Why don't officers wear marksmanship badges?

I wore mine, prior service, earned them.

I am trying to go back in as a Officer.

If I do, you bet your booties that I will still wear my mortar qual badge and CIB unless some reg comes out explicitly forbidding it.

I had been told during WOCS that you only wear the marksmanship badge if you had qualified in that weapon within the year. After seeing this question posted, I did some reading and found the following: DA PAM 670-1 paragraph 20-15b Where Worn: “Marksmanship badges are worn on the Army service/dress uniform coat and service uniform shirt. Female personnel may also wear marksmanship badges on the maternity tunic. Soldiers may wear marksmanship badges unless they fail to qualify in accordance with AR 350–1 or are exempt from qualification by Army regulations.” Therefore, I think the “may” verbiage has allowed officers to not “HAVE TO” put on the marksmanship badge on the uniform. Besides the fact that, in my experience, with JAG and Medical Corp officers they don’t qualify as often as other branches/units (that’s now changing with the focus on readiness/metrics) and thus, in my humble opinion, officers decide not go through the trouble of ever adding it to their uniform. To be honest, no one looking at their uniforms is really checking if they qualified within the year and are wearing the correct authorized one (unless they do it for a DA Photo that is)... I’m thinking more a dining in/out scenario.

I asked my father the same question. My father was a WW2 veteran (87th Mt. Infantry Reg. 10th Mt. Div.) and retired LTC of infantry. When I was an ROTC cadet I noticed the same thing and noticed he did not wear marksmanship badges in any of his pictures. So, probably around 1973 when I came home from basic and was very proud of my expert rifle badge, I asked him why don't officers were marksmanship badges. His reply, based on my memory, was something like this: officers are expected to be expert marksman. He also said something about they should go to the range again and again and again until they are expert marksmen. (Remember, that is the opinion of a WW2 infantry officer.)

When I was Infantry, I was told that officers didn’t wear those because it was expected that we all shot expert, so there was no need for a show of any delineation if we were all expected to be at the same standard as infantry officers, which was expert riflemen. Same as grenadier goes.

To be honest I never notice or even thought about it. As a former enlisted, I would just go from how I perceived officers and that was they were suppose to be better than enlisted. One way to leave that perception intact would be to not show weakness. Yes I know that they are not better and in fact can not compete in many areas but why not leave the impression anyway. Just my thoughts

Served ten years enlisted before OCS. I continued to wear my assigned weapon qualification badge and the driver (track & wheel) that I earned while in the mech infantry. Had several (officer) supervisions, over the years, who required me to remove both qualification badges and the rest of my supervisions didn’t care or were indifferent.

Well quite honestly, the way things are going in this country concerning the displaying of certain inanimate objects, I'm surprised that the display of a any kind of weapon ie "gun" on a military uniform hasn't been banned by the "oversensitive & fragile" civilian types out there (lol) It would be great though if there could be a change of the Enlisted MOS Badges / Emblems for our Class-A's that didn't look so cheezee and non-descript like they currently do. I was an Army 19E & 19K before my USAF years and never cared for that little brass button representation of our MOS while the officers got to wear one that let everybody know that they were a Tanker.

I was prior enlisted Special Forces and continued to wear my marksmanship badges after I received a direct commission in the JAG Corp. Nobody ever quested me.

Marine officers do.