The Team House - Ep. 22 w/ long range marksmanship expert Emil Praslick, 3hrs in-depth on sniper skills

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

Emil Praslick is a old friend and is *the* source for everything long range marksmanship related. We're going to discuss Emil's career in Ranger Battalion and the Army Marksmanship Unit, the current state of SOCOM sniping, the ASR (advanced sniper rifle) program, extreme long range (1500 meter plus) shooting, modern ballistic solvers-how they work, wind reading for dummies, and we'll take viewer questions as well. We will also had an additional 35 minutes or so with Emil for our Patreon supporters and because he is the man, he offered to answer any further questions that we may have missed on our subreddit found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MurphysLawstreamBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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We are the high-tech human approach to help protect and grow everything you've worked so hard to build. It's nice to meet you. Find out what AccroShore can do for you at AccroSure.com. We are alive. Welcome to episode 22 of The Team House. Big episode 22. I'm Jack Murphy. This is David Park.

Dave Park. And our guest today, Emma Praslick. Thanks so much for coming on today. I know we pulled you away from family time and the holidays and everything so that we come here and talk your ear off about marksmanship. Anyway, that's really your background is you start off in Ranger Battalion, then served in the Army marksmanship unit for a long time. Really, your speciality is long-range marksmanship.

Yes. And now you continue to work in the... industry working in ballistics yeah I as you say I retired from the Army in 2015 and then I took a job for a company in the industry so I do I'm a business development guy for like military projects and military sales for a company that makes bullets ammunition things like that so we have some of our some of our components are in current Army programs So I kind of shepherd those and, you know, just out there being part of the big military industrial complex that everybody warned everybody about.

That Eisenhower warned us? Everybody warned us and I'm out there trying to fleece Uncle Sam. You're playing the mandible for them? I am 100%. So are you going to be able to tell us who shot Kennedy tonight? With a magic bullet? Well, you know, we have a laboratory in Finland. Yes.

So I know where the shovel is on. Yeah, nice. I mean, I feel like we're really lucky to have you here today because, like, you are the guy that, like, you should be teaching the master class on long-range marksmanship. And, you know, tonight we're going to get to talk a little bit about that. Probably the people who are tuning in and will have a few questions, too, that we'll get to. But I feel like, you know, like my friend Jim West is a retired warrant officer from seventh group is, like, the guy to talk to about martial arts in hand-to-hand combat. Like he's been doing it since 1977 when he was like a kid and he's a grandmaster in his system now. Like as far as it comes to like fucking people up with your bare hands, he's the guy to talk to.

You're the guy to talk to about long range marksmanship. And I feel like both of you guys have that expertise in their particular subject, but also you both have this real strength, I think. Maybe your true strength is as teachers and that you've passed a lot of this knowledge on to people over the years. and we were talking a little bit earlier before we got started about your time in the Army marksmanship unit and you were also a coach, right? I was a coach, yeah. I mean

you know, one way to be a successful guy in any field is to outlive your competition, right? Just through attrition. There are some really fantastic guys that do what I do as well, that train military guys. You know, I'm just but one of those guys

right now. I do some of that work now. But my, you know, my, my, my, my forte is really about wind reading at long range and at extreme long range. Yeah, that was the, I think the thing I enjoyed the most about being a coach at the Army Martiansby unit was my opportunity to get a chance to teach people. Not only my own shooters, you know, we would, we, we had guys that shot competitions for the U.S. Army. but also getting a chance to go out and work with everybody from, you know, regular 11 Bravo's at the 101st to, you know, a combat support battalion guy at like Fort Story, Virginia, or working with guys in Soft, Rangers and SF and cats like that. So that was really the true, you know, enrichment for my career. That's what I treasure the most about my military career is the opportunity to go out there and share with guys.

And I'm learning as much as I ever taught. Each time I go out to, you know, if I'm out there working with guys and they're like pipe hitting dudes, that's not me. I'm like a partnership guy from the AMU. You know, my guy shoot on golf courses. But I would, I would, you know, internalize, get the stuff that they needed and that would change the way that I taught it. You know, so it was more applicable to them where they could get more value. Right. Because you're learning how people learn.

Yeah, absolutely. And they're bringing back, you know, experiences from over. sees and tell practically what they're experiencing. Well, they also need to apply probably the fundamentals that you're teaching. Well, I know we're not saying fundamentals. But the lessons, you know, the essentials that you are teaching them, but they can't always do it in an ideal world the way somebody on a marksmanship team might be able to. Yeah.

So what you have to do is if you're training guys for operational stuff is you have to distill down like you know the higher up the the pyramid you get guys have less and less time to devote to like learning the thing right right right so guys are like bro just tell me what I need to know right so I I have kind of different different way different sort of packages you develop as an instructor hey do we have an hour do we have a day do we have a week right do we have two weeks and so uh develop the develop the process about wind reading or putting a number

on the wind that I could probably talk about in 20, 30 minutes that somebody could probably use right away. Very basic thing and especially now with the advent of technology and ballistic solvers. So you really have to, there's still one thing that you cannot

solve on a ballistic solver or using technology and that's what is the wind doing. The wind is the is a non-deterministic variable. It's the single most important or weighted reason why guys miss shots is missing the wind. So they have to be able to do that for themselves. They have the best gun, best bullets, best cartridges, best solver, kestrel, you name it.

But if they can't figure out what the wind is doing downrange and put a number on it, they're not going to hit the target. You know, it's interesting because I think that like people's common, you know, like both Jack and I were snipers and kind of applying that, applying this to that is that I think that civilians tend to believe that when they see a sniper team, that the shooter, the person with the gun, that's the sexy part, that they're the senior person. But really, anybody can squeeze that trigger if they have good basics. And it's really the person behind that spotting scope that needs to know what they're doing

and needs to be seasoned and needs to be able to. I mean, you see that a million times, like when you're, you know, if you're working in the, in the instruction environment, you know, I talk to guys that are instructors at the various sniper schools. And that's the thing like you watch, you can watch a shooter and or a sniper get complete vapor lock when they're trying to do something. And they, like, think left is right and right is left. But a good spotter, a good observer can really is a force multiplier. Yeah. You need to have the physical attributes to pull the trigger without moving the rifle and all the things that they have to do But you know more and more

Even though we train like that in a training environment using a spotter and using you know having a sniper I think that happens less and less in an operational environment You know the way that the way that snipers are employed Especially in the the soft world is You know What are fast- run as fast you can to where you're going to be. And then everybody is on the rifle.

Everybody is shooting. Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the misconceptions people have about snipers, because there's many out there. And one of them, I think, is exactly what you're saying, that people still have in their mind this idea of, like, Carlos Hathcock and Elephant Valley, when the reality, I think most of the time,

is that your snipers nowadays are in more of a direct action role in that they're going out with an assault force. They're pulling overwatch for them. Yeah. Yeah, the, you know, when I was, when I was in the Army the first time in the 80s, I was a machine gunner. So we were like usually in a support-by-fire position for, you know, raids and things like that. And so you have all three guns for the platoon or all together, and you're like talking to the guns and all that other stuff that you do. But now, you know, we, we, and every once in a while, we would have one of the snipers up there with us.

Right. I mean, if you think about it, that ability to mass- aimed fire, you know, having a group of guys together, so they can communicate with each other. That is an absolute soul crusher to whoever you're shooting at, you know, especially with the level of the cap, the level, the competence of the guys. I mean, I'm so impressed when I see the guys out there that I get a chance to work with. I mean, just how good the rifles are, how good the ammo is, how good shooters guys are. how much opportunity that like, especially guys in soft, whether the Rangers or SF dudes, have the ability to go and train with instructors and shoot at places that aren't, you know, range 66 on Fort Bragg or, you know, or Burroughs range on Fort Benning. So getting all those different looks and terrain and everything else.

So, I mean, I would say our modern sniping capabilities are the best that they've ever been. And I don't think there's anybody that does it as well as the U.S. guys do. Since you have all this experience, too, going out and training all sorts of different people, conventional military, all the way up to the top guys, I mean, what are some of those misconceptions that you think the public has about snipers and what snipers? Or even long-range shooting when it comes to when it comes to that. Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, the whole, like, the one thing that gets me when I, you know, if you read, read stuff or you watch a movie and like this concept of like the guys like

waiting to time his shot between his heartbeat and like, you know, shit like that. You're like, well, maybe. I don't know. I was never able to kind of time my shot between a heartbeat. And also, you know, for the modern, for the modern sniper, the fact that like shooting is really not a huge part. It's part of the job, but it's probably not even the biggest part of the job for the way that they're used, especially nowadays, you know, all the assets that that guy can bring to the fight, his ability to see the whole battlefield, his ability to leverage technology. You have to be a good shot and have good equipment, but all the other things.

I mean, if you attended a military sniper school, you know, you shoot for a few weeks. Right. And then it's all fieldcraft and, you know, trying to learn the actual business and doing the job. Yeah, I think one of the misconceptions is that you could take a regular sniper. And when I say regular sniper, I mean any given soft sniper. Not like a naturally gifted person or, you know, who's just nailing it. Or somebody who shoots for fun all the time. They shoot competitively or whatever else.

But, you know, that I think that if you have a sniper that can shoot a minute of a bang, at 600 are we talking yards or meters anymore I don't remember it 600 yards that's a competent that's a competent sniper oh absolutely

you know that that's that I actually you know a good answer to the question about misnomer's is the accuracy of the system you know you see lots of like advertisements out there for both rifles and ammunition every one's a quarter minute yeah I mean we've been able to

because of technology you can instrument everything. We can measure almost everything now, you know, but we can measure muzzle velocities with portable radar units. There's portable radar units of $500, maybe. And you can track the base of that bullet

the first 50 yards. So you're getting, I mean, laboratory level velocity measurements. So of course, on Facebook and social media, guys are putting pictures of like how low their standard deviation is or how small their muzzle velocity is and guys shoot

groups and the guys claim levels of accuracy. I've got a quarter minute gun. I've got a half minute gun. I've got this. When in reality, like I said, Dave, if you have, if you have like an M-110 with M-1-18 LR ammunition or the sniper ammunition that the army uses, and that rifle and you are even shooting 1.5 minutes of angle or about, you know, call it about 0.4-1-4-1-4-1. mills group size at distance, that is lethal. That's as good as it really ever needs to be. And it's probably as good as it gets most times. You know, not on a three-shot group.

You know, when I was at AMU, when we tested rifles, we test like in 30 shot groups. Or you aggregate groups to like 100 shot groups. Then you look at the data. And you, then at that point, like, if somebody tells me they have a quarter minute rifle all day, every day, you know, we'll shoot 20 shots at 600 meters and if it's quarter minutes, you let me know. Yeah, right. That would be super. That that they're not out there.

Yeah. But that's, it's almost unattainable. So a minute to a minute and half is as good as it ever needs to be, honestly. Right. And for people who are like watching, are totally baffled to lay people out there. What do you mean when you say minute of angle? So minute of angle and mills are angular measurements that we use in shooting. So we use them for a couple of reasons.

We use them to calibrate how much the sights move when we click the scope. So you click the scope, there's a little tube in the middle of a telescope on a rifle. And when you click the knobs, whether it's left or right, which we call windage and up and down, which we call elevation, it physically moves that tube inside the scope. So if you click to move the strike of the round up, right? We'll say up on the scope, and then I come up, click, ten, click. on the scope, it actually moves that erector tube down inside the scope. So when I move the erector tube down, now I'm pointing lower. So if I want to put the crosshairs on the target,

it makes me raise the muzzle, right? So up and down those measurements, we use we use minute of angle or mill. The military stuff is pretty much all mill, which is miller radian. And minute and angle stands for is, is, if you look at that 360 degrees, of a circle, each circle has a degree has 60 minutes. So 60 times 360 is 21,600. So that means that if you look at a pie chart, there's 21,600 little minutes of angle all the way around. So it's much more accurate than a 360 degree compass. Right.

So, you know, in artillery you might use angles, but, you know, for small arms, the ballistics, the arch trajectory doesn't really go that far. so we need a much finer adjustment. And minute angle is handy because it's linear and it tends to line up with like statute measurements. So like one minute of angle, that little angle at 100 yards or 100 meters, it's about one inch. And at 200 it's two inches.

So if I were to say that rifle shoots one minute at angle and I'm shooting at 600 meters, I should expect about a 6 inch group at 600 meters. And that's what the weapon system itself is capable. Right. And then you have to account, of course, for the person behind the gun. Right. And like if you can deep dive like Army Research Institute, like ARL and AI,

they've done all kinds of instrumented studies on what a dude can do. Really? Yeah. So. Like physiologically. Yeah. So they have a, and they take these numbers and they factor them into designing total weapon systems. So I think I remember reading one time that they expected a train.

military sniper to be able to point a group of about 0.2 or 0.3 mils. Really? Yeah, which is about a minute of angle, a little bit less than an angle. So, and that a regular infantry dude was like, he could point like 0.8 mils or 1 mil. So at, so imagine at 300 meters, they're expecting a regular infantry guy to be able to physically hold a rifle and his total group size, without factoring in how the rifle shoots or the precision of the ammunition, his total

group size of about one mil, which at 300 meters is 0.3 meters, which is about 12, 13 inches. About 13 inches. So they would expect that without any other, but that guy's physical ability to point the rifle

is about a 13 inch group. And that's, you know, they take these big egg heads. They take, they they take all these numbers and they, hey, we need the total system to do this. And so, therefore, I need the rifle be able to shoot this well and the ammo to be able to shoot this well. Now, is that, is that, are they talking about the average, the average infantry guy? Right. Or are they talking about a person that you've trained up and?

I'm not sure. I mean, those metrics exist as kind of what was my point. So, like, you know, it may not be one, maybe 0.90, but like, I remember going into, we did some work at AMU with the, Army Research Institute. They instrumented my guys. Right, really? Yeah, so they did all kinds of stuff. Like they put like these bands on the guys' chest to see how how fast they breathe under stress or when they were calm, measuring pulse rate, measuring blood pressure, and they would have my guys,

who were some of the best shooters in the world. They would have my guys shoot different positions, do different things. And that like established a baseline of like, okay, this dude, like the best guy there is, this is what he does. Right. And so then they would go out and they would do the same measurements on like a basic training at Sandhill. And then they, they would, I think they brought guys over from Kelly Hill. If you guys were Kelly Hill, I think they had, you know, guys regiment did it too. So they're, they, that's what they do all day.

You know, if you ever talk to any of those guys, they all have a, you know, you're usually the dumbest down in the room. I usually was. everybody's got more degrees than the thermometer. So, so, okay, so if we're saying that a standard sniper, or a soft sniper, you know, a trained sniper in the military can shoot one minute of angle, which is one inch every hundred yards, basically.

Yeah, I would agree with that. How does that compare to a national level shooter, an Olympic level shooter, Camp Perry level shooter. Well, so we would, and so, you know, it was interesting. I actually got the chance to see that firsthand. So like when, so at the Army Marcheonship Unit, part of our competitive thing that we did

is we went and shot the national championships at Camp Perry, you know, which is on the shores of Lake Erie. The bullets actually land in Lake Erie. So you shoot the firing line faces due north and the impacts, the bullets land in the lake. The EPA hasn't shut that down? Well, you know, they have a chat. What does shut down the rain?

is like guys on jet skis. Okay. Like, woo, this is awesome, man, give me another Keystone lat! And like they drive right where in my whole my beer and watch this. A thousand people are shooting, right? So a coast car would go in. What could go wrong? But we had a program before the GWAT and it lasted a little bit after the war started where we would take a couple of Rangers from each battalion and we would have them attached, we would get them attached to the AMU. And that got spearheaded by the third Ranger Battalion,

sniper platoon, which I think set the kind of the standard for, at least within the Ranger Regiment, of how that was supposed to happen. Jack, you were a member of that group. So just like some, you know, mountains of men, you know, like real legends in that community of those guys that are running that. So we took two guys from first battalion, two guys from second battalion, two guys in third battalion, and we did that for a couple of years. So these are guys that they're really good shots.

Like they're really good at everything that they do. They have to be to be in that job, you know. It's great for my guys because my guys and you guys, like, you know, they didn't have any of that experience. They were, they joined the Army to shoot in the Army. They were recruited specifically to come and shoot for the Army Marshal unit, right? So now they're like next to, you know, some, a real freaking ranger. And they got to see like, oh, okay. Well, actually, we had guys that intrigued them enough that they went and did SFAS or they did other stuff in the Army because they got motivated by so.

There are also Rangers that went over to AMU and did one leave. That is true. It was pretty sweet game. I mean, better than a 25-mile road march. Yeah, yeah. You know, beats a poking in the eye with a sharp stick. So, but the biggest. thing was watching those guys try to make those adaptations to the style of shooting that we did.

So the style of shooting that we did was completely different. So it really isn't a fair sort of metric. But what I will say is that those guys, all those Rangers, and we've had guys from group, different guys from group be attached to us in that same sort of program over the years, the rate that those guys learned. is their curve is the fastest I've ever seen out of anybody. You know, the guys that we hired for AMU, the guys who were recruited, you know, they maybe started shooting me as like 12 years old.

You know, it's like his local shooting team in Pennsylvania or something like that. And then he was in 1718, we would approach him and say, hey, you want to come in the Army and shoot for the AMU. They go through basic training. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five,

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And every time you donate with Griffles Plasma, you're compensated. You can receive over $500, the first month. Learn more about plasma and how it helps people at gripplesplasma.com. They go through AIT. Then they report directly to A&U as a private. And so I had guys so, like we had a mutual friend, Jared Van Alst. And so Jared was one of those guys. So Jared showed up, shot like a summer for us. I think he was a team leader. He was. And so he finagled

and he's like hey I kind of want to go over to AMU for a couple of years so he comes over and for real within six months he was shooting as well as half of my team that had been doing it for like 10, 12 years.

He was scary good. And I would tell these guys that we'd have and it was pretty, everyone's when you get a guy that just couldn't do it and that's like a physiological thing. We had one guy he was from

he was an aggressor at um at mountains at ranger school right so we had we had a couple of those guys come down one year but I think we had four four or five of them

and this guy he was awesome and he was a physical animal and freaking great soldier that he physically could stand still yeah oh really like I'm like dude just stand there

and don't move and he moved personality. He would tell me he's like, yeah, my dad used to like, like, whack the crap out of him because I was like holding the flashlight and he was working on the tractor. He's like from Kansas or something. And like the flight would be moving. He just was in capable of standing still. So you do get those guys. Yeah. But ordinarily, you couldn't, if somebody wants to do it, shooting, you can teach him how to do it, which is why it's such a great sort of activity.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on something because there is a, um, again, a misconstitutional. In the military, and one that I think I had as well, that, you know, this competition shooting is a bunch of bullshit. You know, this stuff where we're going to go out to the flat range, we're going to have a sling around her arm, and we're going to shoot these yard lines. Like, this is bullshit. This isn't how it works on operations. Right. But Jared Van Allis and others were very accurate in saying that, no, actually you go and you really put yourself into this and apply yourself to this. Right.

And you will learn lessons that are absolutely going to make you a better. combat sniper. I think that's true. You know, the caveats to that are obviously for competition shooting, it's competition shooting, right? So like, hey, I've got like, I've got to lie down a certain way or I have to sit a certain way because that's the rule. Right. Right. And I have, I have to use a sling because I'm not allowed to stabilize the rifle in the other way. Right. Right. So, but working within that construct, you're really training sort of pure marksmanship. You're training, you're still training side alignment. You're still training trigger control.

You're still training, reading the wind, all those things. So trigger time is trigger time. I mean, if you look across the board, I mean, I know lots of guys in special operations, and they're all shooting USPSA. Yeah, right. You know, they're shooting PRS. They're shooting the precision rifle series. And those like, hey, you're putting your body into unconventional positions.

You're shooting at steel under time pressure. Yeah, nobody, you're not in a tactical environment. You're not wearing full kit. You're not having to do it at night. But, you know, steel sharpens steel. And competition shooting, at least for the stuff that we did, especially for snipers, I think was incredibly relevant because it taught you in a controlled environment

what the physical effects of the wind did. That was the biggest single thing. Yeah, number one, you know, guys are all competitive, especially guys in those units. They're all meat eaters, you know. So they want to do well. They, you know, it was the funniest thing sometimes you go to Camp Perry and there'd be some, like, fat little 15-year-old girl

that would, like, whip the shit out of, like, an east-ed-degree beret. And he was like, what the fuck? Yeah. So that guy would then go work harder. It's not about your deadlifts, bro. Yeah. So, but the ability to see the, you know, we go to, as you guys know, as you guys are both snipers,

you know, when you go to the range, you're at the range maybe a half a day. You got a couple of cans ammo. You meet your training objectives or whatever it is. You're going out to get dope on the rifle. You're going out there to true your catcher. We're going out there just to work some drills, shoot movers. But then you're done. Right.

So, you know, in one summer, the guys would join us like in June. And then we would take these guys all the way to August, which is why it pretty much ended when the war got going, because you just can't really expect units to let one of their best assets go for a couple months. But they would see more of these sort of situations, these simulations of like wind, having to solve these problems, of reading the wind, making choices. The good thing about competitive shooting is that it's a direct feedback loop, right?

You've got the shot on the target. That gives you feedback. Then you get to go, what did I do? Where was the crosshair when I pulled the trigger? Well, it was here. The shot ended up there. Was I moving? No, it wasn't moving.

Was the wind blowing? The wind is blowing. Which way is it blowing? Holy shit. I didn't even see that. Next shot. Wind's doing the same. Now I'm going to aim upwind that much because that's how far it was down one last time.

But when you shoot the shot, you see the result. And then that whole decision loop starts again. And that training of figuring that out is huge for guys. So I think there's value in it. You find it speeding up the more guys spend out at the range. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I mean, any competitive shooting thing is its own rabbit hole? I mean, I won't defend it too hard because, like, it can be a thing.

You know, like, okay, well, I've got this jacket and I've got to do this and do that. You know, is that what it's about? Is that what it's about? And is that aiding that guy, you know. It's like being a ranger wasn't really about having a high and tight. You know what I was. Well, it was when I was there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we should go back to the heritage standard.

We're talking about pure accuracy. Are the people at a national level that are competing at national level, are they shooting a half minute, a quarter minute? So when I was good, and I wasn't a fat fuck like I am now, when I was good, and another elite level shooters at 1,000 yards, you know, we'd shoot these prone rifles, the Calvertrin or Winchester Magnum then 6-5 284 all these 7mmeter

type magnum rifles so I had cross-airs and my hold using a sling without any other support was about two maybe to three inches out of 1,000 yards that's how much my cross-air would move

and that's probably typical within that now guys that were shooting standing with that to support your elite level guys can probably physically point a rifle with no other support within about a five-inch hold at about 200 meters, just standing up. That's incredible. Yeah, it is, but, you know, you're shooting one shot of that is. Like I said, I think that's one of the misconceptions of, you know, like I think that people

think of soft guys as being these awesome hand-to-hand guys, awesome pistolleros, awesome, you know, snipers are these amazing shooters. And the thing is, is it they are if they pursue that outside. But there are so many tasks. Oh, yeah. You know, there are so many tasks. You can't be proficient in a world. You can't be proficient in.

And as a sniper, 80% of the job is mission planning is getting in. And more importantly, getting out once you've taken that shot. So to think that your standard, even, you know, special operation sniper is a world-class shot, if that person is not, if he is not like a competitive shooter, you know, they're shooting at a high level, at a high functional level that the job requires, but they are not, you can't put them on a line at like Camp Perry and expect them to... And I mean, both of you guys know full well. I mean, as a ranger sniper, and I'm sure it's probably true in any other units out there, yeah, ideally we all wish we could go out to the range for 15 minutes a day and shoot like at AMU. But the reality is we would have these training periods where, you know, you're out at the range. four days straight and then you're not out of the range at all for two months. Right. So it's very, like you said, unless you're pursuing. And you're sitting there and you're

waiting for range control to come out and open the range. You know, then you've got to get everything closed up so range control can come out and close the range. Yeah. And it's like, oh my God. The other responsibilities you have, right, you know, being, you know, your airborne qualifications and current and the tactical stuff, mobility. And that brings up a really important point that I always try to make to guys, you know, when I still do have the opportunity to work with guys to train now. And the one thing I try to transmit is that when guys go out to the range, a lot of times, if you're an operational guy, you're going to the range for a reason, right? And you just want to, you're getting it done, you leave, but take a pause, why you're there and work on Mark's

machine. Yeah. It's a huge thing Like is what look at your hold Now now now Now you're not in a sling With a giant rifle and a You know a three thousand dollar scope or they are now They're actually more expensive now

The scope's at the sniper's stuff But But if you have your movement is this Try to get your movement smaller Make small adjustments Make a small adjustment to your bag Yeah Are your bipods set up the way you want to set them up

And try experiment to work on marksmanship. That's something a lot of military guys, military snipers don't get a chance to do because once they get put in the job, it's like, that's the job. Right. And so when they do go to the range, a lot of times, it's, hey, I got a new scope. I've got to get the scope zero. You have to get 100 meter zero. I have to true my ballistic solver at a certain range so that if I have to go and do something tomorrow or next week, I'm ready to go. I'm operational. So, but taking that moment, taking that pause, to actually work on marks on. It's super important. When I was 18 Bravo, I think I used to drive my team a little nuts because I'd have them do dry fire drills at the range before we started shooting. It's not a bad idea. I mean, it can sound like kind of a dating.

Like we're going back to BRM. Kind of a dated thing to do. But, you know, you should be watching your crosshair, and you should know exactly where that crossair is when you shoot. I mean, that's a big thing that I see is, you know, I still shoot competitively. and, you know, I do the long-range thing. And so I shot in England this last summer at their national championships. And I would kind of like write down at the end of the day and make little notes to myself, you know, kind of debrief myself.

And like if I shot 100 shots in that day, honestly, I probably shot 10 shots that were perfect. Just 10, maybe. The other ones were a little left, little right, little hot. They weren't bad shots. They were still in the center scoring range. But I knew where they were. And so when I got on the range, especially with the young guys, you're like, where that one break, man? Center, perfect.

Yeah. Like, every shot, center? Yeah. Like, are you sure? Because you're not critiquing yourself. Right, because that can, that actually has real effects to the accuracy of your zero. Right. If you're not breaking them exactly in the middle, if you're breaking them on the right side and you have shots on the right side and then you click left.

Right. then when you're in a no-wind condition, you go out there the next time, where is your shot going to be? It's going to be left of where you think it's going to be because you've clicked yourself that way. So the accuracy of the data, these ballistic solvers are very advanced now, but they're only as good as the data you feed it. So, you know, we're talking about the accuracy of a person and the accuracy of these different weapon systems. So, you know, in mills, you know, milleradian, there's about 6.2 radians in a circle. So the old trigonometric formula or equation for circumference of a circle is 2 pi r, right? So if your radius is one, one of anything, say one meter or one mile or a thousand meters,

and you draw a circle, that circle is going to have a radius of two times pi times the radius. So the radius is one. Your circle is going to have a radius of 6.283 radiance. So think of a radius is kind of like a sixth of a pizza slice, you know, around there. And a mill radian is one one thousandth of that one radian. So, and mills are great for these angles we're talking about because a mill is a thousandth of that radian. It's a thousandth of whatever the radius is. So if I'm shooting out 1,000 meters, 1 mil is 1 meter at 1,000 meters.

If I'm shooting out 1,000 yards, 1 mil is 1 yard at 1,000 yards. Right? So my experience tells me that a really good, say, M110 and shooter is probably out to say 800 meters, 900 meters, is probably good for about between 0.2 and 0.4-mill group size. Like 0.2, 0.3, that's a fantastic rifle and shooter and ammo. They could be as big as, say, up to 0.6. And not be deadline and be within the acceptable margins for performance. Right.

So that means that my group size at 1,000 meters is, say, 0.3 mils. That means it's 3 tenths of a meter at 1,000 meters. So it's 0.3 of a meter. So it's 30 centimeters. Right? That right. So, no, it's not right. So you've got, if there's like about 39 inches in a meter,

so 10% of a meter is like 3.9 inches. Yeah. So it's three times 3.9. So that means that at its best, that gun is shooting around 12 inches. 12 inches at 1,000 meters. Now, 12 inches, when they say it's shooting at 12 inches, that's the spread. You can, the naturally occurring spread you can expect when you, shoot that, when you shoot that gun at a thousand meters.

Right. Right. So, so that means that if I'm correcting my zero at distance, and say my gun doesn't shoot 12 inches, say it shoots 18 or 20 inches, which is more realistic at 1,000 meters. And I'm trying to true my ballistic calculator, my kestrel, all these different devices. I can induce error because I am overstating. You're poisoning my data. I'm poisoning my data.

Right. So, because there's a way that these ballistic solvers work where you have to take your impact that you can see, and you're comparing it against the impact that's predicted. That's essentially what you're doing. So then you're trying to align those two things. So like, okay, I know where the bullet hit, the bullet doesn't lie, and I know how much elevation I used in my scope, whether I'm holding on my ballistic-type reticle in my scope or I'm clicking.

and when those things don't line up from my calculator that's on my phone or whatever other device that we're using now, I have to be able to align those things. And there's different ways of doing that. You can change data inputs, whether it's velocity or the sort of the ballistic performance of the bullet in the bullet model. And you do all that and you try to get it aligned because what you're trying to do is you're trying to predict where that bullet's going to hit at any range. So if my data is skewed, I need to correct. my dad but what you see a lot operationally you know when when you're out there with a guy and he has like he's like being his left because he misses the wind he hits right because he

misses the win he hits the center of the target like once or twice he's like okay I'm good yeah that's like I'm at uh 9.8 mils and let me correct my stuff like but if he shot like another 10 shots right the whole group might be 0.3 or 0.4 mil so Like, my advice is if you're doing, if you have confidence in the ballistic information you're inputting into your device, you have to really be mindful of what your group size is. And don't let hubris get you. Like, so the new guy, that's dead in the middle. It's perfect.

The middle. So if you're not right in the middle and you're not accepting that group size, you're not accepting your error, and you're not being honest with yourself, you're not going to have an accurate system. I feel like also sometimes new guys, because I feel like shooting is similar to driving. When you first start driving, there's so many, like there's so much stimuli, you know, so many different things going on. And, you know, you're checking your mirrors and you're, you know, I got to turn my signal and all this stuff. And then after a while, a lot of becomes rote.

And I feel like shooting is the same way in the sense of once you start getting your breathing fine-tune, Once you start getting your trigger squeeze fine-tuned, once you start, then the reticle a lot of time, like, the world starts to slow down. So a lot of times the newer shooters, they have no idea where that reticle was when that round went off because it all kind of happened by surprise and everything. Well, then let's even get into what constitutes a kill in sniper operations when you take a shot at a guy from 800 yards away and you just see that silhouette disappeared. Now, did that guy get killed or did he just like drop to the ground and like move the cover? Right. I mean, even before that, you know, when you're

asking a new shooter, where was that reticle when that round went off, when that trigger broke? And I feel like it takes a while it takes a quite a bit of time behind the gun before like the world slows down enough

where you're actually It's like sky bad when you first start off. You're like, but then, where you, you're like, okay,

that was low right. Or low right. Yeah. You know. Right. I mean, the things that you have to do first execute the shot,

like you said, it's a great point because, you know, if you're thinking consciously of a lot of these things, you see it a lot where, um, if you're, if guys are training in terrain,

so where they're not lying on a flat ground on fort menning, perfectly flat. They're like this. Mm-hmm. keeping the rifle and your sights level is a huge deal. Yeah. Because inducing can't into a shooting platform will cause errors. So, I mean, basically the way it works very simply is if the rifles can'ted to the right,

shots will go low into the right. If it's can to the left, shots will go low and to the left because you got your axis of bore and you've got an axis of your sight line to the target. So when you do this, you're actually inducing that error. So guys have like levels on the guns now, which work great, a little bubble level. But you can have all kinds of stuff on that. There's even levels that are electronic. So you have a green light if it's level within like a degree or two.

And a red light, if it's not level. Yeah. Right? Some like competitive shooters are using is now. So it's rightful. But it can, it can fool you. So, I mean, I've shot like lying in a creek bed. up at a target and like

I think my crosshairs are level I think everything's level and the guy I'm shooting with is like dude look at your level and like I'm completely not level right like holy shit it messes with your messes with your sense

of what it's so like all those elements if they're not right you're not getting true feedback out of that target so yeah you're right I mean like if your zero has been knocked off yeah and the more you shoot the sort of the more unconscious those things become. But sometimes, you know, guys hit these sort of phases where

their performance plateaus or even goes down. Yeah. And that means that they're taking stuff for granted. Yeah. I mean, I saw that on the competitive side at AMU all the time, where you'd see guys, scores go like that, then they'd start dipping down. Is that complacency? Yeah. Or you're just, you're making an error that recoil is hiding. Right. So at that point, the best thing to do is like sort of deconstruct it, strip it back down, maybe even dry fire, you know, maybe even do some exercises where you don't know if the rifles loaded or not.

Just crap like that. Really basic stuff. Yeah. They've been doing sense of civil war. Going back to, I mean, ball and dummy drills are amazing when that happens because it really uncovers show you what a fuck up you on. It could be embarrassing, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I happens to me too. I, you know, sometimes I do unintentionally like, I was shooting at Camp Prairie last year, and I had a round that had like a bad prime So when I pulled the trigger, nothing happened, right? So I'm like this, I'm at 1,000 yards. Yeah.

You know, I'm like, doing really well. I'm trying to win this national championship. And I'm like, I'm like, holy shit. Exactly. I'm like, oh, my God. If that had actually gone off, that would have been in the pumpkin patch. So, like, scare crap out of me. I unloaded.

I drive fired about 10 times. I'm like, okay, go back. So, yeah, all those stuff to me, everything in shooting is, like, very perishable. I mean, a good analogy of shooting is like land navigation, you know. It's a very perishable skill. And if you're, some guys are naturally kind of great at it. Some guys aren't. Some guys have to really work hard.

And the guys have to work hard at it like me, I was telling you earlier today, I was never, I don't think I was ever really a talented guy, shooter-wise. But I worked relentlessly. I was tenacious. And I still am for obsessive. So let's that. So I would, but if you're like that, the skills fall off pretty good. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five,

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Quick, unless you maintain it. Talking about being tenacious, we have not discussed your origin story yet. So, like, you joined. Were you when you joined the Army? 17.

Okay. Now, were you already shooting competitively at that time? Not, no. Not in an organization in a way. I grew up shooting. My father was a competitive shooter. Okay. He shot, you know, NRA high power.

He shot for the Navy back in the 50s and the early 60s. It was a really good shooter, won a lot of champions. So it was the kind of the thing that we kind of grew up around. What I will say is I had a little Mossburg 22 And my dad Welded on a front site post from an M1 Garand on this Mossburg

22 and cut the stop down And put like a set of like Of sites that kind of look like sites Of like an M1 or an M14 I never looked through a scope shooting Until I was like 18 years old Yeah And so when I joined the Army

And no matter whenever we went out shooting was always some sort of competition. We're trying to like shoot the smallest thing you could shoot you know. When you were a kid or when you're when I was a kid. Okay. You know my brother and my sister were all, my dad would take us out with the range and we'd go upstate. My grandfather was and it was never, we never shot

just the kind of like just clink. Plink. We were always shooting for small groups and whatever it is. So when I joined the army I was just I was naturally good at it. Yeah. I had been doing it. My dad had trained me. My dad, you know, there's a, there's a, there's

an exercise called Shadowbox, which is like one of these really old marksmanship training tools. So what you do is it's kind of dated because we don't use iron sights anymore in military marksmanship. You know, everything's an optic. We don't. What the fuck? Well, you know, there's lots of arguments. Jimmy's Russell. Well, there's lots of good arguments to say that, you know, it's obsolete. Modern optics don't break. The amount, you know, the Marine Corps did a huge study on the, on the RCO or ACOG is...

The ACAC is built like a tank. And they just don't break. They don't... So, you know, you only have a certain amount of time to train Joe, and what should you use to train it out and show? What they're going to go into combat. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the concept of shooting iron sights is probably important because

pistols have a manual siting system and, you know, lots of machine guns do. Cruiserve weapons do. You know, cruiser of weapons have optics on them now, too. But, so kind of knowing that principle is, but the way the shadow box worked is you'd put a rifle in a rest

and so it was like pointing somewhere right so if you align the sites perfectly the sites were pointing at one spot out there and then what you would do is you would like have a piece of paper and you'd have like a bullseye and like a maybe a two or three inch disc with a hole in the middle

and you'd move the bull's eye around until the guy would tell you that's perfect so I have a perfect site picture you know center mass sites are aligned and then you just take a pencil and you make a hole through the holes. I remember this in the back. Yeah. Right?

The shadow box, right? So I remember my dad doing shadow box with me with an M1 grand when I was five years old. Right? I don't know. So I was a good shot. I didn't really get a chance to do because back when I was, so I went through base training and I ended up after volunteering after airborne school at Second Range training. battalion and I was in a weapons squad you know I was kind of a little guy I was like five

seven five eight and weighed about 140 pounds so of course what he do you put guy weapons right or more yeah exactly to break his soul yeah yeah what they did so um then when I when I graduated air school I was a I was a gunner at a at a gun team um but it was all I was always interested in marksmanship always trying to show when I got out of the arm I got out in in 89, early 89, and I started shooting competitively, because I initially did it as a way to spend some time of my dad. My dad stopped shooting competitively in the 70s, and, you know, he and I didn't really get along really well when I was a kid

because, like, you're an asshole when you're a kid, right? So I got out of the army, I'm like, oh, I was an asshole. So I said, hey, Dad, you know, you got all these rifles downstairs and all this shooting equipment, like, why don't you try doing it, let's do it again, and I'll do it with you, and you can teach me how to do it, and when to spend time with them. So I started doing that.

They got good pretty quick at the competitive game. And then I joined the National Guard because I got some money to do it on the weekend. And then shooting for the National Guard, I made their all National Guard rifle team. And I was shooting at the National Championships. I was on that team for a year. And the Army Marketship Unit came and offered me a job

to go back active duty, and I did that. So that was like in the end of 96, And then I was at the AMU from then until I retired at the October 2015 is when I retired for Fort Benning. And I drove the hypotenuse of America to get away from Columbus, Georgia. To get to Washington. This is really funny, too, because the way I, you were the first ranger I ever met, actually, Emel. Because your mom golfed on the golf course that I worked on as a kid. I was a professional, semi-professional weed whacker.

at the Quanticon golf course. I remember meeting you as a young man. And I think I asked you, you know, and my mom was like, hey, he's got this nice young kiddie. Let's say he's going to be a ranger. You want to talk to him? Like, yeah, I was home on leave. And I think I asked him like, so are you good athlete?

You know, should be running. Are you running marching? How old are you? 18? Yeah. I'm like, so here's a deal. Show up, be able to run. Being able to run as private,

and Ranger Pettel I can get you at a lot of freaking problems. This is true. And like, be sure. strong, don't be a quitter, be the guy that selects yourself, don't let somebody else deselect you, make sure that you're the guy that deselects yourself. All very good advice. Don't quit, and you'll be fine. Yeah.

And then about, I don't know, a year or so later, I'm in my office in Fort Benning, and one of my best friends who was Jared Van Alls is like, hey, Emil, do you know this fucking guy? He says he knows you. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, he doesn't know you. Like, he's getting ready to just destroy Murphy because Murphy says that he knows me. I'm pretty sure he did anyway.

And he goes, I'm like, oh, he's just looking for another reason. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was very funny. So, all the advice you gave him, and you neglected to give him the most important piece of advice. Never marry a stripper? No, that's... Don't get a DUI.

Don't go and buy a car without your squalier. Second battalion. Second battalion. Well, I mean, I don't want to get into it. It wasn't my choice. It wasn't my choice. I mean, I'll tell you. The lifestyle chooses you.

I will tell you this, I was, when I went through Rip in the, like, the thing, our class picked up right after a block Christmas leave. I remember you telling me back in the day, back in your day, they had battalion level Rip. They did. So we were in probably, I don't know, it couldn't have been more than four or five total rip classes,

regimented of rip classes have been conducted. So when we got up to Fort Lewis, they were like, you didn't go through Rip. This is it? Yeah, I mean, that was part of when you got up there as a young dude. So Rip is Ranger Indctrination program.

Yeah, I don't think it exists anymore. Now it's called Rasp. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's a much better, I mean, they like everything, everything evolves and they have a much better product now. Yeah. They're assessing, selecting,

and their training guys. They have lots more. It was just a smoke session with no training at all. It really was. It was just to see if you would quit and if you could do the metrics. I don't remember a lot about it. Yeah. Completely honest.

I don't either. I remember it sucked a lot, but that's about all I remember. Yeah, so, yeah, so, yeah, it was a small army, and obviously in, like, Ranger regiment, and any of those units, they are very small. So you kind of run into guys over and over again, a different sort of. stages so it's very interesting. We have some questions that we should get to real quick. Yeah, sure.

So first off, thank you, everybody. Also, we have a Christmas gift for you. We are now on iTunes. You can find us under the Team House on iTunes. Our podcast is it's there.

Well, we get asked just about iTunes just about every day, so. Well, it's the number one. Okay, let's go to Andrew's big twin belt. Thank you very much, Andrew. and thank you everybody. In Emil's opinion, which foreign sniper rifle

would he use if he had to go into an elite international sniper competition to defend America's honor when en route his rifle was purloined by a cheating foreign nationals team. This sounds super specific. Well,

you know, I've used I've gotten a chance to use a multitude of these rifles, but you know, the British rifle is a great rifle. The AI rifles are great. Actually, the national. That's the British Rifles? It's a good platform, yes.

And, you know, and depending on caliber, you know, the larger caliber rifles, like the Canadian rifle, you know, they use a Prairie Gunworks, or at least they did, you know, 338 LAPUA Prairie Gunworks, PGW. It's a Canadian company. It's a fantastic rifle, too. Our current The rifle that just got selected For Socom, the advanced sniper rifle Is made by Barrett The Emrad, which is a bolt-action rifle

It's if you see if you hear Barrett people immediately think of 50-Cal you know For the bullpug M-A-2 or whatever is the giant clunky Oh my gosh thing that's not particular accurate but these M-RADs are very good rifles and they're extremely accurate Yeah, the wall-man

And what caliber? What do they shoot? So the rifle that got selected for Socom, it'll be the Mark 22, is the nomenclature that's been given it. And it's a change barrel system. So the rifle will come with, and I'm not giving anything away that's not open source. There's a 338 Norman Magnum, which is an anti-material round.

So does that replace the 50-callos, the anti-material round? No, not really. Nothing can. The thing about 50 caliber, which I think it will probably stick around for a bit, is because of the size of the cartridge, you can do a lot with the bullet construction. So you can have multi-purpose rounds. You know, you can have, you know, the Raffus rounds. Yeah, the Ralfus, which actually is made by the company I work for. So what do they cost like $25 a pop or something? I'm not sure. Street price is probably something like that.

But that is a explosive arm-piercing incendiary fragmentation round in a 50 caliber. So when you start scaling down the size of the projectile, there's only so much engineers can do with that. So 3-38, you know, you can have a great armor-piercing round. You can have an API round, which is decent with it. But you're not going to get any of the multipurpose sort of aspects. And API is armor piercing incendiary. Right. So, you know, so, but so the, so it'll come with a 33-norma.

It'll come with a 300 Norma, which is going to be the primary sort of anti-personnel barrel. And that 300 Norma is a very high-performance cartridge. It shoots a 215 grain bullet at close to 3,000 feet per second. So if you want to compare it to, you. Like where a 7.62, the drop out to 1,000 meters versus like a 300 norma drop out to 1,000 meters. The bullet is dropping. I don't know. I'm probably just swagging this here, but it's probably dropping at 1,000 meters, probably about 2 meters less.

So what that does is that increases the hit probability. And that's what all the, you know, whenever you make a new weapon system, you're always trying to increase hit probability out to a range, right? So, you know, M110 or the 7.62 semi-automatic sniper rifle that's currently in use, you know, out to say 600 meters, you know, you have probably about a 90% hit probability. And you go out to 800 meters and that probability goes down. And you go out to 1,000 meters, goes down even more. So all these weapon systems are just are trying to extend that high 80 to 90% hit probability as far out as you can go.

Now, is that mostly due to the drop in, and like the velocity or the drop in, you know, performance at the end? Or is it mostly due to the arc and your hit percentage, like the flatter around the better your chance at hitting verse? It's both. So if you want to talk about trajectory and that part, you know, that's kind of that danger space is the term that we use. So you have kind of a rising branch and a falling branch of danger space.

And what danger space means is if I have my site setting set for, you know, say 600 meters, because of the drop of the round, the trajectory of that bullet, that means that I might be able to hit within whatever aiming portion I'm looking at. So hunters do look at for, you know, it's however many inches is where you can hit an animal and, you know, be able to hit, you know, harvest the animal. And in military terms, it's usually, you know, from, if you're aiming center mass, it's up to here and like down to the crotch or whatever. So with a 300 norma, like I might be able to hit everything from like

350 meters out to like 650, 700 meters, just by holding center mass. But with a 308, I might be able to only hit to about 550 meters, maybe like 600 and 10 meters. So the length of, those numbers aren't absolute. I'm just pulling it out of my ass, literally.

So, but the, how big your danger space is is a, is a, is a, is a, is a, is a, is a, is a, is a, is a, factor of how ballistically effective the cartridge is. And also that will coincide with velocity and the bullet's performance, how less the wind bullets, the wind drifts in the wind, or how much it drifts in the wind, I should say. There was another question, Dave, Alex Bennett. He had actually, he said he's VA's cousin, had a question about. We actually have four questions. So, Alex, all right, Alex, he says hi from VA's cousin. I actually

don't know who this dude is, but he said, what's your favorite story about Jared Ben, Alice? Because you guys were tight, you guys were friends, as you talked about for a long time. He was my platoon sergeant twice, which I've talked about in the past. I mean, it's just like too funny

how all that came about, but we kind of had VA in common, but you knew him much better than I did on a personal level. My favorite Jared Van All's story was, so he lived with me and my wife for

almost a year before they bought their house in Columbus and when his wife was pregnant so they were Jared was deployed and so Katie was staying with us and so

we would kind of carpool into work every once in a while right so I think his car was in the shop or something like that so at the time he was working at sniper school so he left he left regiment to go take over NCIC of the Army sniper school at Fort Benning. He did that while he was training up to go to selection.

And he completely reinvented that program from where it was to Lafrey. When he got there and when he left, it was a completely different program. That really, it really reflected current stuff that was going on because he had just come back and do all this stuff. So anyway, we're in the car and we're leaving Fort Benning out towards the main gate. and a car comes on the on ramp so this guy's coming in from like Kelly Hill like third ID out there and he like swerves right in front of us right and like so I think Jared was driving and so it's like a road ragey thing starts with me and I'm like dude we're on bait we're on post just just relax he's

getting so mad so in Jared was one of these guys where he's probably the last guy you ever want to fight Van Als was like, he had a martial arts background, he was just naturally a gifted athlete. You did not want to fight him. He was one of the guys that when regiment started up their combatives program, Jared was one of the guys that would go and train with the Gracies. And he kind of brought the, he brought the jih Tzu thing back to regiment and helped stand up the whole regimental program with the other guys that did. So very, very capable guy, like boxed and all the stuff. Yeah, so you carried a carambit with them overseas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So not the guy, right? So anyway, this guy's, we're doing things. So, like, this guy's next to us, and everyone's flipping each other off. I'm like, can we just get off post? I just want to go. Right? I'm not a great fighter, so I'm like, okay. So, like, I don't want him to be the guy to get punched in the face.

Well, you're beating that other guy up. The other guy beats me up. So anyway, they kind of do by mutual hand signals that pull over thing. So Jared pulls over, this guy pulls over. And Jared reaches over in the glove compartment, open up the glove compartment and pulls out a mouthpiece. I'm like, you carry a mouthpiece. He's like, you never know. And he gets out of the car, puts the mouthpiece in, and starts walking towards the guy's car.

And that guy, like, watched him, like, putting the mouth his in, and started, like, stretching out, the guy, all the way. He probably made a watch show. So that's my favorite Jerry's story. Oh, man. That's awesome.

Don't fight a guy who has cauliflower ears, who carries his own. Yeah, mouthpiece. That's probably good advice. Let's see here. From Andrew Dunbar. Does the Army Marksmanship Unit have the biathlon program? Like, are they training an American

in Simo Hayat? Hayat? Oh, they're not the finish. So biathlon is a winter Olympic sport. So the Army Marketship Unit trains

the Summer Olympic Precision Sports. So that's like air rifle, there's some pistol events, the Olympic shotgun events, the small-bore rifle events. Now, the

U.S. biathlon team, their shooters come down to Fort Benning and the gunsmen at AMU did all the work on their rifles and helped support them. Bifflin is a very interesting thing. So I got to meet the U.S. Bifflin coaches like years, years ago. And, you know, they're always kind of recruiting.

And the guy goes, hey, so do you ski? You know, and I'm like, well, I can ski. I mean, I did, like, the mandatory learn how to cross-country ski in the Army thing, you know, when we went to, like, Muck Creek up in Washington. and he's like, okay, forget it. I'm like, what do you mean? I'm like, I can, he's like, it doesn't matter. So he's like, listen, I'll put it to you this way.

You can take a guy that's a world-class skier, like Olympic-level skier. So if the guy doesn't make the Olympic team, but he's still in the top, like, 30 guys. And the best shooter in the world, who's been, and let's say that guy has never shot a rifle before, never even picked up a rifle. And the best shoot in the world

that knows how to put out cross-country skis, and like go. And that guy missing every target will beat you by two hours. Something like that. Because it's such, it's an unbelievably physically demanding sport. It's more skiing than his shooting. So the guys that win are the guys that shoot okay or shoot good and their world class skiers. So you can take a world class skier and train them up to the standard that is quicker than you could take a world class shooter and train them?

I don't think you could. Yeah. Yeah. So the people they recruit for biathlon are the guys that aren't making the national team for a buckingerski. And they'll peel those dudes off because they're still like crazy good skiers. And the only do is like watch the biathlon. Every single one of those guys when they cross and they're like as fit as marathoners, they all throw up. Yeah.

So here's like, who trains their shooting? Who trains their shooting program then? So is it, is there not the focus on that? They train it a different way because it's very interesting. You know, for sort of static, sort of, you know, the traditional precision events like the Olympics have and that we, that my team did in the AMU, you're trying to stand still, you're trying to bring your heart rate down and do all these things. You're the, you're the leaf floating down the stream, all this other crap. And in biathlon, like, they just got done skiing however many kilometers. They're not bringing the heart rate down.

So when they train, they elevate their heart rate before they do any kind of shooting training. It's all stress stress. Right. So from my understanding is they'll be on a treadmill and they'll run out of treadmill. They'll get their heart rate up to where they're normally at, like 170 beats a minute when they're coming off of a skiing thing. And then that's when they'll jump down and they'll train. So they stress shoot. Right.

They'll try to figure out like my heart rate slows down or I'll have this like a dip in my movement and that's when I have to shoot. So it's all the timing thing is if you watch them shoot in like on TV and the Olympics, whatever, if you can see if the, if the, guy's in his rhythm he's like pikink pikik it's like right so they're really it's a meter it's a cadence and if the guy misses or if he holds beyond where where he's supposed to shoot he's screwed you'll see him miss like all the targets okay so either they get it or they're and like simo haya was a Finnish sniper that killed you know 400 to 500 Russians during the winter war from like 1930 and 91940 and you know he was like you know this uh you know woodchop, you know, it was kind of a farmer, hunter, dude.

And he actually killed all, he killed a lot of the guys with like a, like a submachine gun type of thing. And he refused to use optics. They wanted to give him a rifle. They captured from the Russians with a scope. He used a moistened-drawn type of rifle. And he thought that an optic would give his position away. He killed all those guys from the close range. Okay.

Like maybe 100 to like 300 meters. And they, the Russians almost, they had to take out and almost. the entire grid score with artillery just to take him out. He survived the war. If he looked at pictures of him, his whole head looks sideways because his whole face was like shattered. I think he got shot in the face or shrapnel or whatever in his face. But he's a Finnish hero.

There's a great movie. I think I mentioned it on another episode we did. It's called The Winter War. It's a finished movie about that. I mean, it's pretty incredible stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's a, I mean, that's, as an aside, it's like not the rabbit hole tonight evening, but that's a great conflict to study

because they didn't have a lot of technology, but what they did have was they had a pretty highly trained group of guys. They had knowledge of the terrain. They could operate in the winter, and they're fighting an army of conscripts. And it was a very small country going up against the Russian bear. Now, they ended up losing the war. But they held out from a long time.

It was pretty painful to the Russians. Because it was before World War. two had really kicked off. So they were like on their own. They were they were fucked I think and everyone knew they were going to lose but right so they still have a pretty good I mean they have a very good uh I do with thinlin lock because my company is from over there um and uh so it's you know it's still a it's still a very big part of their cultural identity is simo is a you know it's awesome. uh Andrew on that note with a biathlon Andrew wanted to know if you ever had the opportunity to work with the Olympic team. And if so, what was that like? So at the Army Marchship

unit, we had many soldiers that represented the Olympics, represented the United States in the Olympics. Really? Yeah, on a normal quadrennial, we would have anywhere, you know, between three or sometimes many of these five or six soldiers shoot in the Olympics. And that's really why the Army Marchship unit was formed was by executive order by President Eisenhower in 1956. I didn't know that. Yeah, so prior to that, the Soviet bloc, the Eastern Bloc countries were winning all the Olympic medals. Because for propaganda, just like with chess, the Soviet Union used all the sports as a way to basically express the dominance of communism and of their system over the decadent West, right, the degenerate West. So they had dogs for impurements. Yeah.

Right. So just like the Soviet hockey team, like the 1980 Olympics, these were all professional players. But because of the way that they were actually in the Russian army, so they weren't actual professionals by the letter of the law. So that's why the Russian hockey team was so good. Well, the shooting team was the same way. They had officers and soldiers that their job was to be shooters, and they were killing everybody. And again, during the Cold War, like this was a major, you know, thing that kind of... It's like the same stuff that's come out about their skiing team, their Olympic weightlifting team.

So they're trying to, you know, we're trying to close the gap so we can, you know, get some notoriety of our own. So President Eisenhower said, like, look, what do we have to do to fix this? And so they formed an army unit of professional shooters. And as soon as they formed it, the U.S. started dominole. dominating Olympic shooting. So all through the 1960s and into the 1970s, U.S. shooters dominated

Olympic shooting competition. I think the number of Olympic medals that AMU shooters have won is up around 30. Wow. So that's a sergeant in the Army who like shoots

like a ski and goes and shoots in the Olympics. He has to go through all the same things to make an Olympic team shooting at civilians who are, that's what they want to do too. So I worked shoulder to shoulder with Olympians all the time.

And so I would say what's that like is that when it starts talking about Olympic preparation and selection, you know, only two people can go from any event to the Olympics, from any country. So if you are the baddest-ass-ass, you know, a shotgun, skeet shooter or a trap shooter or, you know, three-position small-bore shooter, you're fighting for one of two slots against your own teammates. Right. In the AMU, there's, you know, 10 or 12 guys on one section, only two of those guys can go to the Olympics. And you're also competing against the civilians.

And when you get to that level, like, the difference between those shooters is like, what? It's mental is what it is, really. And it's really who has a good day and who it hasn't have a good day. So the biggest thing about Olympic shooting, any of those types of, like, skill events, the Olympics, is timing when your performance, so your best performance is on the day when you need it. Yeah.

So this periodization of training, so your training intensity, which, you know, you do sort of the same thing for like physical fitness. Like if you're training up for an event, for like a marathon or whatever, you kind of run a certain way, a certain amount of miles, certain frequency in order to get to where on game day, you have your best run. Shooting is the same way, except that it's mainly all mental. So you don't want to hit like trace or burnout on your performance and your ability to focus. So you, and so that's where the coaching aspect of it comes into where you're working mental management programs with guys.

You're trying to coax the best performance out of a guy as possible. So they're all so good. And usually it's about who had the best day of who makes team. And then the Olympics is such a short match. You know, guys shoot a World Cup, and it might take a whole week from the shoot. Olympics is like one day. Yeah. And you're done.

Yeah. Wow. So it can be anything, you know, like you're shooting in, you're shooting somewhere in Asia, and you're from the East Coast of the United States. You're not acclimated. Your circadian rhythms are all wrong. So lots, like, we had guys come in from, we had some guys come in from NASA and talk about sleep studies that had done with astronauts of how to get best performance out of shooters based up. on how much sleep they have and like optimum sleep conditions and how to do all that stuff and

nutritionists and how to like manage guys like blood sugar how to manage your mental state it's a whole thing when you get to that level it's it's every so they brief on like VA strategy of like smoking a cohabit cigar out at the range before shooting I mean that came for I mean you know it's so it was part of a ritual right if it's part of an established that's that's true and and also yeah I mean when I people talk to me about shooting competitions and what should I do to get ready for a shooting competition. I'll tell them, don't do anything that you don't normally do. So if you're a guy gets up in the morning and drinks like two cups of coffee and you're on the way to a shooting match, get up and have a cup of coffee. Yeah. Like, because if you don't, it's going to change.

It's going to, yeah, because if I, you know, I drink a couple of cups, a cup of coffee day. If I don't have coffee, I start feeling it at, you know, midday or whatever. And so, like, I need to have a cup of coffee. I haven't had caffeine. Same thing with diet and things like that. So I need to have at least a couple beers a night just to keep me regular. You know, so they, they've done studies to where the Russians experimented with this in like the 50s and the 60s. Of course they did. Very, very small amounts of alcohol can actually improve some of the things that you do with shooting. I'm talking like milliliters.

So they would actually administer some alcohol because there's a whole list of banned substances. And like alcohol wasn't one of the banned substances. So they experimented with like very small amounts of like vodka or whatever it was. they try to get a guy to calm down or whatever. They even went so far as to experiment with having guys get into fights before they had to shoot. So

there's a story, it might be a... So the adrenaline was like... Exactly. It might be like... This might be an apocryphal story. But the way it goes is like in the late 50s or early 60s the Russians would they would go and they would pick a fight

with somebody like maybe the best shooter on the U.S. team. They just start needling the guy, needleing or needling. And then to get the U.S. shooter to blow up, then the Russian shooter would, like, go over the top and scream and rant and rave, I'm going to kill you, blah, blah. And then we're like, what's that guy's problem?

And if you know, if you've ever been, like, on a fight, on the downside of that adrenaline, you're just, like, washed out, emotionally. And that's where then the guy would go up and shoot, and he's already washed out emotionally. And the thing that gets shooters in competition that makes them nervous is, like, sometimes you're shooting

and you're doing better than you have. have before and all of a sudden you get like adrenalineized and you're like oh man I can do it and at that point you get adrenaline physiologically now you're like riding the lightning and you're trying to like pull it back trying to calm yourself back down it's really hard so they actually made rules about like you couldn't go like if you if you were caught like antagonizing somebody whatever you get like dismissed because that's like so bizarre it's sort of like masturbating before a first date in order to uh you know we you know that literally we don't have that little it's You need that tension, right?

I like that analogy. Things I've heard. I'm not arguing. Things I've heard. I'm not arguing. The point. And then Andrew, okay, DJ asked

selling that capability, especially in conventional battalions, is crucial. Oh, selling that capability. I guess he was asking about the capability of like long range shooting in battalions.

Yeah. Or competition style shooting. Not the usual training, especially in MEC, but for surveillance skills, it's priceless. And observation skills and things like that. I mean, I would actually, I would have to say, you know, even though my background is the competitive NRA position-style shooting, and what you see a lot of guys doing, probably the best training on the competition side that an operational sniper could do is the precision rifle-style shooting, which is extremely popular now. So PRS or there's like National Rifle League, PRS, but essentially what it is is, you know,

there are bolt action rifles. Targets are fairly, target size is fairly small. It's two minutes of angle and less. Lots of these matches, the target size is about one minute of angles. That means that if you're shooting at a target at 500 yards, it's a five-inch-wide plate. Yeah. Small target.

And, you know, guys are shooting, you know, all kinds of hot rod calibers that are extremely ballisticly efficient. And, you know, most of these stages are not on your belly with bipods with a sandsong. You might be shooting off of a barricade. You might have to climb up to, like, a rooftop type of obstacle. Some of them, like, you get on, like, a swaying, like, sidewalk. Some of it involve, like, physical duress. Like, you have to run up to the stage, so you already kind of smoke.

Your heart rates elevated. So it rewards fitness. It rewards the ability to be sort of nimble. it rewards you being able to shoot from unconventional positions. That's to me the best training for a guy. And you're also dealing with wind because the small groups, small size of the targets. So you have to make a quick wind call and figure out what am I going to do? Am I going to hold the right edge? The woods coming out of the right. Am I going to click the knob on my scope and hold center? You have to make all these sort of tactical decisions. And you have to kind of make strategic decisions.

waiting to shoot, you're watching conditions, you're looking at the other shooters, you're talking to how the guys are shooting, you're watching them, so you're war-gaming stages. And that's a great training tool, because it keeps you sort of like, you know, mentally nimble. So that style of shooting is great. And there is a tactical element of it. You see the dudes running around with like, you know, $900 cry pants and full of Velcro and stuff like that. So, but, uh, Those rifles are extremely accurate. Guys are loading their own ammunition. They're measuring their powder within a kernel of powder.

Crazy shit. And that's a fantastic way of training. And lots of military guys are going to, especially in the soft community. I mean, I probably know two dozen guys that they do that on the weekends. I want to grind through the last couple questions because we have some other big topics I wanted to get into. Actually, that you would suggest it that are really good. But Andrew wanted to know, do people who are in the President's 100 tab walk around like their hot stuff? Are they kind of treated like the kid who wins the science there?

So the President's 100 tab is a Martianship award. Every year at the National Championships, there's a pistol match and a rifle match. And it's stages of fire. Pistol has their stages, rifles are their stages. And it's a traditional kind of course of fire in the top 100 shooters. at the end of the match or awarded the President's 100 award.

Now in the Army we could wear it as a tab. The longest tab. Right. So it used to be that was the top tab because it went by the length of the tab. So if a guy in Special Forces tab was President's 100 Special Forces and, you know, a Ranger tab.

And then the last revision to AR670-1 changed it. Uniform regulations. Yes, that's the regulation of you're supposed to wear uniform, you know, your cyberns are one one millionth. 670 dashed fun. Right. Yeah.

Your cybers are one one millionth of an age too long. Right, right. Your mustache isn't tapered down. It doesn't look enough like, you know, the guy from the Adams family. Pretty Mercury. Right. So, uh, so I think the, the president's hunter tab is now the lowest tab. Um, just they, though.

Really? Yeah. So I was ranger qualified and I had a president's under tab. So I wore my ranger tab and my president's hunter tab under tab. It looks dumb. It's weird. It's the, it's the, it's so. The haters, yeah.

Here's my thing. So anyway, at the AMU, if you didn't earn your president's 100 tab within about two years or three years being on the team, you probably weren't doing your job. So in my job, in my unit, it was a common thing. And it was more like if you didn't have it, like, dude, why don't you have it yet? Now, and in other environments, I don't know, I can't speak to that. It is a very prestigious award because they only give out 100 a year. And I know on the rifle side, there's about 13, 1,400 competitors that go out for it every year.

Wow. And of those competitors, most of them have already gotten the award before. So I think they give out about 15 to 20 new ones a year. Really? That's it. Yeah. Wow. So the other, like, 75 guys.

I always assumed it was like 100 people. No, have earned off four. So you're not out of the mix if you have. It's like, you don't get mustard sting or, or, you know, stars. No, I, when I was, you know, so when I was in the army and I was shooting, you know, I would have a guy who's like, man, so like, this sucks. You're shooting and like, you already have it. I'm like, yeah, my job is to keep you out, dude. Yeah. Make you earn it. Thank God Ranger Catalan. Keeper in the tab.

Yeah. Thank God. Thank God. Yeah. Yeah. I've got none of us in that aspect. Andrew. Like, I think when I was in the Army, I probably saw one person with a president. 100 tab and I don't think they walked around like they're hot shit because after a while it's actually pain in the ass because you have to explain it constantly yeah and you have I mean you have like

people coming up trying to make uniform corrections like hey there sergeants so I would actually start making up stories about it so I got like President Harnsab what's that like were you more like a two guard I'm like actually what it is is they take the top two bodyguards and we have two in each state so I'm

part of the Georgia guys so we have two in each states where the president's So when the president comes to the state for like a campaign event, they would bring us out to help guard him. That's awesome. Guys are like, yeah. So like, you know, you have to stay on top of it, you know, to maintain all your brevity codes and whatnot. But I also, like, I also don't think that anybody looked at it. I'm like the kid who won the science.

Like, I mean, in any organization, especially once you get into like the tiered units where people have badges or or tabs or anything else like that, There's always a certain amount of envy. Tab envy, badge envy. Like, you know, you see somebody with a Pathfinder badge or, you know, President's 100. You know, you see something with somebody or you see somebody with something you don't have. You're like, hmm. I don't get that.

Yeah, that's the, I mean, that's the thing that the Marines always would say to the Army guys, like, you guys have patches for everything. You know, everyone's just the Marine. And actually, it's not a bad perspective. Right. Honestly, because you do the whole sniff test that military guy, army guys do all the time. Yeah. Yeah, the very first thing I'd come in, like, scoot around and see if you have a tab and like

scoot around on your right shoulder, see if you have a combat action. Yeah, I mean, that's something that we definitely do in the Army, and it's probably not a great thing, but that's how it's the way we do it. Yeah. Yeah. I was never close enough. I mean, that was like a whole other stratosphere. The only guys I ever knew that had it were you guys.

Right. So it's never really a thing with, I just wanted to get my rude to ask. Absolutely. I don't get smoked anymore. You finally get a seat of the back of the deuce and half. That's why I want to get it. And it depends where you're at, too, because, like, in Ranger Battalion, having a Ranger Tab, nobody, nobody cares.

So, that's the grand analogy. So having a Ranger Tab and Ranger Tide is, like, having a President's Hunter Tad at at the AMU. Right. Like, if you didn't have it, you like, yeah. What's up with that? Yeah. I mean, yeah.

I mean, you're not, why are you there? But it is hard to get because it's one match. It's not a lot of bullets. And if you make one mistake, You have to wait a year for the next opportunity. It's like the grenade toss at the EID. It's the grenade toss. It's headspace and timing on the 50-Cal, which is I got me on EAP.

Ian asks, in the faster-paced environments these days, do you pre-build a range card or just estimate range rapidly? So, good question. It depends on, like, how, like, if I'm going to, if I'm shit in the competitive world, right, for, for, like, a match, you're going to, want to build that range card before you go out there. Now there's some ways of dealing that some, both, you know, if we're talking about like a military environment, there's ways of training so that you can deal with targets at unknown ranges quickly and you don't have to do a lot of

calculations. There are some drills that you can do based on the optics that are on sniper rifles that, you know, hey, If this to this fits within my crossair from here to here, then I know that I can hold here in the crossair and hit the target. Guaranteed it, yeah. Right? So you can have some of those things,

but those tend to really run out of gas at around 6, 700 meters past that. You really need to know what the solution is. So what most of the big kids do, at least in the competitive world, is they build a range card beforehand. end. So with range cards, what I would do is, and especially like some of this extreme long range shooting that I've done like out to two miles, I would have the elevation setting I needed to shoot with the rifle, whether it was what I was going to hold in the radical, what I was going to dial on the scope, I would have some wind notes. So what was the wind, how much did

the bullet drift in the wind at say one mile an hour, four mile an hour, eight mile an hour, you know, some of the modern scopes have dots in the reticle, and the dots represent wind holes in miles per hour. Oh, you mean like the SVD scope that has like that grid in it? Well, yeah, I mean, the modern scopes have, they have wind dots. So their time of flight dots is what they are. It's out there. Guys can look at it and find out how it works. But essentially, once you know your bullet's performance, that dot might represent.

present a four mile per hour wind. So if I'm holding in the reticle for elevation, I can put this dot next to where I'm holding on the line. If my hold is four mils, so at the four mil line, that first dot might be four miles an hour of wind. So I might write down target size, how wide the target is in miles per hour of wind. I would definitely write down my cheat sheet of elevations and I might write down what what I think the wind is going to be doing and how much it's going to be blowing. Yeah. So I mean again I was raised as a as a you know assistant gunner and a machine gunner so that whole concept of like almost doing like a range card beforehand it's very valuable. Yeah. It's really effective. And I mean I haven't I haven't operated in any kind of

capacity of sniper for like a decade now. So I'm not familiar with any new optics within new systems. But But generally, like in an urban environment, you're taking snap. You know, if you're set up in an O.P., yeah, you might do a range card. But generally, if you're like on a support by fire, not support by fire line, but if you're in an Overwatch or whatever, all your shots are going to be close enough that they can be snapshots anyway. Exactly. And if you're set up where you need the range and you need to know the ranges,

generally you're going to have the time to set up a range card because you're really not talking about. Nowadays we have laser range finders. Right. And there's ways of mitigating that too, like, you know, if I can dial and this is what what was old is now new again so

you know when I was when I first started like doing this sort of military marchership type of thing the sniper stuff you know some of the optics guys would dial a 300 meter zero or you dial a 500 yard zero

and you would use body holes you can still use some of those techniques so you know if you're if you're at a position and you have to deal you think I'm only dealing with targets at to say 5 or 600, I might put a 300 meter zero on the rifle and know where to hold at these other distances. Again, and the more dangerous space you have because the ballistic effectiveness of your cartridge, the more you can get away with, which again drives like why guys, 7.62 threw away Winchester as a sniper caliber is going away completely within so much.

So talking a little bit about what a 300 meter zero is, what a 500 meter zero is, like why that's important? Well, the concept of zeroing means that you are, you're basically co-witnessing the strike of the round to your point of aim. So if I have a 300 meter zero, that means that like the center of my crossair or the tip of my front sight post, that the bullet is going to hit exactly where my sights are pointed at that range. so in sniping stuff and like precision rifle stuff you know you're shooting anywhere from like a hundred out to say 11 12 1,300 yards or meters so you have to make adjustments to that so if I have a 100 meter zero which is kind of standard in the precision rifle world 100 yard 100 meter if you're working in yards you have 100 yards zero working in meters 100 meters zero and that's my baseline and I know either through experience of going out and shooting and gathering data or if I'm using a ballistic solver

electronic format, whether it's on a wind meter that has ballistic stuff in it or there's, I mean, on my phone, I've probably got five or six different ballistic solvers. I have never used that you can download on iTunes and you type in ballistics on iTunes and you see all the ones that come up.

Right after time on the team house. Anyway, go ahead. There's dozens of them. Well, we'll get back to some questions in a few but there are some other topics you had brought up, Emma, but I didn't want to let it fall by the wayside. One of them you touched on a couple times already is the current state of special operations sniping. And where is that at? I guess there's a lot of different angles to come at that from. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe the way to talk about it is the way it's evolved over the last 10 or 20 years and kind of where we're at now and maybe project where it's going in the future.

So I would say up until even the late 90s, the evolution of sniper stuff, technology-wise, training-wise, is very static, almost the same as like from Vietnam. It really didn't change much. I mean, we got some different weapon systems. You had an M-24. But M-24 had a mill reticle and had minute-of-angle adjustments. the elevation was one minute of angle clicks and the windage was half minute of angle clicks and the reticle was mills like did that make sense to anybody but it was like that for 20 years right um how guys trained and you know so like so back in the 90s or in the 80s or in the 70s if you were a sniper what you did was again your primary job is you have to engage a target at an unknown distance so target pops up How far away is that target? Well, how do I do that?

Well, I have to figure out how far away it is by, I can, like, interrogate it with a device. I can use a mill relation formula. So that's basically how big the target is in my scope, my reticle, and I can apply a mathematical formula if I know how big the target is, and that'll give me the range of the target. Now, now that I have the range of the target, how do I hit the target? So back in the old days, like the way Sniper School was conducted for 20 years is, you'd get a guy, you start out of 100 meters, and you'd zero. And when you're zero, you'd take the little screw out of your scope cap,

and you'd set that to zero, 100 meter, boom. And then you'd go and you'd shoot 150 meters, and you record, okay, I need like one plus one click at 150 meters. You'd write it down. And you go all about every 50, all the way back to like 750 meters. I need the 700 meters setting on my scope plus like three clicks, whatever. You had all that crap written down.

In your dope book. In your dope book. Yeah. Every time around these big dope books and everything, right? So the big change happened when the ability to predict trajectories with electronics came about. So first ballistic solvers were these things called A-trags. And it was kind of a pretty large, it was like a giant palm pilot. Like the mortar ballistic computer?

Well, it was a big, it was like a palm pilot. And it had ballistic software. like on a flash drive or in it. And the way it worked was you shot 100 meter zero and then in conditions and then you typed into the solver all the info on your rifle.

So how fast the bullet is going? What bullet I'm shooting? So you had to input a ballistic coefficient of the bullet, the height above the bore, all this stuff. And then when you're shooting at your target, you had to input the current atmospheric data because that's one thing with ballistics, exterior

ballistics. So there's three types of ballistics you have internal exterior and terminal ballistics. So internal is kind of everything happens inside of a rifle from when the firing pin strikes to firing pin so that's the gas pressure, the shape of the bullet, design of

the chamber, design of the barrel, the twist rate, all this stuff. exterior ballistic is everything that happens to that bullet. When it leaves the barrel to its time and flight till it hits a target. And terminal ballistics is what happens to that bullet when it hits the target comes around. So it's like

glass shooting and what happens like the hunting bullet, how well is it do when it hits a deer or a person or how a bullet does a ballistic gel, all these things. So the solvers would solve predictions based on equations

and algorithms with all this atmospheric data. You say, okay, it's 75 degrees, a thousand feet above sea level, humidity is like 25%, blah, blah, blah. You put all this stuff in, and then the solver would go,

if your target's 750 meters, you need to hold 5.1 mils, or you need to hold 17 minutes of elevation. That was like, that was a huge sea change. That was the lightning bolt, like evolutionary quantum leap in... Otherwise, you would have to be. to spend like ungodly amounts of time to collect all that data.

And the thing about collecting data, the weak point of collecting data, is that you've collected it. Right, you've collected it at that one time in place. And unless you can predict how that trajectory changes, so at Fort Bend in Georgia, on our range, elevation was about 300 feet above sea level. So if I get my data at 300 feet above sea level, 300 feet above sea level at 90 degrees, and with 80% Fort Benning humidity and I go

and I'm in like the mountains of Afghanistan and it's 40 degrees or 30 degrees and I'm at 10,000 feet above sea. I remember when me and my sniper partner Joe got to Afghanistan from Bening we had to come up a minute of angle. Right so like how do you predict that? So that was the biggest evolutionary thing

and then once the solver thing started then the accuracy of the data. So how do we get this data more accurate? So I would say the next biggest sort of thing that came through was this propagation of wind meters. So, you know, wind meter or an anonometer. So you can hold this thing up

and it'll tell you the velocity of the wind. Then they were able to put in the ballistic solver into the wind meter. So now the guy has one thing. Wow. So you have a wind meter, and it's got a blitzker solver, and these wind meters have atmospheric collection things on. So now the meter can tell you it's how many degrees. It's this much...

Right. The atmospheric pressure is 29.11. So now, and it does all the math for you. So once all that stuff was done, then the accuracy of the bullet data came into question. So we need to really truly understand how bullets acted in flight. So there was some work done on that. I would say the guy that did the most work on that is a guy named Brian Litts, who is a 100-pound brain dude.

And he's a champion competitive shooter. He decided that he wanted to start figuring this stuff out, instrumented, measure it. So all the way now, we've evolved. To turn it into a science. It is a science now. So his company's applied ballistics. So now we are at a point where, so if a company comes out with a new bullet, Hornet or Sierra or Lapua or Burger comes out with a new bullet,

they will shoot that bullet across Doppler radar that can measure time of flight data off of the base of that bullet, like maybe get 100 pings on that bullet out to like 1,500 meters. Wow. Or 2,000 years. Yeah. And now, instead of making guesses at what the bullet's trajectory looks like, because, hey, we have a ballistic coefficient, which is an expression of the bullet's ability to penetrate the air.

And the ballistic coefficient is really... You know, a meter off the gun. And the ballistic coefficient is a ratio between the sectional density of the bullet and the form factor of the bullet relative to a ballistic model. Now you have actual radar data. And they have the ability to take that radar data and put it in the solver. So now your solver knows the exact.

All you have to know is input is like, my sights are this high over the door, my muzzle velocity is X, what the current atmospherics are, and we're now pushing this first shot hit, this hit probability out now to, I mean, for real, if you have a cartridge that's capable of it,

we're getting first round hits or close enough to the target where you're right on it out to 34, 3,500 yards and beyond. So, Emma, let me just throw this out again. Some of the longest record sniper shots in the field. JTF2, 2017, 3,540 meters, Special Forces sniper with a Barrett in 2012, 2,815 meters. this looks like a British sniper with an AI L-115-A3, 2,475 meters. That was in 2009. Is this why these guys were able to reach out to these lengths? It's part of it.

I think part of it is there's now calibers, there's now accurate sniper systems that are ballistically effective out to those ranges. So the Canadians are using 50 caliber, right? So they're using effectively a match grade 50 caliber. the Brits might be using 50 caliber might be using 338 LAPUA. These are cartridges that are relatively new for sniping.

338 LAPUA is a very effective cartridge. It shoots a 250 green bullet at 2,950 feet per second. Wow. It's fast. If you think about how fast is 3,000 feet per second? 3,000 feet per second. How fast

that is? That at 1,000 yards in a vacuum where there's no air air resistance the bullet takes one second to go a thousand yards at five-eighths of a mile the bullet travels in one second actual time of flight is about

you know depending on the cartridge on velocity and the coefficient bill but it's part of that part of the prediction and you know it's been my experience that you know optics have really come a long way too so if you're missing you can see it right you can see where you're missing. I mean guys are using thermals, all kinds of extremely expensive equipment

that was maybe designed for a reconnaissance role. Now snipers are using it because they can see where the bullets fall. Yeah. So yeah, all that stuff I think and training, right? So all those programs, the Canadian program, the British program, they have some of the best training in the world. They have both those companies. They have both those companies. countries, militaries have a really long marksmanship lineage and they take it seriously, for real. With this data, so back in the old days, like, you know, 97 and whatnot, before 2000, one of the things that was always drilled into our head was the Cold Boar. Is Cold War? Is it figured into, like, does it matter? Is it not as significant as we used to be led to believe?

Is it fed into this stuff? Not really. So, I mean, Coldborer means, so the very first shot you take out of the rifle, where does it hit? Right. I have found that Coldbore, more often than not, if it's not where, say, your 10th shot is, is usually a factor of you. Okay. And not the rifle and ammunition system. So that is not something that's taken into consideration with the holistic?

It's, you know, as we say, the out on everything when you're in military instructor is like, it's situationally dependent. Meti, sorry. Right. So it depends on situation. So if I know that every time I go out, my first shot is like 0.2 mils low, I have to factor that into my first shot. I have to hold 0.2 mils high in my first shot. And, you know, if you're, you know, the whole data collection thing, Snyder still do that. Right. You know, you should still be doing that. If you're serious about your craft, whether you're a competitive shooter, civilian shooter, you're a hobbyist, you're a military sniper. You should be serious about your craft and document all that stuff. And see if it, but part of that too, that cold war, it can change. So we know things now and these solvers can do things like as the temperature increases, the bullet usually leaves the barrel faster because the powder burns faster in a hotter environment. It's a chemistry thing, right? So the solvers now are, I can measure my velocity. So at, say, you know, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, my velocity is 2,600 feet per second.

And at 85 degrees Fahrenheit, my velocity is 2,650 feet per second. And at like 20 degrees Fahrenheit, my muzzle velocity is like 2,510 feet per second. For example, I can enter those data points into my solver. and then when the solver reads the temperature, it can adjust the prediction that it gives you based on the muzzle velocity it is assuming you're going to have because of that temperature. Do the solvers have, I mean, do they figure for cold bore? Is it, or is that some? I think some do.

The ones that I use usually don't. So it's more of a, you know, again, it's more of a thing that I know. I shot this two-mile competition a couple years ago, and this one particular rifle, it was a mechanical thing, whether it was like how it's set in the bedding of the rifle after the first shot, but the first shot was always like about a minute of angle high. Okay. Always. So the very first shot, I aimed one minute of angle low, and afterwards I held center.

So for people who don't know what that is, a cold war is the very first shot that you shoot in the day. And for a sniper, a lot of times, that data is vital because you're not heating up your barrel or doing whatever. You know, whatever they say, you know, a colder barrel, maybe the round travel slower or whatever. Yeah, then they say like a lot of these things are kind of obsolete with modern weapons. Right. Like we used to have like a breaking in period with guns. Well, you still really, you need to break in guns. Yeah.

The higher the caliber is, the more, so some of these really high performance calibers, like 6'5 Creedmoor, 300 Norma, they're now being used or will be used in military systems, you do experience where the velocity of the barrel will change until the barrel is seasoned. And that's a certain round number based on, you know, based on how the powder, the how it fowls, everything. So is that term seasoned to me wear and tear on the lining of the barrel? Is that what it it's, you know, it's something that I still don't think they know exactly what it is. It could be, there's a couple of things, a couple different, you know, theories about it. One theory is, is you are changing the bore, the condition of the bore.

So it's, after it's first made, it might have some, like, little marks on it from tooling. And you're shooting it smooths those tooling marks out. Another is the, just the fire and heat that comes out of a, of a rifle cartridge. The temperature out of a fired round is actually higher than the melting point of steel.

Really? So when you shoot a round out of your 308 or 300 Winchester Magnum, the temperature caused by the powder burning is greater than the melting point of steel. So you're melting, you're eroding

the steel and the chamber in a barrel every shot. So after a certain point, maybe it wears to a certain point and then the bullet is jumping a certain amount where it wasn't before or maybe you're adding material to the bore because

you're depositing carbon or maybe you're eroding the lands and grooves to a point to where you're knocking the edges off of them and that changes velocity. Whatever the reason is there is a net effect. There's a net effect that velocity will

typically in most rifles regardless of caliber they'll typically speed up a bit from a brand new barrel that you just screw on or just get the rifle, you buy it from your local gunsmith or gun shop and you take it out and after 100 rounds a lot of guys or 200 rounds, guys will realize that their velocity is speeding up.

Does that have anything to do at all with, like, what type of stock do you have, whether you have like a floating stock or like, is it that the barrel settling? It's more what's happening inside the barrel. So that's in the terminal. ballistics thing and the thing that makes it really tough about internal ballistics is you know we can see external ballistics and we can see turbo but a camera inside the chamber right you can't now we can instrument chambers with pressure we know that's one thing that industry that we do is uh you can measure pressure

by a couple different ways of um you basically have a transducer somewhere in the chamber area and when the rifle fires it that pressure can basically pushes on a p.m. etso crystal that causes... Like piezo electric crystals. It'll cause some voltage change, and then that voltage can be interpreted as pressure. That's amazing. And that's old technology. We've been able to do that for decades and decades.

But you can do all that. You can actually even see the pressure curve relative to where the bullet is in a barrel. So, you know, you reach a peak pressure, and then the pressure starts going back down. So we, I mean, we know where that peak pressure is relative to. wherever it is in the bore, but you still can't see what that bullet actually looks like as it's engaging the lands and grooves in the rifle. You can. It says not healthy. Yeah, I mean, you can do it like one time. So your perspective on the modern state of special operations sniping, just to try to summarize.

Oh, sorry. It's become much more of a science. We went far afield. No, it's okay. I love the side marks. I love them. It's become much more of a science. You've been able to take many more measurements than you were in the past and enter them into computation. So the ability to predict is much greater. The tools that the guys have to help with that prediction, so both solvers and wind meters.

The caliber and the ammunition and the weapons platforms are much better. They're more precise. They're more ballistically effective than they were 20 years ago. And, you know, if you look at, if you look at what's, again, going back to hit probability, what goes into hit probability? Well, everything stacks, right? So if I have a muzzle velocity of a certain amount, that error is stacked to my, actually, my base precision of the rifle. And then that error is stacked onto what's my range, what is my, what is my range estimation? what's the word for it

how accurately can I define that? What kind of resolution do I have? So now there are range estimation tools that are in line with the rifle with the gun platform. Oh really? So mounted to the rifle is a range estimator.

There's a laser range finder. And some laser range finders mounted in line with the rifle also give a ballistic prediction. So now the things that I had to do with the Kestrel, if the system is all calibrated and zero correctly and everything else, that I can be on the target and I can press a button and I can see the data. It says the target's 921 meters away and just below it, it can tell me what my data is to shoot it. So it's all super data driven. It's a much more so than

back in our death. It's all integrated, right? It's integrated. It's integrated. And all those aspects of it. And I think the biggest change is the ability for guys to operate in limited visibility. So the night vision and thermal systems. Right. So the just the rap, the advancement of how, and you know how fast night vision changes. You can buy the hotness. Yeah. And in two years it's obsolete. Yeah. Now they have color night vision. Yeah. And there's crazy shit. So all that stuff, without getting too specific but there's, so that level of ability and the ability

to illuminate the target, ability to see the target, and the ability to spot at night using different techniques and different equipment has you know, has, it's just exploded. So that's probably the biggest thing. On that note,

you said you'd like to talk also about the advanced sniper rifle, the ASR program, and maybe that's great and also into what's the future of sniper? So this kind of talks about the future of like special operations sniper. So the ASR and the advanced sniper rifle, again, this is all open source stuff. But, you know, this is a program that, that, you know, started probably four or five years ago,

and now it's coming to fruition to where special operations guys are going to get a rifle with two calibers. It's never been fielded before. that, and those calipers, I mean, these are straight up, it's a straight up target. It's a bullet that came out of the target shooting world. The specifications on this rifle are equivalent to what you would expect any match rifle to be able to shoot. Equivalent to the same standards, same expectation I as the head coach, the AMU would, our gunsweds would give me a brand new thousand-d-hour rifle. how well I expected to shoot, that's how well these rifles shoot.

But it has to be fielded in, you know, all the conditions that, you know, those guys up at Michalaka have to put combat rifles through. Right. And the biggest change is the ability to change calibers. And what purpose does that serve? So, uh, one can you, you know, so the system is, you know, it, I think, you know, comes with about three, it's kind of spec that come with three barrels. So one barrel is a training barrel. And then one barrel is an anti-personnel barrel. And then the other barrel is an anti-material barrel. Okay.

So the anti-material barrel is a separate caliber with a separate projectile that has very, very good armor penetration ability. And the anti-personnel barrel is very high performance. But because it's so high performance, it's not really a rifle that you can go out and try. train every day for a month and shoot 10,000 rounds through it. Because there's a trade-off. The higher performance that your cartridge is, usually the less barrel life you have. Okay.

So the training barrel is designed that a guy can still train all his core competencies. He can do the mechanical work of marksmanship. He can still train how to read the win. Because the thing is, with these solvers that we have now, all you have to do is work all you have to worry about is the wind speed you don't have to memorize dope anymore

so when I train guys for long range shooting I train them to try to always capture what the total wind speed is never mind you know when I first started shooting competition shooting you know one of these old timers at AMU I was like

hey sergeant how much wind is going out there And he looks at his spot scope, he looks up the wind flags, and takes some, you know, grass throws it. He was like, it's about four minutes. I'm like, well, why? Why is it four minutes a win? He goes, well, it just is. I'm like, well, how do you know?

He's like, well, you know, it looks like it is. You know, the mirage is doing that. You got that flag. And it's four minutes, man. Just shoot you four minutes. And I was like, okay, well, I don't have like 20 years to learn. I do this shit. I want to learn it like right now.

And that's really the way that these solvers work. So I don't care what the bullet's performance is. As long as I can tell me as a human being what the wind speed is, what the direction is. And those two things together, the direction and the velocity, will give you the total crosswind that's out there. Once I have the total crosswind, I can use my solver, I can use my reticle, I can just shoot, mile per hour of wind. So a big change in just the way people do it, whether it's the precision rifle shooting community or the military community, is guys communicating to each other in velocity of wind. Because if you and I are on the same position, and I have a 300 Winchester

Magnum and you have an M4 with a scope on it, right? And we're shooting and I'm like, Dave, how much wind are you using? And you go, oh, I'm using like four mills of wind. That does me zero good. I can do nothing with that information. Right. But if you go, A, well, I'm using six miles an hour. It's six miles an hour for your rifle.

It's six miles an hour for my rifle. Right. So inculcating that and training guys and think of wind speed as a total velocity number, don't really worry about memorizing clicks or mills or any of that stuff. Because your solver can tell you that,

your little cheat sheet, your data card can tell you that. And there's all kinds of these shorthand rule of thumb formulas that have been developed that work pretty well. So, you know, I can know that if I'm at a certain range with this system, I know that my wind is probably this for a certain mile and hour wind because of this sort of short, sort of shorthanded sort of formula. So this, this ASR project is it designed to replace. the 110, the wind mag, the whatever anti-material. No, it's designed to replace the M24,

M-24 is already to replace. It's designed to replace the 2010. Okay. So the X-M-2010, which is 300 Winchester Magnum, ASR, across Socom, is designed to replace this rifle. And why are they replacing the 300-1-1-1? Why did they decide that they needed to do that? So the 300-Winchester Magnum is a great

cartridge. It's very ballistically effective. But, you know, some of this stuff is chicken and the egg stuff, right? So, you need to have a capability, but

you can't actually make a system to have the capability unless you have a requirement. And you can't run a requirement unless you've proven you needed the capability. So what happened was one of the big changes with the way the system was set up, it was

was a bunch of operational guys within Silcom got together and said, okay, this is what we think Wright looks like and this is what we want as a system. The 300 wind mag, it is pretty good out to 1,000 meters or maybe 1100 meters and actually beyond if the guy's capable. but it's all about what is the percentage of hit and extending that hit probability out as far as we can. So instead

of like training a guy to be a Jared Van Auster or or somebody else that's really, really good and reading wind or shooting like I want to take my average guy and make him as effective as like a

stud at that range. The only way to do that with like long-range shooting and sniping is to increase the ballistic performance of the cartridge. You're going to compensate. You're compensating the technology. Yeah. Exactly, right. Yeah.

So, do you think modularity is going to be the future then of, you know, I mean, this is a huge question, but maybe of marksmanship, maybe of military marksmanship, maybe of sniper operations? So I remember when the scar came around, really in 2009, I think we started messing around with it at my unit. And I thought it was like a revelation. I thought it was great. Yeah. But kind of fell by the wayside. Man, no one really gives a shit about the scar. I mean...

Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, this rifle is modular. I mean, you can change calibrous within a few minutes. So that's a modular thing. And, you know, the buttstock closes like a lot of modern... But I was thinking of the barrels changing out, the caliber's changing. Yeah, barrels changing and caliber's changing out. You no longer have to send...

I mean, back in the old days with an M-24, once that thing stopped shooting, you had to send it to Remington. So you turn the rifle into the armor, and the armor's like, you're right, it sucks. I got to turn around, I got to send this thing to Remington. The Marines next to the Ronington, right? Yeah, the Marines, you know, again, the Marines are ahead of the Army a lot in marksmanship, all through history. This current marksmanship training that's going on, the kind of revision of marksmanship, for big army

marchership. A lot of that was heavily influenced by the Marine Corps, by Army guys going to Marine symposiums, going to see

Marine training and taking those lessons learned. The Marines do marksmanship. Great. I mean, you're talking to a guy especially from like boot camp in the very beginning.

I mean, you're talking to guy that I shot competitively against the Marine Corps rifle team for, you know, over a decade. And my job was to like kick those guys in the dick.

every time I was on the range. But they do march of ship institutionally really well. I'll tell you, like in Marine Corps boot camp, I can't remember if it was two weeks or four weeks, just snapping in every single day dry firing with the traditional

slain positions. They devolved too. They've evolved too. So they're no longer, you know, the really static type of shooting. They've evolved their programs too to where, you know, they have sort of dynamic tables that include moving targets now and shooting and moving and, you know, all these lessons learn. And, you know, there's super smart guys

and they're doing the same thing that the Army's doing. Those fundamentals like stay with me through through everything just because of that snap, that period of snapping in. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So, but yeah, the modularity bit is, is huge because, you know, I now, if I have a barrel that is shot out or not performing, you know, the system comes with X amount of barrels or just having to put on there. It takes the operator two minutes to do that. So, you know, at a certain point, especially not a long

deployment or something happens, you know, you're jumping it and something goes right. And now you have a rifle that you can't shoot. It's a freaking tomato steak. You can change it out in the field. That's a huge thing. That's amazing. The other subject I wanted to get into

before we take a few more questions that I think people will be really fascinated by is ultra-long-range marksman. You were talking about once you get pushing out past 1500 meters, you were one of the guys out there really, you know, aiming for two miles out. Right. Some of those record-setting shots in the field that I had mentioned earlier, we spent, I think, a lot of time talking about the frictions so far that snipers or long-range marksmen encounter the wind distance, i.e., gravity, atmospherics. What changes once you get to the ultra-long range? So that's a really good question.

So shooting, precision shooting, you know, you have kind of like, you know, if you think about it, a couple different sort of, you know, settings on the gas pedal, right? So if I'm shooting at, say, 600 meters, I know that I don't really have to resolve. I don't have to be like Able Praslich, wind nerd, you know, if I'm only shooting out to 600 meters. I know that, depending on my caliber, I might just be able to hold the right edge of an ipsey. muscle it in. I'll say four or five miles an hour wind with a 7-6-2. If I hold the right edge of an Ipsic at about 600 meters,

I'm probably going to get a hit, whether it's anywhere on the edge depth to downwind. But the farther out that you go, we were talking earlier about, like, so I consider an elite wind reader, somebody that can get the direction of the wind within half an hour on a clock, which is 15 degrees,

and the velocity of the wind within one mile per hour. That's elite level win reading. Now, that level of confidence and, like, granularity, I've had two beers, I don't know. That's not what I'm going to say anymore. But that level of confidence isn't required if you're shooting on this side of 800 or even 1,000 meters. I mean, if your job is to get hits on target,

getting to win within two miles an hour of a total effect is probably okay. And if I'm at 500 meters and in, getting to win within four miles an hour of the, wind. It's probably okay to get hits. But if I start pushing out beyond the transonic range of that bullet, so velocity is supersonic, transonic

subsonic. Right. So supersonic is anything above well it's technically anything above Mach 1 right? But if you remember sort of Chuck Yeager, you know, going through all the vibrations and, you know, all the test pilots that were killed,

there's a zone between about Mach 0.8 to about Mach 1.2, which is very unstable. So the bullet goes through a lot of turbulence through that zone. So if you're shooting at or near that zone, your ballistic performance of your bullet starts degrading extremely fast. Does it get a lot of wobble or what happens to it? Well, some bullets do some bullets don't.

So well-designed bullets are stable through transonic. Okay. Poorly designed bullets are not. So an example of a bullet that the, and it's a bullet that was in like Army competitive, ammunition. So when the army shot 308 for everything, M14 days, the M852 was competitive shooting ammunition, and it was loaded with 168 grain Sierra Match King. The 168 grain Sierra Match King suffers from a problem of dynamic instability. It's because of the angle and the length of the boat tail. So what happens is bullets stay stable in flight because you have a balance

between the center of pressure and the center of gravity. So think of an arrow. Center of gravity on an arrow might be like if you hold an arrow and where it balances, that's a center of gravity. Center of pressure is what keeps it sort of longitudinal.

So on an arrow, the fletchings are the center of pressure. Without the fletchings, the arrow kind of goes end over end, right? With a bullet, we can't put fletchings on a bullet, so we spin a bullet for gyroscopics to build. So the center of pressure and the center of gravity, as long as they're far enough apart, the bullet is stable.

When center pressure will move on RPMs, okay, so as it slows down, the center pressure starts moving. So when you get to a point to where if the bullet isn't balanced well, in flight, it'll get unstable. So that 168 grain match king had a 308. If you shot that thing past about 800 yards, they would tumble into the target. And this was our long range ammo. Well, it was marksmanship down. It set on the box, not for combat use, right? But it was unstable.

Yeah. As soon as it got below MOT 1.2, it was unstable. It would tumble. It would yaw. You'd see bullets like this. Wow. This, like an imprint, like a Bugs Bunny imprint of a bullet in the paper. You probably, you wouldn't want to get hit by it.

And this is a whole other conversation for another time, but there's this big misconception that 556 tumbles. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean Normal bullets do not tumble No, they don't I mean bullets when they hit When they hit mediums, whether it's a gel Or something where they tend to Yaw and bullets tend to

Most bullets tend to break apart Some bullets are purpose built To maintain their mass You know, bullets that are solid monolithic bullets. You look at some of these bullets guys Go shoot like dangerous game with They're like solid copper bullets So they're designed to like

retain all their weight and just bore as deep as they can into dangerous game. And 5.56, because if you hit, it's extremely high velocity in ammunition. 5.56. You know, you're talking about velocity's excess of 3,000 feet per second. And so when it hits target, because that velocity, it yaws quickly, the back of the bullet might break off. So guys would, I think, mistakenly think that the bullet was tumbling because the bullet wouldn't go on a straight line once it hit somebody. It would like take a right turn or left turn that did incredible damage. But that damage was caused just by velocity and things that we know about, you know, by shooting high velocity projectiles at like at gel and water. You can see bullets create a, they have a shock. Cavitation effect. So, but yeah, bullets, if it's tumbling, it's doing something wrong, right? So, but like, so that sort of dynamic. instability of the 168, that was like, that capped the range that you could, you could use that bullet. Yeah.

So like bullet designs come a long way to where now bullets are stable through that. A well-designed bullet will still end, hit point first. It'll maintain that same attitude. It'll follow the nose and the boat tail will align with the bullet trajectory. So then it won't fly like this. It'll fly and maintain a nose forward orientation all the way to the target. even if it hits at well below subsonic loss. So when you're talking

ultra long range, what caliber are you shooting? So the starter caliber is probably a 3.38 lot below. Okay. Which is funny because in the regular world that's like the biggest thing that you probably shoot. So

this competition that I've been a part of a few years called the King of Two Mile and it's down in New Mexico each year around 4th of July and the tariff. And the target start, the first target is about 1,500 yards. And if you make it to the finals,

the final target is two miles. So there's 1,760 yards in a mile. So the final target is like 3,520 yards. So the caliber you're talking about is three separate. We're talking man-shaped man-sized. No, so

they work out to about one minute of angle targets. Oh, got to the distance. Gotcha. So at that range, one minute of angle is 36 inches or whatever. If a two minute an angle target, then it's like two yards across, right? You know, 72 inches or whatever. But the biggest difference is

you have to be able to refine the wind to within 15 degrees and one mile an hour. So as a matter of fact, we were talking earlier about, you know, a tactic or a technique in order to define the actual direction of the wind. So when you're looking at mirage, this kind of this disturbance in the air, you can see it on a road or on the hood of a car or on the rooftop of a building. If you're looking directly into the wind or the wind is directly from your back, that mirage doesn't appear to have any movement.

It kind of goes straight up. It's called a boil, it's the term people use. So if the wind is coming from an angle, for me to find that boil, I actually turn my optics until I see it. So if I know the wind is coming from somewhere in your direction, I would turn my spotting scope

or my binoculars until the wind boiled and that is the actual direction. So to talk about what kind of resolution or fidelity you need, I would actually, I'll have a compass

or I'll take the compass on my iPhone and I'll shoot an asthma at the target. I'll find the boil. I'll shoot an azimid at the boil. I'll get the delta between those two degrees.

And so if it's like a 59 degree wind relative to my sort of my direction of fire. I'll type in the sign of 59 degrees. So 59 degrees and the sign is 0.857. So that's an 86% win. So the notion of a full of a full value wind, a half value wind, a quarter of a value value. That's like kindergarten or shit for what you're doing. You can't do it like that because the target, So a thing that, a useful exercise for anybody to do that shoots competitively or wants to shoot competitively is work out how wide the target is. You know, I talked a little bit about it before.

You know, at say 600 meters and Ipsic, an Ipsic, like, size target is about four miles an hour across if you're using a 308. If you're using like a 6-5 pre-bore, it's about 6 miles an hour of wind across. That means that at zero, I can hit the edge, and at 6, it hits downwind edge, right? So when you're talking, so even these are really large calories you're shooting. So a 375 shaitak with a 379 grain burger bullet with a muzzle velocity of 2,850 people per second. So the 379 grain bullet, that's more than double the weight, right, of a lot of other conventional projectiles that were shooting, right? and the muzzle velocity is faster than what like a 7-6-2

is out of a sniper rifle. So, in normal, very high, ballisticly effective projectiles, but the bullet is in the air like eight or nine seconds. The maximum, the maximum ordinate. So the highest bullet is in trajectory is around 600 feet. Oh my gosh. So the bullet's like 600 feet in the air.

So now I have to calculate not only what the, wind is doing where I am, I have to make a guess of what's the wind speed 600 feet up in the air. I have to look at the terrain. So I'm shooting across a valley or there might be one or two terrain features between me and the target. So you have to start making some assumptions of what the wind is doing, what the terrain is doing to that wind. The aerodynamic. Right. It's very rare that you're going to have kind of a homogeneous wind from you to the target, those ranges. So a good way to visualize it is like take a buck

of water and just pour it on a terrain model and as the water runs down that's pretty much what the wind is doing so you look at like what's the predominant wind maybe what's the wind forecast at what's the wind's aloft i would look at that and then i start making some assumptions you also you know wind is just air moving so other things cause the air to move you have terrain causes the air to move the time of the day can cause the air to move so if i'm sure across the valley and it's in the evening As air cools down, air goes downhill. And as air heats up, air goes uphill. So if you're out in the desert shooting, there's a range out in Phoenix that we shoot competitions on. And you go out that range at 6, 30, 7 o'clock in the morning, and the wind is whipping. The flags, the American flag, and you're like, oh, my God, dude,

this is going to suck so bad. It's 25 miles an hour. And then at 9 o'clock in the morning, the wind dies. because it's heated up all the air and all that air moving up is causing that wind. So wind will go up and downhill across down valleys, down terrain. So you have to look at that. So you're making all these assumptions based on experience, based on guesses.

Because wind, I learned this in college, a high pressure system collapsing into a low pressure system. Correct. So as the temperature increases, that's why it's... Right. And then that's another factor too. is like if I know I have weather coming in, I have to start, be able to make some predictions about what the wind is going to do and change

during the day, right? You can make some basic assumptions. There's really good tools. I mean, honestly, I'll go, before I shoot a match like that, I'll go check like weather under ground or any of these apps like, hey, at 1 o'clock, the wind's going to be at this angle, at this mile an hour. Right. I tell military guys,

you know, you've got guys that are paid to be weathermen in the military. Yeah. So, use those guys as a resource. like before you go to an area ask them what the wind's going to be doing and they'll be able to tell you pretty accurate. So when you're shooting out at two miles

Yeah all of these ballistic computers We've been talking about Your weather meters You're the levels you have on the guns Are they helping you at two miles Or is there still a little bit of an art In which the science has not yet penetrated

So there's a couple of yeah There's a couple of answers to that So number one You have to think about group size So if I have a one minute of angle gun, that means that at two miles, in best case scenario, my gun has a group size of about 40 inches. Now, if my target is like a 36 inch plate, that means that my group, if I have a perfectly center group, I'm going to miss off of different sides of the plate. So you have to trust your data. So if I miss, I tend not to change my solution.

If I see a shot go low, you have to hold back your inclination to hold high. Okay, yeah. Right? Because you might just be shooting on the edge of the group size. Right. And now you've missed off the other side of the groups, of the extreme outer edge of the group. That's one thing. The other part of the other, the main challenge in the shooting extremely,

long range is seeing the impact. That's the hardest part. And that, I think, is where there's the biggest opportunity for advancement in that game is new technology to spot rounds at those

ranges. Pass around 15, 1,600 meters, you cannot see a 30-caller bullet hit the round. These can't. There's not enough, there's not enough mass to it. Unless you have a perfectly, like, a dry, sandy area, you can see the dust pop up but if any kind of edge any if the ground is wet at all

there's any kind of grass around the target you know there's if there's you know plants or trees around that bullet goes into a dark spot you're not seeing it and a thing that we use a lot in shooting is watching the trace of the bullet right you've seen that yeah so the trace is formed by the bullet going down range supersonicically and it actually causes like a little bit of like a shock wave. And you can see that. It kind of looks like an invisible boat going down. When I was in sniper section and I didn't know a damn thing, the way they described to me is like, you remember in the matrix when they shoot the guns? Exactly. A little wave behind the bullets. Yeah, it's the matrix. It looks like the matrix, right? Well, that's great. But when you're a bullet,

if the apex of your trajectory is like three, 400, 500 feet in the air, you can't see it anymore. Right. You can see it out of here. Yeah. And it's going. Yeah. And you're not going to see it come back in. Yeah. So you lose that as a tool for spotting. So spotting is very, very difficult. So the evolution of extreme long range has gone to be in bigger calibers and bigger calibers and bigger calibers. So like the current guys that are the most successful at this sort of two and three mile shooting are using calibers like 416 Barrett,

which is basically a 50 caliber neck down to 0.413. six that shoots like a 500 or 550 grain bullet at close to 3,000 feet per second. So they're unusable. It's like a freight train. Unless you have these massive muzzle brakes. Yeah. Right? So, and these muzzle brakes, what they do is they deflect the gases coming out of the barrel.

Because recoil, you know, Newton, you know, that guy. So you've got energy coming out that way. It's pushing the rifle back this way. So the higher the caliber, the more recoil or kick it has. So, like, one of the worst things you can shoot is a 50 caliber, bolt action sniper rifle with a suppressor. That is... Kick your ass. It's painful, man.

It hurts a lot because there's nowhere for that force to go except straight back, and it's punishing. It just drives straight through you. It's like an impulse. It just never stops. And so 50 caliber, that's a problem with 50 caliber in military sniping. Guys, if you shoot too much, it'll physically damage the body. It'll burn the fuck out of your story. And you get things like detached retinas, and it'll fuck you all right.

And not only that, but your spot are always, you know, especially if you're shooting it in like a kind of an errant environment. You know, you shoot it and you look back and your spot are like the scopes like knocked over. The same place to be is right behind the rifle. Everybody else is having a bad thing. Yeah, yeah. And they're very loud. You have to use like double hearing protection, earplugs and, you know, earmuffs and whatever. So, in order to, extreme long range shooting is, it's all those things that make it very tough.

You have, the prediction is difficult because they have an accurate ballistic model. You have to have shot that bullet and been able to have like radar modeling or have a lot of experience where you can true your data out to those extreme ranges. There's not a lot of places you can shoot that stuff. East Coast, there's not a lot of places you can shoot. You have, so you have the prediction issue, you have just the precision of the range. rifle issue. I mean, you know, even you have a great shooting rifle, when you get to these ranges, your overall group size is probably bigger than the target. And then spotting and seeing impacts is really, really difficult. Do you think there's a possible technological solution for tracking

bullets in this case? Since you can't see the trace, it's really difficult to see the impact in that range. I mean, is there some way you could, I don't know, paint the bullet with some sort of IR or is there some sort of technology that we could apply to the bullet itself to see where it impacts. They're working on it. Yeah. I was going to ask you about the whole muzzle breaking things like that because I remember going down to the steel sniper course and shooting the 300 wind mag for the first time.

And, you know, guys were building those up with as much foam impact because, I mean, it would just bruise the hell out of your shoulder. And moving into these larger caliber weapons, how are they managing recoil with those and everything? It's by use of muzzle brakes. I mean, so that technology is really advanced to where if you look at things like precision rifle shooting, which is a sport, you know, and a lot of guys do it, and there's videos out there. If you just look on YouTube of like a PRS shooter, shooting a caliber, like, you know, a six-per-year-old. millimeter caliber, kind of equivalent to like a 243 or even a 308. And with these muzzle brakes,

these guys can almost just put the rifle on a bag or on a rest and just run the bolt and shoot it and maybe put their hand on top of the scope and almost free recoil and the gun doesn't move. Really? Yeah. So the ideal with these muzzle brakes, they're so good now that you can shoot and you can see your own trace through the scope. That's impressive. So there's such little movement of the rifle and optic when you're firing

that boom, you can sheet and you can actually see the trace through your own optic go in. You can spot your own impacts. And that is the big multiplier. If you're shooting by yourself, your ability to make corrections and spot your own impacts. But that's only

possible with the use of these breaks and things like that. Yeah. Because I mean, we got to that point with a 308 because, you know, it wasn't that big of a round. Exactly. You know, you dial it in tight enough and everything like that, secure enough. And you can, like, put it round after round after round once you have it down. But then you get to those larger, you know, the larger calibers.

And I haven't shot in a long time. Right. So I just can't imagine how you can maintain that, you know, your follow-on shots or your, you know. And a lot of that is skill and a lot of those training and, you know, technique. That's a very important thing to practice. Right. But you say the muzzle brake technology is really good. Yes.

So NEO suppressor technology is really, I mean, and almost all shooting now, at least in the military environment, is all done suppressed. There's almost no unsuppressed shooting done. So training, zeroing, everything is done suppressed. Really? Yes. So that actually adds in some complexities. So because with a suppressor, the suppressor, you know, the way a suppressor works is it kind of, distributes the gas so all the gas doesn't leave the barrel at one time, which makes the sound.

That's the muscle, the report of a rifle firing is, is more or less the gas is escaping supersonicically from the barrel, and that creates that sound, that loud report. Well, your suppressors kind of slow down the migration of the gases out of the barrel and lets them leave at a, it angles them, it baffles them off, so you're eliminating that sort of that report. The problem is all the gas gets run through a suppressor and suppressors get hot. So if you're shooting any sort of

sustained fire after 10, 15 shots, there's so much heat that suppressor gets so hot that it causes so much mirage. So you have a hard time seeing your target. Right. So, I mean, that is a, that's, that's something that guys have the mid again. I mean, guys have

there's all kinds of rude, goldberg things like I've seen guys like there's a little fan like blowing on this on the on the guy suppressor there's different types of covers guys use that can that help yeah you know covers that are heat resistant covers but once it gets hot it gets hot right and a really high bore line will will help that so you know if you have your scope three three and a half four inches which is actually fairly common now in these modern systems because really yeah the scopes are really big they have large objective lenses They have, you know, 56 millimeter objective lenses, the tube.

You know, back in the old days, a tube of the scope was an inch, or even seven-eighths, and now they're 30 to 34-millimeter. They're big. What power scope are you using for ultra-long-range? So, you know, I use in Nightforce, 7 to 35 power. 7 to 35, okay. Yeah. And 5 to 25, 7 to 35, those are usually the power rate these guys are using.

Got some more questions in here. get to because I know we're taking out a lot of your time. I had an inchy nose. I'm not picking my nose. No, it's always pick a man for a lot. I don't like. I'm a picker. You know, that's who I am. I was born this way. All right. Ian came back with it about his range cards. He says, I build range cards off of a base five mile per hour wind and then you, and then use then multiply that base on my wind estimate. Is that a logical approach?

Yeah, that's a good way. So you can, you can, um, you can do a one of two ways. You can figure out you can figure out the total effective wind speed. So talking about percentages of wind. So a 12 o'clock wind is zero, a three o'clock wind is 100%.

30 degrees or 1 o'clock is 50%. 2 o'clock wind or 60 degrees is about 87%. So you can apply those percentages to his base hole. So he says, okay I've got five miles an hour written down personally I prefer if you're going to do a system like that I prefer to use like four eight and twelve because five is a hard number to divide in two or to divide in three right but if I have a four mile an hour

so if I have a wind hold if I write down four mile an hour hold and an eight mile an hour hold if I divide my four by two which is easy I have a two mile an hour hold and divide that again by two I have one if I at if I I double four, I have eight. If I double it and add half, I have ten. So even numbers are always easier to manipulate than odd numbers, mathematically speaking. And most of this stuff is basic arithmetic. So you can take the angle and multiply it by, so you take your wind speed and multiply it by the angle and that'll give you your effective crosswind. Or you can take your base wind hold and multiply it by the angle. So it's a five mile an hour. I have five mile an hour hold.

I have five mile an hour. It's my five mile hour dope will tell me maybe it's a drift of three minutes, four minutes of angle. And it's a one o'clock wind. I just divide my dope. So I take 50% of four minutes of angle is two minutes of angle. That's my dad. So you, it's just the math. It's wherever you want to do the arithmetic. You can even do the arithmetic on the wind angle. and the wind velocity to get your total crosswind, where you can apply the arithmetic to your full value dope, and you're going to get the same thing. But the important thing that you have to do in both scenarios

is know what those angles are. You know, so my sort of my amended, making it easy to do arithmetic in your head, my wind values, my angles, the way I do it is. So 12 o'clock is zero. On the 15 degrees, or every half an hour. So 12 o'clock is zero 15 degrees is 25%.

1 o'clock or 30 degrees is 50%. 45 degrees or 130 is effectively 75%. The sign of that is 0.71. I rounded up to 75. 2 o'clock wind is 60 degrees. It's 87%. I rounded up to 90. Because it's easy to take a 10th off of something.

Right, right. And then anything passed 2, I call full value. because the wind percentage for a 230 wind is like 0.96. You might as well call it full value. So if you, starting at 2 o'clock, if you round everything to 100% past 2 o'clock, you're probably only going to be off, you know, less than 5, 6% of the wind. And those are, that's lost in the noise. You're not going to see that on the target.

You know, if I have a 10-mile-an-hour wind and I'm off 6%, that's 10 miles an hour or 9.4 miles an hour. You're probably not going to see that on the target. Andrew wanted to ask, there's a question about, would it be a smart thing to consolidate all sniper schools in one location? So you guys have been talking about the SEAL sniper course, the Marines have their SCAT sniper course, there's SOTIC, or now the Special Forces sniper course, sniper school, there's the Benning Sniper course, all these different schools. Should they be consolidated in one location? You know, no. So number one, every school,

whoever its customer is, they have their own culture, right? Yeah. So the Marine Corps has their culture. It's good that Marines are training Marines, right? The Navy Corps, you know, for SEALs, they know what they need to do to be operationally as like... And they have their requirements for a maritime environment. That are probably Rangers don't have.

And the basic, the basic Fort Benning Sniper course is probably the, you know, it is a baseline course. It's a great course. The guys down, the current guys down there at the Fort Benning course are seriously switched on dudes. And so they run a great school down there and it's great baseline stuff. But when you get up to like SIFIC, you know, at Fort Bragg, the Special Forces sniper course, you're getting into other things that are the capabilities that they want a special operation sniper to be able to do. Is that not SOTIC anymore, I guess?

No, they changed the name a few years ago. Sorry. So, you know, I think that the sniper school should serve its customer and what they need out of that guy. So you know, I get the best example is the Fort Bend sniper course. That's like

the basic course. That's like, you know, the basic level that anybody with a Bravo 4 skill identifier and the Army is expected to be at. And they, graduate a really good product, that guy is super capable. But, you know, at SIFIC, they do more stuff of like moving targets. They might do stuff with that, you know, how does, how does, how does that sniper operationally work with guys that are doing things assaulting? But they, yeah, they have,

at least the last time I knew they had the Kullex. It was between the Special Forces sniper course and Sephardic. So it was the snipers working directly with the assaulters, which is how they're supposed to work overseas. you know when they deploy yeah I mean yeah the you know I know P OI's change and things like that but you know if that's a capability that they want then they can train it like that in you know it's so I don't I don't think uh no I don't think they should all be consolidated because you're not really getting the product for the customer uh Alex asks uh what are the differences and challenges of working with non-military units like that FBI HART U.S. Secret Service

cat counter assault team I believe and private organizations like nuclear security folks so I've done some training with folks like that

most of those guys are former soft guys almost always so you know if you're working with Department of Energy snipers even in nuke security guys

yeah they're all Rangers SF SEALs J-Soc guys J-Soc so it's really the same the challenges

are sometimes their gear is dissimilar from something that you've worked with before. They may want a specific capability train. They may have a metric they have to meet. I did some law enforcement training and I did some training with FBI. I haven't worked with HRT, but I've worked with various FBI deal offices, SWAT team stuff. And, you know, those guys, they have a lot. They have some liability issues and I've worked with regular local law enforcement.

Their ROE is going to be very different. and their liability, they have actual like, hey, bro, check it out. For real, I might be in a court room. Right, right. With like a high-paid defense attorney. If they're FBI, they're going to be in a courtroom regardless. It's part of an investigation. So, you know, depending on, they may want to work on, they may have to work on, like,

short-range stuff. They may want to work on limited visibility. You're tamiled of the training to whatever the requirements are. But within most of those organizations, you know, U.S. Marshals or DOE, whoever, invariably, they're almost like, you are like, dude, you know,

you know, so, you play the you know, the you know, you know, right away, and, you know, they're all former soft guys. Yeah, a lot of law enforcement, isn't it generally, it's more, it tends to be short range, and they're going more for like fast paralysis and things like that. I mean, the average law enforcement shot,

I think the number changes based on engagements and research, but it's, it's, it's, it's no great. It's no greater than about 80 yards. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. So most of those law enforcement, you know,

interdictions that happen probably happen between about 50 and like 80 yards. It's a permissive versus non-permissive environment. And they're getting one shot and they have to figure it out and they've got, and they've got to coordinate all that stuff. So those guys, you know, whenever I've trained law enforcement guys, the end state is can the guy hit a one-inch pasty? on command

within 100 jobs. That's it. That's what they want out of that guy. And be able to do it quick, be able to, something military guys don't do a lot of, military guys do train it, but like counting down a shoot. That happens a lot of... Coordinated, yeah. Coordinating...

Right, so multiple snipers. So, whether it's the guy that's running the whole deal, the SWAT commander, he's on the radio, and he's telling guys on a countdown, that takes training. Yeah. The first time that you're teaching guys to do that or you're putting them on a clock, they've got a voice in their head, they have to shoot, they shoot like a can of smashed ass.

It's not, they're not, they're not, a lot of jerking the trigger. Yes, so that's something that has to be trained. Yeah. 100%. I love this one. That's a technical show of a can smash-d ass. Hammered shit, that's a technical guy. You're going to love this one.

Is the 1993 movie sniper a faithful depiction of snipers, or the moment that's the moment. faithful depiction of snipers you know I'm not I really enjoyed the movie sniper you got a respect same you got a respect Zane yeah you know you're trying you know I mean you know

finally bullets yeah exactly like that the burrs off the Gucci Flodge yeah I you know there were some elements of that movie which I think were accurate other words which were grossly inaccurate so

but the movie shooter the Walberg movie and the and the and the shooter series I know some guys that were like

technical guys on those and so if you if you want a bullet nerd out and you watch those the movie or the series all the math's right typically so you know

which is why you always got the guy like you know he's covered in Cheeto does like 4.1 what the hell man it's nice three point like you know write the letter of the editor you know my meatloaf right that guy so um so yeah i think nowadays guys are really they're really careful because they know the people that want to watch the movies are probably the guys that are going to call shenanigans on that and the audience is like i mean there is an audience for those films that are like much smarter than they were you know 20 years ago they're enthusiasts yeah yeah so the guys

might be a shooter he's interested in and he might be watching the movie with his with his ballistic act like that's not the kind of gear seals carry what the fork is yeah yeah I mean you see that across the board like that that uh that seal team uh series that's out right now you know there's there's legitimate soft veterans like working yeah and on that show yeah and you can tell um I mean obviously it's TV show and all TV shows are like really hokey and so yeah yeah yeah but you can tell just by the way that the guys kind of do their thing or the gear or the kit or how they talk about the kit the gear how they hold their gun it's pretty legit um because they know that hey the guys there's you know the veterans you know we have a veteran

population that's you know we've been in combat 19 years 18 years so a lot of people watch that show have real life experiences they're bouncing that stuff off right right right right so i don't be talking mad shit in the comment section right right i've had the i've had the privilege of being uh like being a technical advisor type of guy to a few authors who have written doing some sniper type stuff in a book. So a guy will say, hey man,

I got this scene and in the scene they're going to do this. What do you think about that? And so they'll send me like a thing and I'll make some recommendations about well, it might be more realistic if you change this you tell them, hey, we're shooting at this range

and this wind or whatever. There's an author named John Ringo. Oh, yeah, I read all this books. So John's a pretty friend of mine. And so in his... I read all the sci-fi books when I was in the Army. Right. So his series about the guy that is a Navy SEAL and ends up like being a warlord, essentially in Georgia,

I helped John with a couple of scenes in that. And I think he wrote me into at least one of the books. So a character called Praz. That's awesome. Yeah. Andrew says... By John Ringo Books. How do you think 3D printing

will affect military vendors? Like, are your finished overawords worried about 3D printing? That's so awesome. That guy must know me. As a sea of change event in their industry. I kid about his finish overwords. That's a term I use personally,

so that guy must know me. Or I must have talked to him before. So, 3D printing has changed a lot with weapon design, not in the final production thing, because the 3D print metal, you're talking millions and millions of dollars. NASA does it. I've talked to an engineer. Like, if they need a park, no shit for a space shuttle or rocket, it's a metal 3D printer. And they put the specs into it, go home, and that thing just prints out the part while they're asleep.

So as my dad used to say, that's folding money. Yeah. So most 3D printers print in an extruded plastic. Right, but what that does help is prototyping. So we actually use 3D printing at the AMU for kit improvements, whatever, to prototype something if it works. So 3D printing has changed that for, at least especially for prototyping. The way bullets are being made and cartridge cases, things like that are being made, are still more or less a traditional way. I will say the biggest single change in advancement in ammunition manufacturing is polymer cases and multi-component cases.

You have a case where it's made up of two different materials, maybe part of the case is metal, part of the case is polymer, and you can rapidly change the dimensions of that cartridge case because you're just talking about extruding plastic or changing the shape. And you can hold plastic to ridiculous tolerances. And it's lighter. It keeps less heat in the weapon system. So polymer is probably the next big thing, especially in military stuff.

For casing. Yeah, I mean, right now. And it can handle the pressure? It can. Yeah, that's amazing. So the, I mean, in military aviation, it's a big deal right now. Because polymer casing, so if you have 50 caliber ammunition and it's polymer, three cans of polymer is the same weight as two cans of conventional 50-killed.

Yeah. All right. So if you start thinking about those applications with like aircraft and full weights of ammunition and full weights of fuel, that's a meaningful, meaningful change. Yeah, especially with a little bird or something like that, lighter birds and, you know. In difficult to read situations, what do you use to gauge wind in the absence of trees, flag, smoke, and mirage? What do you resort to next? So, you know, there's a chart that, you know, it's been in every Marksuk manual since the Civil War.

It's, you know, it says something like zero to three miles an hour. You can see smoke begin to drift. Four to six or four to seven, you can feel the wind on your face and things like that. So there's always something to look at with the wind. You just have to find it. So, for example, if you can't see Mirage in front of you because you're shooting over dead space, so you're on a hilltop and your target's on another hilltop

and you've got a valley dead space. The way Mirage works is mirage is the different layers of air heated at different temperatures relative to the ground temperature. So the higher you get off the ground, the less mirage there is to sea. So I'm shooting off a cliff and I look out there, I'm probably not going to see any mirage. However, if you turn around and look behind you, you can probably see mirage.

If you have like a flat area behind you, turn around and look behind you, you can see mirage. Just remember that if I look this way and the wind is blowing this way and I turn back around that way, the wind relative to me looking this way is out of the right. When I turn back around this way, it's out of the left. So there's usually something to look at. Like I know, for example, if I stand flat-footed on the ground, the wind the buffeting of the wind kind of you know you ever sit there on

and a sudden the wind like takes you a little bit off your balance for me that's like 14 miles an hour like I know when I can feel the wind in my beard for the beard is very important for wind reading for lumination the wizard beard is important but there's always something to look at but you just have to find it you have to find it and if there's nothing else besides that

you know you have the bullet you have your first shot if you can and if it's permissive, you can send a spot around in there. You can send around maybe in front your target that the target can't see or

behind the target to where you can just shoot low and look at some splash or look at the dust drift. So those are some techniques you can use to. Obviously, situation-dependent. If you shoot a competition, sometimes it's worth it to burn one low just to catch the wind. Yeah. To go back on the target. Because like a lot of these

PRS matches, the target has a dead space behind it. So if you miss left or right, you can't see shit. The bullets go on. So guys will burn one low, catch the wind, go on their target, and then they'll shoot. Do you feel that like to make up for that 20 years that people don't have to spend at the range, if somebody carries like an an antonometer around with them and like, you know, five, ten times a day, they just kind of go, okay, the wind feels like two miles an hour come from that direction. They pull out the anonymator and go, okay, it's four. That's a great idea. And actually something I recommend and when I train guys.

So when I was in the Army, you know, when I retired, I was a sergeant first class, and I was great. I had privates. Prives are awesome, because you can have them do all kinds of shit.

So what I would do is I would send a guy down range with a radio and like a wind meter. And I, like, stand next to that bush. And I look at the bush through my bios or my spotting scope and I look at my,

and I say to myself, that looks like it's eight miles an hour open. I'm like, what's the wind reader? What's the wind meter say? It's like, It says five miles an hour shard. I'm like, oh, so that's not five.

That's not eight. It's five. Yeah. So calibrate my eyes. So I tell guys, competition shooters and military guys, get like two walkie-talkies. You buy a, you know, Home Depot or Target. Get two wind meters, some binos, and like walk, get a couple hundred yards. Yeah.

And like talk back and forth. What's, you know, try to estimate the win in a guy's position. Stand next to some long grass. Stand next to some veg. Stand next to a flag. it is and try to figure out what the wind is doing at that guy. It's a great training tool. Yeah, it's the same concept as like your range estimation. We're like, oh, I think it's this. Well, the range estimator, the laser estimator actually says. Yeah, you're all fucked up. Calibrate your eyes.

Yeah. I think you already kind of addressed this one. How do you prioritize wind based on distance at the muzzle halfway at the target? I think, uh, I thought, we talked about that before. Before we're on. So it's a video that we'll just put up for supporters of the stream later on. We actually talked to, actually, I'm going to answer that question very much in-depth. Yeah. So Andrew has a question. We missed, how does a competitive shooter's competitive lifespan compare to the normal athletic career? So, again, shooting is a sport that is very long-lived. Depends on the shooting sport, right?

So if it's like Olympic-style shooting, guys can shoot. into their 40s and 50s. NRA style, like prone, long range, there's guys winning national championships in their 70s. At the Olympic level for like, you know, small bore and air rifle, air pistol, you're probably not getting too far past 40. It's more about resiliency.

You might be good for one day, two days, but it kind of aggregates and adds up. But, I mean, the oldest Olympian to ever win a medal wasn't shooting. Really? Do you know how old they were? So there was an event that's not held anymore. It was actually long-range shooting in like the 1896 London Olympics, and I think the dude was in the 60s.

Wow. One Olympic. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, curling, you might have a shot at it with curling. What is it about age? Is it that your eyes start going? Is that a...

Yeah. Eyes start going. Your resting heart rate goes up. maybe guys don't handle heat very well I mean you're shooting outside in a lot of these events so it's really hot your ability just to just to weather that stuff

you've been in 95 degree 90 degree hot heat all day you're probably your eyesight is cheering eyesight's a big thing too even though we have optics but your visual acuity how it lasts over the day some of that can be managed by diet and hydration and rest

and things like that but those basic elements, the side is on the young guy. Yeah. So, Emil, I got a question. I mean, we've taken up a lot of your time. We should probably start ramping up fairly soon. But I wanted to play devil's advocate with you for a moment. Because I know this question is, it's always going to be in the back of somebody's mind, as far as, you know, these big brains of the Pentagon and the way technology is advancing. They're going to say, what the fuck do we really need you guys for? We have all these advances in drone technology in ISR. We have these cameras that can see, you know, a goat's ball sack from

five miles away. We got drones that can fire. I mean, now they have, what do they call that ninja hellfire missile with a blades come out and they kill the guy inside the car without any explosion. I mean, isn't the sniper of the future a predator drone firing a hellfire missile loaded with cement hitting some guy in the forehead? I mean, what the hell do we need these snipers for? What do they do as we progress into this century? You know, I think you're always going to need a human being on the ground. The technology changes to where if I have a weapon system, if I have a platform that if I press a button, it interrogates the air between me and the target, tells me the exact wind speed because it reads it with photons or whatever it is,

if I have a bullet that I can actually self-correct, you know, I shoot the shot and maybe I can keep an identifier on it and it keeps it in there. Snikers are a very cost-effective tool, number one. You know, I remember when the Iraq war started, and, you know, reporters were embedded, and this one group of guys was taking fire from a crew serve position, and it was like maybe three, four hundred meters away. These guys were behind their humbies,

they're on the downslope, and they freaking bring a dude out with a javelin, and they smoke this machine gun bunker with a javelin. And they're like, that was awesome! But you could just hear the groaning. You know, at the command level, like, they did what with the what? Yeah, right, right.

They shot a machine gun mess for the $80,000 missile. In terms of cost-effective thing, I think it's a very effective tool. And, you know, the ability to see what's going on in real time, the ability to support assaulters or a maneuvering element, that has a thinking guy behind it that knows what those guys are doing is huge. That's a huge force multiplier. I don't think that will ever go away.

All the reconnaissance and intelligence assets that a sniper can bring to it. If it's not stalking like Carlos did, maybe it's driving a drone in there, being able to take that feed and then integrate it with the systems that you currently have. So I think having guys that as an additional duty or as a specialized duty been able to interdict targets at long range be discriminatory, you know, that's the biggest thing. In the modern battlefield, ROE, you know, it's not Dresden. We can't just bomb an entire city. It's not Stalin Grand. So that ability to be discriminant and have ROE.

And that's a huge part of the way that, you know, we do. now and probably will continue to do warfare. Where the enemy is just integrated with the civilian population. Absolutely. So how do you get that guy? You're not going to, you know, yeah, you can call me. If we have drone

technology that can, whatever, but in real time, how do you do that? That's a sniper. Absolutely. It's amazing just how far it's come and listening to you talk about how data-driven it is. More so than, I mean, it always was to an extent, but now. I mean, it's

just incredible some of the sensors you have to almost to point sometimes it's too much like i i would say this whenever i train military guys and i would say hey man what's your data for 900 meters if they have to go um uh i'm like bro so you should have some things memorized like so if you don't have any of your data if you don't have your solver like some of that old school stuff is okay right like when dave and when dave was a sniper when you were sniper like having next to your buttstock Yes, having it memorized or having to tape your book. Like, that stuff's not bad. That's the one thing that I think is an issue with this data-driven sort of, you know,

goddamn millennials. But that, that's, you know, millennials, by the way, been fighting the war for 20 years. Getting medals of honor, all kinds of shit. So I got, you know, millennials are okay in my book from a gen X. Fucking kids. Yeah. But, but that, you know, losing that as a. as a core competency

of having stuff memorized so you can be nimble that's important so as long as guys are doing those sort of basics those sort of things that you should be doing for due diligence if you're a professional

if you honor it or craft then I think the technology is great just supplements that so Emil you know you've been super gracious with your time coming down here and doing this tonight I mean this has been like literally

this dude just gave us and all of you guys watching a master class on long-range marksmanship and if you were to invoice us, I shuddered a goddamn thing. I actually feel like we could go another three hours. I got easy pass, so it's okay.

It's like RFK and everything yeah, no, we could go another three hours easily. This is just such a huge topic. We would love to have you on again sometime. Be my pleasure, you know. We'll link up either in person or digitally. I love to. Yeah.

Do you have anything that you wanted to plug that you're doing with work. Do you do training courses that people can come and find you? No. I don't really hang a shingle out publicly. Usually the stuff that I do training stuff. You don't do many interviews either. Is military stuff.

But I work for a company which makes some products. So the company I work for is Lapua, burger bullets, and Vidaivori powder,

and SK. Rind FIRE ammunition. So we make all those products. I'm the military BD guy for all that stuff, but I would look at our, you know, the burger ammunition, factory load an ammunition is probably some of the best factory ammunition you could buy in the world. Our products, you know, they're all leaders in the industry, whether it's a burger bowl and a Lapo cartridge case, burger ammunition, Vida Vodori powder, all that stuff. So check all that stuff. So check all that stuff. without, you know, our brand, you know, freaking buzzwords. But our brand identity is for, like, the precision guy that wants the best in the world.

So some of our stuff costs more than our competitors, but, you know, we pride ourselves on being the best in all those segments. So you want to drive an M5 or do you want to drive a Pinto with a, like, LS1 motor in it? You know, so you want the info. A Morris Minor. Yeah. Guys, thank you everyone who joined us tonight. We had a whole bunch of people watching live, and, you know, everyone else will be able to check this out.

It'll be on YouTube, you know, until the EMP takes us all out. It'll be up on SoundCloud. Now we're up on Apple iTunes. We are on iTunes. Yeah. Look for the team house on iTunes. We're there. We've only included episodes with interviews in them, you know, and nobody wants to listen to just Jack and I.

And all the future ones will show up on there as well. Yeah. And if you are part of our Patreon, thank you very much. We have some footage that we recorded earlier with M-all for that. If you're not a member of our Patreon, please help us pay our rent. $1 a month. The link is down in the description if you want to check it out. And please subscribe to our channel.

Hit the bell, the notification, if you haven't already. Did you send it? No, but I'm glad you threw it out. Yeah. And sorry that we didn't get to all the other questions. questions that weren't, uh, the, oh, the subreddit, uh, the subreddit are, uh, the team house. Um, and we just, we didn't have time. Well, I'm available. If any of those questions that are in the

subreddit, uh, if I can just vector me in on that. Okay, happy to answer any question. All right. Yeah. I'm an open book. You're the man. Thank you so much for your time. It's great. It's great. I mean, this is like expert advice. Like I said, this is like, Jim West is the guy to talk to about martial arts. This is the guy to talk to about marksmanship. I'm the guy to talk to about cheese puffs. Like, I love cheese puffs. They're so good.

They are good, right? It's the texture. I'm the guy to talk to about comic books and Dungeons and Dragons. I was a dungeon master. Hey, this is what we have all of our stuff. You should come play with us. I will figure it. Yeah.

Bring your kids. Because I bring my daughter down here. Yeah. But yeah, that's my only real claim to fame. Otherwise, I'm just, you know, a podcast guy, I guess. But, no, this has been great. Happy New Year, everybody. Thank you.

Oh, this Friday. We have a gift for you also. We actually have two live streams this week. So we have Emmel, gracious, get rid of him. And on Friday at 8 p.m., we have Jeff Kirkham from Readyman joining us. It'll be remote. but join us. He's got a lot of new fun stuff going on

if you've seen his past interviews or whatnot. So it'll be great. So thanks guys. All right. That's a wrap. Good.