Army tackles-marksmanship-shortfalls-new-training-course

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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
Army tackles marksmanship
shortfalls with new training course
By: Michelle Tan, March 15, 2016 (Photo Credit: Brenda Rolin/Army)
HOME YOUR ARMY WASHINGTON DEFENSE NEWS BEST FOR VETS BENEFITS MILITARY L

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).
Army Times
Inside the Army's new
Marksmanship Master Trainer
Course
“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.
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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?”
Army leaders are sharpening soldiers' marksmanship skills to
bring more of them to the expert level. Here, Sgt. Arthur Ruepong,
assigned to the 55th Signal Company (Combat Camera), fires his
M4 during a field training exercise at Fort A.P. Hill, Va., in
September.
Photo Credit: Sgt. 1st Class Christophe Paul/Army
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.
Staff Sgt. Joel Strauch, 1st Battalion, 19th Infantry, 198th Infantry
Brigade, loads magazines Jan. 26 at McAndrews Range. The Sand
Hill drill sergeant is attending the Marksmanship Master Trainer
Course that trains soldiers to teach marksmanship to other
soldiers. The course has been added to the Army Training
Requirements and Resources System this year.
Photo Credit: Brenda Rolin/Army
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.”
Army Times
Myth vs. reality: Army pros
dispel common marksmanship
misconceptions

One big challenge facing the Army is time — or
the lack thereof.
“When you have quite a few requirements levied
on you, you start mixing and matching what’s
important,” Miller said.
Some shooters have the aptitude and
foundational knowledge to only need three or
four days to get up to speed, he said. Others
need more time.
“You need to anticipate more time because we
have to get basic marksmanship right,” he said.
In his assessment, Miller said he believes the
Army can do better when it comes to
marksmanship.
“I didn’t see it as a catastrophic failure,” he said. “I
thought we could do much better and drive up
our expectations.”
The marksmanship initiatives are already
producing results.
Experts at the Maneuver Center measured a One
Station Unit Training infantry unit within the
198th Infantry Brigade.
Two years ago, 52 percent of the soldiers were
qualifying as marksmen, the minimum standard,
said Col. Geoffrey Norman, the operations officer
for the Maneuver Center. Of the others, 38
percent qualified as sharpshooters and 10

percent as experts.
Since then, the unit has made changes to its
marksmanship training strategy and integrated
MMTC-certified trainers, Norman said. A
snapshot of the unit’s marksmanship scores
taken in December showed a 40 percent
reduction in soldiers qualifying as marksmen, he
said.
In December, just 12 percent of the soldiers were
qualifying as marksmen. As many as 34 percent
qualified as experts and 54 percent as
sharpshooters.
“Their numbers are representative of the returns
on investment for this program,” Norman said.
“[The Maneuver Center] envisions an increase in
sharpshooters and experts, people who are real
masters of their weapons. We’ve seen a huge
reduction in folks just getting by.”
Pickett said the shortfalls in marksmanship
abilities and knowledge across the force were
“obvious” to him.
“I can definitely tell you what I struggled most in
was trying to get people to understand how to
shoot and how to teach shooting,” he said.
Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Rose, chief of the AMU
instructor training group, agreed, adding that
there is a lot of misinformation in the force about
shooting and marksmanship.

They include a lack of understanding when it
comes to basic ballistics and what happens to a
bullet after it leaves the barrel.
“Some people thought a bullet accelerated once
it was fired,” Pickett said. “But it’s really a struggle
against gravity the minute it leaves, and it’s
[traveling] a downward arc.”
Plenty of soldiers, regardless of rank, had that
misconception, Pickett said.
Some soldiers also didn’t understand how to
adjust the sights on their rifles, Rose said. Others
didn’t understand minute of angle, which is a way
to measure a rifle’s accuracy, and how it affects
shot groups. Still others don’t know how to zero
the iron sights on their rifles because they’ve only
learned to do so with optics.
Pickett credited Miller for pushing for the MMTC.
“He recognized that there was a huge knowledge
gap in marksmanship and that knowledge gap
particularly affected the NCOs’ ability to teach
marksmanship effectively at their unit,” he said.
This includes the ability to plan training events
and knowing how to get the required resources,
such as ammunition and ranges, for training,
Pickett said.
The first MMTC kicked off in late 2014, Rose said.
To date, more than 230 NCOs have graduated as
marksmanship master trainers, he said.

The ﬁrst soldiers to attend the course included
drill sergeants and soldiers at the marksmanship
academy at Fort Drum, New York, Rose said.
“Now we’re continuing to target E-5 to E-7
[soldiers] but we’re opening that up to whoever
needs the training,” he said.
Now that MMTC has been approved as a Training
and Doctrine Command course, it’s time for AMU
to hand oﬀ the day-to-day responsibilities of the
course to the Maneuver Center of Excellence,
Tecklenburg said.
“We’re responsible for helping the Army with
marksmanship, but we don’t have a large cadre
of instructors,” he said.
The unit only has about 140 personnel, about
100 of them soldiers.
The biggest challenge facing the MMTC is
capacity, Tecklenburg said.
“With only a few courses run and the capacity of
putting in 30 at a time, we have thousands of
NCOs that we need to reach,” he said.
For Tecklenburg, “ultimately, success is when
units are running their own marksmanship
training within their units,” he said.
The Maneuver Center of Excellence’s 316th
Cavalry Brigade, which is responsible for the
master gunner and sniper schools, will partner

with AMU to run the Marksmanship Master
Trainer Course, said Lt. Col. Bob Underwood,
deputy commander of the 316th Cavalry Brigade.
“We were a natural ﬁt for putting the course into
the long-term institutional process,” he said.
“We’re the long-term manning solution, but the
execution of the course is still going to be a
partnership with AMU.”
Day-to-day, soldiers from 1st Battalion, 29th
Infantry, which is part of the 316th Cavalry
Brigade, will run the course.
The plan is to run three pilot courses on ATRRS;
in April, June and August, Underwood said.
The pilots will validate the course as it goes
Army-wide, said Richard Eggers, who oversees
training management for the 316th Cavalry
Brigade.
“The curriculum is never static within the
educational realm, so you’re always improving it,”
he said.
The MMTC is similar to the master gunner
courses that already exist for Bradley and tank
gunners, except instead of focusing on a speciﬁc
platform, MMTC focuses on the individual,
Underwood said.
“It’s really about excellence,” he said. “It’s about
getting beyond basic marksmanship and driving
towards being excellent in the fundamentals of

marksmanship.”
Once the MMTC is up and running, the 316th
Cavalry Brigade can run as many as 15 courses a
year. Each class can hold 30 students at a time.
Students are supplied with weapons, optics and
ammunition.
The primary cost of running the course is
ammunition; each course costs about $50,000 to
run, Underwood said.
Soldiers who attend MMTC must successfully
complete a “shoot-in process,” Rose said.
On their first day, students must zero a rifle and
shoot, using iron sights, at least 23 out of 40
targets — the bare minimum to qualify on a rifle
— to remain in the course, he said.
“We ask you to clear a hurdle right out of the
gate,” Pickett said. “[The course] is five weeks, we
have a lot of material to cover, so we look for a
baseline of capability so we know that unit isn’t
wasting their time and money by sending that
guy, and our instructors aren’t having their time
wasted, either.”

Staff Sgt. Logan Gaughan, left, Marksmanship Master Trainer
Course instructor, gives a brief to MMTC students Jan. 26. The
five-week course trains soldiers to teach marksmanship and was
developed by the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit.
Photo Credit: Brenda Rolin/Army
MMTC is unique because it doesn’t just teach
NCOs how to shoot, Rose said.
“We’re actually teaching those noncommissioned
officers how to teach others,” he said. “A lot of
the curriculum is based around not only their
knowledge and ability to shoot, but also how they
articulate that knowledge and teach it.”
During the course, students will use standard
equipment that is easily available across the
Army, Rose said.
This means they’ll train with standard, rack-grade
M4 carbine and the M855 green-tipped
ammunition that’s standard issue, he said.
The instructors at AMU also “took great care” to
make sure the course was conducted on ranges
that can be found anywhere in the Army, Rose
said. None of the training takes place on “ranges

specific to AMU,” he said.
“We want them to take this training back to the
force and use the ranges they already have,” he
said.
The MMTC is the most comprehensive train-the-
trainer program put together by AMU, Pickett
said. It also will be the first course designed by
the unit to become a full-fledged Army-wide
course via ATRRS, he said.
“What you get out of a graduate is really a force
multiplier for any echelon that he’s assigned to,”
Pickett said.
AMU also is working to get the word out to
commanders about the abilities of a course
graduate. This includes briefing soon-to-be
command teams attending the Pre-Command
Course on post.
“It’s great because we give them a shooting
demonstration, how we do blocks of instruction,
and let them shoot a little,” Rose said. “When
they get an MMTC graduate in their formations,
they know what they’re capable of and how they
can be used.”
So far, graduates of the MMTC have been
surprised by how much they learn, Rose said.
“Usually the first week they spend here, we
debunk a lot of myths, and we’re not just telling
them, we’re getting out and showing them,” he

said. “It’s going to change the way that soldiers
think about shooting.”
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