cover of episode The Transformation of Marine Marksmanship

The Transformation of Marine Marksmanship

2024/10/29
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Capt. Phillip Williams
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Gunner Josh Grayek
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Gunnery Sgt. Jude Stewart
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Maj. Steve Stephenson
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Ryan Evans
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Ryan Evans:探讨了在未来战争中,无人机和精确制导武器等先进技术日益普及的背景下,海军陆战队单兵射击技能的重要性。 Maj. Steve Stephenson:认为即使在先进技术主导战场的未来,地面部队和步枪射击技能仍然是必不可少的,并强调了其在作战中的持续重要性。 Gunner Josh Grayek:指出由于现代战场上无人机和目标识别技术的普及,单兵射击技能变得更加重要,因为大规模集结会更容易成为目标,强调了单兵作战能力在现代战争中的重要性。 Capt. Phillip Williams:认为忽视单兵射击技能训练是不负责任的,这直接关系到士兵的生命安全,并指出技术优势是暂时的,最终还是要回到基础的作战能力。同时,他还提出了一种类似于航空领域中量化飞行员技能的方法来量化单兵射击技能,并强调了通过发表文章等方式来提高认知度并获得资源支持的重要性。 Gunnery Sgt. Jude Stewart:强调了海军陆战队一直注重单兵训练,改进的单兵射击技能对于应对未来冲突中可能出现的非步兵单位需要自卫的情况至关重要。同时,他还详细阐述了2018年能力评估的结果,以及海军陆战队对杀伤力的重新定义,并介绍了SPIR模型(速度、精度、执行控制、适应性和风险暴露)的应用。 Gunnery Sgt. Jude Stewart:进一步阐述了改进后的单兵射击训练将更加注重基础技能,例如精确瞄准和保持枪支稳定,并对每一发子弹进行评估,提供实时反馈。同时,他还强调了引入竞争机制以提高海军陆战队单兵射击技能水平的重要性,以及通过收集大量数据来更好地了解士兵的射击技能,并改进训练方法。最后,他还指出所有海军陆战队士兵都应该达到相同的最低射击技能水平,而不是仅仅满足于获得射手徽章,并建议海军陆战队应该根据士兵的实际能力来调整作战计划,并考虑弹道学因素。同时,他还建议海军陆战队应该对所有步兵武器进行类似的评估,以提高杀伤力。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter explores the continued importance of marksmanship in modern warfare, despite advancements in drone technology and other weaponry. The discussion highlights the role of individual Marines in close-quarters combat and the limitations of technology in certain scenarios. The need for every Marine to be proficient with a rifle is emphasized.
  • The future of war will always include troops in direct combat.
  • Proliferation of technology doesn't negate the need for marksmanship.
  • Individual marksmanship is crucial in small unit engagements.
  • Maintaining a focus on individual Marine skills ensures effectiveness even with technological advancements.

Shownotes Transcript

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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with four Marines about ongoing and major changes in Marine Corps small arms marksmanship focused on making the individual Marine more lethal than ever. The four Marines I spoke to are assigned to Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico, Virginia,

This battalion serves as the Marine Corps' proponent for all facets of small arms combat marksmanship. To help accomplish these missions, Weapons Training Battalion includes, for example, the famed Marine Corps Shooting Team, which has been around for somewhere around 120 years, and comprises the best marksmen in the service and some of the best marksmen in the world.

The command also includes the Marksmanship Program Management section which leads the service's efforts on all manner of small arms marksmanship doctrine, training, weapons, and equipment. Additionally, the command includes an Infantry Marksmanship Training Program section which is heavily focused both on teaching and scaling across the services the changes that we discussed during this episode. And finally, the command includes the Precision Marksmanship course which focuses on teaching and scaling longer-range precision fires across the service.

across the Marine Corps. The Marines I spoke with during the podcast are leaders in these units, and they also recently published a really important article about these changes in the Marine Corps Gazette. I link to it in the show notes. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed having this conversation. One quick but important note before we get started, the views you hear expressed on this episode are not necessarily those of Training and Education Command, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

My name is Captain Phillip Williams. I'm a CH-53 pilot by background, but I'm the Infantry Marksmanship Training Program Officer in Charge. Gunner Josh Gryke. I'm the Director of Marksmanship here at Weapons Training Battalion.

Major Steve Stevenson. I'm a logistics officer, but I'm the CEO of the Advanced Marksmanship Training Company. Gunnery Sergeant Jude Stewart. I am an infantry unit leader by trade. I am currently the staff non-commissioned officer in charge of the infantry marksmanship training program. I'd like to zoom out, and I'm going to ask a sort of intentionally provocative question.

Some people might think about small arms lethality and what you're doing here, and they might think, "Listen, the future of war is all about drones, loitering munitions, missiles, rockets, all this new gadgetry, all this stuff that we're seeing in these video feeds from different theaters. Why is this important strategically for what the Marine Corps needs to accomplish and what the joint force needs to accomplish for the nation?" I think that's an interesting question.

I think the idea that technology is going to rule the future fight is an age-old question. Every weapon system that's been created, the airplane, boats, machine guns, they've changed the warfare, but there's always been footprints on the deck, troops in the fight. I just struggle to find a time when marksmanship's not going to be super focused and needed.

I would say the nature of war is changing as technology gets proliferated across, you know, the advent of drones and signature management and how it's so easy to be targeted on the modern battlefield. I would argue that's why individual marksmanship is even more important because now I will be less likely to be able to mass combat power because once I start to mass, I now become a larger target.

from a targeting standpoint, a drone, you name it, right? The larger signature I have, the easier I will be detected. So the more I can affect the outcome of a battle with an individual Marine and his rifle, I will likely be that much more successful. And that's what we've seen in Ukraine, of course. They never get above these small units generally on the battlefield because if they gather, as you said, they get hit with something. It's a very good point as it ends up being the small unit. Even though it's a huge war, it's sort of a small unit war in many ways.

I think it's frankly irresponsible to not give it the attention it deserves, being individual marksmanship. To Gunnar's point, these young men and women volunteer, and we need to do our best to give them every tool to be successful. So sure, it might be the seventh contingency in the war, but that's going to keep them alive or not. And if we don't give it that respect, we need to leave our positions. On top of that, all of the technology advances are amazing, and they give one side an edge until the other side has either a counter or an equivalent.

And so it becomes a zero sum game. Every time something comes out to make one side better, the other side either figures out a way to counter it or figures out how to have something equivalent to it. And then you're back to where you were. So probably speaking out of turn, but in my community on the stealth fighter side, if you have two stealth fighter aircraft trying to see each other, but they're both stealthy, they can't see each other. Now they have to be within visual range. And so you're back to dogfighting.

Whereas stealth on one side was sort of created to eliminate dogfighting by long range missiles. If both sides have stealth, you're zero sum and you're back in the middle. That's how I conceptualize it. There's so much more technology that goes into that, but drones have been the same way. One side gets mass proliferation of drones, sends them over here, which means they have to hide, which means they sneak in and you're back to guns. You're back to marksmanship.

And I also can't help but think about what happened almost a year ago today, a little over a year ago in Southern Israel, where you saw this, and there was actually a great War on the Rocks article by Leo Blinken on this, the proliferation of small unit infantry tactics among people that were seen as irregular terrorist groups, not particularly professional. But October 7th, you saw some very advanced infantry tactics. So this

This is something that not just our higher end enemies can do, but also our lower end enemies are able to do, which we saw in Afghanistan as well, the assault on Bastion Leatherneck that took out the Harriers. So these are tactics that are proliferating. So it seems like what you're trying to do here at Weapons Training Battalion is keep

us ahead in this sort of thing that's not seen as an important technological area, but will remain a core war fighting function. Completely agree. And I think that's been one of the Marine Corps' ethos for as long as we've been around, whatever verbiage you want to use, more with less, but we've always tried to focus on the training aspect of the individual Marine and less so on technology. And this just reinforces it, I think. On top of that, like you said about Camp Ashton,

Those situations are going to be more frequent if war looks like the way it's projected to look through Force Design 2030. You're going to have non-infantry units needing to provide their own security, their own security for logistical support within the WES, the Weapons Engagement Zone. So they're within range of precision fires. They're within range of an enemy counterattack without infantry support because the infantry has to be somewhere else.

So this proliferation of constantly improving marksmanship gets back to every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman because they have no choice. So you're telling me that even people in the Marine Corps who fly these buckets that just drip oil everywhere constantly need to have this kind of... I think that we do. I 100% believe that because that's what I'm passionate about. I think that there is a right and appropriately placed...

hesitancy to assign that to the highest priority because of how much more skill goes into fixing and flying aircraft. And you just run out of time in the day, but it doesn't exempt someone in the aviation field from needing to be competent. I agree with you, Phil. I love the Marine Corps infantry and it is amazing what it's able to do, but wars are won and lost off logistics. So when we talk logistics in a contested environment,

It is absolutely fundamentally important for every Marine inside the MLG to be lethal with their rifle. Yeah. And we saw that, of course, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where no shortage of logistics Marines got caught up in all sorts of firefights.

So let's talk about the sort of origin story of how this became such an important issue that the four of you and your unit are all working on in terms of improving small arms lethality in the Marine Corps. Back in 2018, we had the close combat lethality task force that Secretary Mattis stood up. How did that play into what you're all doing now? I think the big part that played in it was it put a larger emphasis on the Marine on the deck, the individual rifleman.

You know, General Scales mentioned in his book, Scales on Wars, you know, a lot of the casualties come from the individual Marine doing the fighting. And over time, there's been a large focus on technology and things, you know, whether it's aircraft, tanks, et cetera. And the argument was more emphasis needed to be placed on the individual riflemen. So that led a lot of people to start figuring out areas where we can

for simple terms, modernize or revolutionize the Marine riflemen, whether it's training related, equipment related, like for an example, the PVS-31s, that was a direct correlation to the CLTF and their efforts. So that led a lot of people to recognize and start identifying how we can improve the individual riflemen.

What I'll add to that is the infantry is phenomenal, right? The ability to achieve a combined arms attack on any objective anywhere in the world, and I've said this before, the majority of the focus has always been how you sequence fires and maneuver. But to Gunnar Gregg's point, circa 2018 with the CCLTF, we started to look at how can we measure objectively the lethality of the individual Marine closing the last 100 meters of the fight. Gunnar, what were you doing back then?

So in 2018 timeframe, I just left being a range officer out in Hawaii. And then I was with 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines. Primarily that deployment was a unit deployment program out to PACOM AO. When this all came out, did you all immediately have a sort of reaction response to this? So my kind of first exposure to CCLTF was in 2018 at SOI.

I was a combat instructor and we were kind of talking about a new course that was going to be designed and we were all excited, but we didn't really know anything. I was in about a seven week off cycle and I got bored. So I went to the battalion gunner and I was like, hey, I've heard of this thing. What are we doing? That then led into something called the Tactical Small Arms Markership Assessment, which is a program. I don't know where it stands now, but that was the first take that we had of

a marksmanship assessment that was very granular and could explain to you why someone was better or not. That kind of led into development of the infantry marksmanship assessment. We essentially were, in my mind, we were out cycling what our partners were doing in that task force, and we just kept running with it. Reading your article in the Gazette was really interesting. Tell me why you felt it was important to write it and how it all came together. Colonel Cuomo asked us to get this information out to the fleet, and I jumped on it because

Something similar to this had been rattling around in my brain for a while. The way that the aviation community grades someone in their pilot skills is that we have assigned standards to be an altitude and airspeed and heading, and you can't deviate other than by a certain margin. And we grade every flight, every landing, whether it's on the boat or in my case in an LZ, by the numbers. And this is a very important thing.

This was an opportunity to show how that can be applied within the marksmanship continuum, where it's not just accuracy, but it's accuracy and speed at scale. The genesis behind the article was really, whenever you try to affect change in the institution writ large, the best way to go about that is how do you get your message out to the madness community?

To just, one, make sure you're not planting this in a vacuum. It may be a good idea for you, but can you scale this to 180,000 Marines across the total force? So it's about getting the message out there and then kind of proliferating it so it can grow awareness. And whenever you have a new idea, it needs to be resourced. So that's the best way to obtain those resources. To that point, exactly. This has been in the works since about 2018 after that capabilities-based assessment occurred with our CD&I. And

And some people heard whisperings of this and they were aware of it. So this just proliferates the idea and informs everybody of where we're going. How are you changing the way lethality is being measured in terms of how the sort of new training and new metrics you're rolling out? So going back to that 2018 capabilities assessment,

It largely started through the Combat Marksmanship Symposium where it was identified that there was a lot of after-action reports from the wars from Afghanistan and Iraq where there was alleged claims that our round wasn't incapacitating or killing Marines. The stories were, I know I shot that guy. He didn't fall. He kept running. So basically it was determined we need to take a closer look at that. And they started identifying that CBA, the Capabilities-Based Assessment, was

convened to get after that. A couple of the outcomes that came from that was the Marine Corps didn't have a clear definition of what lethality meant. A lot of our legacy marksmanship was built off of a points system, not a did you kill the individual perspective. A definition of lethality was born.

That definition is basically the ability of a system, basically a Marine with his rifle and the ammo, to instantly incapacitate an enemy. And that incapacitation is going to likely result in a death. Physiological stop is the term we use, which means a likelihood of the individual instantly stop doing what he's, you know, his actions on you. I mean, that kind of redefined our lethality. That's why the ARQ target significantly changed.

You could argue it's still a point-based target, but it's based off science and data based on lethal zones of a human body. Yeah, so that capabilities-based assessment kind of came to three conclusions. Fundamentally, the Marine Corps was missing the mark on shooting and moving, shooting unknown distance, and then shooting at night. So the whole modernization of marksmanship since 2018 after the CCLTF was

How can we get better at those things from an individual perspective increase a Marine's lethality? Along with that, taking a step beyond the CBA, which talked about lethality from a human anatomy perspective, the Office of Naval Research and Training Education Command further defined lethality as something that needed to be objectively measured with numbers. You had to be able to quantify it. And so they broke lethality down into what's known as the SPIR model,

of five elements. You have speed, precision, executive control, adaptability, and risk exposure. Each one of those individual elements can be measured with some sort of number, usually as a result measured in time. However, accuracy is obviously measured if you just assign a point system to where the round falls on the target. Executive control, you can measure by having a course of fire where there are

set parameters that an individual has to accomplish. And if they don't do those in sequence, then you've measured a lack of executive control. Pretty much the only one that we can't measure in a marksmanship assessment per se is that risk exposure, because you need a two-way gun range to measure that with force on force. You're going to measure that using how many friendlies were killed, how many

rounds did you take coming at you, things like that. But when you can measure all of those elements and compare those against each other, the one with the higher measurement is objectively measured more lethal than the other. The easiest way to do that is to combine the measurements of speed and accuracy. If two people are the same accuracy, but one person is faster, that person is objectively more lethal than the other in that situation.

I want to take a quick break from my conversation with these Marines about marksmanship to hear from some other Marines. If you're a War on the Rocks member, you might know that we have a show called Marine Pulse for members only. It's focused on core wide issues. I'm going to play you a clip of a really cool episode hosted by Ian Brown with Wolfgang Hagerty, a former Marine Corps signals intelligence and collections operator who's gone on to fight in Ukraine. Here's the clip.

I had a much different experience than I'd say a vast majority of Westerners that have gone over there. A majority of Westerners end up in the Legion proper, right? So they're at 1st Battalion, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Battalion. Those units get ducked on a piece of the front line and they're told to defend it or do assaults or whatever else. And they act more like a typical military unit.

I worked for Gore directly, the Ministry of Intelligence. Basically, working for Gore, you had a lot of flexibility and you had, I wouldn't say a lot of power, but it's kind of like working for the CIA. You know, if you just kind of show up somewhere, people want to work with you and kind of give you a certain amount of baseline respect. I told my team lead, I want to work. I'm here to wage war. I'm not trying to go screw off in Kyiv and drink my money away.

So he gave me permission to just run down to Mickelive and start causing trouble and havoc wherever I could. That's kind of just what I did. If you want to listen to episodes like this and more, become a War on the Rocks member at warontherocks.com slash membership. You get access to so many shows, newsletters, an app, and more always coming every month.

Let's go back to when you all first joined the Marine Corps. Compare how you were trained then on, let's just call it shooting and moving, compared to what you are all realizing now here at Quantico. I came in the Marine Corps in 2004, so we still had iron sights. The way we were trained was very much the legacy approach, you know, pre-2016, where you shot what I refer to as crisscross applesauce on a known distance range. And I was

basic fundamentals of marksmanship, that's weapon system and person agnostic. Those will always transcend the tale of time. But what has changed so dramatically is the technology at our fingertips by virtue of a better weapon system in the infantry automatic rifle, the better optic in, you know, the RCO rifle combat optic, and of course, the squad common optic, the SCO. But from a training perspective, outside of like lateral movements and pivots, that's about as complex as it got, you know, back in 2004 with training. What

what's referred to as the old CMP tables? Yeah. So I came in before the war back in the late 1900s, as I like to call it. Some units did a little more, some units did a little less, but I think generally, you know, from an infantry perspective, most of the marksmanship was probably either rifle range related, some close bay type stuff, or like squad attacks.

We didn't do a lot of shooting on the move. We didn't have targets to shoot moving targets, or if they did, they were even back in those days antiquated, a green Ivan on a railroad track that popped up. Some units did a little bit more CQB type shooting than others based on missions, but it was very different, I think, is the easy way to put it. And it wasn't until probably even in recent years in the war that a lot of stuff started to change.

The RCO came out around, I was in Fallujah when we got literally handed an RCO-1 for the entire platoon. We're like, wow, what is this thing? So the RCO, the rifle combat optic, basically a scope that had a built-in reticle with a bullet drop compensator. So instead of having to adjust your rear iron side or something like that, it just had the number system on there. And if you estimated the target was 300 meters away, you'd put the three on the target and pull the trigger.

So that helped advance marksmanship and training that we recognized throughout the time. I think that was one of the big first items to push it along the way to where we're at now. I joined the Marine Corps in 2014, and I remember vividly being at boot camp doing the range and being frankly bored. There wasn't much challenge to it. I had never shot that style of weapon before, but I just did what the coaches said, and it didn't seem hard.

And then I remember being a student at the School of Infantry, shooting on the move for the first time and being terrified because I couldn't see through my optic. I was being told just to shoot. And if I hit the paper, I called. And I remember that frustrated me because I didn't feel prepared. What has been relieving to see is the effort and the emphasis put on increasing that confidence in the brand new 17-year-old who turned 18 in boot camp.

He's seen it on TV. He's played video games of it, but he actually gets to see real time with a competent instructor that I can do this and or if I'm not doing this well, here is why I'm not doing it well. And we're able to target that very efficiently. My marksmanship background is, it's not the same obviously because I'm an aviator. I did go through the initial rifle training. Hadn't actually shot very much before, but because I had not shot much before, it was new to me. And I was just trying to figure out what's the basic technique

thing that I need to do. And it was very simple. Line the sights up with the target. And then when you pull the trigger, don't let the gun move. And then everything else was just a technique to accomplish those things. And our coaches did a really good job of helping at least me understand that so that then as I progressed through my marksmanship career, eventually getting on the shooting team

Those fundamentals stuck with me so that when I started moving and shooting, I was just looking for what are the things that I need to do that I can keep the gun straight and when I pull the trigger, not let the gun move while I'm moving or the target's moving or it's at night. None of that really matters. I mean, it does because you have to be able to execute those techniques well and that takes some skill. But when you come back to those fundamentals, it is very simple.

Put the sights on the target exactly where the sights need to be. And when you pull the trigger, don't let the gun move and the bullet's going to go where you want it. What is training going to look like if you're able to realize everything that you're working to build here at Weapons Training Battalion? If you get the buy-in that you want from the Marine Corps to transform how this is done, how are Marines going to be trained on shooting and moving if that all happens?

in a way that's different from today or from yesterday. I think one of the big first goals is not re-educating, but re-emphasizing some of the, probably the most important factors, how to get a quality zero on your rifle. Because if you can't group well and you can't then zero your gun, everything else is garbage in, garbage out, basically. So

That's one of the big fundamentals that we're – I use the word fundamentals, but that's one of the biggest skills that we're trying to push, making sure a solid grouping and zero can be obtained. And then that's just going to further enhance all the training that Gunny Stewart can definitely speak to about where we're getting after for all those. One of the things I'm most looking forward to is the accountability per round. So instead of you'd shoot an entire string of –

Let's say 25 meters and in, hammered pairs the whole way. You shoot your mag and then you score at the end. I don't know which ones were good, which ones are bad. I just see a target with a bunch of holes in it versus now we have accountability and a time associated to every shot taken with the place in which that round was placed on target. I can have a higher hit factor for having a less lethal shot if I did it faster. So what I'm most excited for is that accountability and the real-time feedback of people who may be

less inclined in marksmanship, they can read the data and the data will tell them what to do. They just interpret that and they pass that to the force and the force executes. What Gunny Stewart brought up is exactly what I was hoping to get at with the article that I had the concept of in my mind before I wrote this one. I had spoken to infantrymen before

Not being an infantryman myself, I didn't want to speak out of turn, but that was what I heard, was that the primary skill of, when we say locate, close with, and destroy, the primary means by which destroy happened was not being graded at scale. And one of the main things that we get at with JMAP, with the infantry marksmanship assessment, is there's no longer an excuse not to. We have accountability for every round, and it's not just accuracy.

It's accuracy with time. On top of that, because time has been factored into the score, there is no maximum. Because if two people both clean the drill where all their shots go into the destroy zone, someone could always do it slightly faster. So their score is now higher. And that could always happen. Someone could always get a little bit better.

Through that, we can essentially institute a competition, for lack of a better word, across the Marine Corps. Something that we breed into ourselves at the shooting team is that competition breeds excellence. If I'm constantly striving to become better because I have some person to compare myself to, that's going to drive me to be better. That's why the shooting team goes to shooting competitions. That's why any squad

wants to say who had the best CFT score, who had the best PFT score. Our squad has collectively a higher PFT or CFT score than them. Now we can put marksmanship on that. Whereas before, that wasn't something that anybody really cared about. That's a great point. And I often find myself talking to my buddies in the fleet, really comparing the scoring style to that of like a meritorious PFT, physical fitness test. I am not currently incentivized to do more than my maximum amount of pull-ups unless it is for something of a meritorious...

like promotion board, if you will. I can argue that if sir and I both did 300 on the PFT, but he did his with no breaks in between events, he is more physically fit than I am. But our current system doesn't allow that. Our rifle range, the qualification table, it's a fair qualification, but it doesn't tell me why you're better or if we have the same score, who is better. So with the scoring style that we are adapting, taking from competitive shooting backgrounds,

I know how and why someone is better or worse than me. And what I have seen from privates through, I've seen a two-star general shoot the infantry marksmanship assessment. They all want to know what they were good at and bad at. And we can show them real time. That was another item that was addressed in the capabilities-based assessment. We didn't have the right data sets to quantify exactly what Captain Williams and Gunny Stewart were talking about. We had a ceiling effect on our marksmanship. All of us could shoot 43 and three on ARQ.

But if you all are doing it, you know, 30 seconds faster than me, that matters. And that's what we're trying to get after. So another example I would use, I might get the acronym wrong, but USPSA, they have a shooting system where people are labeled as like a grandmaster, master, B-class shooter, so on. And what we find is that last decade's grandmaster would get smoked by today's grandmaster. That's because the competition has been increasing every day.

Us, our statistics, when I pull back into our statistics back to 2014, all we have is a plateau. And not saying that that's the only reason, but because we have that ceiling effect, we haven't seen growth, I would argue, in long times. A couple tips in the scale occur when we make minor changes to the rifle training programs and how we score them. But generally speaking, it's been a plateau effect.

I would love to see in the next couple of years, these scores reflected on some form of electronic portal. And I can do just that. What competitive shooters do, honestly, across the world is they look at what they have shot. And if they were to shoot that right now, where are they? I know as a gunnery sergeant, I'm a good shot, but I can't really prove it unless it's through that metric. If every Marine's a rifleman, we all have to be on the same minimum ceiling. We can't just get a marksman badge and say we're good enough. Because if I'm going to be fighting next to you,

I need you to do just as well, if not better than me. I imagine also something you said earlier is the why they're better or worse for that matter. And having that kind of data across a large group of Marines, you can then start making more informed judgments about who will be a better shooter and why, according to experiences, aptitude, things like that. Data over time will be powerful to then loop back and shape the training even more. Is that fair?

Yeah, that's totally fair. And what we see with shooters that perform at a higher level, once again, down to an entry-level student, once they're shooting well, and we give them a couple of tips to shoot faster, they can generally recall where every single shot went on that paper. And, or if they see something moving in the background, like they'll make a wind call on the fly, they're not hyper-focused on the shooting. They know what the results are going to be because of the training and the muscle memory, their sight tells them it was a good shot. So they're already thinking about the next thing. So when I've seen privates who have gone through this style of training, do like a fire team attack or a squad attack,

In my assessment, they generally react faster to target feedback. Yeah. And the way that we're able to measure that is we talked about how it's a competition. We talked about the classification system from the United States Practical Shooters Association, USPSA. The way that works is everybody shoots the same thing. And so because everyone is shooting the same course of fire, now you're comparing apples to apples.

If myself and Gunny Stewart shot two different courses of fire and both of us came back with a 5.0 hit factor, those don't compare to each other because my course of fire had this many targets and I executed in this time. He had significantly fewer targets, which means he executed it slower in order to get the same points, points divided by time in order to get the same hit factor. So they don't compare one thing against another. You have to be shooting the same course of fire and that's where the IMA comes in.

So back to the history of it, as the infantry Marine course was adopted and the change happened, the way that this was assessed was the infantry marksmanship assessment. It's a course of fire that is set up exactly the same every time. And every infantryman since 2021 has fired that course of fire in a pre-capacity before they received training, and then a post-capacity after they've received training. So

We know for a fact that each person improved their lethality by this much, and it compares across the entire service. So to your point, the more people who do it, the bigger the experiment becomes. And that's what JMAP allows us to do, is basically have a running experiment for the rest of the time in the Marine Corps. We can use that information to

continuously push marksmanship lethality advances in readiness reporting. We are this lethal, and a battalion commander announces to his regimental commander, to his division commander, to the commandant, I am this lethal as measured by the IMA in this hit factor averaged across my battalion. On top of that, from an acquisitions perspective, because we have this running experiment,

When we get a new weapon or a new flak or a new whatever, we can immediately have Marines use that new equipment, shoot this standardized course of fire, and immediately know that made them better or it had no effect or it made them worse. We want that thing or we don't want it. And we know that immediately.

So you've put this article out in the Gazette, highly recommend everyone reads it. What are some other articles that you would like to see other Marines write on this topic? What are some of the unanswered questions or debates that you think the Marine Corps still needs to have with itself about small arms lethality?

With small-scale lethality, I think we need to be honest with what our individual maneuver units can do. Generally speaking, we plan off of a technical manual's explanation of what a gun or system can do. I've personally hit a target at 975 meters with an IAR. I'm not saying that's best, but it's outside the range of what it's supposed to be able to do. So if we have accountability to the level that we've described, I can then have my planning factors change based off what my squads can actually do, and we can tie that to terminal ballistics. So I can have a pretty good idea...

based off train analysis of where I can put my force while keeping force pres and the maneuverability of them in play. I think it'll change a lot of how we employ our forces and the risks we put them through. Similar to that, I think a future effort we're going to look to undertake with the schools of infantry potentially and the fleet units using JMAP

is getting after that same concept, but with now all of our other infantry weapons, the M320 grenade launcher, the Mark 19, the Carl Gustav. Every weapon system that we employ should be able to be evaluated and critiqued in the same manner that we're doing individual marksmanship to improve lethality.

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