Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [10]
In my opinion, the quick pace of war today has rendered the traditional role of the sniper obsolete. In a raid of this sort, the tactic still worked well, but modern battlefields are changing, and long-distance precision shooting means little if tanks and armored personnel carriers filled with infantrymen have already moved the fight five miles beyond you.
Somehow, we needed to be able to move, far and fast, and I dreamed of running a Mobile Sniper Strike Team that could roam the battlefront and take the fight to the enemy. Scraps such as the one in Somalia only validated my belief that important parts of basic sniper doctrine were flawed.
For instance, snipers are taught never to expose themselves to the enemy. In Mogadishu, we ignored that; we arrived quickly at the front edge of a likely fight and worked out in the open, shielded only by a masonry wall. With other Marines around, we had plenty of protection, and without having to worry about whether or not the enemy could see us, we dominated the battlefield.
Mobility would be the key to the sniper remaining an effective combat tool.
Using traditional methods, just reaching a good shooting position could be extraordinarily complicated. Sometimes we humped along with a patrol and dropped off at a specific point to find a hide and set up shop. Or we might cling like leeches to the back of a tank and roll off when it passed a certain location. Or a helicopter might drop us several miles from the target location and we would sneak forward on feet, bellies, hands, and knees.
I dreamed of the day that we shooters would have wheels, but the time had not yet come for that. Bringing about that change became my beacon, and I intended to hurry things along any way that I could. The problem with evolution is that it is too damned slow.
During World War II, snipers who fought in Europe worked much as their forerunners had on many of the same battlegrounds twenty-five years earlier. The Germans and Russians both used snipers to great effect, and in the Pacific, Japanese snipers were deadly shots. However, the primary tactic remained the same: hide and shoot.
In Vietnam, the craft was forced to adapt to a jungle environment, which proved that it could change to meet new conditions. Then, creative Marine marksmen such as Carlos Hathcock and Chuck Mawhinney proved that snipers could be much more aggressive and effective by getting out of their holes and going on the hunt. These guys refined the ability to stalk and shoot, and showed up where the enemy least expected them to make a kill. Hathcock’s stalking and assassination of a Vietnamese general was a classic piece of work.
Perhaps they were too good, because their methods became embedded doctrine. Hathcock’s story, Marine Sniper, was not only a best seller but became a bible in sniper school. Students can often pick up an extra ten points on an exam by answering a bonus question that almost always comes from Marine Sniper.
Our planners apparently believed that if Hathcock and Mawhinney did it, then it must be right, and they adjusted their training to include the conditions imposed by Vietnam. That meant they were still mistakenly basing their teaching upon historical patterns, albeit more recent history, when they should have been looking into the future. What the modern tacticians missed was that Hathcock and Mawhinney were not only good shots and scouts but were also very thoughtful men who would have been among the first to insist that what was right for Vietnam would be pretty useless outside of the jungle.
Most people go through life without ever seeing a dead body, unless it is laid out on coffin silk. Cops and first-response emergency workers wade in carnage but usually arrive after the violence has been committed. Even in the armed forces, death frequently is not seen, and much of the killing is done from a great distance.