I qualified EXPERT.... what does that mean? [Feat. Bloke On The Range]

This episode was brought to you by Slate Black Industries. For M-LOK grips and accessories, visit slateblackindustries.com. The confirmed army expert marksman. Better yet, U.S. Marine Corps. 500 yard qualification for the rifles. Completed iron sight only. Personally, I qualified expert with this particular firearm. With this particular firearm and this one using that optic over that. Qualifying expert in your issued firearm shows a certain level of proficiency and adhering to military standard. But does qualifying as an expert marksman mean that you are also an expert in small arms development and handling? Just with a basic rifle qualification. Rifle quals are like the driver's license test. You're supposed to be qualified if you're operating the equipment under official capacity. Today we'll talk about three different fallacies that may occur if one were to purely assume expertise in small arms development or handling just because of an outdated military qualification. Fallacy number one, context matters. So oftentimes we get asked, exactly how big are these targets that you're shooting at? So from your left to your right, you'll see the reduced size IPSC target that we sometimes use for 500 yard clearance on the practical accuracy course. You have a standard IPSC target that we all know and love from IPSC and three gun activities. We have the 500 yard gong that we use to clear 500 yards on practical accuracy. And then we have a U.S. Army regulation sized pop-up target that's slightly camouflaged right now. And then at the very end, because we couldn't fit it in the vehicle, we've digitally imposed the U.S. Marine Corps 500 yard B modified qualification target that they use for rifle qual. And then my jeep. So we've moved up to the 350 yard line, which is close to 300 meters. And let's do a little bit of a target comparison. This is a standard IPSC target that you would find on a civilian USPSA course. And next to this is a practical accuracy target that we use from 150 to 450 yards. Next to that is a U.S. Army regulation 300 meter qualification target. That's the furthest distance, 300 meters, to shoot at this target with an M16 rifle. And because I couldn't construct it to fit in my jeep, next to that we've juxtaposed a U.S. Marine Corps 300 yard target that they would qualify on. And of course, right here is my jeep. Fallacy number two, people cheat the system. I'm looking at the army. This is what we call the alt C qualification. You set this at 25 meters and use this to score a soldier whether they qualify for the rifle qualification or not. There is no distinction between using an alt C target or the regular 300 meter pop-up target. It's a great tool for commanders because you could deploy this. If you don't have the facilities, it's not easy finding a 300 meter pop-up facility if you're deployed. Say, for instance, when you're in Afghanistan. So the way you shoot this, you have three magazines, sort of like the pop-up targets. First magazine is for prone supported and you shoot two shots in each of these targets starting from 50 all the way to 300 meters at the 25 meter mark. Second magazine, you shoot prone unsupported and you do one shot per target. And the third magazine, you do kneeling two shots for the 100 and the 50 meter targets and then one shot per 150 meter target. The problem with this, not only does it not account for wind drift or bullet drop, but you can cheat because the NCOs don't stop the range and walk down to check to see if you've done the course of fire correctly. You're supposed to score at the end of the entire event, which means if I were a smart specialist, I would count my shots when I was prone supported to where I had the greatest ability to shoot tightest groups and I would shoot all of my rounds into the 250, 300, 200, and 200 and just shoot the 50 meter targets and the 100 meter targets when I was kneeling instead. So we've got the Alt-C target set up at 25 meters. I've got three magazines loaded 20, 10, and 10 and I'm going to complete the Army course of fire to qualify for the Army rifle qualification with an MP5. So the next shooting position is prone unsupported. The last position of fire is kneeling unsupported. This, ladies and gentlemen, is an Army Alt-C target that I just qualified with an MP5 shooting the cheapest Winchester steel case I could find. Three, three, one miss right there. Three, three, three, one, two, three, four, four. One, two, correct, four. Five all, five. Nice. Five and five. So we have a 39 out of 40 right here and I just qualified under the Army system as an expert marksman with an MP5. Does that mean I could shoot a 300 meter target with an MP5 using a red dot? I guess there's only one way to find out but according to the Army, I'm qualified to perform this task. As the Marines adopted the M16A1 with the rest of the military, they did not adjust their course of fire to the new weapon system. The M16 is effective to about 400 meters. 500 yards is on the cusp of it going on the difficult side and a large part of it is because it's just got a two-position sight. 250 or 400 meters. 500 yards means your front sight post is going to cover the target. To remedy this, drill instructors would go around using nails or cartridges to adjust a recruit's front sight so they could hit the 500-yard target. So essentially, they're reverse-adopting a system that was not designed for that distance to shoot that distance. Enemy's 500 yards away. Don't worry, Sergeant. This Marine's got you covered. Later on, when you see that in fact the M16A2 had these nice target-style adjustable sights, that was with the input of the U.S. Marine Corps because they needed to shoot on their course of fire. So not only do they circumvent the system, but that circumvention drives their later deployment of the weapon system, which we should move on to point number three. The fuzzy memories. I reached out to our friend Mike at Bloke-on-the-Range and asked him, Mike, do you deal with any fuzzy memories from British squaddies? From the British Army or the Royal Marines? This is what he said. So this one's a classic. Fantastic piece of kit. Easy to clean and maintain. Shoots straight. Better than the crap they have now. The SLR had real stopping power, and I could hit a figure 11, head and shoulders, target at 800 meters, usually eight or nine times out of ten, using iron sights only. Great rifle. A couple of things to take issue with this. Figure 11's the full-body target, which is 45 inches high and 18 inches wide. The head and shoulders target's a figure 12, which is 22 inches high and 18 inches wide. So this is about two minutes of angle at 800 meters, and I scaled these to what they would look like at 100 instead of 800. If you think that you could see these well enough, camouflage targets, to hit them reliably eight or nine times out of ten with a rifle whose grouping capacity is significantly larger than the target, you're a better shot than I am. That's all I can say. The second problem is that the sights on these rifles only go up to 600 yards. So if you're trying to hit something at 800 meters, which is about 875 yards, you've got to be holding about 13 feet over with the sights on the high setting. And to put this back into perspective on our little scaled 100-yard target, you've got to be aiming over by about 17 inches, which is going to be somewhere up here. So you're not even going to be able to see it to hit it because it's going to be obscured by your front sight or your gas block. So there you go. Particularly for us, I run into an issue to where soldiers and Marines seem to tell me that I was using the wrong sighting system in our M16A1 video. They seem to think that M16A1s all have large ghost ring apertures instead of a two-position 250 and 400-meter rear sight. I am looking at it right now. These are not ghost ring rear sights for low light. This is a long-range L-mark setting and a short-range 250 non-mark setting. What they are referring to is in the late 70s or the 80s, they were issued something closer to the Gordon carbine that has a ghost ring and a small-diameter rear sight for more precise shooting. They remembered this piece in their issued firearm and then they decided to tell everybody that this is in fact how the M16A1 is and that there was no change in the design in between. We're not about ego here. If we were, I wouldn't show you my misses on practical accuracy. In fact, I wouldn't even show you rifles that did not complete the course, especially not one that's so popular. We're about data, we're about facts, and we're about knowledge. And sometimes that takes us to set our egos down. Military qualifications were designed to not only increase proficiency but also give the soldier or marine the confidence of using the weapon system at those ranges. And it shows that it does indoctrinate people for that type of confidence, sometimes for the worse. When was the last time you heard a special forces operator or a MARSOC operator tell you that he in fact qualified expert in the basic rifle qualification? Or when was the last time you heard somebody who holds a President's Hundreds Tab or a Marine Scout Sniper come up to you and give you advice on weapons handling? Because in fact, they shot a 500-yard target with iron sights. I would recommend that we listen and learn the principles of ballistics as academics rather than tell the world that the pinnacle of your shooting career was to sink a round into a 500-yard target the size of a Jeep. One six. Spin light two. One victor. Two facts. Recon one. Over.