There are plenty of stupid people with degrees, even PhDs. Don’t forget that colleges are in the business of granting degrees, not withholding them.

– John Wilson

Military and police instruction is designed to pass people into serving a needed role. Firearms instruction is only one part of that and most people in these positions are not interested in learning beyond what is required to maintain employment.

Military and police qualification is deliberately low so that new, novice-level shooters – recruits that we must assume have never handled firearms before – are able to pass while in initial recruit/basic/academy instruction. Almost no public sector qualification standard requires any improvement beyond these novice, entry-level standards.

Marine, Soldier, Police, it doesn’t much matter. Even with twenty years experience, there is no guarantee they ever progressed skill beyond that required during initial, elementary, short basic training period.

This goes for most tactical schools. The business model is to host and fill as many classes with paying students as possible. Not every attendee will be particularly skillful or learn particularly fast. Many just want to go to Operator Fantasy Camp or Dynamic Critical Incident school instead of Disneyland.

Businessmen posing as trainers realize this and play into it. They eschew any way to quantify results as it’s difficult to maintain an air of competence with empirical evidence to the contrary. Avoiding any form of objective skill measurement is key. Best to preemptively criticize those that do measure skill in order to counter any questions as to why a professional trainer that charges students money under the guise of teaching skill fails to measure that skill.

This why I’m a fan of skill classification as found in formal, national-level shooting organizations. Any membership fees (if there are any) are the same for everyone so there’s no reason to grant a “go” unless it’s earned and verified in front of multiple witness, usually over the course of multiple sessions at different places. Courses are validated at many places around the country.

Perhaps not perfect, it’s much better than what passes as “training” elsewhere. Best of all, it teaches you how to train, setting difficult goals and achieving them. No instructional course or evolution will ever teach or reinforce everything worth knowing but this puts you in a place to better train whatever is needed to be learned.