Sniper: one shot, one kill

[Aljana]

La familia Remington 700 lo que sí que consigue es una precisión muy alta con un peso muy contenido lo que siempre es de tener en cuenta. El M-24 del US Army es ciertamente menos capaz, también es más barato, que el M-40 de los Marines, pero no tengo ya muy claro hasta que punto el último no pueda competir en cuanto a calidad y dede luego con los ptoductos europeos que comentas al los que también se debiera añadir los Steyr.
Tampoco estaría mal hacer una comparativa de estas armas. A ver si uno de estos días con más tiempo doy una opinión sobre aquellas que conozco y cada uno puede hacer luego un aporte.

Un saludo

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La familia Remington 700 (de la que son miembros los M24 y 40) es un arma económica con la que no se tienen mucho miramientos a la hora de la fabricación, como en otros fabricantes, cuyos productos son más caros, necesitan más elaboración y son muchísimo más precisos.
La familia Remington 700 vale para su uso militar hasta una distancia de 900 metros y siempre que se use exclusivamente munición match (como la M118), mientras que otras armas de igual calibre tienen un alcance efectivo más amplio. Esto va por el uso de:
- determinados tipos de forjado de cañón,
- equilibrado del arma,
- uso de aceros inteligentes.
...
.

In addition, each stock is epoxy bedded for accuracy and all weapons must shoot less than one minute of angle (MOA).

Esto está tomado de www.fas.org en lo referente al M40. Los modelos europeos usados para tiro militar tienen una precisión en algunos casos estandarizados entre 1/4 y 1/3 de moa. Esto se ve en el precio: el M24 está en los 500-600 dólares y el M14 duplica el precio; mientras, un SSG3000 o un TRG21 está aproximadamente en los 7-8000 dólares (sobre los 6000 euros).

[Shackleton]

LOCA ACADEMIA DE FRANCOTIRADORES VERSION ISRAEL

Fuente: www.isayeret.com

Los textos en negrita es lo que más me a sorprendido

Selection

The IDF mandatory service is three years. Because of budgetary reasons soldiers and Non Commissioned Officers (NCO) rarely serve more then the regular three years (while in the mandatory service the soldiers receive a symbolic fee of 150-200$, after the mandatory service they receive a more "normal" fee of 1500$). On the other hand, the training regime in infantry units lasts 14 months and in most SF units 20 months. After this period, the soldiers are reassigned, some remain with the team, other go to officers course or to NCO command positions in other teams. So when a commander makes a decision on who to send to a sniper course, he takes into consideration that if he send a high-quality soldier, that soldier will most likely proceed to a command position at a later stage, thus he will lose a sniper.

Therefore, in most cases the ones that are actually send to the snipers course are the worst personnel in the team. In SF units this is less of an issue as most of the personnel are high-quality to begin with, but in regular units where quality personnel is always in short, it's a major problem.

Unfortunately this is an objective problem that can't be solved, since everyone prefer that the IDF will have the best officers and NCO it can possibly produced on the expense of less skilled snipers, rather then the other way around.

Another problem is that the sniper course is a bad joke from a physical point of view. During the course the students spend most of their time sun resting, talking to the fellow students and staring at the good looking female sniping instructors. All in all, the school is more like a vacation rather then a demanding military school. As such, the soldiers who are sent to the course are often soldiers with legs problems and other physical injuries, that are being send to the course in order to have few weeks to heal up.

When most IDF soldiers think about snipers they have the image of someone whose just lying around all day, sun bating, while everybody else are running around doing real combat. With such bad reputation no wonder the snipers course rarely attract high quality personnel.

The low fitness requires for the course and needed while in it, is causing another problem - after a month of down time, the new snipers will have a hard time keeping up to the their fellow team mates, and it will take them few weeks to reach the proper fitness level again.

The acceptance tests to the school are also a bad joke. The only test done is a Groups Test with the soldiers' own personnel issued M16. The future snipers are required to shoot three groups of five rounds each, at 25 meters range, and have to keep to average for all three groups under five centimeters.

The test itself is regarded in the school as a "MP" - Must Pass test. Meaning that even if the soldier will do worst then five cm groups average, he will still be accepted to school. In fact, often when the school's staff is short on time, the test is not conducted at all and the acceptance to the course is automatically.

Moreover, no physical tests are done, no vision test, no interviews, no checking of personnel records and relevant military expertise, nothing what so ever.

One of the reason for this lack of tests, it that the school staff simply knows that if it will flank someone on the tests, or during the course itself for that matter, it is not likely to receive another sniper to replace the one that flanked. In which case, the student's unit will be one sniper short.

The school attitude is basically 'we prefer a bad sniper then no sniper at all'. As a result, unlike most snipers courses in the world, which are considered physically and mentally harsh and only the best and the most fitted ones are accepted and pass, in the IDF sniper course everyone are excepted and everyone pass. In fact, in order to fail the sniper course the student should shoot someone else or do other kind of severe damage. No one is flanked based on his pure sniping skills and if you are doing what you're told, you will pass the sniper course even if you are the worst sniper in the world and couldn't hit a tank from 100 meters.

The biggest problem is that nobody seem to really cares. Most of officers, team leaders and NCO aren't fully aware (if any) to the full potential of a good sniper and don't do much to improve the mediocre sniping state. Even the school's staff is just passing time until it can go home to the weekend.

Since most of the IDF high ranking officers don't even know and don't want know what a highly trained sniper is capable of, this sad situation has been going on undisturbed for dozens of years. So while in most countries the snipers are proud to ware their sniper insignia, given to them on the completion of the course, almost no IDF sniper ware the sniper insignia. Even the sniper school's instructors themselves don't ware it, part from the female ones that were any insignia they could get their hands on.



Instructors

The Mitkan Adam army base, was always considered as the number one in the combat soldiers' reassignments list, not so much for the 'sex-appealing' of the sniping profession (which nobody really cares about any way), but rather for the facility extremely good conditions:

Mitkan Adam is located in a lovely forest, center of Israel, less then a 30 minutes driving from Tel-Aviv, which is very comfortable when you go home for the weekend.

The accommodations are well build and not tents like in many infantry bases.

The food is good.

Everybody gets CAR15 (the carbine version of the M16A1), just like combat soldiers.

You get paid like a combat soldier

The base has allot of other soldiers to do all the chores for you (guarding, kitchen duties, etc.) due to the courses students as well soldiers which do their basic training phase in the facility.

Two very big bonuses - you get home every weekend and dozens of good looking female instructors walking around in half civilian/half military clothing.

While these reasons may sound a bit juvenile to a non-Israeli reader, one must remember that most of the IDF soldiers are 18-21 years old, right out of high-school, and more or less with same interests and desires as your average teenager.

In most snipers schools around the world, the typical sniper instructor is an experienced sniper doing a second tour as instructor. In the IDF, things are as usual quite different.

The instructors can be divided into two typical groups according to their gender:

Female Instructors

The female sniping instructors are all qualified infantry instructors, which got to the school after finishing their infantry instructors course, passed a sniper course, a sniper instructors course and start teaching.

The female instructors are all highly motivated, high-quality personnel. The problem is that unlike the popular (outside Israel) belief, the female instructors simply don't know the first thing about actual field craft, not to mention that their physical stamina is not a match to that of the infantry students, yet alone to that of the SF ones.

While being excellent and patient teachers of the more theoretical aspects of sniping, when it comes down to actual operational tactics, the female instructors have no combat skills what so ever. Since the female instructors only sniping experience is what they were subjected to in the sniper course, they can't give the soldiers a sense of what it's actually like to be a full fledge sniper in a combat situation. This by no mean come to say that the female instructors don't do their best, since most of them do, and in most cases even more then the males instructors, but they simply don't have the necessary knowledge, experience and expertise to make good sniper instructors.

The students themselves know that the female don't know much more then they do, so they don't really respect them. The luck of respect from the IDF itself is showed in the weapons given to the female sniper instructors - an IMI Uzi SMG. The females are issued the long, old, standard, version of the Uzi which no combat soldiers in the IDF carry or use. Moreover, they only carry the weapons when they go home for the weekend and not on the base, thus setting a bad example for the students. The male instructors, however, receive the CAR15, like all other infantry oriented combat soldiers, and the weapon is attached to them always. The female instructors don't even share guarding assignments with the male instructors (such as duty sergeant). So basically all the politically correct sex equality the IDF is so proud of, is remaining on paper, with the female instructors enjoying all the privileges but not the duties.


Male Instructors

All male sniping instructors are dropouts - from infantry units, SF units, and various command courses (i.e. officers and NCO courses). Some of these dropouts were snipers when they were still combat soldiers, but most didn't, and only went through sniper training upon arrival to the school.

Most of these dropouts didn't arrive to school because of a particular burning passion to the sniping profession but rather due of the good conditions the school has to offer.

Unlike the female instructors, who arrive fresh from training to the school with only few months of service behind them and high motivation, most of the males instructors arrive after at least one year in the service, some after very unpleasant situations like being kicking out of their original units. So their motivation is not exactly in flying colors and is mostly aimed in to getting home as much as possible and hitting it off with their fellow female colleagues.

Moreover, some of the male instructors arrive to the school with only a year of service left till the end of their three years mandatory service. Since it take at least few months to become a good instructors, many of the male instructors have a very short period in which they are actually productive and contributive.

Most of the instructors don't really care if they teach sniping or driving as long as they enjoy Mitkan Adam renown good conditions. Most of them don't have any special respect or desire for the job, and the students sense it, and since they know all of the instructors are dropouts they don't much respect them as well.

However, unlike the females, most of the male instructors have some kind of real field experience, if not in the sniping field then as a regular combat soldiers. Moreover, many of them (especially the ones who originally came from infantry units) also have some combat experience that they can contribute. The problem is that they are very few combinations of males instructors that were both snipers in their prior service and had actual combat experience in it.

One might say that this grim situation is again the result of the three years IDF mandatory service limit and the very long duration of the IDF combat units training regime. Hence no one will send a full qualified sniper, after finishing his training regime, to be an instructor in the school.

But unlike the problem in the selection phase, which is un-solvable unless the IDF will start signing much more regular troops for non-mandatory service (and not just officers), this problem could have been easily solved if the IDF would have recruited the sniping instructors in the same way it recruits its parachuting instructors - select them prior to their military service, attached them to a infantry brigade for 6.5 months of basic and advance infantry training, send them to sniper course, let them do actual combat sniper deployment near the South Lebanon border or in the Territories for four months and only then reassigned them to the school. It's not ideal but this way the IDF can enjoyed both worlds - on the one hand combat experienced snipers, and on the other hand instructors with over two years to teach, as well as high motivation for doing so.

tambien hablan que el Barret M82, usando la municion normal de 12,7 es posiblemente el peor rifle de francotirador

However, in practice, the M82A1 is one of the worst sniper rifles around, especially since the IDF can't afford the very expensive 0.50 match ammunition and uses the M82A1 with a standard low quality armor piercing heavy Machine Guns 0.50 ammunition. So the M82A1 is mainly used for HTI and for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) shooting.

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Lo peor que se puede hacer con un arma de precisión es meter munición ordinaria.
Los fabricantes de armas de precisión exigen que sus armas se disparen con munición MATCH, no haciéndose cargo de los problemas que surjan por usar munición no homologada como MATCH (desde munición estandar hasta recargada aunque sea recargada por el mejor francotirador del mundo).

[rojo]

Para animar pequeño video sobre un calibre interesante : http://www.defensereview.com/Grendel.wmv

Aqui el articulo completo : http://www.defensereview.com/modules.ph ... le&sid=600

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Otro emblema: francotirador de la Policía israelí:

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Es de seis puntas. Lo que pasa es que la punta inferior está en sombra en la foto y por tanto no se puede apreciar. Si observas en la tele a los policías israelíes (sus vehículos, por ejemplo), verás que tiene 6 puntas la estrella, igual que las boinas de la Guardia de Fronteras (verde con el emblema metálico de la Policía, entre cuyos elementos está la estrella de David).

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Ahora os voy a poner un post anecdótico sobre unas pruebas de validación de tiro a la que son sometidos semestralmente unos profesionales en España: los vigilantes de seguridad (antes denominados guardias jurados):
Se hace la validación sobre 30 disparos efectivos (hay varias series de prueba que evidentemente no cuentan para la evaluación).
La prueba de tiro se hace con revólver del .38spl de 4 pulgadas y con munición WC (es más económica que la de trabajo).
Se dispara contra silueta humana de tamaño natural de la siguiente manera:
- 4 series de 6 disparos a 1 diana a 25 metros,
- 3 series de 2 disparos a dos siluetas (1 disparo por silueta en cada serie)a 10 metros.
Las calificaciones son las siguientes:
- no apto: menos de 15 disparos en las dianas,
- apto: de 15 a 20 disparos en las dianas,
- tirador de primera: de 21 a 26 disparos en las dianas,
- tirador selecto: de 27 a 30 disparos en las dianas.
Las puntuaciones y calificación se apuntan en las cartillas de tiro que cada vigilante tiene asignada.

[Iván Carlos]

Ahora los Guardas Jurados no llevan arma, salvo los de protección de vehículos de dinero.

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Llevan armas en las siguientes funciones:
- guardia, custodia y transporte de fondos,
- guardia, custodia y transporte de explosivos,
- guardia y custodia de determinadas instalaciones administrativas e industriales (consideradas estratégicas),
- escoltas.
También está el guarda de campo.

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Totalmente de acuerdo.
Yo suelo tirar con el Astra 960 y es un auténtico placer tirar con esos bichos.

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Pues ya me pones en un brete con la nomenclatura. Mañana te lo confirmo ya que el revólver es del club y me puedo haber liado con la numeración del modelo.

[pagano]

El 960 es del .38 spl.

Voy al grano en lo de los francotiradores; ahora os voy a hacer una relación de cursos oficiales que se hacen en Estados Unidos para la formación de tiradores selectos/francotiradores:
Organismo: Departamento de Energía.
Nombre del curso: Entrenamiento de observador de equipo de francotirador.
Centro formativo: B.A. Kirtland (Nuevo Méjico).
Asistentes por curso: máximo de 20.
Frencuencia: 1 al año.
Duración del curso: 2 semanas.
Contenido: tiro de precisión/uso de arma 35%, táctica 25%, prácticas y técnicas 35%, otras materias 5%.
Dirigido a: oficiales del Departamento de Energía. En caso de que hayan vacantes, podrán acceder otros agentes de los servicios de seguridad.

Organismo: FBI (Departamento de Justicia).
Nombre del curso: Curso de francotirador/observador.
Centro Formativo: Academia del FBI en Cuantico (Virginia).
Asistentes por curso: 16
Frencuencia: 3-4 cursos por año.
Duración: 1 semana.
Contenido: tiro de precisión/uso de arma: 65%, táctica 15%, prácticas y técnicas 10%, otras materias 10%.
Dirigido a: elementos de los equipos tácticos del FBI.

Organismo: US Army.
Nombre del curso: Escuela de francotiradores del US Army.
Centro formativo: Base Militar Fort Benning, (Georgia) aunque pueden hacerse también cursos de forma transitoria en las bases operativas del US Army.
Asistentes por curso: 12-26 estudiantes.
Frecuencia anual: 10-12 cursos sin contar los impartidos en otras bases.
Duración: 3 semanas (19 días).
Contenidos: tiro de precisión/uso de arma: 45%, táctica 10%, prácticas y técnicas 40%, otras materias 5%.
Dirigido a: fusileros cualificados como expertos de grados E3 (cabo) a E6 (sargento de personal) que tengan aún pendiente al menos 12 meses de servicio, sean recomendados por el comandante de su unidad y pasen un test PT (no tengo idéa de lo que significa PT) con al menos un 70% y un coeficiente intelectual de 110 o superior.

Organismo: US Army.
Nombre del curso: Curso de francotirador para el Equipo de Reacción Especial.
Localización: Fort Benning (Georgia).
Número de estudiantes: 20-30
Frencuencia: dependiendo de la demanda.
Duración: 5 días.
Contenidos: tiro de precisión/uso de arma 85%, prácticas y técnicas 10%, otras materias 5%.

Organismo: Mando de Operaciones Especiales del US Army.
Nombre del curso: curso de interdicción de objetivos en operaciones especiales.
Localización: Ft. Bragg (Carolina del Norte).
Número de estudiantes: 16-20
Frencuencia: 5.
Duración: 4 semanas.
Contenidos: tiro de precisión/uso de arma 40%, táctica 25%, prácticas y técnicas 20%, otras materias 15%.
Dirigido a: miembros de SF, Ranger o SEAL cualificados como tirador experto.

Organismo: US Marine Corps.
Nombre del curso: francotirador/explorador.
Localización: Quantico, (Virginia), aunque ocasionalmente se pueden hacer cursos en en otras localizaciones (generalmente en las bases divisionales).
Número de estudiantes: 26.
Frecuencia: 2.
Duración: 21 días.
Contenidos: tiro de precisión/uso de arma 40%, táctica 25%, prácticas y técnicas 30% otras materias 5%.
Dirigido a: fusileros expertos del USMC, personal especialmente seleccionado de la USN y US Army y excepcionalmente civiles miembros de agencias federales que pueden ser instruidos en cursos especiales.

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La munición desplegada por los francotiradores en sus misiones.
Depende si se es en una función policial o militar (hablando de munición en el 7,62 otan o calibre similar).
Despliegue policial:
inmediata/total
trazadora 5 5
M118 match 5 10
match civil HP 20-40 40-60

Despliegue militar:
inmediata/total
trazadora 10 15-20
M118 match 40-60 100-120
match civil HP 0 0 (ya que está prohibida por la Convención de La Haya de 1907).

Como munición de uso inmediato definimos aquí la que lleva el tirador en el arma (cargador) como la que lleva físicamente encima (en canana, portacargadores, chaleco táctico,...). El resto, lo que podemos definir como munición de reserva va en la mochila, convenientemente aisladas de forma estanca para evitar que tomen humedad y por ello se vea modificado su comportamiento balístico.
Como munición match podemos definir la que asegura de forma uniforme una precisión igual o inferior a 1 moa (minuto de ángulo, equivalente a 2,54 cm a 100 yardas).

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Hace unos días, os hablé de los sistemas de ayuda a la formación y entrenamiento de los francotiradores: los sistemas de simulación por ordenador.
Hay de dos tipos: un fusil con un sensor que enlaza con una pantalla de ordenador donde se representa el blanco a abatir (de forma simular al de los videojuegos). Este sistema está extendido entre las unidades de élite además incluso en clubs de tiro (por ejemplo, para el campo de tiro de la federación murciana de tiro olímpico se va a adquirir uno de estos sistemas). Aparte tiene otra serie de enlaces: presión de gatillo, respiración del tirador (en base a los movimientos verticales del arma inherentes a la respiración),
La otra versión de equipo computarizado es el que la pantalla del ordenador donde se proyecta el blanca es sustituida por una variante de la mira telescópica de uso por el francotirador (también se puede adaptar a la versión de visor nocturno). Contiene una pantalla donde se proyecta la imágen del objetivo y está conectado a un ordenador. Un ejemplo de este sistema es el israelí Sniper Witness System, desplegado en la Escuela de Francotiradores del Tsáhal desde el 2002.
Una foto del sistema:

Una descripción del sistema (en inglés):

A derivative from the Elbit Sincrofire (an electronic system used for sniper coordination) the Vectop Sniper Witness is an advanced solution for improving snipers training.
The system provides day/night video flow of the image seen through the scope and optional recording of that feed for post-training analysis.
The Sniper Witness is made of two main components:
Miniature day/night optical adapter including a CCD camera, attached to the sniper scope.
Instructor and command station including a recorder.
Each system costs 25,000$ and 10 units of the system, known in the IDF as "Shahak", entered service in the IDF Sniper School in early 2002.

La foto y la descripción está tomado de www.isayeret.com