Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Why Not Just Call In Arty - or an Air Strike...

That dodged both questions I asked.

I will tell you as someone who has a professional background and considerable operational experience in the middle east, that your statement "Snipers - start at Six-hundred yards." for which you give no citation, is pure nonsense.

Professional precision rifle shooters are just as likely to take a shot at 75 yards, 100 yards or 300 yards in a city or small congested area as they are to take one past 600 yards. In fact today considerable amount of time is spent conducting MOUT training (military operations on urban terrain) since we are not fighting world war two style battles and we don't really do Carlos Hathcock style missions for the most part anymore.

Extensive training is often done in closer range very small target, small window of opportunity, type shooting, in very demanding environments.

Yes, snipers are trained to shoot at extended distances. But to say that for snipers the ranges start at 600 yards, that is simply not true.

To give you a real world example or two.

This picture was taken from an overwatch position. There are Iraqi police and soldiers that can never be trusted as to if/when they are going to turn on you/the person you are assigned to protect. The Iraqis have belt fed MGs in this pic. This was a High Threat Protection Detail for diplomats and dignitaries.



The shots required for guys on overwatch are going to be very close and very difficult once you get 6-8 more cars in that courtyard and 20 more people, and it is wall to wall people moving in different directions.

Similar story here:




In this situation there was both a sniper threat, regualr insurgent attack threat and as usual a bomb threat. The shots engagement distances were expected to be anywhere from point blank to over 1K yards.



The building on the left side of the photo was a known "bad guy" location and we expected to receive fire from it, if we received fire from extended ranges.



As you can see, the today's professional shooter does not begin his job at 600 yards.