Since the 1850s the French marksmanship school at Vincennes and British School of Musketry at the Hythe have been teaching the fundamentals of marksmanship. While Henry Heth (US Army captain and later Confederate general) adopted those techniques and wrote a manual which was adopted during the Civil War, the US Army has been wrestling with teaching soldiers how to shoot. Don't video games teach it and if so, it should be easy to adapt games to marksmanship instructions. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman told us that Duck Hunt was the reason why many young recruits were shooting expert.
Those are great historic references, however, they're from well before World War 2. The decline this article references started after WW2. Shooting "expert" under current standards is still very low because the standards have been in decline.
OMG, if there was only a branch of the military that teaches and excels at individual marksmanship the army could adopt plans from? What will they ever do?
The Army has not been training soldiers since the book “Mud Soldiers “ was published in the late 1980s. Since then the warrior ethos and resiliency of the NCO has gone away. Removing Failure to Adapt discharges forced units to keep soldiers that couldn’t hang. We need to get born again hard, quickly!
Since the 1850s the French marksmanship school at Vincennes and British School of Musketry at the Hythe have been teaching the fundamentals of marksmanship. While Henry Heth (US Army captain and later Confederate general) adopted those techniques and wrote a manual which was adopted during the Civil War, the US Army has been wrestling with teaching soldiers how to shoot. Don't video games teach it and if so, it should be easy to adapt games to marksmanship instructions. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman told us that Duck Hunt was the reason why many young recruits were shooting expert.
Those are great historic references, however, they're from well before World War 2. The decline this article references started after WW2. Shooting "expert" under current standards is still very low because the standards have been in decline.
OMG, if there was only a branch of the military that teaches and excels at individual marksmanship the army could adopt plans from? What will they ever do?
The irony is that the Marine Corps initially started its program by copying what the Army National Guard was doing.
The Army has not been training soldiers since the book “Mud Soldiers “ was published in the late 1980s. Since then the warrior ethos and resiliency of the NCO has gone away. Removing Failure to Adapt discharges forced units to keep soldiers that couldn’t hang. We need to get born again hard, quickly!
The events of Task Force Smith predate the assessment in "Mud Soldiers" by decades, indicating this started much earlier than the 1980s:
https://funshoot.substack.com/p/task-force-smith