates with soldiers taking a timed test in which they fire 40 rounds of ammunition at 40 pop-up targets. Firing from Cold-War-era prone and foxhole positions, trainees must hit 23 to earn a passing score.
“It focuses on meeting the minimum standard — 23 out of 40. Not too good,” Haskins said. “People train to the test ... We believe we need to teach people how to shoot.”
In the proposed qualification test, trainees would shoot a total of 30 rounds at 15 targets. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. The new test requires trainees to shoot from three firing positions — kneeling unsupported, kneeling supported and prone unsupported. They also would use available cover, change magazines, clear weapon stoppages and shoot until the targets are “dead.” Throughout the test, shooters would be required to perform these tasks on their own rather than waiting for commands from their drill sergeants.
“If we train soldiers properly, we should trust them to change magazines when they need to, not just when they are told to,” said Capt. Jeff Marshburn, commander of A Company, 2nd Battalion, 54th Infantry Regiment of the 198th at Benning. “We should trust them to seek cover ... and establish their position based on what they have at hand and the 40-out-of-40 really doesn’t get after that.”
Marshburn, a former Special Forces sergeant, was tasked to develop the proposed new qualification course last fall. Currently, Marshburn’s trainees are qualifying on the Army’s standard course and shooting the new qualification as part of the pilot program.
By late summer, the new course “could actually be used at the IET level and could be exported to the Army if it is deemed viable,” Marshburn said.
But the retooled qualification course is only the latest piece to emerge from a marksmanship overhaul Benning launched last year to transform the way soldiers learn to shoot.
The massive effort is in line with a new concept called Outcome-Based Training, spawned by the research and analyses that led to the new operations doctrine described in the recently revised Field Manual 3-0.
Training officials at Benning said they believe this is the beginning of a cultural shift in the way the Army transforms civilian volunteers into combat soldiers. Outcome-Based Training will replace what has come to be viewed as a strict, by-the-book training doctrine that required “little or no thinking” with a new methodology designed to prepare soldiers for combat by teaching them why things work rather than just how to follow orders.
“It’s teaching, not just training; the difference is soldiers learn why things work the way they work,” Haskins said. “The culture has to change. Our needs have changed.”
Sweeping overhaul plans include future changes to basic training and the physical fitness training, as well as to marksmanship.
Adjusting aim
Perhaps the most significant changes to marksmanship that have come from the program so far deal with weapons zeroing, the process of adjusting the rifle’s sights to ensure that the bullets strike where the soldier aims on the target.
Benning officials are now teaching soldiers to set a 200-meter battle-sight zero rather than the standard 300-meter battle-sight zero, since “98 percent of all engagements” in Iraq and Afghanistan happen at 200 meters, Haskins said.
Between zero and 300 meters the bullet rises and drops six to nine inches, requiring the shooter to aim slightly lower than center-mass of the target for closer targets and slightly higher than center-mass for farther targets.
But with a 200-meter zero, the bullet only rises and drops about two inches, meaning a shooter can aim center-mass at any target out to 200 meters. For 300 meter targets, shooters aim just below the head for the bullet to strike center-mass, trainers maintain.
In addition, trainees learn to zero their weapons without the standard 25-meter zero target, a training tool used for decades that calculates exactly how many sight adjustments they need to make on their weapons to bring their bullets on target.
Instead, trainees are beginning to zero on a special bull’s-eye target and learning how to calculate their own sight adjustments using a formula known as minute-of-angle.
“My soldiers understand minutes of angle,” Marshburn said. For every click of windage on the rear sight on the M16, “it moves the strike of the round a half minute of angle, which is a half an inch at 100 yards or one inch at 200 yards.”
The program also has led to improvements to more advanced ranges, such as a fire-team live-fire course that trainees are exposed to later in training. Sand bag positions have been replaced by realistic walls, old cars and other forms of cover soldiers in infantry training will experience in the urban combat landscapes such as Iraq.
New war, new focus
Last fall, Benning set out to revamp Army marksmanship training with a goal of shifting out of the Cold War mind-set that focused on preparing soldiers for a large-scale, defensive fight against invading Warsaw Pact armies.
“We were still training in very defensive manner and we hadn’t stepped to train in a more offensive or reactionary manner that is required of soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan,” Marshburn said.
In addition to drawing on their own combat experiences, trainers sought help from the Army Marksmanship Unit and the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a special unit established three years ago to help senior Army leaders find new tactics and technologies to make soldiers more lethal in combat.
Many of the changes now in use at Benning come from the training methodology these units have been teaching to combat units for the past several years. BRM for many basic trainees at Benning has changed from high-stress, tightly controlled days to a relaxed regimen that allows soldiers to become comfortable with their weapons.
“They develop a deeper understanding for mastering their weapon,” said Maj. Britton Yount, operations officer for the 198th. “It’s more of a professional instruction — that is crucial; that is a total change from how we used to do business in the past.”
Basic trainees start off “shooting slick,” meaning without combat equipment.
“We begin in a relaxed environment then add stress through more [challenges], not drill sergeants yelling at them,” Haskins said. It sounds like a radically new idea, but the Marine Corps uses a similar approach when it comes to recruit marksmanship training.
The revised Army program puts a strong emphasis on drill sergeants giving trainees one-on-one coaching to catch problems early. This requires extending BRM from 11 days to 13, but drill sergeants take only half a company at a time, leaving the other 100 trainees in the unit to train on other tasks.
The changes to the marksmanship program also require another 152 rounds of training ammunition per soldier. That’s a 32 percent increase over the 341 rounds trainees normally shoot.
Benning officials stressed that the new BRM program can be taught with only minor changes to any of the Army’s existing ranges.
“Our assumption is it can’t require construction,” Haskins said. “If it requires the commanding general to spend $10 million in range improvements, it won’t happen.”
Retraining soldiers
Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Fort Benning’s commander and the proponent for Army marksmanship, is scheduled to decide sometime this summer on whether to adopt the marksmanship qualification test as a new Army standard.
“The hope is to validate it over the next couple of months with different companies shooting it and export it to the Army as an alternative qualification course that can be used in lieu of the 40-out-of-40,” he said.
Unlike the current test — twice a year for most active-duty soldiers, once a year for reservists — the new qualification course moves away from the one-shot-per-target mentality and forces trainees to shoot certain targets as many as three times before they fall.
This is intended to teach soldiers a crucial lesson learned from the battlefield that it often takes more than one shot to “kill a target,” Haskins said.
“Sometimes you have to shoot a guy two or three times before he dies,” he said.
The proposed qualification also forces trainees to fix stoppages on their own, a practice that the current qualification program discourages, Haskins said.
“If you raise your hand and say ‘I have a malfunction and I can’t fix it,’ you get rewarded,” he said. “You get an alibi and you get more targets.”
To ensure stoppages will occur, each of the three 10-round magazines is loaded with one dummy round. It’s “thrown in there anywhere in the magazine to induce a malfunction, so the soldiers have to apply immediate action,” Marshburn said.
“The different focus we have taken with the marksmanship training has provided the soldiers with a much greater understanding of the weapons system and fundamentals of marksmanship.”
But before this marksmanship overhaul could focus on training new soldiers, it faced a bigger challenge: redesigning how it trains the older soldiers who become drill sergeants and leaders.
For the past seven months, a handful of AWG trainers have been running a five-day leader certification course. Students start from scratch and learn in the same environment they will use to instruct their young trainees.
“There is a personal feel to the training,” said 1st Sgt. Steve Walker, who is part of an Indiana Reserve training unit that makes up A Company, 1st Battalion, 198th Infantry, at Benning. “We are not just getting a block of instruction, where we go out and execute it with a bunch of commands. It has that mentor-student feel to it.”
John Porter, a retired Army sergeant major and training adviser with AWG, said the techniques he and other AWG members are teaching at Benning are the same methods he learned throughout his 22 years of service in special operations units.
The training methodology taught in the course goes beyond marksmanship, trainers maintain. It can be applied to land navigation, first aid or any other soldier skill, they said.
“When they walk away from here, they are better shooters, they are better trainers and they are better leaders,” he said.
The soft-spoken veteran wears the expression of a proud teacher when he describes how this new approach to training is forging a more capable breed of soldiers.
“It’s working like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “In the end, with this methodology, they will be more lethal.”
Here are three shooting tips trainers are stressing as part of Fort Benning’s new approach to marksmanship:
1. Rest your magazine on the ground when shooting from the prone. This goes against years of training guidance that said this would lead to ammunition feeding problems. Not true, say professional shooters. If your weapon jams, something else is causing it. Resting the magazine on the ground while in the prone steadies the weapon as well as any sandbag, without harming the magazine or the weapon’s cycling of rounds.
———
2. Practice follow-through and reset. This is the marksmanship fundamental that follows steady position, aiming, breath control and trigger squeeze. After you shoot, hold the trigger to the rear, reacquire your target and reset the trigger by letting your finger come forward until you hear a metallic click.
Why is this important? Accomplished shooters have learned that the recoil of the weapon causes most shooters to let their finger come off the trigger after each shot. This creates a slightly different trigger squeeze every time. A consistent trigger is the key to accurate shooting. Using this technique gives the shooter more consistency and control when taking multiple shots at a target.
———
3. Use a natural point of aim. Don’t twist at the waist when sighting in on a new target from a standing position. It throws you off balance. Instead, pivot at the feet and shift your weight to a comfortable firing position.