For the Airsoft haters..

[Not_A_Llama]

A day out on the airsoft field, indoor or outdoor, is some of the best FoF training that sane amounts of money can buy.

Sims are theoretically better, but unattainable to most people.

$60 at American Paintball Coliseum on Saturday morning with a rental gun and gear will have you absolutely shitted by lunchtime and give the reps to internalize some theoretical training concepts you've learned. You'll be playing against kids, but they're wily, unpredictable, small, and have been raised on a steady diet of Modern Warfare their entire lives. It's probably more structured than most real-life gunfights on the street.

If you go with some competent guys, I don't see the experience as appreciably different from UTM sims. The fear inoculation is real, if you let it be, and identical to times in my life that I've legitimately been in fear for my life.

$60 in any flavor of sims gets you maybe two magazines of ammo. This assuming you have the gun, the gear, the venue, and enough dudes similarly motivated.

Maybe there should be a co-ar day at airsoft.

If you want to get into the game on a serious basis, figure $300 for something like a basic quality KWA rifle, and $150 for support gear, including your first bottle of BBs and a LiPo battery setup.

[cstone]

I didn't watch the video but have some thoughts about airsoft based on some of the other alternatives to "force on force" training I've been a part of throughout my career.

We have used paintballs and FX/simunitions for shoot houses and force on force. Both are much better than the multiple integrated laser engagement system (MILES) we used decades ago in the military. MILES just didn't provide an accurate and immediate feedback on small arms engagement IMO. Paintball had some major drawback as it was a completely different weapon system with lots of shortcomings regarding accuracy and range. Like simunitions, paintball was extremely good at shutting down the claims of "you missed." Simunitions seems to dominate most of what is being used today as the weapons used are actual firearms with almost the same functions as duty weapons. The range and accuracy is acceptable as engagements are within confined areas. Lots of precaution needs to go into running simunitions courses as the sim rounds can cause injuries and if even one actual live round gets into a firearm there can be really negative consequences. Safety on a simuntions range takes a good portion of the training time.

Airsoft using some of the better Japanese manufactured weapons can provide very good training experience without any of the time/safety issues involved in simunitions. The range and accuracy for some of these airsoft weapons is pretty impressive. Even the operation of the firearm is pretty close to the actual function of the firearm they are replicating.

I think there is room for airsoft in training environments. It really depends on what the focus is on with the training being conducted.

[CS1983]

While not airsoft, when I was at Ft. Stewart my platoon had a day where we went to a paintball course in Ludowici. Bunch of 12-18 year old kids were our opponents. The main course where you have to bound up was a slaughterhouse with us as losers. “Urban” warfare just plain sucks. The kids were pretty amazing. Where we got them was when we shifted to the woods course for a CTF. Apparently they’d never heard of an L shaped ambush and patience. But the reality was those kids whooping up on a bunch of cocky Scouts got our attention, and we paid mind to the MOUT training we had to do later. Which was the entire reason our platoon sergeant had us do the paintball. He wanted to get it into our heads that the canned training was no match for the uncanned, unplanned reality of people with an enthusiasm for shooting you in the dick.

[Jer]

Just clicked it and going to add some thoughts as I let it run in the background.

I'm only a few minutes in so far but his first EVER attempt to fire a handgun resulted in... nothing. Which instantly resulted in a tap rack bang and return to target. That in and of itself is worth the price of admission. The rest is just icing on the cake.

That reload drill at 16:45 doe. Wait, that malfunction manipulation right afterwards..... jebus.

Continuing on... this dude moves well. Really well. I especially love how they dressed the same.

Around the 23min mark he tries to speed up and has a massive melt-down of just about every piece of the puzzle and, even while pausing to audibly complain, does better than most keyboard commandos who say airsoft is for children.

Summary: any dry fire working towards efficiency & accuracy as the end goal is good dry fire.

I never doubted airsoft other than recoil mitigation so no real convert here but hopefully watching this allowed some to have a more open mind to these sorts of things. Of course it carries over more than playing Magic the Gathering.