Every US service has basic firearms use training appropriate to their respective usual duties during recruit entry phase. Of course, the Army does Rifle Marksmanship training in Basic and every Army soldier also has to regularly re-train and re-qualify with the primary weapon, and the Marine Corps does so with greater intensity and frequency.
The Marine Corps, besides having ground elements and also serving on ships, has a significant air wing consisting of fighter planes, ground attack planes, transport planes, and helicopters.
USMC Air Wing current inventory: United States Marine Corps Aviation - Wikipedia
But as mentioned above, the Marine Corps is much, much smaller than the Army or the Navy or the Air Force. That’s one reason we’re called “The Few, The Proud, The Marines”.
At least when I in, the Air Force had initial trading in basic and annual qualifications afterwords. The Army did, also (married to a soldier for 3 years).
I don’t know about the Navy.
The Navy had very little firearm training when I was in. Pretty much 1 day for most in bootcamp, but an option to qualify for marksman if you wanted to and could. I don’t know the details as it didn’t interest me in the least.
Notwithstanding all the additional comments made since this post, but the Marine Corps has placed a priority on maintaining basic proficiency with a rifle with the annual qualifications. I’m sure most of us commenting here have had a first aid class at some point in our lives, but if our job depended in passing an annual training in first aid, we’d be more proficient in those skills – even if it won’t make us all trauma nurses.
Somewhere in the military (Air Force, I imagine?) there are guys whose job consists of sitting in a comfortable air-conditioned control room on a base somewhere in the US, remote-controlling drone aircraft. There’s also a guy somewhere whose job consists entirely of training those stateside drone controllers. And a guy whose job is to keep the software in those drones up-to-date and make sure that all of the potential security holes are patched, and a guy whose job is to try to crack the security on enemy technology.
Does it really make any sense to train any of those guys in how to shoot a rifle?
Depends on which part of the Navy you’re talking about. The Seabees do annual range qualification on various weapons (depending on whether you’re part of a rifle platoon or a weapons platoon) when assigned to a battalion, as does every other person assigned to a battalion, including storekeepers, personnel clerks, mess cooks, etc. I qualified expert on rifle no fewer than ten times and on pistol several times.
The reason for that is because Seabees are expected to provide defensive combat at forward construction sites. The arsenal kept by a Seabee battalion is fairly impressive, and includes personal and crew-served weapons.
Seabees and I understood small boat crews also got and kept up weapons training and of course SEALS. But of the 5000 to 6000 on a carrier at sea, pretty much just the Marines have weapons and keep up training. Firefighting and Damage Control were our important battle skills.
I’m not going to go overboard, and I largely agree with you. But part of this is what we discussed earlier - culture.
Every Marine knows the adage “every Marine a rifleman” and they are proud of that, especially those further away from combat arms. And that culture permeates the Marine Corps, as the air conditioning culture permeate the Air Force.
Two other things. The Marines are very junior force. Their median enlisted rank is the lowest in the military. So a larger component of their force is closer to boot camp and they have that war fighter mentality.
The Marine Corps also seems to do a better job of rotating Marines so they are generally not away from a war fighting unit as long as some of the other services. I know so Air Force Officers who havn’t been in an aviation squadron in 25 years. That’s a long time to be removed from the pointy end of the spear. You’d be hard pressed to see much of that in the Marine Corps.
So while there is some, albeit perhaps overstated benefit to the “every Marine a rifleman” it does support their culture, that that is difficult to overstate.
That’s not necessarily a positive thing. Having every member of your organization be a rifleman is only a virtue if you assume that every worthwhile mission can be best accomplished by riflemen.
The counterargument from the other branches would be that some missions require riflemen - and some missions require tank drivers or helicopter pilots or paratroopers or drone operators or submariners or missile technicians or military police or scuba divers or computer programmers. And we have all of those people so we can do any of those missions, including riflemen missions. Meanwhile, the Marine Corps can do riflemen missions.
I realize the Marines would respond that they’re not just riflemen. They’re riflemen who have other specialties as well. But that’s not really an answer. You don’t just wave a magic wand and become skilled at something. You have to spend a lot of time learning how to do a specialty and then practicing it on an ongoing basis to do it well. So a pilot who spends his time being a pilot is going to be better at his job than a pilot who has to also maintain qualification as a riflemen. The time he spends learning to be a rifleman is time he should have been spending learning to be a better pilot.
The Air Force employs lots of pilots and airplane mechanics. These are highly skilled and take alot of money to train. Once trained they can make good money working for airlines. Thus the Air Force spends alot of money on amenities to convince them to stick around. Personnel in the other branches are cheaper to train and have fewer lucrative outside alternatives and so don’t need to be treated as well.
As a junior officer on a submarine, I was required to obtain some minimum qualification with a pistol, and encouraged to try out for a higher qualification. (I ultimately qualified as “Expert” and got the accompanying medal.) I don’t recall much actual training, just an occasional chance to go to the pistol range.
My wife was a Nurse Corps officer, and was encouraged but not required to qualify with a pistol. IIRC, she got either Marksman or Sharpshooter, but not Expert.
IIRC, there was a time limit as part of the qualification test, so you couldn’t take all day. Another part of the qualification test that I remember was the requirement to shoot so many rounds while holding the pistol with your non-dominant hand (to simulate getting wounded on the dominant hand).
Today, submariners apparently qualify using a Beretta M9 9mm pistol, but I believe we qualified on a Colt M1911 .45 caliber pistol back in the early '90s. (The Navy tends to get hand-me-down weapons from the other services for our small arms lockers on board ships and submarines, so I suspect we just hadn’t yet received the newer pistols.)
The enlisted guys on our submarine were required to qualify on a pistol as well as a 12-gauge shotgun, both of which they were armed with while standing watch topside when we were in port tied to the pier. The topside watches were supposed to keep their weapons unloaded unless confronted with a threat, but I can’t tell you how many of them got bored and managed to shoot themselves in the foot. :rolleyes:
I think you’d disagreed with my culture assessment that went with this, and you’re certainly within your right to disagree with me.
But part in parcel with this “every Marine a rifleman” are the qualifications that you must maintain, and keeping in physical shape, and keeping up with tactics, and making sure that you’re not “the guy” who trying to avoid sea duty or hard jobs etc… These are all components of the Marine Corps culture, which makes them who they are and man for man the best Service in the US military and that means something when the fur is flying.
Through slightly deceptive means, I went through my service time without ever shooting a gun. Bootcamp was the only time it came up and when we were due to go to the range, I missed it with pneumonia and then later I just moved my card from the not done to the done side and it never came up. I had easy access to the cards as the company education PO or whatever we were called.
Comments like these are why real war fighters want to punch people in the chair force in the nose.
While the A-10 was literally designed around its gun, I believe due to concerns of vulnerability from ground fire/MANPADS, most of its close air support missions nowadays are limited to medium altitude bombing, not gun runs.
How well-trained pilots are vs. riflemen is perhaps debatable. But there’s certainly a much greater and higher-paying civilian market for pilots than for riflemen. There’s no temptation, after you get your Marine training, to quit to go get paid big bucks as a rifleman at a private company.
Or to put it another way, would it make sense to have a force where every member was a tanker?
But it isn’t unique to the Marine Corps. Every soldier in the US Army must qualify with a rifle twice a year. I’ll never understand why the Marines think there is something special about everyone shooting a rifle. Sure, you’re all riflemen… just like in the Army.
But also just like in the Army, every Marine is not an infantryman.
No, he’s just regurgitating Marine Corps reteric. They’re not the only service with mandatory standards for weapon proficiency and marksmanship, and not the only service requiring recertification. And if theyre only doing it once a year the the Army is doing it at least twice as often s they are. I wouldn’t pretend to know what the Navy and Air Force do, though.
I might agree with your point, if every Soldier had to qualify twice a year. But that’s just not true. There is no such Army requirement.