If a Marine is only hitting paper, he will fail to qualify.
No doubt. And I stated it with no smack talk/arrogance- just reality. They get points for hitting a 6 foot by 6 foot piece of paper at 500 yards. All the nonsense about “Marines qualify to 500 with irons” is just that. Even the black is huge and doesn’t represent any viable real life target. Non of the other branches are better either.
The new ARQ while still not what it should be is much better. And a bunch of Marines that immediately qualifed “Expert” on the old/current qual, turned around and failed to qualify at all on the new one. And the new one would be smoked by any mid level 3 gunner.
Again, with no degeneration intended- the military, any part of it, is not where to look for any source of knowledge or capability in shooting. From the highest levels down, any one that became good did so outside the organization.
Formid...
I consider myself to be one of the "special" ones. In a short bus, helmet, window licker sort of way.
I recognize what you are saying as a truth of sorts. But I think the larger truth is that the military is well served by clerical types who can use their primary weapon to engage a target and perform basic fire and maneuver exercises after 3 days of rifle and 3 days of ground combat training.
Maybe. But no one would say someone with 3 days of high school anatomy class is a “good” doctor. Saying anything about shooting performance or knowledge in relation to the military is just a red herring. They’re not good at it and it is a very poor barometer.
As for your shooting.
With M193 ammo and not using a sandbag, so mag monopodded prone, 10 round groups that consistently stay inside of the black on a B8 bullseye and score somewhere in the low to mid 90’s is decent.
