If you cheat in training, you're stealing from yourself. John Simpson Tweet The very first podcast interview I ever did was with John Simpson. He's a veteran of Army Special Forces, sniper, author, and an encyclopedia of shooting knowledge. John is actually responsible for connecting me with many of my original interview guests, and I've been thankful ever since. Ever since that first conversation, we keep in touch from time to time and I always appreciate his forthrightness and willingness to call me on a my occasional mistakes. Not long ago, John let me know that he had a new edition of his book, The Foundations of Sniper Marksmanship. The second edition has 48 more pages of material, some of which we talk about in this interview, as well as the usual updates and fixes that authors like to make. You can find it on Amazon or through his publisher at Blue 360 Media if you prefer. We decided to sit down and talk a bit more about some of the topics in the book, both the original and revised edition. The Fundamentals Don't Change One of John's motivations for the book is a no-nonsense manual that a police sniper team leader could hand to someone preparing to go to sniper school and get them to understand the basics up front. There's not really any ink wasted on variations or nuances that you might find in other books. John holds the opinion, and rightly so, that you must understand and master the basic concept before trying to change it. A lot of instructors try to think of variations of things just to say that they could put their stamp on it even if there was nothing wrong with the basic version. To illustrate this, when discussing the basic shooting positions, John uses illustrations from the 1889 US Army marksmanship manual. The positions illustrated then are exactly as any good marksmanship program would teach them today. As with many things in life, there's nothing wrong with the basics. Most people are better off mastering the basic positions and skills before trying more advanced items. TRAINFIRE In 1953, President Eisenhower received a letter from Mr. Howard C. Sarvis of New Meadows Idaho. The letter, as reported in history, explained that current army marksmanship training was ineffective at teaching combat shooting. Mr. Sarvis went on to detail an improved program based on combat experience during WWII and Korea. The improved program launched in 1955, and sought to teach soldiers improved combat shooting skills. You can read about TRAINFIRE I over at DTIC.mil While TRAINFIRE is somewhat controversial today amongst a competitive shooting-oriented basic marksmanship rogram, I bring this up because early in John's book, he discusses 9 principles that I thought were valuable. * Enemy personnel targets are rarely visible except in close assault * Most combat targets consist of a number of men or objects, linear in nature, irregularly spaced, and using cover * Targets, detected by smoke, flash, dust, noise,