Battle Drill

[Rex Brynen]

but I know the groups of soldiers who go paintballing together become very adept at working together, And the sting kinda gets the point across to.

Get guns close enough to familiar feel and you could get great drilling anytime anywhere with just a quick stop at your local wholesaler.

You do have to be careful with paintball as a form of tactical training--it teaches some lessons well--and others very poorly.

To start with, paintballs are sufficiently inaccurate that rapid movement provides far more protection than it does on a real battlefield against an enemy equipped with automatic weapons. Overwatch is harder because its difficult to hit anything out past 30 meters. Indeed, at ranges much beyond that, the paintball is so slow, and the trajectory so arced, that a good player can often simply dodge the incoming round--assuming that you can put it anywhere near them. Even when they hit, they usually won't break, and you may not even feel them.

That doesn't work with either 5.56 or 7.62

You can compensate for this somewhat with electronic triggers or fully automatic markers, but then you run into another problem: fire discipline and ammunition supply. I can easily go through a couple of thousand rounds of paintballs in a day with a standard unmodified semi-automatic marker. Similar rates of ammunition expenditure in combat conditions could be fatal.

Third, cover works different. With paintball, leaves and small branches are enough to provide semi-hard cover. That's not a lesson you want your soldiers to learn It would better at training for MOUT, where shorter ranges and snap-to-fire times reduce the differences between real weapons and paintball markers a little.

As for the sting, try playing in the winter up here. Paintballs aren't quite so soft then, and its damn hard to run through several feet of snow