There is a difference between being able to shoot and being able to teach. It is not a subtle difference. On the range, it is immediately visible. Shooting is a personal skill. Instructing requires not only proficiency but the ability to demonstrate, explain, and correct: under observation, on demand, to a standard higher than what you are asking of your students.
In Special Forces, that standard had a number attached to it. Super Dave Harrington required instructors in the SFAUC program to shoot speed bulls: 10 rounds, 10 seconds, 25 yards, at a minimum of 90 percent. Not to qualify. To teach. The reasoning was simple: authority on the firing line cannot be faked. If you cannot demonstrate what you are asking a student to do, they will know it before you finish the sentence. Credibility in this profession is earned on the line or it is not earned at all.
That principle does not change based on the organization. It does not change based on rank, experience, or years of service. What changes is whether the institution around you treats it as a requirement or an aspiration.
Credibility in this profession is earned on the firing line. It cannot be faked. Students know it before you finish the sentence.
In Special Forces, we pursued excellence by seeking the best instruction available outside our own walls. Shaw and Rogers taught us advanced marksmanship across different weapon systems. Gracie and Thompson taught us how to fight on the ground. Scott Racing taught us to drive. The model was deliberate: find the best practitioners in each domain, bring them in, absorb what they know, then elevate the best students from each course into instructor roles and send them back through repeatedly until the nuance became second nature. That hunger for outside instruction was not optional. It was how the standard stayed alive.
FLETC operates on a different model. In my experience, the institution too often hires from within its own bubble: former law enforcement instructors teaching law enforcement, with a strong preference for federal agents and a reluctance to pull from state, local, or military backgrounds unless forced. That incestuous hiring cycle does not produce bad instructors. It produces instructors who have never been genuinely challenged by a perspective they did not already hold. The self-reinforcing illusion of superiority that results from that model is subtle and difficult to name from the inside, which is precisely what makes it dangerous.
Continuing education is the standard in virtually every skilled profession. My wife is a teacher. She carries a 40-hour annual requirement for continuing education. Firearms instruction, a discipline where the stakes of failure are measured in lives, should be no different. Most major instructor organizations already require it. The problem is not the policy. The problem is the barrier between the instructor and the class that would improve them, and who inside the institution benefits from keeping that barrier in place.
The best SOF operators function at roughly 70 percent of their best range days under exhaustion. Without stress inoculation, the average officer is closer to 20. That gap is not talent. It is repetition.
Shooting is a perishable skill. Most officers shoot their absolute best on qualification day, then erode steadily from that level unless they are deliberately maintaining the craft. Simple diagnostic drills like Ken Hackathorn's Wizard and the Vickers 10-10-10 require 15 rounds and will humble anyone who earned expert on paper but has not maintained the standard since. These are not advanced drills. They are honesty drills. The gap they reveal is not a character flaw. It is the predictable result of a system that stops measuring after the record is made.
Round counts tell the story plainly. The average FLETC student fires approximately 1,000 rounds across twelve hours of live fire instruction spread over three weeks. In SFAUC, SFARTEAC, and SOT pipelines, the goal was 10,000 rounds in the first ten days. Every training day opened with a B8 target at 25 yards. A minimum score of 700 on those B8s was required just to enter the first formal shooting evaluation, before CQB instruction began.
That comparison is not an argument that law enforcement should train like Special Forces. The missions are different and so are the operational demands. It is an argument about what repetition actually produces, and what the absence of repetition reliably fails to produce. The human mind learns by induction. Trial and error. Repetition with feedback. An ancient principle from martial arts holds that the body can only go where the mind has already been. In SFARTEAC, we ran live-fire clearing of a three-story building, roughly 30 rooms and multiple stairwells, a minimum of 20 times a day during training. Not because 20 was a magic number. Because that is what it took for the movement to stop being a decision and start being a response.
When I recently attended a Ben Stoeger class as a paying student, I fired 2,200 rounds over a weekend. That is inductive learning at the rate the skill actually requires. The average law enforcement training session runs two hours, approximately 125 rounds, constrained further by safety briefs, ammo issue, weapons draw, and range cleanup that compress the actual training window before a single round is fired. Under those conditions, with those round counts, given those time constraints, a 98 percent pass rate is not a measure of success. It is a measure of how low the bar was set.
The moment you stop seeking instruction that challenges you, you begin to teach from a position that is already eroding.
If you had the ability to build a program from the ground up, the sequence matters more than most administrators want to admit. Teach the hard skills first: shooting, combatives, the physical foundation. Once a student can shoot and fight, establish tactics. The use-of-force framework is already determined by that point; what remains is applying it within a structure the student can now physically execute. Then teach the job: the why and the when, the legal and procedural layer that governs everything beneath it. End with a culminating exercise as realistic as the institution can make it: a full shift of calls, traffic stops, domestics, periods of inactivity, accumulated stress, followed by a force-on-force active shooter scenario with OPFOR returning fire. Then bring them in the next morning, first thing, and run the live-fire qualification.
That sequence is not punitive. It is honest. It tests what the training actually built rather than what the student can produce on a clean range with a good night of sleep behind them.
I have seen what honest training produces in people who had no elite background and no expectation of one. When Northrop Grumman brought a group of us in to train USAF Tactical Response Forces, young Air Force security police assigned to missile fields responsible for protecting and recapturing nuclear assets, we ran them through a compressed version of SFAUC. Live fire inside confined spaces. Movement with teammates in environments where the margin for error was real. These were not operators. They were young men and women with little to do in remote postings who had never been asked to perform at that level. They proved something that bears repeating: with hard, realistic training and sufficient repetition, standards that look impossible from the outside become achievable. The ceiling is almost never where people assume it is.
To be a good instructor, you must first be a good student. That is not a motivational statement. It is a job requirement. The moment you stop seeking out instruction that challenges you, you begin to teach from a position that is already eroding. Every major instructor I have trained under, Ben Stoeger, Mike Pannone, Super Dave Harrington, DeFoor, reinforced the same thing: no one is so proficient that outside instruction stops being useful. The instructors who believe otherwise are the ones whose students will eventually recognize the gap, even if they cannot name it.
You choose what kind of instructor you will be. You choose what standard you will hold yourself to. You choose whether you can demonstrate it when it matters. The choice is made in how you spend your training time, who you seek out, what classes you attend on your own time and at your own cost, and whether you are willing to stand in front of a target and show, not tell, what you are asking someone else to do.
That choice does not get made once. It gets made every time you step onto a range.
The record may be clean. The performance may be temporary. The capability may be unknown. The instructor you choose to be determines whether that changes.