In the last episode, I discussed the Martial Marksman ideal and how it relates to the various topics I talk about here. One of the challenges that anyone going down this path quickly runs into is the fact that there is a lot of "stuff" to learn and practice. It's one thing for a professional soldier to do these things, but it's a very different beast for Everyday Marksmen like you and I.
Military members have the benefit of government pockets paying for training, equipment, travel, and the like. In a perfect world, professional military members make their living pursuing the Martial Marksman ideals, and don't have to worry about competing day jobs and other obligations. Of course, I know that it's not realistic, given the number of "additional duties" and superfluous other stuff they have to do. That's besides the point.
So the non-professional aspiring Martial Marksman must play within a different set of boundaries. It's not that they can't have it all, because they can achieve everything we're setting out to do. But they cannot have it all right now.
Chasing every scenario and capability at the same time is a bottomless pit of spending money, stress, and neglect of our day-to-day lives.
Today I'm introducing the Martial Marksman's training philosophy. These are not so much laws as they are guiding principles to help us stay within the bounds of budgetary, time, and training restraints. As we explore more aspects of the Martial Marksman's capability set in the future, I'll refer back to these principles over and over.
So let's dig in.
The Big Picture Training Principles
I've spent a lot of time writing and talking about different ways to approach Marksmen problems. What I have thus far failed to do is tie them all together into a repeatable methodology. Today I'm changing that. Here are my five training principles from here on in. I'll break each one down a little further as we go.
* Train for the target
* There is no such thing as optimum
* Embrace simplicity
* It's training, not entertainment
* Play the long game
If you've been a long time reader and listener, then I bet you'll recognize a few of these themes. They've showed up again and again throughout my writing. Each one might be worth it's own article or podcast episode on its own.
Training for the Target
A good training program is intentional, not arbitrary. In practice, this means that the training objective is based on something real and tangible rather than something that sounds good in theory. This came into focus for me the last time I talked to John Simpson when he released his book on patrol rifle marksmanship.
To illustrate a marksmanship example, if you ask most people what their personal rifle accuracy standard is, I bet 8 out of 10 will tell you that it's 1 Minute of Angle (MOA), or about 1" spread for every 100 yards of distance. If you follow up with, "ok...but, why?" then you'll get some variation of, "because that's what everyone says."
While we hope not to do it, a Martial Marksman is prepared to fight against human adversaries who wish to do harm. At 300 yards, the outside edge specified by Trainfire, a human is not 3" tall or wide. Since a human is roughly 19" wide (shoulder to shoulder) and 10" deep (sternum to spine), the actual accuracy standard is closer to 3.3 MOA at the minimum.
