Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
Being able to pass the APWT was proven to have no benefit to shooting conducted under stress. This was confirmed by trials. Most empirical evidence seems to indicate that a "good enough" standard of shooting is all that is required.
I look at it this way. If a soldier can't group (from the prone position) 5 rounds within 4 inches @ 100m or 1 inch @ 25m then you do two things. You fire his instructor and take his weapon away and issue him with a machette.

All he will do is make the contact area more noisy and be a greater danger to you than the enemy.

Once qualified to marksman level in the equivalent of APWT then the real training can begin.

Remember there is basic training and recruit training and then there is ETS training (exercise trained soldier). In most armies the basic training does not flow directly into being inserted into unit already in a war situation.

In Rhodesia we did and that made the training people get a lot smarter. And in many instances the training instructors were NCOs rotated out of ops to do the training and subsequently were 100% operationally current.

There's sub calibre devices, TPTP rounds, and today you even have simulators.
OK, but that is not live firing. So can we agree then that the live ammo allocated to training will be fired by the selected crews who in turn are probably selected as a result of using the other stuff?

Well IIRC Moltke said that in war only the simple succeeds. My whole point is to keep it all very simple. My take is to massively reduce "musketry" to simple operational shooting skills and spend the rest of the time and budget on the other platoon weapons.
Ok, lets agree on the basics here and they are , aiming , holding, breathing and squeezing. Once this is mastered at the 'entry level' say by score a 4" group @ 100m etc etc then we introduce light variation, moving targets, making the shooter out of breath before having to shoot etc etc. What goes and what stays and what gets added?

But yes... I think I can see where you are coming from. More kills are propably made by weapons other than rifles and so concentrate on where the difference will be made.