How Military Snipers Work

how stuff works. So yeah, fair games. Yeah, yeah, so, um, it was a pretty good article on our site that I want to refer you guys to just upfront in case I forget um and a certain bye Robert Valdez. And we're gonna be talking about a lot of points that he covered in Military Snipers. And it's worth pointing out that this is one of the few articles that has like a video game component to it, right, it does, which I played this afternoon. Yeah, Um, did you try

it out? No? No, I haven't tried it out yet, but well it's it's buried. It's on one of the latter pages and you have to hit ten hidden targets and you're supposed to do it within thirty seconds. So you line it up in the scope and then UM, hit the hidden target and then I got a hundred points. Wow, So you're you're quite the sniper. I'm I'm interested to

try it out. I was. I always got to kick out of out of games that had some video games that had some sort of sniper component, like like the Metal Gear Solid games specifically the one that came up for PS two back in the day. There was like an there was one awesome level in particular where you're out there among these snow banks and you have a sniper rifle and there's another sniper UM, and you try you have to try and figure out where the other sniper is and you end up like having to identify

where they are based on UM. You can see their breath rising on the other side of this little hill, the sniper trying to pick off sniper. Yeah. Battle of the Snipers. Yeah, it shows up in a lot of video games. You know. It's like the sniper rifle is is pretty common these days and your action oriented. So in the video games, is there a spotter as well or is it just a lone sniper? UM. I can't

speak for the moment. I know there's some like their video games that have titles like sniper you know, but uh, most of your games are going to be more like solo type deals where you just have one dude with and with a sniper rifle, the ones I've seen. Anyway, Okay, well here we are. We're going to educate you because it's not a lone gunman typically, well at least those snipers who are working for law enforcement or the military. Yeah,

like think of it like chess in a way. You know, you have all these special pieces, but they have to they have to work as a team. They have you have to one piece of support the other. Like you don't just send a tank out and do an out into the field. You send a tank out with infantry support to cover its weaknesses and allow its strength to shine through. Right, right, So snipers work in pairs, and

uh is there even the Beltway snipers. I don't know if you remember that, but back in two thousand two in the in the US, there was this infamous pair of snipers. It was an older guy. It was John Allen Mohammed it and he was he was actually executed in two thousand nine, and he had a seventeen year old accomplice Lee Melbo, and they were in the Washington, D C. Area, and I think they were accused of killing ten people. Yeah, it was. It was quite the stir, right.

So they were operating in a pair too. Um, So you have the sniper who gets a lot of the glory, but really you have the other half, the spotter, who's tracking the target while the person pulling the trigger has to recover from you know, gun recoil and stuff like that. And you also have the spotter who's giving feedback on the wind conditions and basically any condition that's going to affect the shot. Yeah, if I if I remember correctly, the hurt Locker features a great scene where you see

like a spotter helping a sniper. I haven't seen that. I really do. You want to see it. It's really good, excellent. So yeah, it's it's a pair. Their elite long range marksman and they're generally part of a special ops team and they obviously can shoot with ridiculous precision, but they tend to be even more than that. They're not just pulling the trigger. They do more than just rack up confirmed kills argualy. Their main role is recon or reconnaissance. I feel like that a little bit of jargon I

threw in there for you. Yeah, that's nice. And so they're very skilled at this thing they call the stock, as in stocking stokers. Yeah. Stock. So there's even a game that you play in sniper school military sniper school. I assume they have the equivalent for law enforcements, some sort of training program, police academy or like police snipers. Yeah yeah, yeah, you need the people who would be a part of a swat team. Right, So in um in military training, the snipers learned how to stock, and

so it's really interesting. There's this stock training. It takes place in a big, old, open grassy range, right, and your sniper students are going to start at one end of the range. They're hanging out and about a thousand meters down you have your instructors checking out what you're doing, how well you're faring, and they're city on top of a truck or maybe a tower, and they have the

spotter scopes so they can see what's going on. They can they have these specialized telescopes to see what's happening. So they're they're trying to they're like judging them on how stealthily I'm coming. So the sniper students have to stalk toward the instructors without being seen. Right, So they're in this grassy field and you know that the instructors are actively looking for them, and the snipers are trying to move toward them on the on the deal, you know, stealthily.

It's very interesting. Would you think you'd be able to do that? Well, no, But but they also have some help, you know. They they have camouflage, they have the gilly suit, which we'll get into a little bit later, which is a key part of a sniper's gear. It sounds pretty cool. I mean when I was in I was in Boy Scouts and we would, uh, you know, you have all your sort of official boy Scout things you have to do like tie knots and you know, start fires and

identify trees and all that kind of stuff. But we would often like end up displaying these like games out in these fields you know where you know, it's stuff like you're sort of like playing elaborate hiding go seek out in a cornfield in the middle of the night or things like that. So I could see where did you really play hide and seek in a corn field

in the the middle of night, because that sounds pretty fun. Yeah, we'll see one group would hide in the field and then the other group would have flashlights and they would come in looking for you. And it was really frightening at times because it's kind of like, on one hand, you're like, oh, my goodness, I'm afraid I'm gonna get

caught by the dudes with the flashlights. And then you find like a really dark corner of the field and you're you hunker down and then there's like nobody around you and it's really quiet, and then you realize, oh, my goodness, sound like out in the middle of the woods and it's dark, and you started getting kind of freaked out about that. So it was quite the adrenaline rush. So I could see where one of these stalking events and sniper academy could be, uh, could be pretty exhilarating.

So while they're stalking, they're they're trying to be these masters of stealth, and they're doing stuff like reporting on the enemy's size, their strength, their location, and this is all pretty helpful and radioing that back to the commanding officers. Yeah, you've got a guy who can get in there close without being seen. So I mean the the reconnaissance value there is immense, perhaps yeah, generally, perhaps more so than his ability to take out a key component of that enemy. Yeah,

so let's talk about that. Who are they trying to take out? Not the average soldier, That's the thing, because I think that's another thing about video games. There's some games where you kind of have a sniper rifle, but you're basically just killing everything in sight. And that's not what this is about. This is about a precision um strike. This is about identifying key person and important aspect of the enemy's forces and removing it from play and maybe

striking a little terror in the process. So who makes you think who would you think might be one of those key people that you'd want to um, the cook because of the cook's gone to know um, well, the obviously any kind of command, um kind of in an individual in command would be a key target. Uh, somebody that has you know, um like a communications officer, you know that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, pilots um Veldes also talked about drivers and your communications operators stuff like that.

So here's something that I hadn't really thought about. Um, there's a famous movie scene or maybe many famous movie scenes in which the enemy's location is disclosed by say the flare of a cigarette, you know, the little orange no at the end of a cigarette or the match right, you know, and they light up and it's say goodbye. So snipers are ultra ultra observe it. That's something they're superbly taught in sniper training school. So a sniper is gonna see you know, a sniper is gonna be able

to discern who's who in the battlefield. They're going to pick up on all sorts of subtle cues. You know, they're looking at the way you know, body language, they're looking at say you make the mistake of saluting your

commanding officer in the field, Well, then what's going to happen? Right, And this is actually like becomes more and more important as we move farther away from like the the the outdated vision of a military where like the guy in charge it has a fancy hat, you know, I mean you have you have you have combinants who do not have uniforms, uh, you know, especially in the field, you know,

and they probably don't have uniforms at all. You know, like if you're insane a situation like in Afghanistan or something. To figure out who's in charge, you're gonna have to observe and see based on their social interactions and the way they carry themselves. You know which guy is the is the command unit, right, and so you don't have these key people. So a sniffer is going to look

for something called a target of opportunity. So this could be, uh, somebody like an officer taking a break to smoke cigarette, or maybe a pilot who's flight checking his helicopter, or you know, a guard who's patrolling the camp or the base. Yeah, somebody who just suddenly they're an easy target to pick off, which in taking that guy out might not actually like it's not like, oh my goodness, Doug's gone, so we're just gonna give up the war now, you know, we're

just gonna completely surrender. But but everybody else in Dougs unit, it's gonna be like, oh my goodness, Doug just bought it, you know, going out to smoke a cigarette. It like it breaks down morale, yeah, absolutely, And then it's not just people thereafter, it's also material things too, stuff like a generator or radio transmitter or um a fuel tank exactly. Yeah, yeah,

something of gray importance to the force there. Yeah, And you were just talking about how a single hit can really demoralize the enemy, and so snappers are called force multipliers by army strategists, and so it's all that means, as you guys could probably guess, is that sniper teams can do much more damage than you'd think an individual would be capable of causing. Yeah, they can kind of spread chaos, you know. So let's get to the other

half of the team, the spotter. The spotter tracks the shots fired, right, Yeah, and you can tell this by um And we were talking about these high velocity, long range rounds and a lot of times they're gonna lea a vapor trail. Yeah. The main way I could relate to this because I don't know that I've played a video game that had a vapor trail after you fired

a sniper rifle. And maybe I'm just playing the wrong games, but but one game does come to mind, a little iPhone um app that everybody plays these days called Angry Birds. It's like everybody, like my wife's addicted to it, and I've played that. Something's pretty phone addicted to angry birds bring up angry birds among iPhone owners, and it's like people go crazy for it. And it's like a game where you sling shot little birds at little pigs that

are in fortresses. It's silly, it's cute, but slingshotting birds cute. Well they're cute birds. Yeah, So you sling shot the bird right and you miss right, But after you fire, you can see the trajectory of the shot tracked little dots, and so you can then you can sort of correct your shot based on that trail. So it's not as simple as that with sniper rifles obviously, but it reminds me of that. It's it's like, oh, we can see based on the vapor trail how the last shot went,

and we can kind of wrecked based on that. Yeah, so Vel does um he interviewed an Army Ranger sniper, which is pretty cool. Yeah he went after a Yeah, yeah he did. And uh, the sniper that Vell does quotes says, um kind of just looks like mixed up air. You can see through it, but you see the distortion. I think of it as if you're ever looking at

a grill. You're grilling something outside and you can see the distorted air kind of rising off the grill, kind of like waves and yeah, or if you look across asphalt on a really hot day, right yeah, same sort of thing, or at least I would think it would

be the same story. That's that's my interpretation too. In the spot are also is going to help your sniper to factor in the condition, so you know your wind, weather, visibility, pressure, humidity, because remember we're talking about pretty long ranges, and the farther you get away, the more precise you have to be when you're aiming your weapon, right right, Yeah, and you have to account for the changes they're going to take place over all of that a long distance, be

it wind or just gravity, yeah, planel gravity can affect your shot. So perfect conditions according to sniper, yeah no wind, mild weather, clear visibility. But that's not going to happen. So given them, you know, there's a rare days a snipery team has to correct for things like that. So they have to correct for the way, you know, the bit of bullets are going to spin and drift, and they do that with this thing called MOA or a minute of angle. I hope they call it MOA. Maybe

they call it m o A. I don't know. Snipers right in and tell us MOA makes me think of like a giant flightless bird, but in m o A sounds a little more like military, you know. So this is the unit of measurement that snipers use. They rely on to to measure accuracy, and their spotters are going to help them with figure out how to get the best shot and and factor in MOA there or m o A right now, the spotter is not just you know,

along for the ride. I mean, he's armed as well, so he's there to provide supporting fire if suddenly the sniper becomes the target or they have to you know, eat a hasty retreat and uh you know and fire some shots along the way. Yeah, he's going to have typically like an assault rifle in automatic assault rifle, I mean, because remember his his main duty is to protect the sniper and thus the unit. Essentially. Here's the other thing

that I'm not sure spotter is like too much. I was reading that being a spotter is kind of like being a sniper apprentice. Um, you know, I'll be like

an extremely valuable one though. We're kind of like a golf caddy, right I would I would take extreme offense to that if I were, Well, that's what kind of what like when you make ca I mean, obviously it's not the same thing, but but like calling him apprentice, it's kind of like this what he's learning, he's learning in the field, And how better are you going to learn if you're not out in the field practicing these skills, because eventually a lot of spotters will wind up, you know,

picking up all the knowledge and maybe leading their own team. Well, in Caddyshack, the caddies all played golf, and well, anyway, I hope not make any more points based on caddy shot And this is a podcast, but ultimately it is the sniper. He's going to get to make all the calls.

He's going to get to have the final say. He's the one who's gonna be coordinating with command to put together the mission, and when they're out in the field, he's gonna have the final word in determining stuff like root your position, um, you know, rendezvous points and even how they're going to escape the scape route. Cool. So, yeah, he's calling the shots. He's a dudent. He's a guy calling the shots. He's the guy making the shots and the spotters, the guy helping him make those shots. Indeed,

so what kind of gear are these guys carrying? Some pretty pretty high tech stuff at time? Right, Well, if you're going for one shot, one kill, you gotta your equipment really matters. So a sniper rifle. But that's kind of an ambiguous term because sniper rifles can be all sorts of there's no set model of sniper rifle. They can be uh, they can be a bolt action, so that that just means for non gun knowledgeable people like myself, a bowl action just means that you have to reload

after every round fired. Yeah, so what's the disadvantage of that, Well, that you have to reload after every shot fired, right, and then of course you're that movement, that reloading movement could give away your position, right right, and petty much anything can give away your position. You know, if you have a semi automatic, which is another option for a sniper rifle, Um that that also comes with it's you know,

own special ways of being detected by the enemy. Yeah, I mean, and all these things are most of these weapons are gonna make a lot of sound. I found it interesting that these were sniper rifles were often referred to as crew served weapons. Yeah. Yeah, the idea that it's a it's you know, it's a big gun, but unlike all your video games or most of your video games,

you need two people to operate it correctly. Yeah. I mean, like we're talking about before, if you come under fire and you've got to get out of there fast, you're not really going to want a sniper. Yeah, the sniper rifle just becomes luggage at that point totally. I imagine ditch it, although I don't know that for sure, but if you're if you're beating a history treat I you really take in your gear with you. Soldiers abandon their

gear in the field. Well, I think the general idea is that as pricey as gear is, its yeah, it's generally pricier to to train the individual, you know, to use that equipment. So it's you know, it's kind of like the whole ejection seat in an airplane thing, right,

like a fighter jet. No, no, keep going with us. Well, well it's not a perfect analogy, but but like with the fighter jet, you have the objection seat because if there's something's going wrong with the plane, so you know, you'll reach a point where it's better to save the pilot than to you know, further endanger the pilot to

say of the point, okay, okay, I got you. There's I mean, there's there kind of comes like a line you know that you right, right, So maybe they're ditching the sniper riffle, but I imagine they're encouraged to bring it back if they can. But yeah, well, the sniper riffle is going to be more than your average gun. Obviously, it's it's match great, right, So it's it's gonna be fine tuned, probably by a professional gun sniff to ensure

accuracy and reliability. These are the kind of things that you know, somebody who would be participating in a professional like gun shooting competition, which these are high grade weapons. And they were also talking about sniper rifles having this free floating barrel and that's going to make sure that the barrel touches the least amount of the weapon possible. And the idea here is that it's going to help with cutting down on vibration from the recoil. They're expensive, right,

you'd guess that. I mean, they may cost as much as fifteen dollars and up, I would imagine and on the lower edge, maybe you're looking at eight thousand, and of course you're gonna need a sniper scope, and that's what the spotter man's. This is the this is the scope that like you look through to see what you're targeting. Yeah, it's specialized, you know, specialized telescope. And we do have an illustration on the site in case you guys are curious.

It's pretty cool that we did a while ago. Here's my favorite part of sniper equipment. What's that? They're kind of hilarious looking. Yeah. Yeah, if you've ever seen it, it's kind of like when you see a soul that looks like he just spent the night in a swamp, or he kind of looks like swamp thing. You know. It's got all this liked definitely, you know, foliage hanging off of them, and sticks and branches and bramble, and it can look a little comical. Yeah. I kind of

think of it like Chewbacca. But I think of Chewbacca a lot these days. Apparently Chewbacca with like leaves cotton his fear. Yeah, that's the exact kind of thing it looks like. Yeah, so it's just camouflage because The overriding point here is that I mean, clearly you don't want to be spotted by your enemy, but also you're gonna want to blend in with nature. And the important thing here is the angle of your gun, you know, the straight line of whatever equipment you're carrying. Um, anything out

of place is going to be spotted by the enemy. Yes, I mean especially so this is interesting. Um rifles. They make little Gilli suits for their rifles even Yeah, I think I've seen those. Yeah, it's kind of like a big camouflage sock that gets pulled over the the the barrel. Now are you going to tell the history of the gil suit because it seems worth if you're Alley, do do you remember the history of the Gill series? Yeah, well, correct me if I'm wrong, But I believe you said

it was of Scottish origin. It is, and the idea of being back in ye olden times. Yeah, you would have Hagets, I believe correct. I'm sure we have Scottish listeners who can correct us on these things. But basically you'd have your big game preserve that belonged to a lord, you know, and uh, the lord would decide that he wanted to say, shoot a deer or you know, or

you know, an arrow or whatever at a deer. Right, but the lord doesn't want to actually go out into the wilderness and you know, put in all the time, you know, and maybe he's not that good, and it's the job of his underlings to let him think that he's good. The gamekeeper specifically, who I picture, even though it's Irish, I picture Darby O Gill from Darby Gil in a little People. Okay, as long as we're going to keep on with Caddie Shock, it's definitely oh Bill

Murray Yeah, okay, Yeah, let's change it. Let's picture Bill Murray in this silly suit. Yeah, yeah, okay, so I got that images. Yeah. So in fact, I think he does have a gilly suit and Caddy shactor. Oh he does, yeah, yeah, when he's hunting the gopher. I'm pretty sure he does. Wow, it comes back to Caddy. Yeah. So so yeah, Bill Bill Murray's character is in this Uh was it Carl? Yeah? I think it was Carl in this in this gilli suit and he goes out into the wilderness and begins

to stalk, like we're talking other, stalk this deer. And he doesn't apparently really have a weapon or anything. He just kind of like creeps up as close as possible to the deer, the ultimate stalker. Yeah, and then nabs it just gan with his bare hands, and I don't know, maybe he puts it in a sack or you know, I don't know, how do you get a deer back to the lord's castle or maybe you just hoisted over your shoulder. Probably doesn't ride it, but yeah, it gets

it back somehow. And then he like takes it into like say an enclosed wooded area, or I don't know, ties it to a tree. It kind of depends on how um proficient the lord is at shooting things. And then so once the game's delivered, then the Lord can come out with his fancy crossbow or musket or whatever. Uh, fire is shot, and yeah, he's great. He just killed a deer that the the games keeper actually went and apprehended with his with his own hands and his skilly suit.

So that's pretty awesome. I did not know that before today. So pretty interesting stuff. Um, So here's something that I was wondering. We're talking long range distances for snipers. We're talking how far exactly. I mean, I was wondering what's the record set here? Well, at first, I think it's like when people think snipers and shots fired off at a distance, A lot of people think of like JFK

and stuff. But the distance that Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired, the distance, Yeah, the farthest distance it was fired was what I think. So let's so keep that to peanuts. Yeah, that's peanuts compared to the record. What is the record right now? Well, as of this recording, it was held by a British soldier, a corporal of Horse. I guess that's the British title. I was sort of uncertain about this how horse fit into his title, but I guess

it does. And a corporal of Horse Harrison, and he was from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and he holds a record of about one point five miles one point five miles. Yeah, so the distance to his two um is, his two human targets, was eight thousand, one d and twenty ft or one point five for miles. And they measured that with a GPS system and notably it was about three

thousand feet beyond the weapons effective range. So yeah, that just completely puts you know, any talk of Lee Harvey Oswald being a sniper to rest, I mean that that dude was nothing. Yeah, Harrison Horse Harrison, No, that's not. His first name was Fried of its hid at all. We should have we should have looked up more about British soldier titles, but we didn't because we're focusing on snipers today. People. But one point five miles, that's that's amazing.

I was really impressed. And to imagine that you could be, you know, out in this was actually an Afghanistan, that you could you could be say, out in the wilds of Afghanistan and your enemy is a mile and a half away and able to pick you off. That's pretty crazy. So you mentioned Lee Harvey as well. Let's go back to him for a second. Let's let's do a little

sniper history as long as we're wrapping things up. So according to the Army Sniper Association, the same folks who sponsored the annual sniper competition, which I guess you go if you're a a super sniper, the U. S Army International Sniper Competition. In fact, it's held annually. Uh. Anyway, the Army Sniper Association says that the term sniper originated

from the British occupation of India in the eighteen hundreds. Interesting, But when you think about it, we're talking about this before we had to have had snipers for as long as we've had long range weapons. Yeah, I think that as long as we've had a long light range weapon, we've had guys um who were stealthy, who were stealthy, who were better at it than than the other other guys in their team, in their team, in their armed unit,

or in the army. I get where going. Yeah, so, so, yeah, we've always had guys that excel at it, and by excelling at it, would be put in a situation where to capitalize on that that skill, right, right, So Lee Harvey obviously goes down as one of the most infamous snipers in history. But yeah, we're not so sure that he was a good one. Per se, Oswald was actually using a rifle he ordered from the mail. And I want to go back for sec I said two, and what I meant was actually two six five ft. So

I was giving him too much credit. Yeah, it's even even worse for that guy. Yeah, and he may not have been acting alone, but we don't even have to get into that. There I'm sure that's like Josh and Chuck and Chucker, you know, stuff they don't want you to know. We'll let them cover all the JFK conspiracy angles. There was something interesting that I had not heard about that you had, in that there was a video game released um JFK Reloaded, and it was released on the

forty one anniversary of Jiff Case Assassination Dallas. So this this game essentially allowed gamers to get behind Lee Harvey assult sniper rifle and recreate the assassination event. Yeah. Remember you could take both sides of it. I suppose, but I mean first hearing about it, first reading about it, I came stumping over to your death, Okay, have you

heard of this game? And you're like, well, you know, maybe they're trying to teach a point about you know, history, and which essentially was with the game creators said, yeah, I don't know. I guess you kind of get if you're around a lot of video game violence, you kind of become numb to it eventually. And it's kind of like, oh, there's a and stupid video games. There's so many like stupid and possibly offensive video games out there. It's you know,

this comes along and you're like, oh, well that's not surprising. Yeah. So I guess if you if you got the if you came closest to recreating the actual shot, you're supposed to win a hundred thousand dollars. But I don't know if anybody ever did and who that individual was. So yeah,

that's snipers for you. If you know, we kept talking about video games, so by all means you gamers out there, if there's if there's actually like a really authentic UH Sniper video game on the market, let us know, well we we'll mention it, you know, specifically if there's anything that involved, because I know there are a lot of co op games now, um and I don't really do a lot of that, but but it would stand a reason you could have a game or one dude is

the sniper and one dude is you know, holding the scope. Yeah, and you can always play the game on our article military UH Sniper's Work. I think it's on page nine or something, but maybe you'll have to click through the entire article and read it in all of its fine Robert Belts glory. Yeah, and we actually we have a lot of really cool military technology, military like science articles on the site. So yeah, so we don't touch upon it very often, but maybe we'll do that. Yeah, we

have a lot of cool content to discuss. Hey, so I wanted to share a little listener mail if I could, Yeah, do it. Well. Back on one of our episodes, we requested some of your favorite science quotes and we got some from from you guys, and you here are some favorites. So, for example, one of our literary named fans, gentleman by the name of James Uh, he sent a couple of his and so there are some funny ones which he

gave us a couple of. This was my favorite, he said, with the bomb squad, you can usually stop running after the first couple of blocks. If it involves the physics department, keep going. That's kind of good. But did you have a funny one? Oh? I did? Yeah, I love this one because this one comes from um, well, this one comes from a listener by the name of Andrew and it is a quote from a character on Futurama, who which is the show I love and I think a

lot of our listeners are really into it. Yeah, we mentioned a bunch. So this is from Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth of Mars University. He's one of the main characters, like the old decrepit mad scientists and uh he said quote technology isn't intrinsically good or evil, it's how it's used, like the death ray. So that's you know, because the death ray is not intrinsically evil, it's just if you

use it for evil purposes. And lastly, maybe we'll end with a serious one on the gravity and seriousness and awesomeness of science. And this one was sent by Bryan who says, go science exclamations for equipped with this five senses man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science. And that was adminnable, very nice, very nice. So as always we love to hear from you guys. If you have anything you want to share about snipers,

science or anything else, um send us an email. It's science stuff at how stefforks dot com and check us out social networking. You'll find us on Twitter as Lab stuff, and you also find us on Facebook. Is just stuff in the Science Lab. We'll keep you updated on what we're writing about, podcasting about, and thinking about in the field of science. That's a little science stuff. Thanks for listening guys for more on this and thousands of other topics.

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