Train how you fight

Satterlee explained that a lot of marksmanship training is still centered around “peer-to-peer” fighting scenarios—battles against other uniformed enemies with well-defined battle lines.

But contemporary battlefields bear little resemblance to that conventional paradigm. American troops aren’t fighting Panzers anymore.

Today, soldiers often find themselves in much more ambiguous settings—dominated by militias, guerrillas and spies. A civilian might approach to give soldiers critical information about the enemy … or blow them up in a suicide attack.

Satterlee said that practical exercises should force shooters to make quick assessments and act decisively. He said he often wonders how many soldiers might be alive today had they not hesitated to ask for permission to act when they saw a threat.

“On the flip side,” he adds. “How many [civilians] down range might be alive that didn’t need to die?”

He said those questions are the biggest takeaways from his time deployed in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

On the battlefield, soldiers have to make decisions quickly. But acting fast can’t mean acting in a rushed or sloppy way. You need to be very deliberate. Handling a weapon is a huge responsibility—as is taking a life.

Satterlee says that for a soldier’s sanity, he or she needs to know they’re doing the right thing when they take their shot. They need to feel confident that they can determine if the car approaching them is packed with explosives, or just a dad rushing to get home to his family.

“You can’t expect a soldier to adapt to chaos unless he’s already been exposed to it,” Satterlee says.

He says they need to train in an environment that simulates the uncertainty of a modern war zone, without its lethality. They need training that allows them to fail safely, and to reflect and learn from mistakes.

He’s taken his lessons from the world of competitive shooting and brought them to how he trains soldiers at JBLM. He’s a seasoned special operations veteran with years of experience—and one of the top shooters in the nation—so his commanders give him exceptional leeway to experiment in his training.

As a member of 1st Group, he’s in an environment that welcomes innovation and creative problem solving. His commanders trust his judgment. It’s an elite unit—everyone who comes through his doors for the urban combat course is handpicked.

But Satterlee says he doesn’t think this sort of training should be reserved for only the most elite troops.

He asserts that soldiers—especially new recruits—need to learn about the complexities of modern conflict much earlier. He says they need to learn how to assess threats and to know the consequences of both indecision and rashness.

He admits that it’s significantly harder to give large, conventional units that sort of training, compared to smaller and adaptable elite units. However, he proposes that the Army can impart these lessons with audiovisual aids and gaming-style training.

But the challenge of introducing new training techniques and philosophies isn’t just logistical—it’s cultural.