Mozambique Drill: Distance, Par Time and Scoring Explained

The standard Mozambique drill distance is 7 yards: two rounds to the body, one to the head, three rounds total, fired from the holster on the beep. A clean run under about 2.5 seconds is a strong result for a defensive shooter, and the word doing the work in that sentence is clean — all three hits inside their scoring zones, or the run does not count.

It is one of the few drills where the last shot is a completely different problem from the first two, and that is the entire point of it.

What distance is the Mozambique drill shot at?

Seven yards is the common standard and the distance our own par times assume. The useful range is 3 to 10 yards, and the choice is not cosmetic — distance is the dial that decides which half of the drill is hard.

For what it is worth, the incident the drill is named after happened at about ten paces — roughly 25 feet, or a little over 8 yards. Seven yards became the training standard because it is the distance most ranges and most defensive courses default to, not because there is anything magic about it.

Record the distance with every score. A 2.3-second Mozambique at 3 yards and a 2.3 at 10 yards are not the same accomplishment, and a logbook that does not say which one you shot is a logbook of numbers that cannot be compared to each other.

Mozambique drill par times

Three rounds from the holster at 7 yards, all hits in their zones:

These brackets are our reading of widely quoted Failure to Stop times, published so you can argue with them rather than guess. Treat any single number you see quoted anywhere — ours included — as an opinion until you know the distance, the start position and whether misses were counted.

Where the time actually goes

A Mozambique is a draw, one split, and one transition. Most shooters train the first two and never look at the third, which is exactly backwards — the transition is the only part of this drill that is not already covered by every other drill you shoot.

Here is the shape of a 2.5-second run: about 1.3 seconds to the first shot, 0.25 for the body split, and roughly 0.9 seconds for the transition and the head shot. That last number is the drill. It is three times a body split, and it is where an entire second is available to anyone willing to work on it.

What makes it expensive is that it is not a movement problem, it is a visual one. The gun has to travel about six inches; your eyes have to leave a coarse sight picture on a large zone and arrive at a fine one on a small zone, then confirm it before the trigger moves. Shooters who blow the head shot almost always fired at the body cadence — the gun was pointed correctly and the eyes had not caught up.

Scoring: the zones are smaller than they look

All three hits count or the repetition is scrapped. There is no partial credit, because the drill models a specific problem — the body hits did not work — and a head shot that misses solves nothing.

The zones depend on the target. On a USPSA target the body A-zone is 6 by 11 inches and the head box A-zone is 4 by 2 inches. Our printable Failure to Stop target is deliberately tighter: a 2.2 by 3.7 inch thoracic box and a small inverted triangle in the head. Expressed as angles, that difference is larger than it sounds:

Read the third row again. Holding our head triangle at 7 yards is the same angular problem as keeping a round inside a 3-inch circle at 25 yards — while moving, on the clock, immediately after a recoiling pair. That is why the drill exposes people who shoot clean groups all day.

Whichever target you use, print it at 100%. A scoring zone shrunk by 6% is a different test, and the calibration mark in the footer of our sheets takes two seconds to check — the full explanation is in how to print shooting targets to exact scale.

Why it has three different names

Mozambique Drill, Failure to Stop, Failure Drill — same course of fire, three names, and the history explains all three.

It traces to Mike Rousseau, a Rhodesian mercenary, during the Mozambican War of Independence. Rounding a corner at Lourenço Marques airport — modern Maputo — he met a FRELIMO fighter armed with an AK-47 at about ten paces. He fired two rounds from a Browning Hi-Power into the man’s chest; the fighter kept coming. Rousseau went for the head, and the round severed the spinal cord.

Rousseau later told the story to Jeff Cooper, who built it into his shooting method and named it after where it happened. In 1980, LAPD SWAT officers Larry Mudgett and John Helms trained at Gunsite and asked permission to teach it at LAPD — they renamed it the Failure Drill, uneasy about the original name. “Failure to Stop” is the same idea stated plainly: the first response failed, so change what you are doing.

The naming matters more than trivia usually does, because it tells you what the drill is for. It is not “shoot someone in the head”. It is recognise that what you are doing is not working, and switch — which is a decision, trained under a clock, disguised as a marksmanship exercise.

How the run falls apart

How to train it

• Split the drill in half. Shoot the body pair alone until the cadence is automatic, then practise starting from a fired pair and doing nothing but the transition. Training the whole string every time hides which half is costing you.
• Dry fire the transition. It needs no ammunition: draw, two dry presses to the body, shift focus, one to the head. The visual habit is the trainable part.
• Move the distance, not the clock. If your times are good and your head shots are marginal, back up to 10 yards and let the target impose the discipline instead of trying to slow yourself down by willpower.
• Pair it with drills that isolate the pieces. The Bill Drill is pure recoil control with no transition; El Presidente is all transitions plus a reload. Between them you can tell whether a bad Mozambique is a recoil problem or a visual one.

Full course of fire, setup and scoring for the drill itself: the Failure to Stop drill. Build a whole session around it with the plan configurator, and grab the sheets from the free printable target library.

Log your times. Three rounds is a cheap enough test to shoot cold at the start of every range day, and the trend across a dozen sessions tells you far more than any single run — you can record and compare them in the DrillLane app.

Sources

• Origin, naming and the 1980 LAPD adoption: Mozambique Drill — Mike Rousseau, Lourenço Marques airport, ten paces, Browning Hi-Power; renamed the “Failure Drill” by Larry Mudgett and John Helms.
• Jeff Cooper and Gunsite Academy, where the drill entered mainstream American training.
• Skill brackets and the pass/fail scoring convention: the DrillLane standard published on the drill page.
• Angular figures are computed from the zone dimensions at each distance (1 MOA ≈ 1.047 in at 100 yd). Our target’s zones were measured in the rendered PDF: 55 × 95 mm thoracic box, 28 mm head triangle base.