There have been conferences held by the services to disseminate successful tactics. The Marine Corps had one recently. 3/5’s sniper platoon had a very successful tour this year, and those lessons learned are being distributed to other battalions. The sniper threat can never be completely eliminated, but the military is working to reduce it. However, I think we are going the wrong direction with body armor. The focus needs to on developing and disseminating tactical solutions.

I would like to get a valid e-mail address from you. The one you left is bouncing.

Using API is not all that important when most of the shots are taking place under 200M and they are aiming for the exposed parts of the body.

I’m a “school trained” sniper and I’ve reviewed all of the insurgent sniper videos I can find on the internet and all the successful ones are aiming for the neck, face and exposed head or for the sides and armpit.

Why would the snipers spoken of by the Marines in the article be aiming for the gaps in body armor if they all had been shooting API that could go through Humvee doors?

I’d never shoot at a vehicle… just the people.
(Unless using a .50 cal or larger - then its a different scenario and tactics.)

The shooter waits for the people to get out in the open, shoot one, and then displace to another position or lay low until the targets think you are gone then fire again.

The posters suggestion is a good one but I’ve been in the miltiary for over 16 years and he is right.

We are short handed and running on a thin margin with little true and sustainable “reserve”.

“…but concerning manpower, there are plenty of places to get the troops from…Europe…Japan…”

I know of no signifigant #’s of troops in Japan or Europe that we could pull.

Most troops that are in europe are deploying as much and often as the stateside troops.

And as far as japan.. what are you talking about? Do you mean Korea? We have #’s of troops in korea but not Japan. I think we should reduce our committment there.

My feeling is that to catch a sniper, you need a company sized element with aerial support on stanby. One patrol element goes into a neighborhood to bait the sniper, while the other elements are a few, maybe 2-3 minutes away, perhaps concealed, ready to lock down the neighborhood and then sweep through it, looking for weapons and doing the hand wipe tests on all males.

Good idea - workable and what a sniper would fear. Lock ‘em down and sweep the area. Check every MAM for gunshot residue that we come across.

However, this is incredibly man power intensive and we just don’t have the numbers.

Unfortunately this administration didnt have the brains, foresight or balls to push for an increase of the Army and Marines back right after 9/11 like they should have when they still had the support of the Congress and the US voters.

U.S. policy has to recognize the need and make the changes.

It’s not the policy so much as this administration.
Their is as new COIN manual out. This damn thing should have been worked on back in the spring of 2002.

The “leaders” need to start paying attention… this is a neck deep COIN war. And whether we want to admit it or not, it is.

Europe is not in danger and we have no business spending the capital to defend those countries.

We are not defending them, we are continuing to use the bases we paid huge sums of money to build and maintain as forward staging areas which are useful.

You apparently do not grasp how huge the log train is for OEF and OIF, especially the airlift aspect.

Aircraft, C17s and C5s and such coming out of Dover and other points CONUS fly over to Europe (UK and Germany) and stop to refuel, repair, change crews, upload/download cargo and such… if we didn’t have those places it’d be incredibly difficult to get all the supplies and troops to theater.

When we lost K2 in ‘05 it made keeping the boys in Afghanistan much, much harder (but not impossible) to keep supplied.

Their is a new COIN manual out - check it out - its far past due.

semper fi,
ash

Sniper threat
Military officials often say the insurgents in Iraq are a “learning enemy” — able to adapt to tactics and defenses used by U.S. and allied troops.
As defenses against improvised explosive devices improve, insurgents are turning to sniper attacks.
One technique they apparently learned from the United States is the method used by murderers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who terrorized the Washington, D.C., area in 2002. Muhammad and Malvo killed 10 persons and wounded several others by firing rifle shots through a hole in the trunk of their 1990 Chevrolet Caprice.
Now the insurgents in Baghdad are using the same technique. Military officials recently discovered 40 vehicles modified for sniper attacks. The vehicles had holes drilled through the sockets for two taillight bulbs. “One hole was for the scope and one was for the barrel,” a defense official tells us, who noted that they appear to have picked up the technique from the D.C. snipers.

I don’t like to leave anonymous comments. I would rather have a name and valid e-mail address. I never divulge this information.

Regarding what you are saying, it seems doubtful that ALL of the snipers are shooting API (for the readers, this is armor piercing incendiary) rounds, since the article at the NYT makes no sense in that case. Why would the snipers spoken of by the Marines in the article be aiming for the gaps in body armor if they all had been shooting API that could go through Humvee doors?

At any rate, I do not doubt the viability of the suggestion you make in the first paragraph, but concerning manpower, there are plenty of places to get the troops from. U.S. policy has to recognize the need and make the changes. Take the troops from Europe, and from Japan. Let Japan defend itself and it will rearm. Europe is not in danger and we have no business spending the capital to defend those countries.