“A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!”
"Arithmetic on the Frontier"
Rudyard Kipling
Long before Kipling wrote these lines,
insurgents already knew the value of an accurate rifle in the hands of a
skilled marksman as a “force multiplier”. American frontiersmen with their
Pennsylvania or Kentucky long rifles played hell with the vaunted regulars of
the British Army, firing from cover with weapons accurate to three times the
range of the redcoats’ smoothbore Land Pattern “Brown Bess” Muskets. Virginia teamster,
rifleman and future American Major General Daniel Morgan instructed his
frontier riflemen to “shoot for the epaulets”, i.e. deliberately aim for
British officers. Picking said officers off first from long range went a long
way towards disrupting the disciplined command and control the regulars
depended on for their tactical prowess. To this day, snipers are still trying
to pick off enemy officers.
Well over a century after the American Revolution,
as the British Army again found itself suffering heavy casualties from the new
bolt-action Mauser firing smokeless cartridges in the hands of sharp-shooting Boer
farmers, Major Charles Caldwell made special note of the effects of insurgent
sniping in the Hill Fighting chapter of his book Small Wars. This book is often considered the first real Western
counter-insurgency manual. Caldwell noted:
“In the first place there is the wear and tear caused
by isolated
marksmen perched on the hilltops, who fire down upon the troops in camp and on
the march, whose desultory enterprises render outpost duties very onerous, who
inflict appreciable losses among officers and men, and who thin the columns of
transport with their bullets this is more prejudicial to the efficiency of the
army than is generally supposed.”
Military lexicon continues to change, probably to
provide jobs for a certain breed of officers in the Pentagon who might
otherwise try to make important decisions and thus prove dangerous to their own
side. A sniper is now just a part of a Weapon System waging Asymmetric Warfare
via Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance to interdict and neutralize
both soft and hard targets, thus acting as a significant force multiplier.
However you wish to say it, it all comes down to a
good man (or woman) with a rifle. If said sniper is really proficient, he or
she can single-handedly wreak more havoc than a conventional rifle platoon. Some
of the tactics used by a Boer farmer before the turn of the last century, or by
a buckskin-clad frontiersman yet another century before that, can still be
successful when used today.
Geography is no longer a barrier to insurgents
sharing information either; included later is a list of “sniper duties” as
posted on a Muslim jihad website. With the advent of globalized terrorism, a
former Chechen sniper who long ago learned his trade in the Russian Army could
be teaching these same tricks of the trade to classes of Afghan or even
Pakistani pupils at this moment.
What has been seen before is almost invariably seen
again and again. Unfortunately, no matter how many times some information is
presented, it just doesn’t penetrate the institutional memory of some large
modern Western militaries. An example could be the stay-behind sniper, a tactic
very seldom if ever used or discussed in the West, but a widespread and
frequently encountered one nonetheless.
The Soviet
Union, 1941:
The German Army found itself unprepared for fighting in the vast forests and
swamps of far eastern Europe. “A particular
feature of these Soviet defence positions were infantry foxholes which were
unidentifiable from the front and provided a field of fire only to the rear;
they were intended for picking off the enemy from behind after he had pushed
past.”
Guadalcanal,
1942: "They
[Japanese snipers] shot at us from the tops of coconut trees, slit trenches,
garden hedgerows, from under buildings, from under their shelter halves, and
from under fallen palm leaves. I saw snipers buried in the ground with slits
just sufficient for peek holes and the muzzles of their rifles. These positions
were dug to face the rear of our troops after they had passed by.”
Vietnam,
VC/NVA, 1969: “Some [VC/NVA] positions, especially well-camouflaged spider holes,
would remain silent until the attackers passed and would open fire from the
rear and flanks, sometimes not revealing themselves for a considerable time
after action was initiated.”
Fallujah,
Iraq, 2004:
“Snipers began to turn up, with optical sights on rifles. Some would work in
pairs. One would shoot and the other would wait for the Marines to move forward
in response and try to shoot them in the back.”
Gumbad
Valley, Afghanistan, 2005: “As B Company ran along the ridgeline to rescue the beleaguered Afghan
squad, an insurgent sniper opened fire from a concealed position in the valley
below, killing a US soldier.
As the company reached the squad’s position, the
sniper shot and killed one of the Afghan soldiers and wounded another. He then
shot a US
troop in the back as he climbed the hill towards the insurgents’ machine gun
position. The soldiers could not identify where exactly the sniper fire was
coming from.”
VIETNAM
Snipers
were a constant problem for American troops in Vietnam as well. As in WWII,
however, much of what was called “sniper fire” by the GIs was often nothing
more than sporadic harassing fire directed in their general direction and could
not really be attributed to genuine sniping as we know it. Yet both the VC and
the NVA, especially the latter, did indeed field well-trained dedicated snipers
whose training, fieldcraft and skills made them particularly dangerous and
demoralizing. Just as in 1775, the snipers of the 1970’s were still “aiming for
the epaulettes.”
The
United States Marine Corps gathered considerable intelligence on the enemy
sharpshooters they encountered and how they operated.
“An analysis of the
techniques and tactics of enemy snipers reveals several points of interest.
Enemy snipers are organized into teams or cells. The
team (5 men) and the cell (3 men) are trained as snipers by an organized unit
with which they operate. Snipers have used the K-44 rifle (7.62mm Mosin-Nagant)
with scope attached. This is a bolt-action rifle with a 5-round magazine.
Maximum effective range with the scope is 1400 meters, and the maximum
horizontal range is 3500 meters.
“Trained
snipers employ mines and other explosive devices to cause casualties; to
channel friendly troop movements and to facilitate their own withdrawal.
Snipers may engage at distances between 50 to 600 meters depending on the
terrain. The snipers are usually deployed so as to permit the friendly force to
be engaged initially from head on, and then from the flanks and rear. The
initial fire is usually aimed at the point element in an effort to fix the
friendly unit’s attention toward its front.
“Remaining snipers are concealed in
predetermined positions along the route of friendly advance. The flank and rear
snipers’ principal targets are the unit commander and men carrying automatic
weapons and radios. Enemy snipers usually do not fire more than about 5 rounds,
with most casualties resulting from the first 2 or 3 rounds. Trained snipers
will normally maintain contact with a target by withdrawing along preplanned
routes paralleling the route of advance of the friendly column. Firing is
continued from predetermined positions.
“Much of the
fire reported as sniper fire can be attributed to local guerrillas. Such fire
can be distinguished by its larger expenditure of ammunition and the shorter
ranges involved. It is also usually less accurate. The local guerrilla operates
independently, with a sector of responsibility rather than as part of a team.
“The basic
tactic of enemy snipers should be studied to determine the most effective means
of countering them. Unit commanders should bear in mind that harassing or
sniper fire can be extremely effective, and can slow or even halt the friendly
advance.”
CHECHNYA
It is worth noting that while Western military
forces invariably use only the two-man sniper-spotter team, our opponents can
and have used a wide variety of different structures. An insurgent sniper can
actually be anything from a true lone wolf to just part of a team consisting of
up to 15 members. Chechens operated with “cells” as the basic maneuver group, a
cell being composed of three squads each consisting of one or two RPG gunners,
a machine gunner, a sniper and two or three rifleman/ammo bearers with
Kalashnikovs.
Of the insurgents fielding real
snipers, the Chechens have been the most successful. A large part of the reason
is that some Chechen jihadists had formerly served in the Russian or even the
Soviet armed forces and had received the same training as their opponents.
Living and being educated in a modern society, they were also able to master
the technical and intellectual aspects such as ballistics and mathematics
involved in the modern sniper’s art.
The Chechens were also using many of the exact same
weapons and equipment fielded by their Russian opponents. For snipers, that
meant the Dragunov SVD. The Chechens had well over 500 of the weapons in 1992,
and acquired more throughout and between the ensuing battles in 1996 and 1999.
Soviet/Russian SVD Dragunov
Caliber: 7.62x54R
Operation: Gas,
semiautomatic
Barrel Length: 24in (610mm)
Overall Length: 48.2in
(1,225mm)
Empty Weight: 9.5lb
(4.31kg)
Magazine Capacity: 10
rounds
Maximum Effective
Range: 800m
The old Soviet Union
was well-pleased with Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK47 assault rifle when they
adopted it en mass for their large conscripted mechanized infantry forces.
Someone with brass on his hat was smart enough to realize, however, that an
infantry squad armed with nothing but assault rifles could find itself at the
mercy of opponents armed with long-range, full-size rifles. To counter such a
threat, one man in every infantry squad became a sniper armed with an SVD in
order to keep some ability to “reach out and touch someone” within the squad’s
own organic firepower.
Although introduced in 1963, the SVD remained an
enigma in the West for a long time. During the Vietnam War, the CIA was
offering a $25,000 reward for a captured Dragunov. Rumors persisted that white
Russian snipers were conducting “live fire testing” of the SVD on American
troops in the field during that war.
The SVD is an air-cooled, gas-operated
semi-automatic rifle firing the older, more powerful 7.62x54R cartridge, a
fully rimmed round dating back to Czarist Russia, the first Mosin-Nagants, and
1891. In power and performance, it falls between the .308 Winchester and the
.30-06 Springfield, certainly nothing to sneeze at.
The Dragunov was partially based on the AK47’s gas
system, but utilized a short stroke rather than a long-stroke gas piston and
had a heavier, stronger machined rather than stamped receiver. With its
impressive-looking PSO-1 scope, long, thin flash-suppressor equipped
chrome-lined barrel, curved and ribbed 10-round magazine, and distinctive
skeletal buttstock with removable cheekrest, the SVD was readily identifiable,
almost sinister in appearance, and very modern-looking for 1963.
If
the rifle looked futuristic for its day, the scope was positively Star Trek and
indeed an up-graded model, the PSO-1M2, is still in production today. For optics the SVD wore the PSO-1, a fixed
4x24mm scope with good quality glass, a 6-degree field of view and an accordion-type
collapsible rubber eye pad. The PSO featured a separate squeeze-type
range-finding reticle that allowed the shooter to determine the range of a
man-sized target out to 1,000 meters. The scope also incorporated a built-in metascope
that allowed the sniper to see if infra-red night vision devices were being
used by his opponent. A battery-powered light illuminated the aiming reticle
for low-light shooting and there was even a battery-warmer included to keep it
working in those harsh Russian winters. The aiming reticle was an inverted “V”
pointer adjusted via a mechanical Bullet Drop Compensator for ranges from 100
to 1,000 meters. For longer ranges, with the BDC maxed out, three additional
“V” pointers provided hold-overs for ranges of 1,100, 1,200 and 1,300 meters.
Reticle pattern of the PSO-1 scope, with range-finding scale to be used with a 1.7m tall man in the lower left.
The latter was wishful thinking; effective range of
the SVD is most often listed as 800 meters. For most of its lifespan in Soviet
service, no special accurate Match-grade ammunition was available, and snipers
were most often issued the standard LPS 147-grain mild steel core “light ball” ammunition.
The very best accuracy this combination of ammunition and rifle could hope for
was 2-2.5 MOA. This same lack of Match-grade sniper ammunition hindered
American snipers up through the early years of the Vietnam War. The Russian
Federation seems to be taking sniping more seriously and uses the Match-grade
7N14 cartridge for sniping, firing a 152-grain boattail bullet at 2,700 fps and
which is supposed to be capable of MOA performance from the SVD.
The rifle can of course fire any standard military 7.62x54R
cartridge and these include light and heavy ball, tracer, and light and heavy
armor piercing incendiary rounds. Prior to the Iraq War, the Iraqi Army issued
their snipers an extra five rounds of B-32 155-grain Armor Piercing Incendiary
ammunition for use against hard targets and vehicles. Standard military body
armor, including the Level 3 SAPI Small Arms Protective Insert plate, is not
effective against such rounds.
The 2nd
Generation (green) Level 3 SAPI plate is proofed against the 7.62x39mm API
(bottom) but not the more powerful 7.62x54R API (top).
In addition to training and equipment,
viciousness helped Chechen snipers with their success as well. It was found to
be a frequent tactic of Chechen snipers in the battleground city of Grozny to
deliberately wound a Russian soldier, usually shooting him in the legs. When medics
or his fellow soldiers tried to come to the aid of the first casualty, they too
would be shot and only wounded if possible. When it appeared no one else would
be coming out in the open to help the injured, the sniper would then methodically
kill them all.
As with snipers in Iraq, Chechen
snipers often fired from well back within the interior of a building so that
both the muzzle blast and report of the rifle would be obscured, hiding the
location visually as well as making the gunshot harder to locate by ear.
Sniper hides varied, of course. The
top floors or attics of tall apartment buildings located at corners or major
interactions were often used as such a location provided long fields of fire
down two or more streets. Many times the gun port used to shoot through would
be no bigger than a single roof tile removed for that purpose. Chechen snipers
often preferred other high firing points, including chimneys, factory
smokestacks, and overhead construction cranes.
After the battles for the city of
Grozny ended and the fighting moved to the mountains and countryside of
Chechnya, the Russians noted significant changes in Chechen sniper tactics.
Ranges became much longer, with snipers trying to engage Russian troops from
900-1000 meters. The sniper would fire no more than two rounds before
relocating to a new firing position. Rather than two-man teams, the sniper
operated with a four-man security team armed with Kalashnikovs, who might
actually be as far as 500 meters away from the sniper. If Russian forces
located and engaged the sniper, the support team would fire at them in attempt
to distract them long enough for the sniper to escape.
Chechen snipers were also found to
possess an unknown but fortunately quite small number of the Russian Vintorez VSS
Special Sniper Rifles. These weapons had formerly only been in use by SPETSNAZ
Special Forces or by counter-terrorist units of the MVD internal security
forces. The VSS utilizes the special subsonic 9x39mm SP-5 cartridge, which
fires a heavy low-velocity bullet containing a carbide steel or tungsten
penetrator core designed to pierce body armor. The rifle’s barrel has an
integral sound suppressor built around it, which eliminates muzzle flash and
effectively suppresses the sound of the muzzle blast, thus making a sniper
firing a VSS, especially in the dark, very hard to locate. Its general
effective range is 400 meters; it is accurate to 600 meters, but the large slow
bullet’s performance drops off rapidly at longer ranges. Whether these weapons
were captured or stolen from Russian forces is unknown. Luckily, their
appearances in insurgent hands have been rare and the ammunition is hard to come
by.
AFGHANISTAN
When the Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan from 1979-1989,
most of the country had little to no experiences with the outside world. The
hawk-eyed Pathan of Kipling’s verse still existed, his ten rupee jezail
replaced by the .303 Lee-Enfield. Before the Soviet invasion, rifles were
treasured items throughout the country, and men became intimately familiar with
their personal weapon from a young age. Ammunition was both hard to come by and
expensive in the impoverished countryside, so it could not be squandered by
hasty or inaccurate fire. Additionally, ranges were often long and game scarce,
so riflemen had to be good of necessity.
The most popular weapons were versions of the old
British Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) in caliber .303-inch British. A
bolt-action rifle with a 10-shot magazine, the Enfield was reliable, durable, accurate and
hard-hitting. With a magazine capacity twice that of other bolt-action rifles,
and a bolt itself that had a conveniently-placed handle and a short, fast bolt
throw, the Enfield
remained a good choice. There was a saying after World War I that the German
Mauser was the best hunting rifle, the American Springfield was the best target
rifle, but the British Lee-Enfield was the best combat rifle.
Some things never go out of style: Afghans with the No. 4 Lee-Enfield (first adopted 1941) and RPG-7 (1961).
It served well indeed in the mountains even in the
age of the assault rifle. With twice the range of the 7.62x39mm Soviet round
fired by the AK and RPK, marksmen could pick off individual infantrymen in
relative safety from return fire. The big 174-grain FMJ .303 bullet not only
had good long-range ballistics and impressive knock-down power, but could also
penetrate the body armor used by the Soviets at the time, whereas the
Kalashnikov’s 123-grain 7.62x39mm could not.
In somewhat smaller numbers, other old bolt-action
military rifles were floating around the country, such as the 7.62x54R
Mosin-Nagant in its various models as well as copies of the German ‘98 Mauser
chambered in a variety of full power cartridges and produced in various
countries from Turkey to China.
When American troops entered Afghanistan, with our
brass making many of the same tactical mistakes they had once chastised the
Soviets for in the 1980’s, they encountered the same levels of Muslim fanaticism
but much less marksmanship. The new generation of Afghan rebels had been raised
with Mr. Kalashnikov’s AK-47 in hand rather than the Lee-Enfield, and
ammunition had become both plentiful and relatively cheap. The single,
well-aimed long-range shot had mostly been replaced by thirty rounds of
ammunition fired from the hip in three seconds’ time in the general direction
of the enemy. Such shooting is exciting and loud and looks very macho,
appealing to young men the world over. Never mind those sights; if you were
meant to hit your target then Allah would give some divine guidance to your
bullets.
In fact, it became worthy of note when
a proficient Afghan rifle marksman actually did show up. When the U.S. Marines
took the town of Marjah in 2010, they were expecting IEDs to be their main
problem. Instead, it turned out to be snipers. A single sniper did the most
damage, firing from the “holy ground” of the mosque, where American forces
found a pile of fresh, empty .303 British shell casings, leading one to
speculate the effective sniper was some dangerous old fart with a Lee-Enfield,
most likely with open sights.
The last two or three years have shown
a disturbing trend towards better-trained and more effective insurgent snipers
in Afghanistan. Until the Obama Administration and the MSM (but I repeat
myself) felt the sudden urge to absolve all Chechens of misbehavior after the
Boston Bombings, it was common knowledge that veteran Chechen snipers were
coming to and operating in Afghanistan especially as well as assisting
insurgents and terrorists elsewhere in support of the global jihad. Some other
proficient shooters in Afghanistan have come from Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt. An
Al Qaeda recruitment video quoted the Koran to inspire young Islamic men to
take up the sniping trade. “Fight them and Allah will punish them by your
hands, lay them low, and cover them with shame.” To bolster religious fervor,
TAQ also offers bounties of as much as $25,000 for killing an American. Rumors have
consistently popped up of a dedicated terrorist sniper training school run by
Chechen and Arab imports.
In Helmand Province in 2010, American
and British forces encountered four expert snipers operating in two pairs,
believed to be foreigners brought to Afghanistan just for their expertise. Over
a period of five months, these hired guns were credited with killing four US
Marines and 10 British soldiers with precision long-range shots. Two British
soldiers, including a sniper, were killed with single shots to the head, one of
them while he was observing through a 9-inch loophole in a mud wall.
The identity of the foreign snipers
remains unknown. A combined British SAS and American Green Beret operation
tracked down and cornered the sharpshooters in the Sangin Valley, where they
were taken out by F-16s using precision-guided 1,000-pound bombs, leaving
little evidence to collect afterward.
AFGHAN SHOOTER TACTICS
The vast majority of Afghan shooters, not just snipers, employ a few
simple old-fashioned tactics to increase their effectiveness and survivability.
As one American soldier summed things up, “Their accuracy wasn’t as impressive
as their fieldcraft.”
1. Attack when the sun is low
on the horizon and behind them, and in the eyes of friendly troops trying to
fire back.
2. Infiltrate into
pre-positioned firing positions under cover of darkness or during fog, rain or
snow.
3. Attack from high ground.
4. Fire their weapons from directions intended to steer their targets toward a
larger ambushes and/or IEDs.
5. Travel light. Superior mobility allows one to choose the site of engagement
and, perhaps more importantly for survival, disengagement and in rugged terrain
and mountains that mobility still often comes down to foot travel.
IRAQ
A fairly typical Iraqi insurgent “sniper”.
While Saddam Hussein’s former national Iraqi Army
did have sniper rifles and a sniper training program, the actual numbers of trained
snipers were small. The vast majority of snipers encountered during the
insurgency generally had no special training or skill and could, in fact, be
nothing more than a neighborhood goon who happened to find an SVD. This is
hardly out of the realm of possibility considering that well over a quarter of
a million tons of Iraqi Army ordnance was unaccounted for after the preliminary
conventional invasion ended. Even so, insurgents equipped with real sniper
rifles were seldom if ever encountered until the uprising in the spring of
2004. During and after this event, more insurgent snipers were encountered on a
much more frequent basis.
In addition to some older Soviet-built genuine
Dragunovs, the insurgents also possessed an Iraqi-manufactured copy of the same
known as the Al-Kadissiya. Another similar weapon often mistaken for an SVD was
the Romanian-made FPK, sometimes also known as the SSG-97. Although firing the
same 7.62x54R round and closely resembling the Dragunov on the exterior, the
FPK is actually based upon the RPK light machine gun and doesn’t deliver
accurate long-range sniper rifle performance. They also used the Iranian-made
Tabuk “Sniper Rifle” which is essentially nothing more than an AK47 with a
heavy barrel and a scope. It fires the same 7.62x39mm M43 assault rifle round
as the AK, SKS and RPK, giving it a range of only 400-600 meters at best.
Pretenders to the SVD throne encountered in Iraq: (Top) The Iraqi Tabuk Sniper
Rifle in 7.62x39mm and (Bottom) the Romanian FPK (SSG-97) in 7.62x54R.
Army National Guard Intelligence took notice
of the Iraqi “snipers” generally poor quality.
“There are some estimates
that the prewar Iraqi Army had approximately 3000 "trained" snipers;
however, the prewar training these designated snipers received is questionable,
since the incidents of insurgent sniper attacks reported generally exhibit a
poor shot-to-hit ratio. Most of these "trained" snipers are
equivalent in skill to a squad-designated
marksman. There is one
report from August 2004 of a "sniper" in Najaf firing more than 80
rounds over the course of 8 hours at U.S. forces, but this sniper's
firing did not result in any casualties. It is more likely that the firers of
these weapons may actually be looking down the sights or through a scope and
aiming rather than pointing the weapon and emptying the magazine, which is the
typical procedure. The incorporation of scopes on weapons has probably
increased the average insurgent's marksmanship out to perhaps 200 to 300
meters. There is evidence of some true snipers operating in some insurgent
groups, which is exhibited by spikes in single shots to the head and torso
(shots through the side of the IBA). A possible source of these true snipers might
be the influx of experienced veterans from the Iran-Iraq war.”
The majority of Iraqi snipers were
also quite poor in terms of long-range precision fire, most of them only taking
pot-shots at ranges of no more than 200-300 meters at the outside. This put
them well within the effective range of accurate counter-fire from Western
infantry small arms and many of these snipers did not live long. To compensate
for their inability to match Western marksmanship, they often fired from the
midst of crowds of civilians or took only a single shot before fleeing along a
pre-planned route, ditching or hiding their weapon and then blending with the
local population. Besides fleeing on foot, there were jihadist snipers who used
ambulances, police cars and motorcycles as escape vehicles. Other Iraqi snipers,
along with just about every other “religious” jihadist, used mosques as hides,
knowing of American reluctance to destroy such “holy” sites.
The DC Beltway Snipers, who seemed to
completely disappear from the collective consciousness of the American media
and government security apparatus when it was revealed they were not white male
military veterans, killed ten people and seriously injured three more in
October 2002 using many of the same techniques then being used by Iraqi
insurgents. The technique involved using a car as a mobile sniper’s hide and to
blend into the crowd as well as to escape quickly.
The DC Snipers used a larger Chevy Caprice
4-door sedan with a roomy trunk. A small hole, just large enough for one of the
men to aim and fire their stolen AR-15 through, was cut in the trunk lid just to the
right of the license plate. The rear seat had been dismounted so that the shooter could easily access the trunk from the passenger compartment. The Irish Republican Army used similar methods in
the 1990’s, in one example fitting a Mazda 626 with a firing port in the side
of the vehicle and also adding some interior armor plate to protect the gunman.
Iraqi insurgents have used too wide a variety of vehicles to even list.
The small, hard-to-spot firing port the DC Beltway Snipers cut into the trunk of their Chevy Caprice.
A 2012 US Army document outlined the
basic tactics involved in a typical “Portable Shooter” attack as had been seen
in Iraq.
1. Surveillance will confirm static
location and choke point.
2. Range to target will be measured or
estimated.
3. Driver positions vehicle.
4. Video cell may record the shooting.
5. Shooter confirms specific target
from camouflaged platform viewpoint and shoots.
6. Vehicle moves calmly into traffic
patter and departs area.
Jihadists increasingly communicate via the
Internet, posting messages and setting up temporary Web sites to convey
information. In May 2005, an Iraqi terrorist Web site gave seven
"duties" or target priorities for that country's insurgent snipers.
Here is a literal translation of that posting from U.S. Army Intelligence:
Duties of a Sniper
1. Target enemy snipers and surveillance teams.
2. Target commanders, officers and pilots; that is, to target the head of
the snake and then handicap the command of the enemy.
3. Assist teams of mujahideen infantry with suppressive fire. These teams
may include RPG brigades or surveillance teams.
4. Target U.S. Special Forces, they are very stupid because they have a
'Rambo complex’ thinking that they are the best in the world. Don't be arrogant
like them.
5. Engage specialty targets like communications officers to prevent calls
for reinforcements. Likewise, tank crews, artillery crews, engineers, doctors,
and chaplains should be fair targets.
- A tank driver was shot while crossing a
bridge, resulting in the tank rolling off the bridge and killing the rest of
the crew
- Killing doctors and chaplains is suggested as
a means of psychological warfare
6. Take care when targeting one or two U.S. soldiers or agents on a
roadside. A team of American snipers [may be] waiting for you. They [may be]
waiting for you to kill one of those agents and then they will know your
location and they will kill you.
7. In the event of urban warfare, work from high areas and assist
infantry with surrounding the enemy, attacking target instruments and lines of
sight on large enemy vehicles, and directing mortar and rocket fire to
front-line enemy positions.
Heavy or Anti-Material Sniper Rifles
Disturbingly, there were also a few instances of
Chechen snipers using 12.7mm heavy sniper/anti-material rifles. The 12.7x107mm
round (often mis-named the “.51-caliber” by Americans in Korea and Vietnam) is
the Russian equivalent of the American .50-calber BMG (12.7x99mm NATO) round,
and most often seen in the DShK-38 heavy machine gun, again roughly the
equivalent of the Browning M2 machine gun in its roles and performance. Rounds
include not only the standard full metal jacket (ball) ammo, but also Armor
Piercing (AP) and Armor Piercing Incendiary (API) ammunition. The standard B-32
steel-cored API round that is most commonly available has been in production
since WWII and is capable of penetrating over 20mm of RHA armor plate at 100
meters. At least during testing, the incendiary element proved successful 75%
of the time in igniting fuel containers placed behind the 20mm plate. Russia also now
makes a 12.7mm Snaiperskii “special
sniper” round that utilizes a solid brass lathe-turned 864-grain bullet capable
of Match-grade accuracy just for use with their heavy sniper rifles.
Russian OSV-96 Anti Material Rifle
Caliber: 12.7x107mm
Operation: Gas,
semiautomatic
Barrel Length:
Overall Length: 1690mm
Empty Weight w/out Scope: 12.6kg
Magazine Capacity: 5 rounds
Maximum Effective
Range: 1,800m+
The rifle is question is the Russian OSV-96, a
gas-operated semi-automatic .50-caliber weapon fed by a 5-round magazine. This
long-barreled bipod-equipped AMR rather resembles the WWII PTRD-41 anti-tank
rifle on the exterior. First scoped with a modified PSO-1-1 scope with its
magnification increased to 13x, the newer dedicated scope for the OSV is the
POS 12x50mm. The OSV is also compatible with the PKN-05 night vision scope,
effective to 600 meters. Maximum effective range is listed as 1,800 meters,
just over one mile.
TAQ fighters in Afghanistan have on more than one
occasion been video-taped using the old Soviet WWII PTRD Anti-tank Rifle. This
simple but reliable old weapon fires the devastating 14.5x114mm round, which is
roughly twice as powerful as the .50 BMG. The standard BS Armor Piercing
Incendiary round fires a tungsten cored projectile with a muzzle velocity of
3,300 fps which can penetrate around 30mm of armor plate at 500 meters. Newer
and even more potent rounds such as Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot and High
Explosive Incendiary are now being made in Russian and Red China.
Another "oldie but goodie" shows up in Afghanistan: a WWII-vintage 14.5mm Soviet PTRD-41 anti-tank rifle, complete with custom green recoil pad.
Their 14.5mm round being so potent, the Soviet
Union continued to manufacture and use their anti-tank rifles through the end
of WWII when other countries had long since dropped the concept. Hundreds of
thousands of the single-shot Degyratev PTRD-41 were made along with smaller but
still significant numbers of the 5-shot semi-automatic Simonov PTRS-41. PTRs
were popular weapons to air drop to Russian Partisans operating behind German
lines; the weapons allowed the partisans to interdict German supply lines by destroying
railway locomotives, rolling stock and trucks from long range. Further north,
Finnish long-range ski patrols infiltrated through Soviet lines to shoot up
Russian trucks and trains with their own Lathi 20mm anti-tank rifles. Many thousands
of PTRDs and PTRSs were given to North Korea and Red China and were
used in the Korean War. Once obsolete against tanks, they were used as
anti-material and heavy long-range sniper rifles, some fitted with scopes by
enterprising soldiers. Others went to Warsaw Pact satellite states; Albania kept
their PTRs in service until the 1980’s.
Although there are probably still tens, if not
hundreds, of thousands of these things crated away in forgotten armories, there
is actually little need to resurrect any more PTRs out of mothballs. There are
plenty of newer and lighter optically-sighted anti-material rifles available
now that fire the same potent 14.5mm caliber rounds. The Hungarian Gepard, for
instance, comes in 14.5mm and actually bears a strikingly similar appearance to
the PTRD, and four other countries also currently manufacture other 14.5mm
AMRs.
All of these weapons, of course, are easily capable
of penetrating even the latest military body armor. Even many of the widely
used light armored vehicles used around the world today are capable of being
penetrated by such weapons. Modern military forces also have a wide variety of
expensive high-technology equipment which can be destroyed by precision fire
from weapons this large, as evidenced as far back as Operation Desert Storm
where SAS “SCUD Hunter” teams were equipped with Barrett Model 82A1 .50-caliber
rifles.
Fortunately, these weapons were only used in very
small numbers in Chechnya
and did not find their way to Iraq.
More recently in Syria, however, these things seem to be popping up all over.
Watching videos posted of the fighting there, the OSV-96 and the Chinese-made M99 12.7mm rifles are by far the most popular AMRs, but I've also seen a British AS-50, an MKEK and one that appears to be completely home-made.
Their effectiveness is usually highly limited by a lack of even remotely qualified
operators. I've watched many shooters getting scoped repeatedly, guys shooting off-hand from the shoulder at flying helicopters and jets like they've got a giant Marlin Goose Gun, guys shooting with the barrel or even the muzzle brake itself resting directly on concrete or cinder blocks, AMRs being shot without sights, the semi-autos being used in spray 'n' pray mode, you name it; all are accompanied by the shooter and everyone else in the vicinity chanting "Allah Akbar!" in an apparent effort to get the projectiles to actually hit something. I saw only one video of a sniper actually trying to engage and destroy Syrian Air Force MiG-23 jet fighter-bombers parked on the ground at an air base and he didn't appear to be scoring any vital strikes in the video. In fact, the only thing that I saw deliberately targeted, hit and actually destroyed was a D-9 Caterpillar bulldozer. At least playing with their powerful toys keeps these rebels too busy to kill, behead and rape Christians or burn down any churches for the moment.
"That ain't your daddy's shotgun, Cowboy!"
One
has to wonder at the convoluted journey the OSV rifles must have taken from
Russian factory in Tula to wind up in insurgent hands in Syria. Russian
President Vladimir Putin has been much more aware of and vocal about just how
dangerous these Syrian Islamic rebel factions (who include Al Qaeda) truly are,
certainly more so than American President Barack Obama, whose administration has
both openly and clandestinely supported little-known and uncontrollable Muslim
rebel groups there.
While they are not concerned in the least about increasing
numbers of large-caliber AMRs in the hands of Islamic terrorist organizations including
Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in the Middle East, the Obama Administration’s various
government security agencies, politicians in both houses of Congress, gun
control advocacy groups, and the Mainstream Media periodically become quite
strident and frantic about banning .50-caliber BMG rifles from private ownership
by American citizens. Despite the fact that such weapons have never actually been
used in a crime in the US,
these groups argue that they must be taken away because they have the potential to destroy an aircraft,
especially a civilian airliner.
Oddly enough, these same groups apparently do not
care nor even deem it worth mentioning that some 400 American-made AIM-9
Stinger shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles went missing into unknown
Islamic hands during the Benghazi Fiasco. Neither were they concerned in the
least when as many as 20,000 older Soviet-made SA-7 Strela-2 man-portable heat-seeking
SAMs, which already have a rather long and bloody history of actually shooting
down civilian airliners when they find their way into terrorist hands, were openly
stolen from former Libyan Army arsenals over a period of months. One would
think that if these champions of airline safety were indeed truly and deeply concerned
about the safety of passenger aircraft, the theft of several thousand
man-portable and easily-hidden heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles might at
least register on the radar. Apparently, it does not.
In the past, terrorist organizations including Al
Qaeda have unsuccessfully attempted to purchase American Barrett Model 82A1
.50-BMG caliber and South African Denel NWT 14.5mm/20mm anti material rifles
via front organizations.
This, however, has only delayed the
inevitable. Between our good friends the Saudis and the Afghan/Pakistan opium
trade, Islamic terrorist organizations have more than enough money to purchase
such weapons. Modern AMRs as well as plentiful 12.7mm and 14.5mm ammunition to
feed them are being manufactured in places like Communist China, Serbia, Iran
and Azerbaijan, nations whose governments may be downright supportive of
insurgents and who tend not look too hard at the End User Certificates of the
parties they sell weapons to. Chinese-made M-99 rifles in 12.7mm have been showing up in the wrong hand in Burma and Syria for months, but of course the Chi-Coms have no idea how they got there.
Expect to see more of these types of weapons in
insurgent hands in the future. The saving grace at the moment in that the hands
they are currently in are mostly incompetent ones which cannot utilize these
powerful weapons to their full potential.
The insurgent sniper has been seen before and will
be seen again. Since the grunt with boots on the ground has no real say in the
matter of conducting a counter-insurgency operations, perhaps even these few
small bits of low-level tactical “when to duck” information might prove of more
practical and immediate value than grand theories about ink spots, hearts &
minds or Mao’s fishes.
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