https://archive.is/3UosA

@Tervell@hexbear.net you're gonna love this one

The Army is standardizing how armor crews train and shoot

Armor brigades with the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia are training with a new set of qualification standards, or gunnery tables.

That's right folks, the U.S Army armored and Mechanized forces HAVE NOT had a standardized training program for their gunners for who knows for how fucking long and have completely relied upon skills of individuals - usually a mix of whatever retained passed-down knowledge in the magical game of telephone between generations and whatever personal experience each master gunner accrues in their time in service!

The Army is standardizing the way crews of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles keep up with their combat skills.

Fucking embarrassing it took until 2024 for the clowns in the Pentagon and TRADOC to figure this out

Brigades with the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia have taken the last month to train under a new set of qualification standards, or gunnery tables, against targets set at longer distances for their M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

People think ww3s gonna happen while the fucking Army that they think will fight it is just realizing what actual modern warfare looks like and has vaguely grasped how jacked up their combat capabilities are and are in a mad scramble to fix themselves while stumbling on their shoelaces

“What we are trying to do is train our crews to be more adaptable and be more lethal as our adversaries change,” said 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team Command Sgt. Maj. Ryan Roush. “Everyone will go through the exact same validation process. Once these tables are implemented Army-wide, we could receive a new soldier from any unit in the Army and know that the training standard that the soldier has used, are the exact same across the entire Army that we have and then base our performance and expectations off of that.”

Fucking magical they've figured out standardized training is a necessity IN MOTHERFUCKING 2024!

Tank crews have to validate their skills twice a year on a unit’s gunnery tables. Under the current integrated weapons strategy there are six gunnery tables that crews must be certified in: Table I gunnery skills test; Table II simulations; Table III proficiency to train with live rounds; Table IV basic skills of the platform; Table V practice and Table VI qualification for crew to participate in live-fire exercises.

Blah blah blah they had all the shit that's needed to make a standardized system but didn't

Master gunners could previously use their own discretion to create tables with time and distance categories for targets. But with this initiative, there would be set standards that soldiers and crews have to complete, said Sgt. Daniel Blandon, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team Abrams Master Gunner.

Fucking lol

Large scale combat operations

Over the last two decades, training for Iraq and Afghanistan was focused on counterinsurgency operations “for a whole career of a soldier,” said Steve Krivitsky, chief of the weapons and gunnery branch at the Directorate of Training, Tactics and Doctrine for the Maneuver Center of Excellence. “There was a series of soldiers that never experienced the long range and then the large-scale, combat-operations-type training.”

Translation: we had a brain-drain because we spent too many years playing whack-a-mole games now we're struggling with basic concepts of war fighting

Tank crews often were tested only on skills and targets their commanders deemed essential for Iraq and Afghanistan deployments, or that could be shot within the confines of the ranges of their own base.

Translation: our training over the past 20+ years has been checkpoint guarding and occupation force intimidation tactics with the rare masterbatort larp session stateside to make our tankmen feel like they still matter

“When you look at Fort Stewart and Fort Stewart’s ranges, they made a scenario that was tailored to their facilities and their training needs of their unit based on their past performance,” Krivitsky said. “What they chose to shoot would not be exactly the same as what something at Fort Carson might shoot.”

Translation: each base, like feudal kingdoms, had their own ways of doing shit.

Soldiers at Fort Stewart, Krivitsky said, are “pushing the limits of the training ammunition and the system itself to hit targets up to 2,200 to 2,400 meters.”

Translation: we've fucked up so bad so we're scrambling to make up standards to teach everyone based off of the knowledge we've gained from the Ukraine war

The current qualification for the farthest main gun engagement is a single target at 1,800 meters. The requirements under the new tables would increase main gun engagements to seven targets between 1,800 and 2,400 meters.

Translation: Ukraine wars teaching us modern war isn't like battlefield 4 or world of tanks

The new tables also focus on multiple stationary and moving main gun engagements. Now, Tables V and VI will include an offense and defense four-target engagement.

Translation: we've fucked up on training for more basic shit, again.

With the current gunnery qualifications – for all of the different types of engagements – the average is 31 seconds to defeat a single target, Kravitsky said. But the new standard would involve four targets in a shortened time frame.

Learning how to cowboy quickdraw shooting but with a tank.

“On a four target engagement, they don’t have two minutes, they have 75 seconds. And so that 31 seconds might overlap with another target’s 31 seconds because it’s exposed,” he said. “That speed in combat, the speed at which you deliver accurate fires first, your reward is you win. So our goal is to hit first, hit fast and move on to the next one.”

Reminder that U.S tanks require a manual loader so there's a dude that's busting his ass loading 4 big ass tank rounds while huffing depleted uranium fumes in 75 seconds or less.

Fucking lol

Officials are finding new ways to use the latest sensors and optics on Bradleys and Abrams. On the M1, for example, the vehicle commander has a Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station, or CROWS system for on-the-move target acquisition and first-burst target engagement.

Fancy thingamabobs that theoretically work but aren't rigorously combat tested. Who knows, maybe it'll accidentally do some friendly fire if a war happens.

The new standards for Table IV force the tank’s gunner to run through five defensive machine gun skills rather than use the main gun, while the vehicle commander has five tests on the CROWS system.

More basic shit

“When the gunner is executing the machine gun engagements, the vehicle commander is using the commander’s independent thermal viewer to identify supplemental targets,” Krivistky said. “It speeds the process of target acquisition and target hand-off to rapidly defeat multiple targets in sequence.”

More basic shit

The Maneuver Center of Excellence looked at all of the different possible target engagements that a tank crew might see and found 3,264 different variables. With the gunnery tables, officials need to decide which types of engagements are the best use of time and show a crew’s gunnery skills.

Aka standardization of training. Fucking fluff to pad out this article

“We only have 30 engagements for live fire so we have to be really selective of which engagements have the biggest payoff to the crew’s experience because the other 3,234 would have to be done in simulations,” Krivistky said.

Lol simulations means they're making soldiers play videogames like ARMA. Unless they got one of those fancy facilities with theater screens and mock vehicles on pneumatic pads to play videogames but IRL

Once they collect all of the data from 3ID’s training, they will hand it off to the Maneuver Center of Excellence for analysis. Officials from the center will take their findings to the Armor School’s Commandant and if he approves the manual, they’ll go through the publication process which can take three to six months.

Bureaucratic shit

When a new book is published and there’s a “significant change in how we do things,” there will be an implementation period across the Army which takes about a year, Krivitsky said. The 3ID initiative “accelerates the completion of this training strategy and publication by at least nine months which in the Army system, that’s fast.”

Army isn't planning to do a cheeky ww3 this year unless someone higher than the Pentagon pencil pushers screws the pooch