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The side with guys and gals trained to hit at a distance need less ammo and can be very deadly. Check out whole units of specially trained marksmen and snipers from the civil war to today.
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Not really.
The place where snipers earn their pay is shooting from ambush, where the target is unaware they are there (or unaware the enemy can reach out and touch them at that range) and so their behavior is not the same as on a two way range. Once the other side figures out they're taking effective fire, behavior usually changes and even with much better training and much better equipment, sniper effectiveness drops off towards the same success rate as regular riflemen. Still better, given those improvements in training and gear (assuming the gear is relevant for the engagement in question), but much less successful.
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Further spraying and praying for a hit was proved very unsuccessful ie vietnam as a generalized statement.
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I guess that really depends on how you define "success." Did it improve shots/kill ratios? No. Did it often mean the difference between maintaining a perimeter or being overrun by the other side? Yes. Did it sometimes mean the difference between inflicting some casualties on an enemy you couldn't acquire and positively ID versus not killing any of them at all? Yes.
No matter how screwed up the American economy gets, I cannot see a situation where, for our military, bullets will ever be more expensive than trained soldiers, so by some logics, spray and pray was a very successful approach in that war.
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Units I have been in went to the range once or twice a year and even pre deployment to Afganistan we worked way more on tactics than actually shooting.
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It depends on the unit you're in, but for Big Army I agree that there is a significant problem there. It's gotten better with some stuff from the SOF side of the house trickling out, but Big Army has been slow to adopt and adapt on that topic, and when they do they manage to make "fixes" that fundamentally make their approach less sound (i.e. the Short Range Marksmanship program, or the retarded "SPORTS" acronym I still cant' kick out of my Joes' heads for better clearance techniques no matter how hard I try).
But that's not anything to do with 5.56mm as a service rifle round and actually if we went to anything heavier you'd have a rise in cost per round from the $0.25 or so per round the government pays for M855 (or did in 2008 when I got out), meaning either even less live fire training, something else getting shorted, or an increase in budget.
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IMHO troops should be at the range two or three times a week for several hours a day for three or four months before deployment and they should be trained on a weapon not based on the 22 caliber but rather almost anything else thats larger. Yes, I know Im dreaming but my experience with 5.56 is anything but reassuring and I will leave it at that for today.
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I agree on something along the lines of the training program you are talking about, but it costs money. In the SFG I was assigned to, deploying companies all went through our SFAUC class or SFBCC class (for the support units) before going over across the water. For the team guys that was several weeks of training with daily trips to the flat range evolving into daily runs through the shoot house and culminating in an extensive FTX done with simunitions and all sorts of bells and whistles. Just in terms of ammunition it represented more ammo for one company of 80 or so guys for one training event than a light infantry battalion gets for a year.
And it really put a fine edge on the shooting skills those guys had, as well as more general CQB skills, mission planning, etc etc etc. And for the price tag involved, it had better.
Big Army could do the same sort of thing -- it would just need to commit to the idea of spending anywhere from five to ten times on training than it does for each battalion going downrange. (To do the same sort of intensive training would cost more for conventional units simply because you're starting at a lower ability level, and so would need one or more "zero weeks" just to purge bad habits, get people confident on their weapons, and remove anyone who simply could not get confident with them -- and there are plenty of them floating around in the military.)
That just means that, in turn, the US Congress either needs to find that money somewhere or needs to increase the tax burden on the American taxpayer to cover it. Whether either of those is politically feasible under our current system of government and pattern of financial mismanagement at the federal (and state) level is a good question.
So, stepping off the soap box -- as for 5.56mm, I have found it to be a reliable fight stopper. Your mileage may, and apparently has, varied, but I personally remain a firm believer that the thing that needs fixing is not the arrow, it's the indian and his bow. Better training and better optics for acquisition/PID/engagement are where we need to spend our money. Sinking funds into a new caliber or new service rifle with existing technology simply won't give us any significantly quantifiable improvement.