In Special Forces, nothing is given and everything is earned. Fresh on a team as an 18 Bravo (Special Forces Weapons Sergeant) and hungry to show how valuable I was to the detachment, I wanted to bring the tactical capabilities of my unit a step up. I had seen other 18B’s running pre-deployment range work ups for their teams, but their programs seemed so vanilla and rudimentary. “Ready up” drills and basic lateral shooting with some depth movement; essentially, comfort food drills.
But we were Special Forces. Why wouldn’t we go beyond what was taught in the regular Army?
I laid out a plan to my Team Sergeant. I could make our guys better tacticians as well as better shooters. Starting with marksmanship from static positions at fixed distances, we would progress into both linear and lateral movement, eventually incorporating weapons manipulation on the move and under stress before applying these skills in “real-world” settings.
Taking my team through that process, I got to see first hand, exactly how other pro-end users learn. I would build on that to continually refine my POI (Program of Instruction), through the rest of my career in the US Army but there was a bigger lesson ahead…
When we got in our first gunfight, there were a number of tactics we had trained for on the flat range that proved impractical in combat. Trying to assume a “correct” marksmanship position took a backseat to necessity when the shooting started. Quick and accurate fire came from shooting in natural positions, not fighting the body’s center of gravity and orienting plates to the threat. In real world direct action missions with simultaneous clears, we discovered coming in high gun meant the M4 could be used to push, pin or drive a threat out of a threshold, whereas in the shoot houses, high gun was frowned upon as something SEALs did.
In combat, that hubris went out the window. We were fighting with rifles inside of rooms, dealing with anywhere from zero to fifty people who we had to immediately identify as a shoot or no-shoot so if something didn’t work consistently or wasn’t repeatable under fire, it got dumped. Immediately. End of story. Successful repeated application of a technique in combat was and is the only thing that counts.
Today, the POI I teach is Fundamentals of Gunfighting vs. Fundamentals of Marksmanship. Marksmanship proved to be the easiest technical element of gunfighting, honed with proven isolation drills and repped out consistently for sustainment. However it is the application of marksmanship, combined with immediate target discrimination and maneuver, that pays the bills. Entering a relative unknown and being able to immediately solve problems is the true hard skill that requires consistent good reps under oversight to improve, and that is the point of all of this. Create a path for improvement as a team and individual – because improving to the point where we kill the enemy and they don’t kill us is the whole reason we train.
– Mike Glover
FieldCraft LLC
Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Bravo Company USA. Bravo Company is home of the Gunfighters, and each week they bring us a different trainer to offer some words of wisdom.
