Today we had Observation and Marksmanship training, did a little bit of a lecture at the start to make sure that the recruits new what we were doing as far as observation techniques. And then we did a few drills, not to different from what you might find at the US Armies Sniper School.
I took the Sgts with me to set up our ‘improvised’ shooting range and had Cpl Sniper lead them through one at a time to shoot at the targets we setup.
At Blades great idea they also had to call Tango Spotted; Threat Neutralized with the V-Commands when seeing and finally hitting a target. After that they had to give an account of it, number of targets and of what types, rounds, occasionally even if they saw the SNCO’s or how many hits.
We hide varying numbers of stuff and in differing spots to keep it a bit balanced. We also shot at them to make it a bit harder ;-).
After that I set up a single target down range and started patrolling. While each shooter took a turn (rotated by Cpl Sniper) to come sneak accross the tarmac, find a suitable firing position (enforced by Sgts Blade & JB) to fire from as indicated. Hit the target and sneak backout without being seen by me. Few people actually pulled it off but several got close…
The hard part was convincing Blade and JB not to kill them at will lol. I try to make things hard during training but I still try to keep it fairly doable for the Rcts… Most of the times any way hehe. I remember one of my training exercises in SWAT4, the Element almost failed each one and lost in the majority of it. But the exercise had been carefully crafted to push them to the limit, those missions were designed to be close to impossible.
Afterwards we did a tango hunt on one of the better sniping maps we had available working in sniper-spotter teams.
I hope people enjoyed it but I think I might have bored one of our poor troopers half to death :. I figured Observation & Marksmanship would give people a chance to do things we don’t do often in training, must of our time is focused on CQB (Close Quarters Battle) after all.
One thing that was quite nice is we had some team work going for a change. I’m quite used to managing things solo, 95% of my other training sessions I didn’t have help with. I liked today though because I had Blade and JB helping (yes I tend to sort names by Alpha 8=) )and we were able to contribute both our ideas to making things a better training session.
I hadn’t originally planned on taking 3 hours to do it but the afternoon was cleared in advance. I try to keep things moving quickly as I can while having to communicate with multiple people (questions/synchronization/etc) in the midst of it all. Usually when I schedule training I try to clear as large a time block for it as I can, because I don’t like to cut people short.
I don’t expect others to do so though, I do it because I find it works best for me. And I try to set the time frames so it is well balanced for the people involved… With [SAS] we currently have members spread across the America, Belgium, Canada, England, Denmark, Germany, and Norway just to name those that come to memory ! That’s including like up to GMT-4 to GMT+2 time zones or worse.
That’s one reason I try to keep a quick pace, I also don’t like to bore or tire people to much with an all day thing. Although I think the best trainings I’ve done in the past usually were over when we had all passed out :
Hmm, I remember when I was a Recruit. I’d join TG#1 and hook up with Rasa and Leon and we would train. Then an NCO would pop in for a bit and train us, like Relish coming in for 30-45 minutes to start us on some Dynamic Training. Then he’d pop off and we’d keep going as our time zones permitted us to. Really, we probably spent more time training together then with the NCOs lool.
Now’re days, were are probably not much better on the organizational level but there is a much better NCO -> Rct connection. Most of the things I ever learned in this business [so to speak] came from a mentors guidence or from the experience of training on my own. I remember Rand and Wiz played a big part in the former and the latter makes up 90% of things I’ve learned since I was given my Recruit Tryout.
Darn, I’m getting old… Hmm I think Miles was the first one we used the new procedures on.
