The Marine Corps will soon make major changes to its shooting qualification standards, likely making it tougher for Marines to receive the storied “expert” shooter badge. That is according to the outcome of the fiscal 2024 combat marksmanship symposium, which took place at the end of 2023 with the service’s top weapons and range experts.
The officer in charge, Col. Gregory Jones, the commanding officer of the Weapons Training Battalion in Quantico, Va., said that the shooting evaluations in the future may ask for various inputs like accuracy and speed to derive a comprehensive “lethality score.” This new scoring system takes up crediting Marines for a wide range of skills with a continued focus on combat effectiveness.
He compared the current shooting standards to the Corps’ physical fitness test, which maxes out at 23 pullups for men. He envisions a kinetic system in which the score required for the “expert” badge is considered anew every so often to reflect improvements in human performance. “When I could do 25 pullups, I didn’t get credit for it,” he said, highlighting the need for a more nuanced evaluation system.
The Marine Corps also is equipping bases throughout the Corps with Advanced Small Arms Lethality Trainers, or ASALTs, and associated digital scoresheet tool called the joint marksmanship assessment package, or JMAP, which records shot cadence and shot placement as shooting speed becomes another factor in rifle proficiency. “If I shoot you in the heart in five seconds, but you shoot me in the brain in two seconds, who’s more lethal?”
Jones asked, underscoring that speed is one of the most important factors in combat situations. Recruits at Marine Recruit Depots Parris Island and San Diego began integrating the MantisX Blackbeard system into their marksmanship training in the summer of 2023. This system, which adds an automatic trigger reset, includes a sensor that feeds a shooter’s trigger-pulling behavior to a smartphone or tablet.
By making training more efficient, the PMISR has reduced annual rifle training at entry-level schools from 14 days to 12, Jones said. However, it hasn’t made it any less lethal, he added.
The two days that have been freed up are now used to introduce more advanced shooting skills, including more time for zeroing techniques and supported shooting. “We’re using those two days to give recruits a leg up,” Jones said.
Other changes to the shooting procedures may be considered as the review moves along, including some changes in the sequence of events or even added events. Schools are now left to take further trials within the observation of Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, commanding general of Training and Education Command.
The rifle marksmanship evaluation, approved earlier in March to replace shooting Table 3 through Table 6 at Marine Corps secondary training sites, will be given to lieutenants at The Basic School together with the annual rifle qualification. Both programs are geared toward more realistic shooting and will be utilized along with the joint marksmanship assessment package to capture data on proficiency and training gaps.
Gunnery Sgt. Mike Paugh, who works with the Marines’ infantry shooting curriculum at the Weapon Training Battalion, said on the other hand that the rifle marksmanship assessment allows them to first find out where the Marines are lacking and how they can be further trained to be lethal, based on their one-shot presentations and their ability to reload.
These efforts to make shooting standards more rigorous come just a few years after the Marine Corps introduced its annual rifle qualification regime in 2021. The new qualification would place greater emphasis on realistic combat scenarios and was expected to shrink the service’s 65 percent “expert” qualification rate down to just 6 percent. Though the impact was not quite that dramatic, “expert” ratings did dip down to between 25 and 30 percent.
To offset this decline, the Corps began offering Marines who earn the lesser “marksman” and “sharpshooter” badges two additional chances to head to the range and try for an expert on their own time. Jones explained that the aim is not to reduce the overall number of “expert” shooters but to weed out old and flawed assumptions about what makes a shooter effective and proficient. “The sports are similar, but they’re not the same,” he said. “If rugby is combat, we shouldn’t be training for football,” he said.
If rugby is combat, we shouldn’t be training for football. In the Indo-Pacific, Active Reserve Marine Sgt. Ernesto Camacho serves as an aircraft electrical systems technician with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 112. He called the last six months “work,” but he reported a far busier scene patrolling the skies of that region. Marine fighter attack aircraft have flown, trained, partnered, and maintained a deterrence check on adversary actions across the region. Camacho said, “It was a flex. And I think we did it well. If anything were to happen, we were ready.”