Quote Originally Posted by SWJED View Post
... what goes around does not come around again. I think, slowly but surely, commanders and operational staffs are learning what a sniper can do and how best to utilize this "precision strike" and surveillance / reconnaissance capability.

We learned volumes about snipers in Vietnam. Yet, just several years later as a Scout Sniper Platoon commander (then called STA) I had to fight with company commanders that, when I sent them a scout / sniper team, preferred to utilize the team walking point or otherwise manning an OP or LP that had nothing to gain substituting this capability with a job that our well trained grunts can do.

My point is – we are learning the same lessons in Iraq and when this thing is done I sincerely wish that we don’t go back to “old school” utilization of scout / snipers as extra warm bodies to fill gaps in regular infantry skill sets.

You want to believe that we are learning, and in some places we are but there is also a price to pay for putting two to three men out in the middle of a potentially dangerous place. An example that I will share is a situation alongside the Afghan-Pakistan border in southern Khowst Province. It is 2004 and a lot of our troops are taking harassing rocket and mortar from POO's just across the border. Like any good analyst I sit down with the Recce Platoon Sgt and go over the terrain on both CIB1 and overhead imagery, long story short we plot three to four good positions with clear LOS into the POO's that we have good grids on from the Q-36 or 37 radar (I don't recall which one) and present this to the commander with the recommendation of putting two, three-man sniper teams on good high ground with clear LOS into the POO's. They have the ability to sustain themselves for about 72 hours max, so we do all the load planning and everything else. Bottom line, we were talking about six shooters (2 x 3 man teams) with .50 and .300 rifles and I think we included thermals and long range finders, so these guys were going to be effective at 500 meters and would still be well inside the Afghan border to get the job done. Well the commander wouldn't have it and started to complain that we would need 24 hr. PRED coverage to provide ISR "overwatch", and that would mean a platoon of riflemen on stand-by as QRF in case they were compromised to include a/c to lift them, so on and so on... Mission never happpened and we stopped planning them. My point? Sure we know how to employ snipers but we don't because we are too focused on Force Protection. The Recce Plt Sgt in this example was adamant that all he needed was a radio if he came into contact so he could call in CAS to cover his exfil and make to the LZ.... Anyone else out there ever run into this type of risk aversion when planning an op using snipers in either IZ or AF?

We talk about all these cool capabilities but in the end the bad guys tie us up worrying about Force Protection and we are too risk averse to put guys out there in a risky situation...

PT