A major overhaul of how Marines learn to shoot and track their skills will begin to roll out across the service in the next few months, according to a Marine Corps-wide Marksmanship Campaign Plan released Monday. The Campaign plan, published by the Marine Corps Training and Education Command, sets deadlines for new training to be up and running across the force and mandates major renovations for shooting ranges that don’t yet comply with the new marksmanship standards.
The new shooting standards and drills, which have been in the works since 2018, are the first major overhaul of Marine rifle training in a century.
Though many units across the Marine Corps have been using the new marksmanship standards since 2021, the Campaign Plan requires every Marine in the fleet — and every range they shoot on — to be up to date by the end of the 2029 fiscal year, said Col. Scott A. Cuomo, the commander of Weapons Training Battalion-Quantico, one of several test units for the new standards.
The changes reflect lessons from almost two decades of constant combat, said Cuomo.
“When we started putting more, heavier footprints in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2018, we were doing really well crushing our adversaries in any fight. This wasn’t a case of ‘oh my God, the Marines didn’t wildly maneuver, close, etc.’,” said Cuomo. “It was just being honest with ourselves, looking in the mirror and asking, can we do certain things better?”
Marines returning from the post-9/11 wars reported that the long-distance shooting they’d learned at boot camp and beyond was not well suited to the combat of Afghanistan and Iraq.
“ A lot of our marksmanship was, over a 60-ish year period — arguably from 1907 up until Hue City in Vietnam — focused more on longer ranges in the treeline-type environments,” said Cuomo. “So what happens when you’re going up against an enemy that is holed up in a lot of buildings, and they’re running from building to building, building to wadi, building to ditch, moving rapidly? Is our marksmanship foundation built in those environments too?”
New tests, same ethos
Few military skills are tied more closely to a branch’s identity than marksmanship is to Marines, who have long instilled in new recruits — regardless of their daily job — an ethos that “every Marine is a rifleman.”
The new Campaign Plan lays out the timetable on which all Marines can expect to be shooting under the new rules, starting with the Annual Rifle Qualification, or ARQ. That test will replace the long-standing Annual Rifle Training, or ART, as the basic Marine marksmanship test taught at boot camp and as the basic annual qualifying test for every Marine. The deadline for Marines to switch to the ARQ is late 2028.
“Over the next couple of years, you will see the complete transition to any Marine, recruit all the way through, will be shooting the ARQ,” Cuomo said.
The Campaign Plan also lays out instructions for Marines in the fleet to begin training by mid-2027 for one of two annual tactical tests: the Infantry Marksmanship Assessment, or IMA, for all infantry Marines; or a slightly toned-down tactical course of fire for non-infantry Marines known as the Rifle Marksmanship Assessment, or RMA.
The drills of RMA mirror those of the IMA except for some short-range on-the-move shooting, Cuomo said. The RMA’s goal is to keep non-infantry Marines prepared for frontline combat duty, even if their full-time job sends them to the range less often than their infantry peers. Cuomo cited units like those that set up forward refueling points for Marine helicopters and MV-22 Ospreys.
“You’re not going to be able to say ‘okay I’m going to have an infantry platoon or infantry company go first to set up security’ and do all that because the signature is going to be too big,” said Cuomo. “You got to be ready to protect yourself. So let’s figure out how to have a small footprint of bulk fueling Marines that get out with the refueling hose and once they set the thing up they’ve got their rifles and, you know, this is ‘every Marine a rifleman,’ this is the Marine Corps, right? Let’s make sure they are lethal as all hell to do that and it’s one of the other reasons I’m super excited.”
A similar revamp for sidearms training, known as the Combat Pistol Program, is also scheduled to be online across the Corps by the fall of 2026.
Scores for distance, time and ‘lethality’
The new approach breaks marksmanship into five skills which the Marines call the “S.P.E.A.R. Model of Lethality” for Speed, Precision, Executive Control, Adaptability, and Risk Exposure.
To emphasize speed, each round is scored on how fast a Marine fires it. For example, the ARQ test requires Marines to fire a two-round “controlled pair” at a target 300 yards away in 15 seconds from standing or kneeling with support, while the “failure to stop” drill calls for three shots in five seconds at a target 25 -yards away while target while standing.
The timed shots, Cuomo said, are a major change from previous tests.
“At the 500-yard line, you would have 10 minutes to take 10 shots,” Cuomo said. “Is that what we experienced in Fallujah or in Marjah?” Cuomo said. “Did you have 10 minutes or did the target present itself for 23 seconds or seven seconds? And the answer is, I’m sure, you know, it was much more the latter rather than the former.”
The new tests also reverse the order of shooting in the ‘long-bay’ events, with Marines firing first at targets 500 yards away then progressing to targets as close as 15 yards. Previous shooting tests generally started with nearer targets and moved farther out.
“When I went through as a lieutenant, we started at the 100-yard line and we worked back to 500. Now, we are starting from 500 to drive into a Marine’s mind even more than we already do, we are always closing on the enemy,” said Cuomo. “So you start at 500, then you go 300, then you go 200, then you go 100. And what’s different is now, there’s a 25-yard-and-in portion, which didn’t exist previously.”
Hits on target are also scored differently. Rather than scoring rounds based on circular rings on a target, each round is given a “lethality” measure, which judges how likely a round is to “destroy, neutralize or suppress” a target.
A headshot or well-placed hit in the chest destroys a target. A round in the shoulder might just count as a suppression.
New Ranges
Under the Campaign Plan announced Monday, all firing ranges across the service must be up to speed by late 2029. Some ranges, said Cuomo, need more work than others, including among the two bases that host Marine boot camp, where every enlisted Marine is first taught marksmanship.
Camp Pendleton’s Edson Range, where San Diego recruits get two weeks of marksmanship training, has both the long ranges and ample room for the short-bay portions of ARQ training. But several of the ranges at Recruit Depot Parris Island have terrain issues for long shots and cramped quarters for short-bay shooting and will need major upgrades.
“It’s just the way the terrain is down there,” said Cuomo. Parris Island’s ranges have elevation changes along their length and almost no open flat ground near the firing area. “So what that means is the ‘short-bay’ as it’s called, for the close-in portion, the terrain physically will not allow them to set up. There’s no flat terrain, so we have to do some facility upgrades and that’ll take some time.”
For now, all new recruits at both depots still train on the ART.
A new scoring and tracking system
The Campaign Plan also mandates the roll-out of the Joint Marksmanship Assessment Package, or JMAP, a scoring and tracking system that will pinpoint and record the shooting skills of every Marine, every time they qualify on the range.
The system — which includes standardized targets, a smartphone and an app used at the range — records shooting scores and compiles them in a central database. Trainers and commanders can then adjust their unit’s training based on their results at the range.
“My excitement is through the roof on this,” said Cuomo. “I have been praying, quite literally, that we would have a way to help an individual Marine and his or her small unit leader understand, objectively, the lethality of an individual Marine in the most realistic combat environments that we can think of. And the Infantry Marksmanship Assessment with the Joint Marksmanship Assessment Package felt like, when I saw this for the first time, it felt like God had answered countless prayers.”
CORRECTION: 9/26/2024:
A previous version of this story said that Marines who attend boot camp at Marine Recruit Depot San Diego complete the new Annual Rifle Qualification, or ARQ, test during boot camp while those who enter the Marines at Recruit Depot Parris Island train for the Annual Rifle Testing, or ART. In fact, recruits at both installations complete the ART during recruit training. Both depots will switch their training to the ARQ no later than the fall of 2029.
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