PDWs...and other small arms.

[LRRPF52]

LR1955 is coming from a perspective where the units he was in were doing SOT or SFARTAETC (8 week SF CQB course) and lots of Group-level CQB training exceed what regular units will ever come near in a career, and they will easily exceed the experience of a conventional unit soldier's 20 year career in a week or two. 500 rounds per day per gun (carbine and pistol) are the baseline, and now that SFAUCC I and II are in place at the Group level, you commonly see shooting schedules with the carbines that reach 1000 rounds per day.

That's just the individual-level CQM before going into Team-level CQB, week-after-week, month-after-month, year-after-year.

One particular day that I did a CQM range with a Team from 3rd Group's newly formed CIF, I literally shot 1100 rounds through my M4 in about 4 hours, and every single round was within the vital zones on FBI B7 targets that we kept spray adhesive attaching to the target backers. We only were shooting in the latter half of the day, not a full day.

The point is that we're talking about career soldiers who put most of the military BS aside and focus on nothing but training, then deploying, with and average of 3-4 marriages in the wake as symptoms of the OPTEMPO.

Conventional units never get to the range even a fraction of that, which is one of the reasons why the Army refused to accept most of the SOCOM requests for PIP on the M4, because they rarely shoot their M4s, whereas armorers/18Bs in SF would be replacing bolts and locking blocks by the bucket load.

As far as transitioning to pistol goes, the current trend in SOCOM and other units above that has gone away from the drop leg holsters, and more to war belt mounting of the holster for sidearms on the few mission profiles that call for it.



What does this have to do with PDWs? I'm not even sure at this point.

I just wanted to point that out before any more took the pedestal of lecturing to someone who has probably spent more time in a week doing the things we're talking about, than they likely have done in 20 year careers even. The experience level shows when you take an entry-level soldier against someone who has been blasting his whole adult life. A lot of the lessons you guys are trying to explain were learned by your audience before many of the current generation were even born, then built upon over seasons of professional, real-world experience covering decades.