Army tackles marksmanship shortfalls with new training course

The Army is launching a training course to fix a deficit in one of the most fundamental skills of soldiering: shooting straight.

The Marksmanship Master Trainer Course was first stood up by the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit, the service’s elite competitive shooters. This spring, it will launch Army-wide and fall under the 316th Cavalry Brigade. The course is already available on the Army Training Requirements and Resources System, or ATRRS.

Soldiers must be well-versed in the basics of soldiering, said Maj. Gen. Scott Miller, commanding general of the Maneuver Center of Excellence and Fort Benning, Georgia.

“If you don’t have the foundational skills, you don’t get better when we put more stress on you,” he said.

Leaders believe so strongly in the course that graduates will receive an Additional Skill Identifier (which is still in the works and does not yet have a number or letter designation).
We think it’s important that people who come through this are identified, so as a company or battalion-level command team, you can start identifying these individuals as they come in, and we can help manage them better, too,” Miller said.

The hope is for the MMTC to help the Army fill a gap in its marksmanship abilities, said Capt. James Pickett, the operations officer for the Army Marksmanship Unit.

“It’s a fix for a problem, but I think it’s important we not focus on the problem,” he said. “This knowledge did atrophy, but it atrophied naturally. Think about all the deployments [soldiers did]. How much time do you think they really had to focus on stuff?”
The MMTC was born out of a recent Maneuver Warfighter Conference and backed by Miller.

After almost 15 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, “maybe we’d lost the essence of being able to focus on the basics,” he said.

As the Maneuver Center of Excellence looked at the areas it should focus on, “from the standpoint of lethality,” leaders began to examine soldiers’ proficiency with their individual weapons, Miller said.

“When you start talking about basic rifle marksmanship, it’s actually very measurable,” he said. “When we looked across the force, what we wanted to do was move more of our shooters to the expert level. It’s a trainable skill.”

Soldiers who score a 36 or higher out of 40 targets during weapons qualification qualify as expert marksmen. Those who hit 30 to 35 of the 40 targets are sharpshooters, while those who score a 23 through 29 are marksmen. Soldiers who shoot 22 or lower do not qualify.
Leaders “didn’t like where our numbers were” in terms of how many soldiers were qualifying as experts, Miller said.

But the issue wasn’t just in the scores, Miller said. It was in resources as well.

“The biggest shortfall is trained personnel to train soldiers,” he said, adding that basic rifle marksmanship is “a skill you generally don’t lose if you learn it right the first time.”

“If you don’t teach them right the first time, you have this self-perpetuating problem,” Miller said.

The ability to plan and resource training is another skill set that likely has atrophied over the course of almost 15 years of war, Miller said.

“What the Army has gotten used to is you have trainers come to you,” he said. “But if you just show up to training as opposed to planning training, that’s a skill that can atrophy.”

The problem isn’t poor noncommissioned officers, said Lt. Col. Bret Tecklenburg, commander of the Army Marksmanship Unit.

“We’ve culturally lost the ability to teach soldiers how to train and shoot marksmanship,” he said. “To fix it, we have to equip NCOs to do their duties. Without the information they need, they can’t do it.”
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