Shooting from a standing position. I had someone tell me that, today, soldiers are taught to use an extreme forward lean when shooting from a standing position because if they are shot on their plate carrier the bullet and related spawling will be angled downward between their feet instead of absorbed into the plate.
I understand that using an aggressive forward lean assists with recoil control and fast follow up shots but my military time was in the days of flak jackets not body armor and this is something I’ve never heard before. The person who told me this claims to have combat experience as Army infantry but I have reason to doubt some other things he says.
This isn’t meant to be a discussion on shooting positions. I’m just interested in whether or not soldiers are taught that an extreme forward lean in their torso is to angle the plate carrier and cause bullet strikes to deflect downward. And if so, how practical this is.
Sounds like BS to me. Why would you want spawl to go down towards your femoral arteries and groin?
Uhmmmm. I don’t think that what your friend is saying makes much sense.
“Someone” is mistaken.
Most military plates are lined in order to reduce/minimize spall. In addition, bullets are not deflected when they hit a plate (except for maybe extremely oblique impacts).
A plate is designed so that the bullet will expend all it’s energy to crush and penetrate the various layers used in constructing the plate; it does this very quickly, limiting the amount of actual penetration.
Energy is also spent as the bullet flattens as it hits the plate.
Its possible that is a current rumor, but not one I’ve ever heard. The stance is no more “extreme” than you’d see from anyone else using an updated manual of arms. Part of that is recoil absorption and part of it is so that your plate has the maximum area of coverage.
Horse shit.
The plate provides ballistic protection from a projectile going through your torso and killing your ass – same as your side plates.
The original thought to squaring up to a hostile shooter firing at you (prior to side plates becoming general issue) was to face as much of the plate towards incoming bullets. Soft armor protects against fragments, not straight-on rifle fire.
Turn to the side and you can still get a fatal through-and-through wound.
Front, back, and side protection – how does that work?
Bullets play on a different timescale game, so leaning forward to minimize force uptake makes no sense at all - you want the armor system dispersing the armor over the largest possible area, but most importantly you want to cover the largest possible portion of your critical-to-survival organs with the most possible armor. When teaching people how to move in MOUT, the tendency (especially with M16A2’s) is to end up in a really stupid looking off-balance heel walk if they’re focusing on running the optic too much, so the instruction to lean forward aggressively is primarily to actually have weight over the balls of the feet instead of somewhere stupid. It does help with recoil control, but that’s a secondary consideration to just being able to move while encumbered with armor/helmet/pack/rifle. If you have armor, present armor to the threat when possible. If you can run proper body mechanics that lets you engage proficiently while doing so, you’re in solid shape - from there it’s about being able to move to a position where you hopefully don’t need armor (takes more time than most would appreciate; it’s still super obvious when actors have had a day or two of competent training, but still haven’t grasped the concept that being in the right stance and holding the weapons the right way doesn’t mean standing right in a doorway is a conceptually poor idea).
If you’re worried about leaning too far in - even in best case situations for deflecting a comparatively low speed projectile (probably a high-mass ~230gr subsonic round) off the bounciest possible setup (steel Lvl 3 hard over HDPE IIIA) I can think of and it still won’t deflect unless that’s a really shallow impact angle - maybe if you’re shot from a second story while in an aggressive forward leaning position you might find a rare instance where it would skip, but that’s still converted a very high probability of paralysis and massive bleeding from lower torso into a low probability of femur of femoral artery hit (in terms of survivability the worst case scenario I can come up with still improved massively by armor and being squared up to the target). So, spalling (or really anything after an incoming projectile has dissipated a fraction of its energy) is a tertiary consideration at best.
Either way, it’s not a reason to doubt any 11B or similar experience, but there is a pretty big gap between what somebody remembers about some training they didn’t fully understand, and something that’s so adequately understood and versed with an individual that they’re qualified to teach and function as an SME with regard to.
Thanks for the replies, gentlemen. That tells me what I needed to know.
There are a significant number of misinformed instructors inside military training cadres. Completely possible that he was told this by such an individual and accepted it to be true.
Sounds like the “bullets fired from the M4 leave the barrell and turn upwards” guys. Personally, I prefer to turn and deflect the bullet from my plate back at the bad guy, saves ammo. Long story short, its BS.
F2S is exactly right. I see this on a daily basis. The worst part is most guys in combat arms jobs seem to be way too proud to think they just might be wrong. That’s how we end up with guys thinking and teaching all of this nonsense.
With Sinister and F2S jumping in, this subject has been settled. Move along.
I experienced that first hand as an instructor. In my first year, I learned that half of the classes we taught had been so modified by years of instructors that they didnt even resemble the ones that came out of TECOM. I was guilty of the same thing at first, until I was humbled by a Gunner who had forgotten more about weapon utilization than I had learned. After that, I learned to trust, but verify.
And this is the crux of the issue. Young instructors who have only one frame of reference from where they learned their craft. Young, used to following orders, often only know what they know and don’t know, what they don’t know. These experiences shared by F2S and yourself also mirror my own, when it comes to Military Cadre or even by the military guys that I generally get to work with.
Of course much is based on the individuals personality, but it usually goes something like this…Confidence, bordering on cocky, which quickly fades into humbled once the shooting starts. On the plus side the Military guys generally take the humbling experience well and shift into a learning mode much easier than a LE or civilian instructor. The good thing is that you learned a valuable motto to live by, trust but verify. In all honesty many of my experiences have been more problematic with some instructors in the civilian world who may hold some type of bias towards those in LE. So again don’t think this is just a military problem. Take that motto with you wherever you go and apply it. 
This.
And yes, there are plenty of misinformed turds teaching CQB in the military these days. There also some good ones. The key is to recognize as such and employ sound principles.