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1. On June 16, 2023 at 4:04 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:

   The Marine Corps has been corrupted and contaminated by the same toxic influences that have ruined so much else in American public life. So, in light of this, it is sad but perhaps not unexpected to say that the traditions of the Corps have been diluted and corrupted as well. Standards have been compromised downward. What else can it be called when sixty percent of newly-qualified trainees at boot camp are “expert” riflemen?

   The whole point of having three levels of marksmanship qualification is to recognize that whereas every Marine is a rifleman and therefore must meet a uniform standard of competency and skill, there is an elite group at the very top of those who earn the term “rifleman,” which is what is supposed to be denoted by the expert rifleman’s qualification badge.

   In other words, if everyone is an expert, no one is an expert.

   None of this ought to be surprising, since it is absolutely characteristic of the ‘woke’ Cultural Marxists to attack the very idea of competency and merit itself.
   At this point, I’m actually surprised that the marksmanship qualifications haven’t been attacked as “white supremacy” or “toxic masculinity” or nonsense along those lines.

   Perhaps I ought to place permanent quotation marks around “Marine Corps,” since whatever it is today is certainly not something great Marines of the past such as John Basilone or Chesty Puller would recognize.

   Off-topic, but perhaps it would interests your readers to know that the Marine Corps has just disbanded their renowned scout-sniper program. The current commandant apparently believes that the existence of drones and UAVs makes such training obsolete for modern, 21st-century warfare. What an idiot. I’m being sarcastic, but only just – is he working for the Chi-Coms, too?

2. On June 16, 2023 at 9:53 pm, X said:

   Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this video dated? Yes, the Marines used to use a qualification course similar to National Match. However my understanding is that a couple of years ago they transitioned from the M-16 to the M-4 and changed their qual program to be more like the Army’s.

3. On June 17, 2023 at 9:34 am, PGF said:

   @X, I don’t know. The point of the post, I hoped, was to find some baseline for training that we might use. But, many here are interested in history too. If there is a link to the historical “gold standard” that the Marines have used prior, we’d be interested in that. I’m not a marine.

4. On June 17, 2023 at 8:21 pm, X said:

   Well, the “baseline for training that we might use” WAS the old Marine qualification, which is three-position slinged shooting at 200, 300 and 600 yards. Very similar to NRA/CMP National Match. (The Corps modified it from 600 to 500 for the M-16).

   The NEW qualification course is based more on reactive snap-shooting with the M-4:

   https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/02/23/the-new-marine-corps-rifle-qualification-is-here/

5. On June 20, 2023 at 12:38 am, Georgiaboy61 said:

   There’s nothing wrong with working on reactive shooting, but that should come after mastery of the fundamentals of field shooting with a sling, done the old way as it was done by the Old Breed.

   During the Second World War, the assault rifle revolution in small arms began. The USSR and Germany were the first nations to implement the idea on a large scale, against one another in the largest land war in human history then being fought on the eastern front.

   The U.S. took part also, with its M-1/M-2 Carbine and its intermediate .30-Carbine cartridge, but the whole assault rifle/intermediate cartridge model didn’t really take hold amongst the Anglo-American allies until latter on after the war, in the 1950s-1960s and afterward.

   The Corps has always believed that for the individual rifleman, it is not shots fired that count, but the number of hits on target obtained per number of shots fired. Real firepower, in other words, is hitting the target.

   However, the army adopted a fire-suppression model based on laying down as much fire per unit of area as possible. This approach was in part dictated by changing ideas about the nature of infantry combat and technology, but also by the nature of the Vietnam War, which was fought not only conventionally but asymmetrically and as a guerilla war. And the closed-in nature of much of the terrain in SE Asia – dense, triple canopy jungle – only added to this mindset.

   Assault rifles (and the intermediate cartridges they use) are ideally-suited to engagements of 0-300 yards/meters, which is the range envelope in which most infantry combat takes place.

   However, as our forces learned in subsequent conflicts and actions in places like Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, intermediate and long-range contact with our enemies did not go away. And in those wars, aimed precision fire again assumed its historic importance, as the “Muj” (mujahadeen) took to engaging U.S. & ISIF forces from beyond 300 meter/yard ranges.

   That’s why the old war-horses like the M-14 and G3 were hauled out of mothballs and re-entered the fight; the troops needed the extended range possible with the full-power 7.62x51mm NATO M80 Ball/FMJ round.

   In sum, then, if those running the Marine Corps these days believe that they can safely set aside and neglect the old ways of learning riflemanship as practiced by Marines of the past, they are making a serious mistake.

   Our experiences in Afghanistan show that the smart enemy will engage you not on the terms you wish, but on terms advantageous to him and at a time and place of his choosing. If you wish to engage between 0-300m, then you can bet he’ll learn to hit you from 300-600m or in some other manner that works to his tactical advantage.

   Perhaps even the army is learning that what is old can again become new, because the new Sig Spear MCX 6.8x51mm rifle and cartridge seem to suggest that precision LR riflemanship is again a priority for them.

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