Forged to Kill: Competitive Marksmanship and the Infantryman’s Path to Digital Lethality

Transcript: https://funshoot.substack.com/p/competitive-marksmanship-increases

Forged to Kill: Competitive Marksmanship and the Infantryman’s Path to Digital Lethality. What Makes Infantrymen So Deadly? In the evolving landscape of modern warfare, the traditional metrics of infantry proficiency—basic qualification scores and doctrinal compliance—are insufficient to ensure battlefield dominance. The gap is not small. The rise of the peer and modern threats, with their emphasis on algorithmic warfare, persistent ISR, and long-range precision strike capabilities, changes the lethality equation.

Modern conflict punishes hesitation, indecision, and rote training. Yet in the practical application of TC 3-20.40, much of the U.S. Army’s marksmanship instruction remains compliance-based, emphasizing safety over mastery and qualification over combat capability.

Competitive marksmanship fills the critical gap. Unlike standard qualification, which merely assesses minimum competency in sterile conditions, competitive shooting develops true lethality under pressure. Competition is the collective pursuit of individual excellence. That collective pursuit is the dynamic force producing change. It forces Soldiers to perform under observation, against time, and in dynamic, unfamiliar scenarios that mimic the unpredictability of war. Competition as training has no regard for rank or what you did yesterday. It’s a ten-digit grid point of your real skill level, under duress, in relation to everyone else on the map. Competition exposes truth, inoculates participants against stress and builds cognitive resilience—attributes increasingly recognized as essential for high-performance tactical units.