He wrote letter after letter pointing out how frightfully backward we were in marksmanship.
I was much impressed by his letters; but Wainwright was about the only other man who was.

And as Sims proved to be mistaken in his belief that the French had taught the Spaniards how to shoot, and as the Spaniards proved to be much worse even than we were, in the service generally Sims was treated as an alarmist.

But although I at first partly acquiesced in this view, I grew uneasy when I studied the small proportion of hits to shots made by our vessels in battle.

When I was President I took up the matter, and speedily became convinced that we needed to revolutionize our whole training in marksmanship.

Sims was given the lead in organizing and introducing the new system; and to him more than to any other one man was due the astonishing progress made by our fleet in this respect, a progress which made the fleet, gun for gun, at least three times as effective, in point of fighting efficiency, in 1908, as it was in 1902.