I think need to work on my reading skills :). Except for Sea Sorbust’s outlandish claim about assasinations I have not been able to make heads or tails of the rest of his posts.
I’m usually pretty good at reading comphrehension so I hope its just a fluke 
Just a little story about the SAS I read in one of Any McNabs books. The scene: dropped in Iraqu deep in enemy lines, 4 man team prepared for a quick dash operation and then back on the heli and back to base, only a days worth of emergancy rations.
Once landed one of the most severe sandstorms hit their position rendering a pick up by helicopter impossible, they went ahead with the mission anyway. Being trailed by Iraqi special forces they they attempted to walk to Syria (180 miles away). On this hike they managed not only to evade Iraqi troops on their own ground and surviving the hellish weather but also killed 160 troops on their travels…If any of you have read their training you would realise these guys are tough!
I have to agree. Members of the SAS actually go to other countries to brief/teach their special forces.
You have to give us at least something to be good at as a country. we’re crap at everything else.
SAS is (also) a statistics package. IIRC, “SAS” does not stand for anything (in that context).
SAS is noteworthy because it analyzes 1 line of data at a time. Thus, in contrast to other packages, it is not limited by the amount of memory in your computer. SAS will regularly crunch millions of observations at a time.
It is not as user-friendly as many other statistical packages though, IMHO.
As far as snipers go, the best in the world are Canadian.
Canada has, in fact, an extremely lethal special forces regiment, which most people are not aware of (which, obviously, is the way they like it).
Currently, Canada has the highest kill ratio in Afghanistan, and our snipers are working hard to increase that.
A few weeks ago, a Canadian sniper took down an al-Qaida terrorist at 2430 meters, making it the longest combat kill by a sniper in history. That’s about a mile and a half, btw. The shot was about 200 meters longer than the previous record, held by Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam.
At a mile and a half, the .50 cal bullet is going to drop something like 20 FEET. A breath of wind can knock it several feet off course. A shot like that is astounding. And apparently, the Canadians are making ‘routine’ kills out to 1700 meters.
These are the guys that would scare me.
As far as “The Final Option” (titled “Who Dares Wins” in most countries), it’s pretty accurate when showing how the SAS clear rooms and stuff. Just don’t buy the ‘fly in through the windows hanging from moving helicopters’ stuff. That was pure Hollywood.
There are a number of ‘elite’ forces in the world, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. It’s impossible to say who the ‘best’ is, because their missions differ. What do you want, underwater demolitions? Overland infiltration? Target spotting? Undercover work? Liason?
The U.S. Special Forces, for example, do a lot of work organizing and coordinating enemy forces. They are excellent at that. It’s been one of their prime roles since at least Vietnam. That means they go undercover a lot, and they often penetrate very deep into enemy territory. For example, there were special forces right in the heart of Iraq, designating targets for smart bombs with hand-held targeting lasers. Using that technique, a bomb can be dropped on a residential neighborhood and go right down the chimney of the bad guy’s house.
The British SAS is excellent at counter-terror and assaulting small groups with hostages. Same with the Israelis. The movie “Who Dares Wins” was a depiction of the SAS raid on an Embassy that actually happened, and the result was pretty much as the movie showed (i.e. every terrorist was killed ‘resisting’. Some resisted so hard that they had to be shot several times in the back of the head…) Definitely mean mo-fos.
So, do they use computerized ballistics or a machine-gun approach? They don’t just guesstimate do they?
intersting you should quote that event. Apart from the mission being a total operational cockup, the book by McNab is claimed to be very exaggerated. There is a docu this week on TV this week on the issue (UK), so I will be interested to see what they say.
Flowbark: Well, they use a number of electronic aids these days to set up the scope and such, which I’m not really up on. I do know that Canada has some pretty cool sniper rifles which are way better than anything even the Americans have.
But the basic idea is to ‘zero’ the weapon to a known yardage, so that you know exactly where the bullet will be at that distance. Then you make small adjustments if, based on your judgement or rangefinding gear, the target is closer or more distant.
For example, the shot that Hathcock made in Vietnam was from a set sniper perch. And earlier, Hathcock had exactly measured the distance to a road, and had zeroed his rifle to that distance. Then he set himself up in his perch. So to him, when he put the crosshairs on a target on that road, that’s where the bullet would go. If you looked at his gun from the side, you’d see that the scope was actually canted at a visible angle to the barrel, so that when the scope was sighted onto something, the barrel pointed somewhere up above it to compensate for the bullet drop.
Then there’s wind. A sniper scope has an adjustment for windage as well, and the sniper will have memorized the scope settings for various amount of wind, and will be an expert at judging both the current wind and what it’s likely to do in the next few seconds. So he’ll dial in the windage to move the scope to the right or the left. But this is part of where the art of this comes in, because when you’re shooting out to a mile or more, the wind at the target is likely to be somewhat different than the wind wherever you are. Even a couple of miles per hour of wind can cause a bullet to miss at those distances. As far as I know, this is still a judgement call.
Then, there’s the problem of actually seeing the target. At those distances, a human is probably not even visible in a typical sniper scope, or if he is, it’s probably just as a tiny dot. (You can’t put a super high power scope on the rifle, because the field of view is so narrow that it’s hard to spot and stay on target). So often, the sniper will have to assume where the person is based on his knowledge of the area. In Hathcock’s case, he could see the vehicle, knew roughly where people sit in it, and aimed for that.
In the case of the Canadian sniper, I seem to recall there was a notch in the rocks, and he figured the shooter had to be in that notch. There was some metal shield set up that he could see as well, and he shot the guy right through it.
Here’s another part of the ‘art’ of this - at those kinds of distances, the bullet can take several seconds to get to the target. So if your target is moving, you have to shoot at where you expect him to be several seconds from now, and not where he currently is. In the case of the Canadian sniper, his target was stationary behind fixed cover, so he didn’t have to worry too much about that. But speaking of who you’d be afraid of… Can you imagine having a guy get hit beside you, in total silence? All you’d hear is the sound of a bullet striking a body. The report of the rifle would take a LONG time to get there (like, close to 10 seconds). Long enough that it would be hard to even connect the two events. So from your standpoint, it’s like a hand is just reaching out and snuffing out people around you. Must be terrifying, especially when you have no idea where it’s coming from and no way to fight back.
And no, they aren’t just machine-gunning the area. This is a single shot event. If they miss, they’ll take another shot, of course. But they’re not just hosing down an area hoping to hit something. That’s not sniping, that’s covering fire. They do that as well when necessary with .50 cal machine guns, but it’s not the same thing at all.
Finally, the other, and maybe most important thing, is the quality of the gun and ammunition. There’s real skill involved in making a bullet accurate enough to make kills from those kinds of distances. It requires tremendous quality control. In the old days, snipers used to hand-load their own bullets, carefully crafting them for maximum accuracy, because the ‘factory’ loads weren’t up to it. Later, specialty ammo suppliers sprung up to provide sniper ammo. I suspect that today the best stuff comes from a precision factory somewhere, because modern automation can probably do a better job than the handloaders do. But I’m not certain of that.
All in all, it was an amazing shot. Any shot past 1000 yds qualifies as impressive. To do it at two and a half times that distance is astounding.
I’d be interested be interested to know who exactly claims that NcNab is an exaggerater and read what they have to say (especially since his war stories seem somehow “off” to me as well, although I’m not a Brit, a person who fought in Desert Storm, or a former POW–I just got a “feeling”). I’d really like to see that documentary.
Regarding the question about the Latin American training center, could it be the Jungle Warfare School in Panama–I think about a zillion soldiers have learned about getting lost at night down there. I’ve read that the French have conducted quite a bit of training in French Guyana (heard it was very hard and heard that it was a joke). Then there’s the Brazillian school mentioned by arara123. Of course, the militaries of nations all over the world receive train with their allies, so it wouldn’t be surprising tohear about any Latin American country training the forces of some other country.
As to who’s the best, as others have indicated, the question should be, who’s the best at what? Soldiers in a lot of units will argue that since they’re the only people with their unique missions that they’re the best.
IMHO, wherever the SAS rank, they must be considered to very near the top of the heap, if not at its pinnacle.
:o That sounds kind of dirty. It should be:
nations all over the world train with their allies . . .
or
nations all over the world receive training from their allies . . .
Stuff like this wouldn’t happen if there was a preview button . . .
When is that on then?
The SAS also exist so that a certain type of backbench MP can achieve and maintain erections.
You just missed it on C4. It was by a former SAS man who went to IRAQ, interviewed everyone involved, including the local villagers, Iraqui policeman and soldiers, McNabb’s seniors and debriefers. I seemed very convincing. The conclusion - Both Macnabb and Ryan told a load of cobblers in their books. Instead of 250 iraquis dead, Micheal Asher could find no evidence of any enemy dead at all. One firefight in the books was described as fighting against several hundred soldiers and armoured vehicles -the truth seemed to be three local villagers with a shotgun and rusty kalashnikov. Some of the blame for the cockup seems to have rested with McNabb going the wrong way (west instead of south) upon abandoning the mission. It just reinforces what we are finding out in afghanistan - never believe a thing you hear without independent evidence
yesss…
and apparently the Australian SAS shot up an Afghan wedding
last week! Can’t find the cite dammit!
you are probably thinking of this
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/20-5-19102-0-0-47.html