The last M9's have been delivered...an end of an era (also pic of upcoming "M9A4")

[Suvorov]

@Cory how many days or hours of M9 training did you get as USAMPS?

I realize I’m not the one you are asking, but…

My “official” Army introduction to the M9 was at Armor Officer Basic Course which consisted of a morning of how to maintain it and an afternoon that consisted of some Fam fire with coaching and then qualification. As @Cory stated, this what a case of the “one eyed leading the blind.” Fortunately for me - I had been shooting somewhat seriously for several years and was able to clear the course and gain a little cred with my classmates.

By contrast my training at FLETC consisted of five 4 hour range sessions (20 hours) along with about half that much time doing Judgmential shooting training and dry fire.

This contrast is extremely stark and shouldn’t be considering that the pistol is the PRIMARY small arm for tank crewmen. I realize that this isn’t an apples to apples comparison, that soldiers have “mastered” the rifle before being issued a pistol while FLETC is designed to teach the pistol to someone who can be assumed to have never fired a gun before, but obviously US Army pistol training is extremely wanting.

So when I heard stories if how the M9 was not as effective at dropping Iraqis climbing on to tanks - it really wasn’t hard for me to see where the problem was. That said, every time I wanted to spend more time during qualification on getting real quality pistol training for our soldiers I was always told that the goal was getting them qualified and not trained or that qualification WAS training. I then watched that same BN commander put a round into the ground in front of the 15 meter target - but he qualified and went on to get 2 stars, so what do I know?

The sad thing is that Army units have the resources they need. The TMs/FMs are actually very well written and contain TTPs from the best instructors in the world, regular Army has the AMU and the guard have their various State marksmanship units who will provide world class training on request. But in the world of ever increasing EEO, Suicide Prevention, Recruiting and Retention, Sexual Harassment, and now counter Extremist briefings, who has time to get their soldiers to the range other than for qualification? I won’t even start on holster training, so there are no surprises when NDs happen in theater as well. As @Cory so eloquently pictured, in the Army at least, there is a cultural and institutional aversion to spending the needed amount of training time on the handgun. Unless Joe wears a funny colored floppy hat or lucks out and get a “gun guy” as a BN or BD commander (which is now unlikely as that officer has probably been tagged as an “extremist “) - Joe is on his own when it comes to becoming truly proficient with his pistol no matter the “M#.”

[MandoWookie]

I realize I’m not the one you are asking, but…

My “official” Army introduction to the M9 was at Armor Officer Basic Course which consisted of a morning of how to maintain it and an afternoon that consisted of some Fam fire with coaching and then qualification. As @Cory stated, this what a case of the “one eyed leading the blind.” Fortunately for me - I had been shooting somewhat seriously for several years and was able to clear the course and gain a little cred with my classmates.

By contrast my training at FLETC consisted of five 4 hour range sessions (20 hours) along with about half that much time doing Judgmential shooting training and dry fire.

This contrast is extremely stark and shouldn’t be considering that the pistol is the PRIMARY small arm for tank crewmen. I realize that this isn’t an apples to apples comparison, that soldiers have “mastered” the rifle before being issued a pistol while FLETC is designed to teach the pistol to someone who can be assumed to have never fired a gun before, but obviously US Army pistol training is extremely wanting.

So when I heard stories if how the M9 was not as effective at dropping Iraqis climbing on to tanks - it really wasn’t hard for me to see where the problem was. That said, every time I wanted to spend more time during qualification on getting real quality pistol training for our soldiers I was always told that the goal was getting them qualified and not trained or that qualification WAS training. I then watched that same BN commander put a round into the ground in front of the 15 meter target - but he qualified and went on to get 2 stars, so what do I know?

The sad thing is that Army units have the resources they need. The TMs/FMs are actually very well written and contain TTPs from the best instructors in the world, regular Army has the AMU and the guard have their various State marksmanship units who will provide world class training on request. But in the world of ever increasing EEO, Suicide Prevention, Recruiting and Retention, Sexual Harassment, and now counter Extremist briefings, who has time to get their soldiers to the range other than for qualification? I won’t even start on holster training, so there are no surprises when NDs happen in theater as well. As @Cory so eloquently pictured, in the Army at least, there is a cultural and institutional aversion to spending the needed amount of training time on the handgun. Unless Joe wears a funny colored floppy hat or lucks out and get a “gun guy” as a BN or BD commander (which is now unlikely as that officer has probably been tagged as an “extremist “) - Joe is on his own when it comes to becoming truly proficient with his pistol no matter the “M#.”

So, in the opinion of the folks in here who have served, what would an effective training and skills maintenance program look like for the Army( and other services too), and what would have to change institutionally to make it viable?
Was there ever a point in history that the standards and training was noticeably superior to how it is done now? And if so, how do you move the pendulum back in that direction?

[Suvorov]

So, in the opinion of the folks in here who have served, what would an effective training and skills maintenance program look like for the Army( and other services too), and what would have to change institutionally to make it viable?
Was there ever a point in history that the standards and training was noticeably superior to how it is done now? And if so, how do you move the pendulum back in that direction?

In my opinion and on the Armor track, I would like to see an instruction block, similar albeit smaller to the Basic Rifle Marksmanship training tailored to the pistol during the AIT phase of training that occurs after Basic Training. This same training would be extended to officers going through their Basic Course. Holster work MUST be a part of that training as well. I do think that if the use of the pistol is emphasized at an early stage in a soldiers career, then it will become important to them and change the culture. I can’t say for other tracks as there is less uniformity in say the infantry for who carries a pistol, but for tankers it is straight forward. But getting to that point - to convince the TRADOC guys that 16-20 more hours of training is needed for a weapon system that produces the lowest number of enemy casualties of any system, I really don’t think it’s possible unless the stars and planets align and one of our kids becomes TRADOC commander.

I don’t think the “Big Army” (the ones that don’t wear funny colored floppy hats) has ever had a period where it did pistol training right, it simply had a period where more soldiers already had the skill when they entered service. This is evident by the fact that the various high speed sloppy units went outside the Army for their pistol training when the were spun up and still do.

Obviously some units in the Army know how to do it extremely well - extending that to the Big Army is the trick.

[JonInWA]

Well said, @MandoWookie.

The Johnson and Reising were interim substitutes given the lack of availability of the Garand and Thompson, along with production delays of the M2 Hyde. Not "deliberate choices".

As noted the Reising was designed as a police firearm, and it was actually quite a good gun within that context; detritus under the charging handle and individually fitted, non-interchangeable parts simply weren't issues in such a use. The Johnson wasn't that terrible, either. It was actually quite good compared to other semi-automatic rifles from around the world in 1941. There were lots of good designs that didn't go past prototype or limited production simply for reasons of wartime efficiency, not because they were bad. One of the rarest American SMGs during WWII was also one of the best, the Marlin UD-42.

"Piece of junk" from WWII makes me think of something like the S&W Light Rifle. Certainly not either the Reising or Johnson.

We're probably beating a long-dead horse here with this portion of the thread discussion, but to quote Ian V. Hogg and John S. Week's "Military Small Arms of the 20th Century 7th Edition," which I've consistantly found to be a good reference book, p 163: ...The Reising was an ingenious design which fired from a closed bolt. The internal mechanism was complicated and the pressing of the trigger set off a series of inter-related movements which culminated in the striking of the primer, a far remove from the simplicity of most open-bolt blowback mechanisms. Automatic fire was really a series of semiautomatic shots in sequence, since the mechanism always operates in the same way...The Reising proved entirely unsuitable for combat use; the complicated mechanism made no allowance for the presence of dirt or grit, which promptly jammed it, and the breech-locking recess soon attracted fouling or dirt which prevented the block from rising and thus prevented the weapon firing at all. These shortcomings were discovered in the Guadalcanal operation, where most Marines jettisoned their Reisings in favor of anything else they could find. The weapons which remained were withdrawn and issued to police and security forces in the USA where, in the absence of combat conditions, they performed quite adequately.

Similarly, regarding the Johnson Self-Loading Rifle Model 1941, on pp 287-288. "the Johnson rifle was designed shortly before WWII as a light military weapon, and it was extensively tested by the American Army and Marine Corps. Neither accepted it-which is hardly surprising as the Garand had just been put into mass-production-but Johnson obtained an order to manufacture them for Dutch forces in Sumatra and Jave. With the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, this contract was abruptly terminated. but as the US forces were expanding rapidlyand Garand production barely getting into stride. the US Marine Corps rapidly moved to take the balance of the order, issuing them to Raider Battalions and to their early paratroop force. They were also used to some extent by US MArines in the ETO, but expereince showed that they were less robust than the Garand, their mechanism jammed more easily, and the long exposed barrel was vulnerable to damage."

To paraphrase, both guns were sufficient in administrative, non-combat environments. Their complexity induced difficulties in combat environments and use. To a soldier, weapons such as these are indeed pieces of junk-basically paperweights to be lugged around and for which one's life, and the life of others could not be depended upon. While some of their features might be of interest to an engineer, where the rubber met the road they were both abject "fails.".

A similar debacle occurred in WWI with the Canadian Army's initially issue rifle, the Ross. It was also discarded en mass by Canadian Army soldiers in favor of the Lee Enfield.

Best, Jon

[TGS]

@JonInWA

Most of the USMC Reising experience has to be taken with a grain of salt as the Marines were given the weapon with zero instruction on its proper maintenance.

It was a hand fitted gun with non-interchangeable parts. When your platoon takes a bunch of Reisings and throws them in the same bucket of solvent/fuel and reassembles them by taking random parts from the bin, the guns were obviously going to fail in a spectacular fashion. In the context of automatic guns in the 1st half of the century, that's not necessarily a fault of the gun. The USMC experience with the Reising would not have been so short and so spectacularly awful if the guns weren't set up to fail from the get-go by being reassembled after routine cleaning with non-matching parts the guns were literally incapable of functioning properly with.

Would you declare the MEUSOC 1911 to be an "abject failure" or "piece of junk" if a platoon of reconnaissance men circa 2003 put all of their sidearms into a tank of solvent and picked out random parts upon reassembly only to find out the weapons didn't function? Regardless of the shortcomings of the MEUSOC 1911, that'd be a pretty ridiculous statement, right?

If I issued the M16 to a bunch of troops deploying to southeast Asia in the 1960s and told them the guns didn't need to be maintained, it'd be a pretty ridiculous statement to call the M16 junk and an abject failure when a bunch of troops got killed when their rifle malfunctioned. Right?

If I issued the M249 to a bunch of joes and told them, "Fuck CLP, just scrape pencils against the rails for dry lubrication. Oil collects dust", and then those joes went on to have a terrible time getting their M249s to run, would that make the M249 junk and an abject failure? That'd be a pretty ridiculous statement, right?

What if, in 2021, I was cleaning a Mk19 and threw the bolt assembly into a solvent tank and then reassembled the gun, lubricating it with CLP? Would that mean the gun was an abject failure and a piece of junk because my improper cleaning procedure removed the packing grease from the bolt assembly that it depends upon for proper function?

The guns were not perfect, but that's a far stretch from declaring them junk. Nothing you wrote about the Johnson changes anything @MandoWookie or I stated, and, more to the point regardless of its shortfalls the M1941 Johnson was still one of the best semiautomatic rifles available in 1941 and wholly adequate for issuance as a battle rifle if the M1 Garand wasn't available. You literally quoted some of the things we were speaking to, actually.

And, they still weren't "deliberate choices". As we stated, and as you quoted from the text, they were interim substitutes.

[TGS]

My “official” Army introduction to the M9 was at Armor Officer Basic Course which consisted of a morning of how to maintain it and an afternoon that consisted of some Fam fire with coaching and then qualification.

Ouch, that's scary. Not as bad as the Navy fleet warfare qualification, I guess. I think they shot 5 rounds just to show they know how to handle, load, and fire it. No target, no scoring. The sort of qualification that they got scored on and awarded ribbons for was entirely extracurricular and for fun, not required to actually carry a weapon.

[Suvorov]

Ouch, that's scary. Not as bad as the Navy fleet warfare qualification, I guess. I think they shot 5 rounds just to show they know how to handle, load, and fire it. No target, no scoring. The sort of qualification that they got scored on and awarded ribbons for was entirely extracurricular and for fun, not required to actually carry a weapon.

I honestly thought the Marines would do better.

I’ve said many times here how I think the M17/18 program was a tremendous waste of tax payer money, but as I’ve witnessed the past two stimulus packages, I realize that things like this are drops in the bucket.

By Beretta fan boy status not withstanding, I just want our troops to have the training they deserve.

Most soldiers will never need a pistol, but if they do - they REALLY NEED IT!

[WobblyPossum]

My unit handed out M9s during our pre-deployment training. Pretty much everyone was handed one because, at the time, the powers that be decided every NY Army National Guard soldier deploying would have at least two weapon systems issued to them. The training consisted of a couple of the squad leaders showing you how to field strip and clean the gun. Actual marksmanship instruction consisted of “don’t shoot yourself or your buddy.” We qualified once so it could be documented. Then we didn’t train on the guns at all. There was an SF unit on our FOB and one of their NCOs agreed to teach our platoon a quick handgun class in theater. This occurred near the end of our deployment.

[TGS]

I honestly thought the Marines would do better.

They did, and do.

That was the Navy fleet warfare qualification; think sailors standing watch on the boat. USMC is totally different.

[Suvorov]

They did, and do.

That was the Navy fleet warfare qualification; think sailors standing watch on the boat. USMC is totally different.

Check