MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va. -- Marines with Combat Shooting Team, Weapons Training Battalion, hosted the 4th Annual Quantico Combat Shooting Match Oct. 28-30 at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.
The match was open to all qualified federal and military competitive shooters to test their marksmanship skills against one another.
“The biggest draw of this is forcing Marines to learn individual skill sets that are applicable in any theater in combat,” said Capt. Jared Dalton, a Salt Lake City, Utah native, and the officer in charge of the combat shooting team. “Those skill sets vary from shooting on the move, weapons manipulation, weapons presentation, reloading, transitions and unorthodox shooting positions.”
The competition included five stages of varying courses of fire. Each stage presented obstacles designed to force the competitors to problem solve, while shooting targets in a real-world scenarios.
“It helps Marines to break out of the historic norm of training to the last fight and forces us to train for any fight,” said Dalton. “Once a Marine is confident in his weapons system and platforms it doesn’t matter whether he is in a house on a street, jungle or desert.”
The obstacles included: obstructed view of targets, shooting in a multitude of environments such as corridors and buildings, and weapon swapping and reloading.
“The theater doesn’t matter,” Dalton said. “As long as he can effectively employ that weapon and engage the threat until it is no longer a threat he’s successful.”
The competition consisted of high-paced combat-oriented marksmanship requiring a calm mindset through a stressful scenario.
“In division matches you are firing static,” said Staff Sgt. Timothy Hall, an Indian Lake, New York native, and a member of the combat shooting team. It’s focused on the mastery of the fundamentals “Here it’s dynamic. It’s more like a real world scenario.”
In addition, the event was set up as a three-gun shooting match, in which the competitors are required to switch through unfamiliar weaponry while maneuvering through the course.
“Any person is going to have a difficult time with something they are unfamiliar with,” Hall said. “Without the hands-on experience, you’re going to have that ‘fumbling’ with the weapon.”
The competition concluded Oct. 30, with multiple shooters awarded the distinguished marksmen badge. The top three military competitors were Sgt. Teren Holsey, a critical skills operator with Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, Sgt. Jason Wattle, a rifleman with Weapons Training Bn., and Staff Sgt. Jonathan Shue, a member of the Combat Shooting Team.
The combat shooting team is looking to spread their matches throughout the Marine Corps.
“Last year we had a match at Twenty Nine Palms [California]. This year we have this match, one in Twenty Nine Palms, and we are working to solidify matches in Okinawa [Japan] and [Marine Corps Base Camp] Lejeune, [North Carolina],” Dalton said.
In the long run, these matches may develop Marine Corps methods of training for combat in the near future.
“The [team] is taking everything it can from the civilian sector trying to take the civilian template and make it Marine centric, so we can train Marines to be effective in combat,” Dalton said. “[This] challenges them in a way that they won’t be challenged in any other match or any other shooting they do in the Marine Corps.”