Video: Marines Experiment with Moving Targets on Range

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The Army and Marine Corps want to make rifle qualifications and marksmanship training more realistic.

This is a subject that associate editor Matthew Cox has covered for us in the past. In fact, Cox was at last month's moving targets demonstration that the Marine Corps hosted at Quantico Marine Base, Va.

Above is a video that was party shot from that demonstration. It also has a few of the key players on the Marine side talking about the importance of the project and where it is going.

"Current marksmanship tables in the annual rifle qualification are completely unrealistic to train a Marine to shoot a moving target. Any Marine watching this is going to know shooting those movers on table two that that's the truth," Capt. Ben Brewster, a project officer with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, says in the video above.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group are leading the way on the initiative. Here's a breakdown by Cox on what the moving targets demonstration entailed:

"The Sept. 16-27 experiment had a handful of Marine instructors from The Basic School here practicing a series of techniques for hitting moving targets while shooting from the prone, kneeling and standing positions with M4 carbines and the service’s M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle.

"They used the tracking method, which involves leading the target before shooting at it. Marines also practiced using the ambush method, which calls for picking a fixed point in front of a moving target and firing as it moves into it.

"The third technique is known as the swing through method. The newer technique has the shooter begin firing at the rear edge of the target, moving the muzzle forward to the front while continuing to fire.

"The experiment also involved Marines firing in semiautomatic and three-round burst modes from the M4, and full auto from the M27."

 

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