From the Archives: Repetition Builds Winners
by CWO5 Ray Browne
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the CxFile in February 2021.
This is not a lecture from a senior to a junior Marine, rather a reminder to my comrades in arms of something we all know intuitively, but may not be
practicing: repetition builds winners.
At the onset of our military careers we are inundated with clichés that are meant to resonate and reinforce good habits to build professional competence. Examples include Malcolm Gladwell’s theory on 10,000 hours (Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers) or practice makes permanent, practice makes perfect, perfect practice makes perfect, muscle memory, conditioning, slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and more.
I went to high school in a small Northern California town that always did well at wrestling and routinely sent athletes to compete at the state level. Among my memories of being a wrestler, I remember the exhaustive runs, wearing a sweat suit in a wrestling room with the heater on full blast, burpees, and feeling like I could not possibly exert myself anymore and wanting to quit. Every time I lost a match, I felt horrible. I blamed myself for not trying harder or practicing more. My teammates that lived and breathed wrestling always did better. In retrospect and after decades as an infantry Marine the reason for their success is fairly obvious: they practiced more than anybody and therefore they won more than anybody.
Better yet they practiced well and a lot. Science and history prove the more you practice something, the more you perform that thing the way you practiced it. The importance of dedication and practicing was reinforced emphatically when I joined the Marine Corps. If you do something a lot, and if you do it the right way, you will always outperform those that do not. Do something a lot the wrong way, and you will only learn bad habits and lose to those that are better prepared.
My wrestling coach, Bob Colvig, may not remember me but I remember him and his many wise reflections on life and hard taught lessons. Huge letters were blazoned on the wall in the wrestling-mat room spelling out two of Coach Colvig’s most meaningful sentiments: “Never Quit” and “Repetition Builds Winners”. Coach Colvig never relented and constantly pushed his athletes. It was his mission in life to make us better wrestlers and inculcate us with valuable life-lessons in the process. It was extremely daunting being on his team and many of us vehemently resented him at the time, myself included. I had no father around as a young man, so the impact of an adult male pushing me and disciplining me was not something I was familiar with and I resented it, though I was obviously in desperate need of it. I never became a state-level competitor, but the lessons I learned under Coach Colvig’s watchful, uncompromising and sage tutelage laid the foundation of my character that in time enabled me to become a successful infantry Marine.
Coach Colvig relentlessly strove to instill into all of us the lifelong understanding that the work, passion, and repetitions you put into something, directly correlate to repeatable and sustainable proficiency. This may give the impression that he believed everyone should simply repeat tasks correctly over and over again and they would become state-level competitive wrestlers. That is far from the truth. The intangibles of passion and other basic human factors were things he knew were the ultimate unknowns that can make the difference between good and great. However, he also knew that if you were an extremely passionate person that only did something right a few times, it is doubtful you’d gain consistent success at any level. The balanced application of passion and correct practice is where he knew true lifelong capabilities were found and fostered.
Most importantly, Coach Colvig always showed up and kept his end of the bargain as our leader, trainer, and mentor. Every day he presented us with a new challenge harder than the previous day’s. If you wanted to win, you had to have the passion and will every single day to practice more than the others, and to practice perfectly to achieve true greatness and victory. Just like Coach Colvig, Marine leaders are in positions to inspire and train their Marines each and every day towards greatness. Are we, as leaders of Marines, keeping our end of the bargain by physically, mentally, and morally by demanding the most out of our Marines? Of ourselves? The stakes are infinitely higher on the field of battle than on a wrestling mat, so we had better be.
Natural abilities, genetics, and intellect have something to do with success in physical and mental endeavors for a blessed few in all professions and walks of life. Unfortunately, in the Marine Corps our ability to “manage talent” is at the mercy of the manpower cycle that randomly assigns Marines to our units. Then for those few with natural abilities, if they are not taught, coached, and mentored correctly throughout their careers how long will they sustain their abilities? Who will be their “Coach Colvig” to build on their basically trained skillsets and challenge them on a daily basis?
The Marine Corps recruiting model recruits young men and women that meet established minimum standards and have the uncommon will to become a Marine. The prevailing philosophy is that talent can be grown, nurtured, and constantly developed throughout a Marine’s enlistment. Our newest Marines often did not learn many valuable lessons in their youth, those gaps will have to be filled. Similarly, many of them have unexpected skills and capabilities that can be capitalized on and further developed. The Marine Corps may benefit from correlated skills that lend to discipline and a desire to practice something over and over, but when new Marines come to us, our first training iterations set the tone for how they translate their civilian life lessons learned into Military proficiency. This is why training plans that reinforce battle drills, immediate action drills, and small unit actions can develop a muscle memory that can lay the groundwork for solving complex lateral thinking problems down the road. More Importantly the more you practice something with variation (full mission profile across the ROMO) the better your brain retains how the fundamental steps you learned adapt through many different tactics...without thinking about it.
Some key examples of how to do this are in the type of training we complete. If given the task to qualify with a grenade, do you choose a range that forces everyone into bays with repeated commands that put you into uncomfortable throwing positions to mechanically meet the requirement of getting a frag from one place to another? That’s a way, and we have seen it...and done it at SOI and TBS. Another way, and IOC works this out quite well, is to qualify on throwing a frag as part of a larger idea. What if I did not throw that grenade unless I had some suppression? This key concept at low levels may be innate to everyone who passed through IULC or IOC but is lost on the brand-new Marine whose experience at SOI was a blur. We need to make every effort to prevent basic weapons qualification and standards-based training from being instructed as a mechanical step process, and instead ensure they learn it as part of a larger battle drill. Then we need to do just what is stated...drill it...over and over and over again until it’s done right. Once this drill is complete? We do it again as part of an even larger drill...assault fires into a trench...teams entering into urban environments...rockets firing onto objectives and more importantly maneuvering with adjacent units.
The Impact of the PTP
I never heard of the Pre-deployment Training Program (PTP) until OIF. We just used to call it the training cycle. The PTP of the mid 2000s is what most of our field grade officers experienced during their platoon and company command time. To me PTP means 3000 SME requirements for under 1000 Marines in a battalion in order to meet theater entry requirements to get into Iraq or Afghanistan. It meant I had to send people to GBOSS, PGSS, man tracker, combat hunter, driver school, CIED MLF, C2, language classes, Stu Stegall, SASO, NTC, EMV, all in 7 months prior to the next pump ‘over there’...all while trying to train my battalion to the METL associated to the mission set we were deploying for. This meant I did not really gain a lot of proficiency in any one thing. Don’t get me wrong, I am not crapping on this methodology, it is just what was best thought of at that time when units were leaving for 7 months, returning for 7 months and repeating...there was no time. Unfortunately, the side effect of this, I submit, has in turn conditioned Marines to believe that a standard is completed when a training authority watches you do an action once and if you pass you are qualified, proficient, or ‘trained’. This just is not the case.
The reason I feel so strongly about this is because I have seen a lot of training incidents over the years, and as the IOC/TBS and now MAGTFTC Gunner, have seen quite a bit of incidents that potentially could have been mitigated by some repetition during training. That may sound fairly safety centric, but it really is not. If you have not heard that training is safer when it is tactically correct, then there you go. It is a thing.
The reality, though, is I cannot get to a position of being tactically sound if I have not built a foundation of battle drills and immediate action drills that correlate to larger collective tasks. This is why it is important to bring in your Master Sergeants and Master Gunnery Sergeants to detail how to conduct training in the current space with resources available. Seek out those Marines that served prior to 2003 and ask them to review your training plans, more importantly get them to the field to watch and participate in the instruction to your Marines. The reality is in some ways they are the only ones who hold the keys to how we prepared for OIF and OEF.
As far as I am concerned, we did a pretty damn good job as a service in those conflicts and it was built in a low resource world where sometimes all you had was engineer tape, a training area, no NVGs and just a whole lot of doing things over and over and over and over again.
Gunner Browne is currently the 1st Marine Division Gunner and can be reached at raymond.browne@usmc.mil.