• ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I guess sniping Spetsnaz is a lot harder than sniping Afghani children.

    • CommCat [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      these past few decades, the US and its lapdogs have not really fought wars, more like bullying poor countries, and we all know what happens when a bully meets his match.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Russia isn't even a match to the US. This is more like backing a terrified animal into a corner and discovering that it can still fling itself at you and take a chunk out.

    • Animasta [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Honestly, I have no idea how sniper combat with, ahem, near-peer enemy is supposed to look like. Like how does a high-tech military deal with enemy snipers?

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Ever seen the Iraqi sniper video? It's like thirty minutes of American troops losing their heads, over and over again, all allegedly recorded by one guy with one rifle. If you don't have air support (a helicopter is better than a strike aircraft for this purpose) the only thing you can do is mitigate the damage and hope you find them eventually.

        • Malagueta [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Can I get a link to that? I need something wholesome to make my day even better.

          • GnastyGnuts [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Here's one, kinda shit quality: https://archive.org/details/201223_20201225

            • Malagueta [she/her]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              lol lmao

              taking a shot every time a yankee gets shot

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Helicopters and close air support (like the A-10 aircraft) usually. And artillery and mortars.

        But if you're dealing with a near peer enemy, they have those things too. So it basically turns into WW1 with airstrikes in place of trenches as the main cause of death until someone gets air superiority.

        • cawsby [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Loitering munitions aka suicide drones are for when you don't have complete air superiority but can still fly something up for 10-15 minutes.

          The US has over a dozen loitering munition systems in public knowledge, but not all of them have deployed in actual combat.

          Turkey, Russia, Israel, and France make some as well.

          EDIT: Yep, Biden is going to give Ukraine Switchblade 300 600 drones. These can take out tanks in 20km 40 km+ radius.

          https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-asks-biden-admin-armed-234550236.html

          https://www.army-technology.com/projects/switchblade-tactical-missile-system/

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            These things scare the shit out of me. It's a hop-skip-jump from loitering anti-tank munitions to declaring a curfew then having a robot shoot anything with a thermal signature.

            • cawsby [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              They have those too. South Korea has automatic turrets along certain corridors in the DMZ.

            • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              Civilian police already do this, and they're a hell of a lot cheaper and more prolific than flying robots.

              Civilian police also have the advantage of a highly advanced processing system (ie, human brain) that allows them to distinguish between "poor black guy in a wheel chair who was coming right at me!!!" and "rich white lady in an SUV who can do whatever she likes because she pays my salary".

        • BeingfromInnerSpace [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          How much does raining down bombs on one guy with a Dragunov hiding in an attic come out to? 50,000 US per guy killed? 200,000 US?

          War isn't merely Hell. It is a wasteful, useless Hell.

          • mark213686123 [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            you're thinking about it wrong that's the whole point it's a transfer of funds from the government to private weapons companies which donate generously to campaigns and lucratively employ former politicians.

            War is a racket

        • Animasta [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          All my knowledge about snipers comes from Enemy at the Gate (I know, I know) so I assumed not letting people know your precise location was an important part of being a sniper.

          • AntipastoAktion [they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Yes, but unless we're talking hardcore secret squirrel spec ops sniping (the kind who crawl for literal days to get to a hill, wait three more days, then shoot the nuts off a general before crawling back out again), most are engaging within a few hundred metres, and it'll be easy enough to start to narrow down their location.

            If you're approaching a village that has a tall building, you probably assume they're in that building - otherwise you just keep taking cover until you get a good idea of a general location and direction, then call in mortars and artillery to flatten everything in that grid square. That's essentially how the Soviets tried to kill Simo Haya: they knew roughly which patch of woods he was operating in, so they just levelled the woods.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Also worth remembering - Simo did most of his killing with an SMG, from ambush. He wasn't just killing people from a mile away with a rifle.

          • D61 [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            There's the "sniper" stuff that's, like, shooting somebody four miles away and hitting them by aiming at the sun.

            Then there's the "sharp shooter" stuff where they're doing SWAT team styled "trying to shoot enemies that are shooting at my team" stuff. Pretty hard to keep your position concealed when you're constantly sending rounds downrange from the same location.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I think Designated Marksman" is the term the US uses. The Soviets had a thing where they had a guy at squad level with a powerful, accurate rifle and mid-range optics so the squad would have built-in precision firepower. I think the US usually attaches snipers to infantry platoons. From what I remember this goes back to WWII, where the US liked to have a small number of really good snipers, while Comrade Ivan preferred to have a lot of okay snipers to back up their front line troops.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Some asshole in hollywood: "Communism doesn't work because these two really hot guys want to bang Rachel Weiss but Rachel Weiss only wants to bang one of these really hot guys. Also the Soviets definitely machine-gunned their own retreating troops that's a real thing that happened trust us."

          • riley
            ·
            edit-2
            8 months ago

            deleted by creator

          • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            True. But, at the same time moving positions carries significant risks, especially if you miss your target.

            Also, artillery shells and hellfire missiles don't need to be nearly as precise as a sniper's bullet. There's a reason the preferred weapon of insurgents in places like Afghanistan and Iraq were roadside bombs and not rifle rounds. You didn't last long by actually engaging with the enemy in person.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Depends on a lot of things. In Chechnya the Russians dealt with snipers in high-rise apartments by using armored vehicles with 23mm anti-aircraft guns to stitch the entire building. Meaning they went up and down the apartments with exploding cannon rounds systematically blowing the shit out of each apartment until they were confident the sniper, and anyone else in the building, was dead.

        The other conventional method of dealing with snipers is to figure out roughly where they are and drop artillery on the area until the sniper is paste.

        The US has a system called Boomerang (If your city has Shot-Spotter tech you're familiar with it) that uses an array of microphones and computers to figure out where a shot came from and roughly how far away it was. This can be used to dial in artillery or air strikes against the presumed location of the sniper.

        You can also deploy your own snipers to hunt the sniper. This is less Enemy at the Gates and more a couple of guys with maps and binoculars plotting out where people had been taking fire from, then triangulating possible vantage points, then directing artillery fire on those points.

        • Animasta [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I've read about the 80s Shtora system that's supposed to protect soviet tanks from being targeted by lasers and thought that maybe, considering that every Russian or US solder is equipped with a bunch of high-tech gizmos and linked in a net, they could use that to triangulate the position of the sniper.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            That's exactly what Boomerang and the systems that developed from it do.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShotSpotter

            Apparently they may not actually work, though.

  • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    -World's Deadliest Sniper

    -Man who got owned 20 minutes after venturing into an actual conflict where he couldn't call in 'tactical airstrikes' on any suspicious looking male over 10 years of age

    Pick one

  • Tomboys_are_Cute [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Found an article on this guy before he died, some notes of interest:

    he was convinced to go by his Ukrainian-Canadian boss

    member of the 22eme, not CANSOFCOM so not actually an "elite" sniper, just a regular Canadian sniper

    served on tours with yankees, war-crime likelihood increased drastically

    There is something profoundly sad about being convinced by your literal petit-bouge boss to go and die in a pointless war, somehow more so than usual.

    • mittens [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Can't say I feel any empathy for the guy, but the gal to tell an employee to go become cannon fodder on a war you cannot possibly win is all sorts of fucked up.

      • mark213686123 [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        see this is why we need unions. The union would tell your boss to fuck off if he tried to draft you

        • OrionsMask [he/him,any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          What kind of loser actually listens to someone telling them that though. Yeah, the boss is a jackass, but he doesn't have the power to send him to Ukraine. He should have been the one to tell his boss to fuck off. Now he can't cause he's dead.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            So there was this war called World War I and several million young men signed up to die in the mud in France because of reasons that I still can't comprehend after 35 years of living and readying history.

            • mark213686123 [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I didn't get how WW1 even happened until I heard people who previously struck me as completely non political started talking about how we should do a war because of a treaty (there isn't even any treaty)

              it feels like a body snatchers horror movie

    • cilantrofellow [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Ukrainian-Canadian

      Depending on what generation Canadian they are, that’s probably gonna be a yikes from me

    • mr_world [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago
      1. Going to war for your boss's country while he sits in yours behind a NATO shield is pretty funny. Takes peasant mindset to subject mindset.

      2. "He's not a great sniper. But he's okay. Pretty average. So let's send him to help an underdog army of rag tag civilians and right wing nationalists.

      • Tomboys_are_Cute [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Number 1 hard agree. Number 2 basically Canada has a history of actually training a lot of good snipers but when I served every battalion had at least one platoon of these guys, so 20ish/300 infantry was this level of sniper. This guy was not the crawl three days in, wait three days, take one shot types, they are usually part of a recon detachment or a heavy weapons detachment, not some lone wolf types.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      There is something profoundly sad about being convinced by your literal petit-bouge boss to go and die in a pointless war, somehow more so than usual.

      • NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE

      • We sent our most gullible interns to die in a hail of cruise missiles on the other side of the planet

      :-/

      • Cowboyitis69 [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        If a single tomahawk lands on polish soil then Moscow is :nuke:

    • 4zi [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Ukraine is a team of normal people while Russia is a team of heavy bots all blasting that one heavy song

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Canada sent in a guy famous for racking up over 2000 confirmed kills against Afghani 13-year-olds sifting through rubble for scrap metal. He was immediately wasted by Lyudmila Pavlichenko's great-grandson, a boy who grew up learning to fire a vintage Dragunov using bullets made from shit he swept off the floor at a derelict factory recommissioned to do piecework for custom orders on Etsy.

        Something something hard times something something dudes rock.

    • Vampire [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Is it true that he's dead or just pixels?

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I didn't know what would result of the Reddit Army, but even funnier than them crying and pissing themselves like the mercenaries who stormed Venezuela is all of them dying immediately after getting there. Not firing a shot, not doing anything they can be martyred for, dead so ingloriously that they'll never be mentioned again for fear of deterring the next dumbass. The last thing we need is movies being made about these people unless it's a Tropic Thunder sequel.

      • JosipBRUHTito [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Former special forces members from several NATO countries and also a bunch of tacticool goobers vs a swarm of mass produced scud missiles, WHO WOULD WIN?

        Thank you for watching this week's episode of deadliest warrior, the missiles won and therefore all cool battle footage was subsequently destroyed

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Turns out those tactical sunglasses and $5000 custom scope weren't enough to save you from a veteran of Chechnya with more than five minutes of experience in the field.

    • voice_of_hermes [he/him,any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      We're probably being influenced by a lot of selection bias. Others whose stories we're not seeing could be causing a lot of pain and suffering. We probably shouldn't get too cocky when they could be helping out the murder and torture squads like Azov and C14.

        • voice_of_hermes [he/him,any]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          No doubt. However, having that fodder serves its purpose and allows more violence by the state and fascists. I just think it's dangerous to underestimate the damage that's done by having people feeding into the war because we look only at the few videos that are spread around about some of them being ineffective and even killed before they engage. For example, we should continue to dissuade everyone from going and doing this volunteer shit, and thinking they just go and get owned and die or leave tends to make us (leftists) instead just shrug it off and some even possibly encourage it. Like, getting your proto-fascist neighbor to go pick up an AK in Ukraine might not (just) be a recipe for getting him killed; him being there might result in some additional neo-Nazis (whether him or the people he's supporting) murdering people.

          It's probably fine to deride the ones who do wind up obviously having zero effect, but generalizing that to the point of implying that the entire phenomenon of people going to support the war is fine and harmless IMO is a bad idea.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            God forbid one of these idiots survive to come home and start telling impressionable youth about how manly and hardcore the ukrainian nationalists were and how they should be more like them etc etc

        • crime [she/her, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          My brain parsed FL as Florida and not Foreign Legion so I'd like to treat everyone to the mental image of the first Floridaman regiment, armed with alligators and a PCP ration

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The last thing we need is movies being made about these people unless it’s a Tropic Thunder sequel.

      Remember how they had to make a fictional movie about an Italian who could go more than three rounds in the ring against a black guy? I'm confident that we'll see Mel Gibson churn out a hagiography about this asshole that insists he was single-handedly blocking a Russian tank battalion while evacuating six school buses full of child brides, only to be killed by a hail of cruise missiles so thick it bloated out the sun.

  • corgiwithalaptop [any, love/loves]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Lmao these stories are great. People go in to do a wholesome epic 100 big chungus war crime, get got in 20 minutes. Priceless.

  • LoudMuffin [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Of course we have no idea how deadly these guys are with their regular support, but now I'm starting to feel a little more justified that the USA and other cringe Angloid countries would get fucking decked in a real war

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      starting to feel a little more justified that the USA and other cringe Angloid countries would get fucking decked in a real war

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

      It was a simulation of a war between the USA and Iran, carried out by the USA. The US lost quite badly. I'll add stuff in brackets

      Red (Iran in the simulation), commanded by retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, adopted an asymmetric strategy, in particular, using old methods to evade Blue's (USA) sophisticated electronic surveillance network. Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to front-line troops and World-War-II-style light signals to launch airplanes without radio communications.

      Red received an ultimatum from Blue (USA in the simulation), essentially a surrender document, demanding a response within 24 hours. Thus warned of Blue's approach, Red used a fleet of small boats to determine the position of Blue's fleet by the second day of the exercise. In a preemptive strike, Red launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles that overwhelmed the Blue forces' electronic sensors and destroyed sixteen warships: one aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five of Blue's six amphibious ships. An equivalent success in a real conflict would have resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 service personnel. Soon after the cruise missile offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats, which carried out both conventional and suicide attacks that capitalized on Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

      They then proceeded to change all the rules of the simulation to make the USA win lol

      Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force (Iran in the simulation) was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and during a combined parachute assault by the 82nd Airborne Division and Marines air assaulting on the then new and still controversial CV-22, Van Riper's forces were ordered not to shoot down any of the approaching aircraft.[5][6] Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force (USA in the simulation), and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.[7]

      • JosipBRUHTito [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Huh so forget China vaporizing every carrier battle group within range instantly, Iran could also do this, according to the Pentagon...

        Did they use this to ask for more money???

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          I edited my original comment now, so you can read that for what they did, they re ran the simulation and changed the rules so America would win.

          And then they asked for more money lol.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          The Straight of Hormuz has always been a known death-trap for the American surface fleet. It's narrow enough that it could easily be saturated with anti-shipping missiles, mines, or small boats armed with missiles or suicide payloads. The credible threat of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz has been an important factor in imperialist planning since '79.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz#Events

        • Fartbutt420 [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          "Your trial subscription to your iM-16 has expired, please purchase more BulletCoinz™ to continue murdering innocents"

          • mark213686123 [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            run a war on the blockchain because why the fuck not. All bullets fired must be accompanied with the purchase of a bullet buddies NFT warbond

      • mark213686123 [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        They then proceeded to change all the rules of the simulation to make the USA win lol

        this is the biggest red flag from an organisational perspective just not even remotely interested in improving which since they want to use their powers for evil is a good thing

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah it's good that the US empire is run by a bunch of failchildren and retirees, imagine if anyone competent was at the helm. That would be horrifying.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          To play the devil's advocate; Setting up a large scale training involves probably tens of thousands of people, millions of dollars, and millions of moving parts. Even if they had wanted to analyze what happened and learn from it that would be something to do in next-years op. They've got a time window to work with, so aside from COPE they probably also reset and went ahead with other trainings because they didn't have time to change the schedule and start over from scratch. The training where the US got it's ass absolutely handed to it would be studied and workshopped and analyzed for future use.

          That said, the US did get it's teeth kicked in and the "enemy" have had 20 years to iterate and improve while the US military remains burdened by the fiscal needs of the military industrial complex and it's role as America's leading jobs program.

          • mark213686123 [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            It's the US army that's pocket change for them. Also it's not like they have important things to do

        • JosipBRUHTito [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          While everyone dying on a sinking ship is very unlikely in this day and age, the exercise determined thay due to the destruction of so many ships at the same time, losses would indeed be very high and most survivors would likely be captured, depending on proximity to Iran

      • ToastGhost [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        how is this not a cringy natsec DnD that the generals got way too salty about?

        • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          It revealed the clear weaknesses of the US military against a competent adversary, so the generals re wrote the rules until America won, because the USA can't lose!

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Technically they re-wrote the rules because they got everyone out of bed and needed them to actually practice stuff. getting your ass kicked on day one and sending everyone home isn't good use of training dollars. It just so happens that day-one revealed that all the training they were doing was probably pointless twenty years ago, and is even more-so now when America's designated enemies have had 20 years to build improved weapons and tactics while America is still wearing the albatross of the aircraft carrier battle group.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Any fight between actual tier 1 militaries would be a bloodbath like we haven't seen since WWII. Worse than that, because the weapon systems are orders of magnitude more lethal. just entire armies being wiped out by missiles and artillery fire until both sides ran out of planes and missiles, then it'd be back to WWII tank warfare until they ran out of tanks, then it'd be WWI trench fighting.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        War is just the interlude between diplomatic negotiation.

        I doubt it would ever get to tank warfare much less trench warfare. We'd shoot our load, declare victory, and then negotiate a retreat from the region that saves as much face as possible. Same as what happened in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam.

  • Malagueta [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    licking a boot till it crushes your skull to own the libs

    :rip-bozo: :bootlicker: