A Rifleman’s War

Notes on modern marksmanship training.

The following synopis is from a longer article. Download the entire article from Small Arms Journal: https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/532-wall.pdf

A Rifleman’s War

by Jeffrey Wall

Afghanistan has become a rifleman’s war. Because we are fighting a counterinsurgency campaign against a tribal warrior society we have and increasingly continued to limit the use of supporting arms. Machine guns are even proscribed in villages and cities for fear of inflicting innocent civilian casualties. The result is that we must rely more and more on our riflemen to engage and defeat the enemy.

We know that 52% of the fights in Afghanistan begin at 500 meters and go out from there. Recent publications by Dr. Lester Grau (Foreign Military Studies Office) indicate that a majority of the fights in Helmand Province are between 500 and 900 meters. The problem is that we don’t teach soldiers to engage with their rifles at those ranges anymore.

If Major Thomas Ehrhart’s monograph Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer is correct, the Army gave up teaching marksmanship as a primary Soldier skill in 1958, then thinking that all future wars would be waged either atomically or by armored forces where infantrymen would mop up, engaging at close range a defeated and demoralized enemy who had been pulverized by supporting arms and armor. No one anticipated a counterinsurgency campaign against mountain and desert tribesmen in the Hindu Kush Mountains and deserts of Afghanistan.

In either case, near or far, we now must rely on our riflemen to do the work. The trouble is they are not trained for it. Employed as I am at the California Pre-mobilization Training Assistance Element on what is known as Team Rifle, I am one in a squad-sized unit tasked with training California Guardsmen (and those of other States who come through here) in rifle marksmanship as well as the M9 pistol and the machineguns M2, M240B, M249 and Mk19. We are most frequently given one day to present Preliminary Marksmanship Instruction (PMI) and 4 or 5 days on the ranges for all of these weapons – with 1 day on the rifle range.

According to 1st Army standards we are to – ideally - train a rifleman going to war with 58 rounds of ammunition – 18 to zero4 and 40 to qualify on the “Pop up Target Range”.

Let me say that again – 58 rounds. What is not trained when Soldiers are sent to war after having fired only 58 rounds? Well, let’s see – long-range marksmanship, range estimation, the effects of wind and gravity on trajectory, short-range marksmanship, gun handling skills such as rapid magazine changes, and enough practice to cement these skills - all things that might help in Afghanistan. In the civilian world, one might call this “criminally negligent”.

In his seminal work A Rifleman Went to War, Captain Herbert W. McBride noted that trained riflemen observed the battlefield for targets, found them, and engaged them while untrained riflemen simply put their rifles up over the lip of the trench and pulled the trigger. He further noted that it was the untrained rifleman who usually ran out of ammunition while the trained riflemen did not. Captain McBride also noted that he was shooting rifles in earnest by the age of 12 and shot them with regularity all of his life but it wasn’t until he was in his thirties that he would dare call himself a rifleman as he felt he had not yet attained sufficient knowledge and ability – 18 years of nearly weekly practice before he would dare claim to be a rifleman. [Hmm, that’s food for thought about what it really takes to be good with a rifle.] If you are in any way associated with infantry combat and have not read Captain McBride’s book, you really need to.

So we are sending Americans off to war with minimal rifle marksmanship training to engage an enemy on his turf with inadequate skills. Inadequate skills you ask? Can’t be! Consider: The popup target qualification course is all fired with a battle sight zero out to 300 meters. No allowance is made for wind other than “hold a little this way or a little that way.” No training in reading the wind is given, no formulistic method is taught for wind estimation or how to calculate a wind adjustment even though the rifle itself has a half minute of angle windage adjustment capability. Worse still is that many Soldiers don’t even attempt to shoot the 300-meter targets preferring to save those rounds to ensure a hit on the closer-range targets. They have no idea what adjustments need to go on their rear sights to engage at 400, 500, or 600 meters. What we have then are soldiers whose effective engagement range capability (call it the EERC) is 200 to 225 meters.

One SGLI payment is $400,000. One M855 cartridge costs about $0.25. For sake of argument, say it takes 3,000 rounds to train a Soldier to engage targets really well from 0 to 500 yards (yards vs. meters is intentional here, most Known Distance Ranges are laid out in yards):

• 3,000 x $0.25 = $750 for the ammunition for 1 Soldier

• $400,000/$750 = 533 Soldiers trained to really effectively engage an enemy with rifles via an increasingly difficult and stressful training regimen.

That’s about a battalion’s worth of Soldiers. Does anyone not think that training 533 Soldiers to employ their rifles really well will save at least one Soldier’s life? The Coalition lost 104 Soldiers in Afghanistan during June 2010. How many more before we train to the reality of this fight?

Jeffrey Wall, California Army National Guard, VMI graduate, and a former infantry officer in the Marine Corps who commanded infantry and weapons platoons, a rifle company and guard forces and other companies of up to 600 Marines. He retired as an independent business man in 2001and fought his way back into the service after 9/11. Since then he has served as an ETT in Afghanistan in the Eastern Operating Zone at company through brigade levels. At the California PTAE he has trained hundreds of Soldiers in rifle and pistol marksmanship as well as machinegun gunnery. A Distinguished Pistol Shot, he has “leg points” toward distinguished with the rifle and is a qualified sniper. He was the 2010 All Army Smalls Arms Championship overall winner in the Open category.