Sharp Pens Beget Sharp Shooters

How a team of Marines turned an article into a DoD sanctioned document

In September of 2024, the Marines of Weapons Training Battalion published an article on the Revolution of Small-Arms Marksmanship Lethality. Subsequently, Training and Education Command Commanding General, General Watson, (Weapons Training Battalion’s higher headquarters) signed the Marine Corps Marksmanship Campaign Plan. This plan mirrored what we wrote in the Gazette article and established the policy for the advancement of Small-Arms Marksmanship. How did the Marine Corps make these changes so quickly? It was largely due to the fact that our article in the Marine Corps Gazette highlighted the need for change, and the Marine Corps responded.

But there’s a little more to the story.

The power of a Gazette article

Beginning with a 2018 Marksmanship Lethality Capabilities Based-Assessment, the Marine Corps realized the clear need to improve marksmanship across the Corps. Weapons Training Battalion Quantico, the Marine Corps’ proponent for small-arms marksmanship, was tasked with the modernization of Marine Corps marksmanship training across multiple lines of effort. This included a new annual rifle qualification, a new initial infantry training course, and an Infantry-specific marksmanship course to name a few elements. Separately, the USMC Training and Education Command worked with the Office of Naval Research to develop a new tactics-agnostic framework for lethality which was incorporated into the Infantry-centric marksmanship advances. This framework, known as the “S.P.E.A.R. Model” quantified lethality through concrete metrics, measuring and recording this data in a system known as the Joint Marksmanship Assessment Package (JMAP).

SGT Goslin provides instructor feedback using JMAP. (Photo courtesy of Capt Williams)

Individuals and units seized the initiative to drive these programs, but they weren’t well integrated with each other. The new annual rifle qualification was a step in the right direction in terms of marksmanship, but it didn’t incorporate the SPEAR model. The new initial infantry course created much better basically trained infantry Marines, but it left out 4/5s of the force regarding advanced marksmanship instruction. JMAP allowed for continued growth through data-driven analysis of shooter performance and an individual’s lethality capabilities, but only infantry Marines’ marksmanship performance was being measured. The Marine Corps needed to unify these lines of effort into a single concrete plan that included future marksmanship advancement. Consequently, the Marines of Weapons Training Battalion drafted the Marksmanship Campaign Plan to unify these efforts. Crucially though—Weapons Training Battalion needed a catalyst to stimulate a sense of urgency and gain momentum regarding the Campaign Plan’s adoption and execution.

To stimulate that sense of urgency, the Marines of Weapons Training Battalion wrote an article in the Marine Corps Gazette to highlight the opportunity to revolutionize marksmanship and individual lethality. The collaborative drafting and revisionary process led to the whole concept gaining momentum and widespread buy-in, leading to the rapid publication of the Marksmanship Campaign Plan. Generals and other senior officers across the Marine Corps, through reading the article, came to understand the need for the campaign plan and an overhaul of the marksmanship enterprise.

To put it simply, General Officers listened to the ideas of their subject matter experts who were leading the charge. They listened because the ideas were sound, well-articulated, and put in the format they could digest readily, an article in the Marine Corps Gazette. This was possible because the impact of a Gazette article is well-known throughout the Marine Corps. The Gazette has legitimacy. General Officers and senior field-grade officers look to the Gazette to get a pulse on current, professional thoughts and they often make changes and decisions based on what they read. They also provide feedback to Gazette articles, both formally through policy changes, and informally by engaging in the professional discourse. By providing this feedback, they inspire Marines across the Corps to think critically and innovate regarding problems facing the Corps and how to solve them in creative ways. The Marksmanship Campaign Plan is simply one of countless examples of this occurrence.

Marine refines her technique for SOM based on instructor feedback. (Photo courtesy of Capt Williams)

Lessons for Branch Journals and the Line of Departure

The Army wants to leverage Branch Journals for the same reason. However, there is a lack of initiative and creativity within the Army’s professional writing sphere because many soldiers with great ideas believe that their leaders won’t listen to or take any action on their creativity and hard work. The Army is increasingly recognizing that those closest to the operation usually have the best perspective on changes that need to be made to edge forward. They want to hear what their troops are thinking and what ideas they have about ways to make the Army more lethal. Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom analyze organizations that incorporate this type of decentralization in their book The Starfish and the Spider. They highlight that this process of implementing bottom-up changes is a key aspect of decentralization and is one that enables traditionally slow-moving corporations to rapidly adapt to emerging business needs and stay ahead of their competition. They interviewed Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez of Goodwill who said it best,

"We needed to get people into a conversation and get them to be innovative and creative. People in positions of power needed to understand that great ideas come from people who are closest to the ideas."

The Army desires to leverage this principle of decentralization to regain the initiative in future combat development.

One way Army leaders can inspire their soldiers to find creative solutions to future problems on the modern battlefield is to counter the cultural message that lower-ranking soldiers aren’t listened to or taken seriously. Senior leaders could provide feedback or respond to certain articles in Branch Journals or the Line of Departure to explain how they are accounting for the feedback they’ve received from certain articles.

By doing so, senior leaders would demonstrate to authors and thinkers that their ideas are taken seriously, even if they aren’t implemented. This would achieve each function of professional military writing. Senior leaders would (1) inform their subordinates and their community about thoughts and potential decisions, (2) encouraging cross-community discourse, (3) establishing a clear response mechanism for ideas, and force writers and thinkers to (5) improve their communication proficiency by (4) inspiring the generation of these creative ideas. The Marine Corps provided this feedback by specifically citing the Gazette article during the release of the Campaign Plan. By leaning into the ideas of branch journal authors and having formal and informal feedback mechanisms through professional writing, the Army could achieve the professional writing culture that has already been established in the Marine Corps.