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Improving Army marksmanship: regaining the initiative in the infantryman's hale kilometer
Infantry Magazine, July-August, 2006 by David Liwanag
The Army has trained several generations of Soldiers since 1958 using Trainfire, transitioning from .30 caliber M1 and 7.62mm M 14 rifles through the M16A1 and M 16A2 to the current M 16A4. Nearly all serving Army senior leadership personnel (generals and command sergeants major) have been trained to shoot to a maximum range of only 300 meters.
Trainfire gave Soldiers immediate feedback whether or not they hit a target, but it could not give qualitative feedback (a hit to a fringe area on a 700 square-inch E-type silhouette is as good as a center-of-mass hit to the central nervous system). Trainfire "was never intended to be, nor is it suitable for providing the feedback necessary for diagnosing problems, correcting a faulty zero, or gradually refining or sharpening a beginner's shooting ability," according to a U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences report.
Trainfire's lack of precision downrange feedback, declining numbers of advance-trained shooters and coaches, and the collective inability of our NCO corps to analyze and correct shooting errors began to have a cumulative detrimental effect. By the end of the 1980s, most KD-trained NCOs and officers had attrited from service and Army-wide marksmanship competition was dying. We lost our experienced unit and institutional Army marksmanship training base.
Trainfire is also a throw-back to the active defense strategy of the 1960s and 70s, in that it is a defensive course of fire (where the shooters in static prone or foxhole shoot at targets that appear at varying distances downrange of the Soldier). It conditions a Soldier to shoot as a defensive measure, vice closing with the enemy to destroy him.
Post-Vietnam frustration with the general level of marksmanship proficiency led Army Vice Chief of Staff General John Vessey to publish a Marksmanship Memorandum dated Dec. 11, 1980. The lead sentence reads: "Many current Army regulations and policies place insufficient emphasis on individual, crew, and unit marksmanship. If the fighting Army does nothing else, we must be able to hit our targets. Conversely, if we do all other things right, but fail to hit and kill targets, we shall lose."
Eventually, Clinton administration guidelines to simplify government resulted in many government and Army regulations being declared obsolete and discarded. In 1996 the Army's Director of Competition Marksmanship (DCM), directing the Army Competition Marksmanship Program (CMP), became the civilian Director of Civilian Marksmanship overseeing the Civilian Marksmanship Program (a congressionally-mandated corporation). Formal active-Army marksmanship competition ended in 1994, the Army Championships having moved from Fort Benning, Ga., to Camp Robinson, Ark. The U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit (USAMU) at Fort Benning was slated for deactivation in 1998.
The problems identified by the Army Research Institute (ARI) in Basic Rifle Marksmanship Training in 1977 have remained:
* Too few competent instructors,
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