There is a push to get rid of the basic training requirements to throw hand grenades. Sounds shocking, but before you start yelling at your screen and breathing heavily as you begin to pull up twitter to talk about how this "new army" sucks, the requirement is still in place for all basic training soldiers and this has not been implemented yet. I repeat, this has not been implemented yet, so please finish the article before you start making phone calls to your congressman.
First, let me give you a background. I worked in a basic training unit and One Station Unit Training for infantry soldiers from 2022-2023. During a brief with our top brass, the commander brought up the grenade throwing failures within our company. Out of a class of 97 soldiers, we had 11 hand grenade failures. This failure rate held very consistent with the basic training companies in our Battalion, and throughout the Brigade! About 10-15% of basic training soldiers, or "trainees", could not pass the basic training assessment for throwing a hand grenade. The assessment consisted of identifying hand grenade types, throwing a dummy grenade, and finally throwing a live grenade. Each trainee picks up two M69 dummy grenades and gets into a "pit" with a sergeant who assesses the trainee's throw and form. The trainee must throw a dummy hand grenade above a wire suspended 7 meters off the ground and about 25 meters away over a "log" on the ground used to measure throw distance. You do not even have to hit a target, you just have to yeet this 1 pound metal ball over a wire and a log in the general vicinity of "downrange" to show the cadre you won't kill yourself with a real hand grenade.
This sounds relatively simple, trainees are given 4 attempts to pass the dummy grenade throwing assessment before they can finally move onto throwing their live hand grenade. Once they finish live throw, mission accomplished and on with more training. Those that fail usually are sent with another training unit to throw again. Within my single class example, out of the 11 that threw again, 5 passed and 6 failed. Out of the 6 that failed again, we managed to get about 2 more to pass after exhaustively sending them to throw again and again. One soldier in the failing lot threw 4 more times until we decided to outprocess them. These failure rate for grenade throwing were the same amount of soldiers that failed the physical fitness assessments. Out of the 6 that failed, 4 of them failed the ACFT as well and were probably not fit for service. However, the overlap isn't 1 to 1 and many times soldiers that failed the hand grenade toss were able to pass the physical fitness assessments! I don't have brigade numbers for this amount, which is why this is a neocities blog and not a full blown article in an Army publication, but this trend had me thinking about "why do people fail the assessment and what could we do to get them to pass"?
Why You Should Care
I do understand that physical ability to throw hand grenades in the infantry is not only an important requirement, but now more important than ever! With the major urban combat and trench warfare displayed in the 2023 Russo-Ukraine War, we are seeing firsthand video of soldiers throwing grenades to assault through enemies. However, with the already aching recruiting numbers for the Army, it is very frustrating that the thing stopping soldiers from passing the program is throwing a metal ball, especially when they pass all the other assessments.
It Isn't Just Basic Training, It's a big portion of the Army
"Oh well so what? The purpose of basic is to weed out the ones that physically can't do it. Good riddance!" The issue is, the hand grenade throwing deficiencies don't stop at basic training, they continue on with other army assessments and paint out a deficiency in grenade training through the infantry. Enter Expert Infantryman's Badge, or EIB. EIB is an optional skills assessment test soldiers do for a badge. The assessment consists of a physical fitness test, land navigation, rifle shooting qualification, 12 mile timed road march, and the most notorious part of the assessment: EIB lanes. Candidates must go through a large battery of performance lanes that test their ability to memorize tasks with extremely specific grading standards. Out of all these patrol lanes, the most failed assessment is the hand grenade throwing.
To be fair, the EIB statistics probably more point to an issue with the assessments itself, there are several other events soldiers fail before they even get to the grenade throwing assessment, making it the biggest failing factor in patrol lanes consistently, but not the biggest thing failing soldiers in EIB. For example, where you do EIB can affect you. Ft Hood has a pass rate of 5% woth the majority of failures coming from the physical fitness test, Ft Stewart and Ft Jackson has a pass rate of 50%. Special Forces and Ranger units have an almost 99% pass rate, but as someone who has frequently talked to others who got their EIB at Ranger units, this is usually because of their lenient grading. The average passing rate for EIB is 27%, which sounds ok until I tell you a "standard deviation" z-factor for this data set is 25.5%. This means that a good portion of the assessments average so low that it takes only one standard deviation to get an average of 2% passing, and this is including the almost 100% pass rates of EIBs hosted by special forces. The grenade failures aren't the only thing bucking people off the EIB horse. But let's say you passed the PT test, the shooting qualification, and any other pre-assessments before you got to the EIB patrol lanes. When compared to all the other patrol lanes, the grenade throw is the most failed assessment in EIB.
What does this all mean? A good sizeable chunk of recruits cannot throw a hand grenade, and so many are failing that there is debates about whether we should waive the requirement. The asssessment for hand grenade throwing in basic training is not very realistic to how grenades are used though. When you get the high performers of motivated infantrymen to do more realistic and complex grenade throwing assessments like EIB, a sizeable amount fail. EIB can choose several different assessments for the grenade throw (another variable), but usually the assessment consists of throwing a dummy grenade 30 meters away within 5 meters of a target, throwing the grenade 20 meters into a window, or throwing the grenade 25 meters into a defensive fighting position. These are very relevant to how a grenade will actually be used, and a lot of soldiers are finding these tasks difficult to pass. This isn't a massive, "shut it all down we need to get everyone throwing metal balls for hours every day". But this issue does deserve some consideration.
We Need to Train Hand Grenades More
We don't train hand grenades in the US Army infantry. Once you finish doing your basic training assessment, and if you decide to earn your EIB, that is the last time you will ever throw any hand grenade at all. In the operational Army, most soldiers never train with dummy hand grenades in fear of losing them. In every single training assessment I have been to, we almost never deployed a hand grenade. Maybe, once in a blue moon, some unit will get a few live hand grenades to throw into a bunker for a highly choreographed live fire exercise. But I have met almost no unit that uses dummy grenades or pyrotechnic grenades in force on force training.
Now compare these videos to the milsim community.
Laugh at the airsoft example as you may, but the lack of hand grenade sims in the US Army paints bigger tactical issues for infantrymen. If you don't train with all the assets you'll have in a battle, in realistic conditions, you won't be prepared for those trenches in Ukraine when you realize that life and death can be decided by how well you throw a hand grenade. Simply, infantrymen don't practice with hand grenades enough and so the reps are not there for the soldiers to throw them effectively. When do you throw grenades? How do you time your grenade toss so others around you don't bound into your grenade? How do you organize enough direct fire cover to throw a grenade? Have you thrown from awkward positions and in realistic conditions? These questions will never be answered if units don't start incorporating grenade throwing into their regular training. Compare that to the milsim West example pictured. There are some rough issues with movement, potentially, but these guys are getting realistic repetitions in employing grenades and using grenade launchers. They are learning how to effectively use them, and you can see how it significantly affects their tactics in this force on force training event. They are employing grenades behind dead space, taking initiative to throw them, and using them prolifically before entering any buildings. Honestly good application and use, and something that full time infantrymen should be doing and applying more than larpers.
Make a US Army Hand Grenade Sim for Force on Force training
The blue M69 dummy hand grenades and hand grenade bodies are listed as a non-expendable item. Meaning, like a rifle or a radio, you are not allowed to lose them and if you do you someone is paying for it.(note, find Fedlog data for exact price and SEC code). For almost $90 a pop, you can imagine most units are skeptical about letting every single soldier have two of these and throwing them all over the woods. The M228 Dummy Grenade fuse that go inside these dummies are also a pyrotechnic that demand each soldier return the pin and the spoon. If you lose a spoon, the ammo supply point won't take back the fuses and your entire unit will be walking through the woods looking for these pins and spoon. This practice further makes units paranoid about training with grenade sims. If you lose any part of this thing you are supposed to throw, you will get in trouble. Incidentally, this causes a training scar where soldiers keep carefully removing pins and spoons from grenades to pocket before throwing. This might not matter as much for an M83 smoke grenade, but for a real M67 grenade this can cause dangerous behavior and in fact several soldiers have injured themselves on the quick burst M106 smoke grenade from this administrative behavior.
Not that the M228 fuse could really be used as a good umpire tool for force on force training. How would you know that you got "hit" unless an observer called you out? This is where the world of milsim comes into play. The US Army needs to field a fully disposable grenade sim for units to throw at each other in force on force training. Using the same protective equipment that we use for simunition, a unit could incorporate sim grenades that replicate typical Army hand grenades for realistic and fun force on force training. For feedback, these sim grenades fire a set of cardboard pellets that are propelled by the pyro inside the grenade which lets the soldier know he's been hit.
A simulation center employee at Ft Hood had talked to me about prototypes concerning a suite of pyrotechnic MILES gear systems that simulate claymores and hand grenades. The hand grenade uses a pyrotechnic dummy fuse and uses sensors to shoot lasers to "hit" people wearing MILES gear. This can come in handy for force on force training centers and units that utilize MILES. The system itself does have risk, like all laser based MILES systems, everything that can block a laser can block the emitters. And with the high cost of the hand grenade, there is a GPS tracker inside that will require soldiers to find it. However, and maybe I'll talk about it in another article, MILES is the most accessible and best system for an Army unit to incorporate all their weapons assets in force on force training environments, so finally having a hand grenade for the scenario will definintely help soldiers learn how to employ and throw them.
Make a "Hand Grenade Qualification" Training Progression
The US Army has a weapons progression training program for almost all weapons systems. We don't expect soldiers to come into basic training knowing how to shoot a rifle, over a month is dedicated to just M4 rifle training, governed by the regulation TC 3-20.40. You begin with a skills assessment showing how to use and handle the weapon, go through shooting progressions until you have been shooting for at least 2 weeks, then you perform your first rifle qualification. We might need a similar qualification and progressing for grenades. Maybe it doesn't need to be this elaborate, but making a hand grenade training progression and making basic training and operational unit soldiers qualify would definitely bridge the gap. Right now, hand grenade throwing lasts a single day and is usually an after thought, although we had only 2 out of 97 soldiers fail rifle shooting while having almost 11 fail grenade throwing.
Change the bad way we teach throwing
"You don't throw it like a baseball!" I have heard this piece of advice multiple times and in both my experience with basic training, my experience with EIB, and my experience running basic, I have seen NCOs give some very bad throwing advice. Currently, as I have witnessed it, soldiers are told to "strike an exaggerated pose" and then told to "throw the grenade like a shotput, ending with both hands over the grenade pit before taking cover". This is all done as safety measures to ensure that soldiers throw grenades in a manera that guarantees it goes over the barrier. Not every drill sergeant says this, some actually give good throwing advice that some of the struggling trainees need. But it is common knowledge that a lot of the training aids and advice for throwing in the Army is overall bad, poorly explained, and probably deserves a rework from someone like professional baseball coaches.
Asides ensuring you take measures to hold down the spoon and not fumble the grenade, cadres should teach a more baseball throwing focused method of training that maximizes power. (Note, try to make a grenade throwing video, links to explain this https://m.youtube.com/shorts/NXnz5txPCHY
Make a better, more ergonomic hand grenade?
An Army rumor I once heard... somewhere was that the M67 hand grenade is circular because it was meant to simulate a baseball. The thinking went that most Americans played baseball, therefore if they made baseball shaped grenades soldiers would throw them better. I have not found any research, procurement document, or testing document that mentioned this. Trust me I have looked, if you have it message me. But it did get me thinking, can we improve hand grenade ergonomics to make them more accurate and throwable to even the inexperienced? The Germans famously used the "Steilhandgranate" which were grenades on sticks.
These types were commonly used by assault troops who festooned themselves with stick grenades to assault trenches. Many stormtruppen through World War 1 even mentioned assaulting positions with only hand grenades and handheld weapons. Opting to not bring their rifles to attack trenches. The Chinese and Soviets commonly used these designs with the Type 63 grenade and RG33 grenade through World War 2. And while the US never adopted a stick grenade, we experimented with several grenade patterns going from the M26 "Lemon" Grenade, the MK2 "Pineapple" Grenade, and the current M67 "baseball" grenade. Do grenade types make a difference? Can we produce more accurate throwers with a different grenade type. Tune in for part 2 as we get a variety of hand grenade types and test this theory!