Sniping in the Crosshairs

Hunting is an atavistic human activity which is now falling into disfavour. One can understand why it is so, because one cannot hunt animals that have been over-hunted, food does not need to be hunted any more. The view, that the only reason why one would hunt an animal is because it is posing a danger to humans, is increasing now. However, there is still one animal which is hunted these days and that is man. You might very well ask why I talk about hunting men? Well, in a particular case, hunting men is no different from hunting animals. I refer to the art of sniping. Let us take a look!

First the usual disclaimer! I love hunting although I haven’t done so for a long time now. It goes back to those old halcyon pre-teenage and teenage days of hunting with a slingshot and pebbles/marbles and then graduating to a pop air gun and then to a rifle and the very rare shotgun/high powered rifle. Mainly I went after large birds, squirrels, rabbits and the rare boar or antelope. Quite a lot of the shooting was to do with target shooting and practice. I have even managed to shoot couple of humans as well, but with a dinky air rifle. The chances of actually doing big damage with that are fairly well limited. I got one in the calf, which was an accident and one was by design and I got the boy in the patootie. But I have had experience of shooting off the big rifles as well and using scopes. Those are big men’s toys and you can see a man being brought down. Not that I have bought a man down, mind you, but I can see the similarities.

This brings me to sniping. If my memory serves me right, the first time I read about sniping was when I read ‘Dogs of War’ by Fredrik Forsyth. In that book, the hero talks about how it would have been so much easier to get a mercenary with a sniper rifle to expend a bullet costing ½ a shilling to take out Adolph Hitler rather than go through the whole headache that was World War II. That piqued my interest and it has become more and more of an interest since then. I read with deep concentration how Navy SEAL snipers took out three Somali pirates with three shots. Now those were absolutely great shots. Can you imagine taking a pot shot from the pitching and unstable USS Bainbridge’s stern at a tiny target, where only the head and shoulders were exposed, and that also rather hazy and wavering in the dark, at least 300 meters away, in a pitching lifeboat? Not touching the captive at all - but just pops – pop-pop-pop, and the captive was free. And totally coordinated, all three pirates had to be brought down at the same time; otherwise the captive’s life was in danger. I simply cannot imagine the skill and ability of the snipers and I suspect that a vast majority of people on this planet cannot get that done either. I hope the SEAL’s get due recognition for totalling those pirates. Down through the ages starting from Julius Caesar and Cicero all the way to now, that has unfortunately been the only way to deal with pirates.

By and large, people are very uncomfortable about sniping as a weapon of war. The main objection seems to be that it offends the rules of fair play. I suppose it’s the same feeling that the samurai or the Red Indians were faced with in the 17th century when being confronted with rifles and guns. These would smell, stink and kill without honour. But killing is killing, I guess. That said the feeling that if you do want to kill and fight, then you do it face to face. We still use terms such as “back stabber” or “sneak up behind”, all sounding very bad and dishonourable. We do not like anonymous strangers and we think it’s a sign of courage and morality that fighting should be like fencing, one to one. So the idea that somebody can be a kilometre away and using a high powered rifle to kill a target, who does not even have a chance to react, is sort of anathema to normal folks. You don’t give a warning, you don’t allow any chance of defence, you don’t provide any retreat clause, and you just kill. But life is brutal and sniping is a way of life. When humans would sneak up on animals to kill them, hundreds of thousands of years ago, they were doing the same. But then, it was for food, now it’s for “war”. I can understand this, I still do not have a good explanation why this would be so, but I can see the military need for it.

If you can, from long distance, avoid the need to engage with the enemy and just quietly and safely take out an enemy leader who is directing his men to fight against you, why wouldn’t you do that? Take for example this book ‘Sniper One: The Blistering True Story of a British Battle Group Under Siege’ (ISBN-10: 0141029013) by Sergeant Dan Mills of the 1st Battalion, Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. Sergeant Dan Mills lead a group of British Army Snipers deployed in the field in Al Amarah, Iraq with Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, the first Victoria Cross holder in the Iraq War. But the book is not about Lance Corporal Beharry, it’s about the group of men whom Sergeant Mills lead for months. They were snipers, based on the top of a low building, for months on end.

And what they would be doing is taking out suicide bombers, jihadis, various Shia militiamen, assorted RPG and mortar holders, men planting IEDs on the road side, and so on and so forth. All of them were using their British Army sniper rifles and in some instances a 50 calibre rifle. By safely dispatching these assorted fundos out from a kilometre or more distance, they literally saved their fellow soldiers’ lives - hundreds if not thousands of times. They fired over 33,000 rounds and are credited with 200 kills (that they know of, very difficult to confirm kills in urban conditions). It is a very good book, highly recommended. The author was mentioned in dispatches even. Very brave man and very brave soldiers. It feels pretty good to read about it as well. Yeah, I know, I am being childish now!

What about counter sniper operations? This is something that people engaged in urban warfare face all the time and it was and is currently happening in large areas in Iraq. What do you do with enemy snipers who are going to pick your tank, APC or other commanders off while they are on patrol? (Please keep in mind that this isn’t the place to talk about whether or not they should be in Iraq in the first place!) Then rules of engagement come in. Rules of engagement are in place to define how, where, why and when etc. of how soldiers should fight. The rules differ from place to place, time to time, regiment to regiment, commander to commander, etc. Basically, the bottom line is, that it depends upon how risky you want the battle to be. If you are very risk averse, then you will have stringent rules of engagement. So in this case you will say to your counter sniper teams, you cannot shoot an enemy sniper till the enemy sniper has actually fired.

Now as you can imagine, that means that you can only fire in self defence or fire after a fellow soldier has already been killed, wounded or targeted. What if the enemy soldier is just doing reconnaissance? Can you still kill him? How about a commander or a Colonel? What about an unarmed, not in uniform mullah who is ordering his men to commit suicide attacks? What about a sniper nest up in the minaret of a mosque? Can you fire at the sniper nest in a minaret? You know that if you fire at the minaret, the uglies and the idiots will come out boiling and create more problems. What if the shot is worth it?

What about you having just observed a group of men triggering a roadside bomb in a heavily built up area and then suddenly you have a whole bunch of people running away from the explosion? The perpetrators aren’t nicely sign posted, you have dust, blood, smoke, debris and body parts flying all over the place resulting from the explosion and you hear the screams of the wounded all around you. Then you are asked to take out the chap who triggered the explosion, despite the fact that there are usually two men in each sniper team, you are both still looking through a very narrow telescope or binoculars. How do you decide whom to kill and whom to spare? It is such a difficult decision, but you know that you better take the chaps out because they are also carrying the triggering device which will trigger additional IEDs to take out the follow up ambulances or APCs which are going to come to check on the first ambulance. What a tough decision to make!

What about you taking out a man you know is an insurgent leader, has been seen and known to be a master bomber? You have now found out where he lives and have been informed that he is plotting an attack. You also know that there is no court in Afghanistan or Iraq which will ever convict him or any prosecutor brave enough to prosecute him and no policeman brave enough to arrest him? But you know he is alive and he is directing operations which are killing your men and other innocent civilians. Well, a real life case such as that has happened when Green Beret Master Sgt. Troy Anderson took out Nawab Buntangyar and was prosecuted for unlawful killing. He was acquitted of the charges on the grounds that it was justifiable homicide, which is a good thing in my humble opinion. But now you see the problem for snipers. They have to be very careful. You don’t have hotheads in the sniper teams, at least not in the professional armies. You cannot say much about this for the snipers in militant and terrorist groups.

Sniping is more of an art than a science. The entire exercise of getting to a place, settling down there for ages, having almost inhuman patience to stalk, to keep zillions of things in mind, and then, phut, the target is pushing up daisies. The ingress and egress from the ultimate shooting position would be nerve wracking. You will need to be very careful; you cannot just stand anywhere and shoot. You need to think about getting in, taking the shot and then getting safely out. And once you are in situ, can you imagine the patience it requires? You cannot move, cannot just take a break at any time, cannot eat properly, cannot do the bodily functions easily And all that for hours and in some cases, days on end, where the sniper team just sits there and waits.

All that can end up only for one chance which might exist for 10 seconds. In those 10 seconds you have to make a judgement call on whether or not it is legal or ethical, whether the situation is under the rules of engagement and then worry about the physical act of taking the shot. Just one shot from hundreds of meters away, relying on a controlled explosion inside your barrel which will propel the bullet over hundreds of meters, battling smoke, wind, heat waves and then hitting the head or a vital part of the body for a proper kill. Bloody hell, that’s one hell of a difficult way to top somebody.

But I have rambled on long enough and the best way to close this essay is to write four quotes which encapsulate this secretive and strange world of sniping.

Reporter to sniper in Iraq. "What do you feel when you shoot an insurgent?" Sniper to reporter, "Just a little recoil."

Another one is, I am a whisper, a shadow, I don't exist. By the time you realize I'm there it's already too late and by then I'm long gone.

Then you have the "one man’s fate comes from another man’s wait" and the final rather gallows humour one, "a sniper is the worst romancer, they never make the first move."

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!