When you’re training, your main goal should always be to improve tactical and technical proficiency. Combat is a contest of skills and abilities, and without tactical & technical proficiency you’ll surely lose this contest, going from survivalist to speed bump before you know it.
Let’s start by defining these terms. Technical proficiency is obtained from the experiences you gain from training whatever equipment you plan on using, whether it be an AR-15 [1], a field dressing or a compass, to name a few. Tactical proficiency is best gained through experience training with your team, such tactical movement exercises, drills for reacting to enemy contact, and so on. To attain a level of proficiency that will sustain you through a life or death fight, you need to train. Proper training will help you to overcome the small problems that can compound and cripple your ability to kill your enemies and protect your loved ones.
But how do you train?
While at the range, a good approach would be to go into your range drills the same way a professional athlete would go about his or her workout; with a well thought out plan that details what exercises you’re going to perform and how much time or ammo you’re going to devote to each activity. This approach will help you train more efficiently, instead of just going to the range without goals and a well thought out plan. Poorly planned training wastes both time and ammo, and can quickly get expensive while building poor form and weaknesses. A wide variety of range drills are out there on the internet for you to take and implement in your own training program, on web sites like www.vikingtactics.com [2] and www.pistol-training.com [3] to name a couple.
Don’t forget about how beneficial it can be to practice dry firing your weapon against a safe backdrop. Army Special Operations soldiers have been known to spend their first 2 weeks of weapons training only dry firing their weapons, because this is a very effective way to develop the muscle memory to bring your weapon up on target quickly. As a sniper, I dry-fired my M110 a lot to remain familiar with the feel of the trigger and to practice my marksmanship fundamentals. While deployed to Iraq I was able to keep up on my marksmanship skills just by dry firing. A 70% dry fire / 30% live fire ratio during weapons training has proven to be a good, cheap, and low profile way to maintain and refine your skills as a firearms operator.
Training blocks are a great way to manage your time and help your training program transition from one fundamental element to another, while maintaining accountability of what skills you’ve practiced and what skills need practice. For instance, in my group’s carbine training plan (We have different training plans for each weapon system we train on, as well as different aspects of operations, such as first aid/self aid and land navigation), Block 1 is a simple loading/reloading drill. We break Block 1 down into different sub blocks, because there are different methods to how we reload our weapons, depending on what type of environment you’re in, e.g., Admin loading is done before range training, patrols; tactical reloads are used when there’s a lull in the gunfight and you have an opportunity to top off your weapons; and speed reloads are used when in a time-is-life situation, such as when there are bullets snapping past your head and your bolt locks to the rear.
Our next block would be Basic Marksmanship, since that would logically come after loading your weapon, and so on. So when you look at it on our training plan it looks like this:
RIFLE/CARBINE TRAINING PLAN
Block 1- Load/ Reload and AR-15
- Administrative Reload
- Tactical Reload
- Speed Reload
Block 2- Basic Marksmanship Drills
- Prone Supported
- Prone Unsupported
- Kneeling
- Standing
- Short Range Marksmanship
- Intermediate Range Marksmanship
Block 3- Advanced Carbine
- Weapon Transitions
- Offhand Marksmanship
Block 4- Malfunction Correction Drills
- Immediate Action Drill
- Remedial Action Drills
Of course there are many more aspects to employing an AR-15, but, for all intents and purposes, you should develop your own training program that best suits you and your team’s needs.
After you’ve designed enough training plans you might wish to combine them and have a team field training exercise, if you have the resources to do so. Not only are these fun team building events (when done right), but your team can focus on a wide variety of different skills, and can evaluate individual members to diagnose areas that need more training, like first aid, marksmanship, or land navigation.
Okay, some things to think about when actually employing your training plan: I like to keep records on my skills as they progress, and when I don’t see the type of improvement in a certain area that I’d like to see, I’ll focus on that problem area by devoting more training time to it. It seems pretty obvious, I know, but if you don’t keep tabs on your progression you’re not going to know what skills need attention. Keeping a training journal will pay off big time in the long run.
- Buy a shooting timer. I use a PACT-III Timer and it is awesome for working on your Balance of Speed and Accuracy (BSA [4]) Drills. Training with a shooting timer will help you get rounds on target a lot faster, and they’re especially good for short range marksmanship training.
- Dummy rounds are excellent training tools. You can randomly put them into your buddy’s magazines to help build better immediate action skills.
- If you can, try to video tape your training. If you’re trying to learn how to do a dynamic team movement, video is a great tool to help you see who needs work, and to show that person what they’re doing wrong. Sometimes you have to actually see what you’re doing wrong to understand how to improve. Video is also a good way to help improve the mechanical aspects of drawing your handgun or transitioning to your handgun from your carbine, because you can actually see and identify where your excess waste movement is coming from and can better eliminate it.
- Lists are your best ally if you hate leaving things behind. Pretty straightforward, but a lot of people don’t think to take the time to put together a quick list and do a quick layout of everything you want to make sure you have, before you leave for the range. (When I was in my company’s sniper section, our training coordinator would always forget something important when we went to conduct training, and it would cost us hours of valuable training time. One time, we were going to conduct a stalking exercise, and when we got out to our training area he realized he didn’t have the table that the guys on glass needed, so he had to go back to get a folding table. When he got back, we went to go grab our blank rounds that we would be using, and we realized nobody remembered to bring the blanks that we needed. The next time we went out training we made sure we had detailed checklists for everything we needed, and that helped immensely.)
- Research and develop your own creative drills to train with. Go take classes if at all possible. Training weighs nothing, you can take it anywhere, and you only have to pay for it once. If you can’t make your way to a course at OnPoint Tactical or Magpul Dynamics, you can watch Magpul Dynamics DVDs, which have a ton of great information on them, and it’s also easy to find a lot of good tips on YouTube for free from some tactical training schools, like Viking Tactics.
- A good way to induce stress into training is to put the shooter under some sort of bodily exertion, maybe by knocking out 25 pushups or some sprints before the buzzer goes off, and using a stopwatch to time the shooter.
- My favorite way to practice reloads for both my primary and secondary weapons is to take several magazines and have a buddy load only a few rounds into each one, and to speed reload/ tactical reload after each magazine runs out, until I’m “rounds complete.” You can also do weapons transitions between reloads with this drill, and this is also a great way to stretch a small amount of training ammo. You can incorporate dry firing into this exercise to get even more mileage out of it.
All in all, training should be the first thing in your mind when you’re prepping. This article focuses mostly on weapons training, but a good technical proficiency is absolutely needed with all aspects of your self reliance, and without a good technically and tactically proficient team when the horde comes or while bugging out, you’re sure to be dead in the water. Remember: All the cool guy gear in the world means nothing if you don’t know how to use it, and when things go south it’s already too late to start learning.
About The Author: “I’m a B4 qualified Army Sniper with two combat deployments to Iraq under my belt; one as a Sniper and the prior one as a Rifleman and SAW [5] Gunner. I gained teaching experience as an instructor for my battalion’s Squad Designated Marksman program and by training Iraqi National Army (INA) soldiers on numerous occasions, and have been an avid shooter since age 10.”