Spotter (sniping)
| Occupation | |
|---|---|
| Names | Sniper |
| Military / Law enforcement | |
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Activity sectors
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Use of high-precision rifles and special reconnaissance |
A sniper is a marksman who operates alone, in a pair, or with a sniper team, to maintain close visual contact with the enemy and shoot them from concealed positions or distances exceeding their detection capabilities. They generally have specialized training and use high-precision rifles and optics, and often feed information back to their units or military bases.
In addition to marksmanship and long range shooting, military snipers are trained in a variety of techniques: detection, stalking, and target range estimation methods, camouflage, field craft, infiltration, special reconnaissance and observation, surveillance and target acquisition.
The verb "to snipe" originated in the 1770s among soldiers in British India in reference to shooting snipe, which was considered a challenging target for marksmen. The agent noun "sniper" appears by the 1820s. The term sniper was first attested in 1824 in the sense of the word "sharpshooter".
A somewhat older term is "sharp shooter", a calque of 18th-century German Scharfschütze, in use in British newspapers as early as 1801.
According to figures released by the United States Department of Defense, the average number of rounds expended in the Vietnam War to kill one enemy soldier with the M-16 was 50,000. The average number of rounds expended by U.S. military snipers to kill one enemy soldier is 1.3 rounds. According to the United States Army, the average soldier will hit a man-sized target 10 percent of the time at 300 meters using the M16A2 rifle. Graduates of the United States Army Sniper School are expected to achieve 90 percent first-round hits at 600 meters, using the M24 Sniper Weapon System (SWS).
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