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Combat Rifle Marksmanship Exercises: Training Effectively for Combat Readiness

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It's been said that inside every fat book lies a thin book trying to get out. Combat Rifle Marksmanship Exercises by Andy Stanford is a thin book with an anorexic book inside that needs to eat something!

First, the good. The gun world is in DESPERATE need of concrete, measurable marksmanship standards that are widely known and used. One of the primary reasons most gun owners are such poor shots is that few of them have any notion of what constitutes a challenging, yet attainable, level of marksmanship or gun handling performance. Even less can accurately report where their skills lie. Every soldier or marine claiming to be an "expert" shooter based solely on military qualification is a prime example.

Regular attendees of organized shooting, such as formal competition and good shooting schools, don't suffer from this problem but they constitute less than one percent of the gun owning public. Stanford's book is a good effort to help fix this by providing a variety of interesting shooting challenges. Solid, measurable standards abound in the competition world, but this book is useful for folks wanting drills for practical/combat rifle shooting.

Big problem with this book is the lack of detail, specifically, many of the drills listed give a shooting format but fail to define what a good performance is. For example, the "A Drill" entails assuming a shooting position from ready, firing two rounds, reloading and firing two more. No suggestions for times, positions or distances is given. What's worse, a number of the "chapters" are only a few paragraphs long, leaving entire pages blank. Plenty of space was wasted that could have been filled with those sorts of researched suggestions. Considering the author runs a shooting school he should have that type of data at hand.

This book has some really good ideas, but it honestly is a long magazine article published in book form.

Another fine book on the topic of firearms use and instruction. Andy Stanford's efforts to relate various methods and drills to increase one's effectiveness is well done.
A great addition for anyone who wishes to better their own skills or to draw upon in instructing others.

By time one deletes the non essential pages of this 49 page book (table of contents, references, etc) , one is left with about 14 "drills". The student is left without any diagrams or pictures to help understand these exercises. While these exercises are taken from actual training courses across the country, the lack of depth in such a topic is concerning considering how easy stick figures are to publish now. Additionally, these exercises are based on CQC, CBC, CQB scenarios (i.e. short range positions) on flat trajectories. While there are directions to use "out to 300". These stay just exercises because there is no significant real world discussion of projectile ballistics (altitude differences or height angle off target, wind, precipitation, night issues, adjusting MOA etc) when dealing with a need for pinpoint accuracy at unknown distances (In my estimation, SWAT and other civilian tactical orgs cannot afford the negative press of inaccurate marksmanship which I consider to be less than less that 3 MOA at 300 (9" groups) especially considering hostage or extraction situations. To think that those WWII vets carried M1 Garands, semi-auto with 8 round en blocs and they had a better hit ratio than those M-16/M4 guys in the decades ahead, there is something to be said here and that is accuracy IS important and should be practiced in all positions and situations.) Then there is no discussion given to communication with the corp in this noisy environment (ear protection, eye protection? radios? ). What about team strategy (smoke? commander directs lead fire, etc)? or is the assumption a solo shooter or "me too" shooting? Coordinating a combat team is a missing exercise and probably one of the most important considering the history of friendly fire.

To summarize, this title incorporates so much breadth, yet the author delivers a fraction of that. Its a start for the author and the reader, but there is much more needed to cover this topic thoroughly.

This is a short book that contains "real world"(?!) practice. If you don't have some trigger time this book can kill you. The only marksmanship education is yardage examples. No examples of shooting positions, use of cover, or movement. One of the biggest issues I have with this book (if you can call it that) is the loading of a set number of magazines with a set number of bullets. Better to have your friend load your mags with an unknown number of rounds (throw in a spent case just to mess with him). And then run some drills.