Reply #36: All this talk has a lot of people taking "Can't Shoot" personally. [View All]

[slampoet]

Accuracy has been dropping in US warfare for decades. Almost a century.


Back in medieval times I bet there were folkes talking about the musket and how it wasn't accurate as a trained longbowman. They were right too. But it took a few weeks to train someone to use a musket. It took years and even maybe a decade to train a good archer.

Same as now. It takes so much skill to train someone to hit a running figure at 150 yards with a WWI-era Lee-Endfield bolt action, that no one even tries to train at it anymore and leaves the job to sniper specialists. It takes longer to train a good sniper than it does for a normal troop. Rifles these days are not a huge amount more accurate at 150 yards.

As sick as it is the strategy on most battle fields is still to get as much flying metal in the air.
This strategy has been around since before battles took place on civilian turf, and the world has paid for it.

Oddly enough, per shot accuracy peaked about the same time as we started fighting on civilian ground. Around the time of the Spanish-American War.