I know the article is old.
Anyone served/serving who can comment on this?
- US Army will no longer require recruits to show adequate hand grenade skills
- Change is being made because many enlistees 'can’t throw it far enough'
- Recruits also won't be required to pass land navigation course to graduate
- Army's redesign of Basic Combat Training is aimed at instilling more discipline
- Many on Twitter used the development to attack influx of female enlistees
- But the US Army denied that the change had anything to do with gender
Wow.
You know what's funny? The grenade range is what really woke me up that the shit we were doing was super fucking DUPER dangerous.
I was young and was just kind of going along with it all. Didn't think too much about the weight of actions until the grenade range when the Drill Sergeant pulled everyone in the platoon aside one by one and looked them dead in the fuck eyes and said "if you fuck this up, you'll not only kill yourself, but you'll kill me and everyone around you. I'll be ON TOP of you the entire time. If you fumble or freeze up, I'll take that grenade from you, throw it, then I'll beat the ever loving shit out of you. And I'm allowed to."
You only need to throw it like 30 meters. It's not that far. You throw it then you duck. You don't watch where it landed. It's not that hard.
Land Nav was the best part of basic. You got left alone for the most part and you were allowed to figure shit out with your battle buddy.
I don't see how removing these things gives more discipline. If anything, it takes it away since it removes the critical thinking skills and weight of your actions and how they affect others.
What's next? Are they going to remove the requirement of being CS gassed? Are only males going to be forced to be CS'd? People with asthma get a waiver? Are they going to remove the 25 pull up requirement? What about 20 min 2 mile requirement (I don't remember what you had to do to finish the run). What about the 20k march in full ruck? Can you opt out because your feet hurt?
Shooting is too hard. No more pew pew qualification.
Biden said nobody needs 30 rounds anyway.
Just get a shotgun.
It's gotta be double barreled.
You say this as a joke but somehow my friend joined the Navy and separated after his initial contract and however many years they make you stay in the reserves without having ever fired a weapon.
Honestly, there's no point in having most people qualify in basic training. Most of them will never touch a weapon once they get to their units because their jobs aren't combat-related. In reality, if ever they were needed to hold a rifle or machinegun, there's be enough prep time to train them up and they'd be better off because the knowledge and skills would be fresh. The level of training they get in basic is practically worthless. Rifle bullshit takes up a lot of time and costs a lot of money in basic because of the way they have to run it. Cutting that and grenades out (practically no one will ever use a grenade in their career and you stop training/qualifying on them after basic entirely unless you're combat arms) would save a TON of money, free up more supplies for actual combat troops, and would allow Drill Sergeants more time to properly soldierize everyone. As it is now, most don't get properly broken in and made into soldiers due to lack of time and distractions like rifle marksmanship. I think it would be more than adequate to give the troops rifles and have them learn to assemble and disassemble, do drill and ceremony, and learn how to zero and do other things like dime and washer drills. Shooting those ancient weapons won't really help them that much.
I think the point is to be prepared for anything, AND to pick the best people that can at least pass those tests, because if soldiers known weaknesses are things like can't throw a grenade for shit, enemies can take advantage of that. The throwing grenade drill isn't just about you throwing a grenade at the enemy, but also about you throwing a grenade the enemy has thrown at you. And in a surprise attack war/invasion, we may not have time to train people on the fly, nor enough people to train people. Not to mention that if you don't train your soldiers from the start, and a big war comes along and the enemy targets those who train people, you start losing the capability to train people altogether. if we reached that we needed to start more thoroughly training people only when the SHTF, this poses a problem, because again, if people don't even have the strength to throw a grenade that far, that's an indication in lacking of other abilities. If they can't throw a grenade as far as needed, then how far can they carry another soldier? How many soldiers would die on the battlefield because their buddies can't adequately move them to be evacuated if they're injured? Especially where seconds and minutes matter. The point of a volunteer military is to weed out and pick the better candidates. That's a luxury of peace time, that won't be available if there needs to be a build up during war time. And the more cream of the crop soldiers you have as a starting point, the better, because it means you won't need as many nobodies drafted. Now maybe there's places where we can retool and focus training and remove some of the fat, but I don't think grenades will ever be made obsolete, front line troops always have the possibility of facing them, and as soon as the enemy knows that's an armies weakness, they will exploit it. You may not need to throw a grenade 25 meters to be safe, but the closer it is, the louder it is, don't throw it fast enough and the aftershock rattles troops, rogue shrapnel, loss of hearing, etc. And you also need to have people not have the first time they see a grenade is one that landed next to them from the enemy. It's an oh shit moment either way, but reaction times matter. Grenades don't generally have long fuses, but the further you throw also correlates with how fast you can throw, which means if that fuse is about ready to pop and you hurryingly throw that grenade away from you, every meter it gets before it goes off, can make a difference. Even the difference between hearing damage. Grenades aren't just killing devices, they're also disorientation devices. Being deafened on the battlefield can be very crippling, and the last think you want is people pinned down in the thick of it, unable to see or hear.
I was going to try addressing all your points (which are HILARIOUSLY misinformed), but it's obvious you've never served and have no idea what basic training is like... or what weapons are like.
You are missing the greater purpose. Grenade and rifle qualification teach focus, attention to detail and accountability for one's actions. It takes patience and persistence. Things soldiers need to have to be effective, hell things everyone needs to be successful.
lol, nope! They're boxes to be checked, nothing more. The Drill Sergeants don't give a shit about the nonsense you're talking about. They just want to pass as many recruits off on their AIT instructors as they can. They're judged on numbers, not quality.
Not really. It takes not being a retard.
If we're picking and choosing, the same can be said for pt. Some of the reasoning why acft is now supposed to be job related, as opposed to universal pt standards.
I think there's value in basic qualification and marksmanship, not sure if I'd want the average Joe being less than worthless if they have to grab a weapon. The ambush on Lynch' s unit is maybe a cautionary tale.
This also reeks far less of cost efficiency, and more about physically weak or otherwise inept recruits (also dropping standards to suit agendas).
Absolutely. And that's why they're back to reviewing the whole damn thing to see if it even makes sense. Standardized PT is stupid and usually counter-productive, mainly because you're always going to be setting the bar too low for most people. The ACFT is no exception, nor is the APFT (of course). The reality is that standardized tests are a terrible way of measuring the fitness of a highly diverse population of people doing a wide range of jobs. The fitness standards should be set be set at the battalion level and PT should be overseen by company grade officers to ensure the standards are being met. This would be how they did it prior to the APFT being introduced. This would also require far more leadership, integrity, ingenuity, and dedication than most officers posses, so it's not much more realistic than the standardized tests. But at least we wouldn't be deluding ourselves into believing we can reduce people to mere numbers and expect uniform results.
There is, just not at the basic training stage of a soldier's career. They can learn plenty when they get to their unit, and it will be far more efficient and safer.
It's certainly a cautionary tale, just not for rifle marksmanship.
Have you ever been to basic training??
Not sure what marksmanship has to do with strength. I don't think you're picking up what I'm putting down. I'm not talking about dropping all rifle marksmanship for everyone across the board forever and just shortening basic training. I'm saying put that burden on their gaining units, where it already is anyway, and spend the time and resources on more important things in basic training, like more effective soldierizing methods. Do you have any idea how much time is wasted just moving recruits to and from the range? Or how much time is wasted having all those recruits sitting around waiting to use the range? It eats up an entire training day just to have each recruit go out and shoot 40 rounds. Tell me how cost efficient that is...
Cute, but stupid and wrong.
Great argument, civilian.
My father was drafted for the Korean War. His hearing was permanently damaged because some loser next to him sissy-threw a grenade in grenade training and it landed very close to the edge of the trench they were in. (At that time they were training to throw grenades from a trench apparently.)
So of course it goes off right next to the edge of the trench and he ends up with permanent hearing damage, even if the fragments didn’t hit anyone.
If they’re dropping grenade training then they must be getting so many unsuitable people that grenades are too dangerous for too many recruits to handle without killing everyone.
It is probably one of the most dangerous things you do. I wouldn't want to train new recruits in throwing live grenades for all the marbles in the ocean.
You’d think they could at least train them on throwing inert dummy grenades to make sure they can throw stuff.
That’s probably the point. They need our troops to be much worse than China’s.
Check out Angry Cops youtube channel.
Hes pretty good at calling this shit out in a humorous way
Same with me. I was just an 18-year-old kid who was having a blast in basic training. It's one thing to pull a trigger and have a projectile move at high speeds to hit a target, but it's another to toss a grenade knowing that if you don't, that's it for you. Also, the DS flat out said he would fuck you up if you threw it like a bitch.