Snipers Sniping & Countering them

[Ender]

Narrated by a man described as the brigade "commander" and subtitled in English, it claims the marksmen use a training manual written by a retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer.

Here is the subtitled video of the brigade commander who interestingly enough, purports to be "Juba." (A thread of Jedburgh's also mentions him above) http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e536c3bebc&p=1 Juba has been on the net posting his attacks for at least six months that I know of, so he at least is not new. I must admit his productions have gotten snazzier. What is interesting is that if he is in fact Juba and the commander of this "brigade" (it is difficult to determine whether he is referring to himself in the third person or not) he has been promoted relatively recently because when I first heard about him even the people (non Westerners) posting his videos didn't even know who he was.

My gut tells me after watching him, studying his "methods" and reading about the D.C. style tactics used in Iraq, that this guy happened to come across the book, had some success with it and is now spreading the good word. I was given Plaster's book 14 years ago and I can not imagine a trained sniper cadre in the world that wouldn't have access to their own user friendly manuals. That they are using ours suggests to me that they are late to the game and are once again evolving their tactics in response to the ass kicking they are receiving. They may be adapting but they can't come close to how fast we adapt to them. I am not a school trained sniper and would be very interested to hear what one would say after watching this dude but my professional evaluation of the methods he uses is that he is not nearly as trained as he would have us believe. It does not take an inordinate amount of skill to implement the D.C. sniper method and while this is scary because anyone can do it, it should also be reassuring. If there were 30+ attacks in Baghdad from trained snipers there would also be 30+ fatalities and not just 8.

Not trying to minimize or trivialize the subject, only highlight a possible hype/threat disparity.