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Practice Drills - SFC Lance Dement

Today, I’m going to show you different exercises at various yard lines that you can use to improve your rifle shooting.    Let’s start here at the 600 yard line. One of the keys to success at the 600 yard line is being able to assess the wind value and being able to correct for it. Here is a drill we use to teach our shooters how to do just that. The shooter has 15 seconds to load the rifle, read the wind conditions, make a windage adjustment on the rifle sight, and fire a shot.  This sounds pretty easy, but to make it more difficult the shooter will wait at least 45 seconds before he will load the next round, make the next adjustment, and fire. This drill forces the shooter to use his wind reading abilities, and is best done when the wind is blowing five to ten mph. The more wind, the better.     Now, lets move down to the 300 yard line, and work on our rapid fire. I am going to show you the prone rapid fire drill. This drill will help you quickly get into position, make a smooth magazine change, and re-acquire your target. Shooter load.  The shooter starts in the standing position.  When the targets come up, he will drop down into the prone, fire a magazine of two rounds, followed by a magazine of three rounds. The purpose of this drill is to refine several key areas during the rapid fire string. First is getting into the prone position from standing. Acquiring a good natural point of aim is the key for well aimed shots in rapid fire.  Next is the magazine change. A smooth magazine change allows the shooter more time to break well aimed shots. While changing the magazine many shooters look through the spotting scope to the see the location of their first two shots.  The final training point of this drill is to properly get back into position after your magazine change. You want to re-acquire sight alignment, allow the rifle to settle and fire your remaining three rounds. If you are doing everything correctly, all five shots should be grouped together on the target.    The last drill we will discuss is the blind standing. We refer to this exercise as the blind standing because the shooter is not allowed to see where his rounds impact the target until all firing is complete. The shooter will alternate between one dry fire shot, and one live fire shot. Sgt. Green will now demonstrate a dry fire shot. Sgt. Green will now shoot a live fire round.  After each live fire shot, he plots his call. A call is where the shooter believes he shot the target based off what he observed off the sight when the rifle fired.  After firing ten dry fires and ten live fires, the shooter will clear the rifle, and move down range to the target. He will compare his calls to the actual shot holes on the target. This drill serves several purposes. It increases the shooters endurance in the standing position, improves his ability to call a shot, and allows the shooter to fine tune their zero. You can utilize this drill with any rifle on any target, and at any range.     The drills we covered today help you get the most training value out of every round you fire, maximize your productivity on the range, and help keep you Army Strong. CLICK HERE FOR PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION