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

all right we are alive welcome to episode 22 of the team house big episode 22 I'm Jack Murphy this is David part Dave Park and our guest today emilp raslak thanks so much for coming on today I know you know we pulled you away from you know family time and the holidays and everything so that will you come here and like talk your ear off about marksmanship and no anyway that's really your background is start off in Ranger Battalion then served in the Army marksmanship unit for a long time yeah really your speciality is wandering for marksmanship yes and now you continue to work in the industry working in ballistics yeah I I just 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 everybody I want everybody about that eisenhower warned us everybody warned us and I'm out there trying to fleece Uncle Sam your swipe your playing them into Miami so are you gonna be able to tell us who shot Kennedy tonight with a magic bullet well you know we have we have we have a laboratory in Finland yes so I don't shovel I 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 gonna get to talk a little bit about that probably the people work to man and a lot of a few questions to that will forget to but I feel like you know like like my friend Jim West is a retired or an 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 he was like a kid and he's a grandmaster and his system now like his farts coming like is as far as it comes to like [ __ ] people up with your bare hands he's the guy to talk to him right you're the guy to talk to about wanna range marksmanship 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 onto people over the years and we're talking a little bit earlier before we got started about your time in the Army marksmanship unit and you are 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 one of those guys right now I do some of that work now but my you know my my forte is really about wind reading at long range in that extreme long range yeah that was the I think the thing I enjoyed the most about being a coach at the Army marksmanship II and it was my opportunity to get a chance to teach people not only my own shooters you know we were we had guys at chop competitions for the US Army but also getting a chance to go out and work with everybody from you know regular Levin Bravo's at the hundred and first to you know Combat Support Battalion guy at like four-story Virginia or working with guys and soft Rangers and SF and cats like that so it was really the true you know enrichment for my career that's what I treasure the most on my mentor 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 from train if I'm out there working with guys and they're like pipe hit and dudes that's not me I'm like a Martian ship guy from the amu you know my gosh you off courses but I would I would you know internalized get the stuff they needed and that would change the way that I taught it you know so was more applicable than where they could get more value right because you're learning how people learn yeah absolutely yeah and then they're bringing back you know experiences from overseas is that right practically what they're experiencing well they also need to apply probably the fundamentals at your teaching well I know we're not st. fundamental sorry but the lessons you know the essentials that you are teaching them but but they can't always do it in an ideal world the way the way somebody on a marksmanship team might be able to yeah so you have we 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 pyramid you get guys have less and less time to devote to like learning the thing right right so guys away broke just tell me what I need to know right so I I have kind of different different ways different sort of packages you develop as an instructor hey do we have an hour do we have a day we have a week right and we have two weeks and so develop develop process about win 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 right very basic thing and especially now with the with the advent of Technology and most excels you really have to there's still one thing that you cannot solve on a ballistic solver or using a 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 guys missing the wind yeah so they have to be able to do that for themselves so you know the best gun that's best bullets best cartridge is best solver Kestrel you name it but if they can't figure out what the wind is do downrange and put a number on it there you're not gonna deter you know it's interesting because I think that like people's common you know like both Jack Meyer 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 a gun that's the sexy part that they're the senior person but really anybody can squeeze that trigger if they have sure good basics and it's it's really the person behind that spotting scope that needs to know what they're doing it needs to be seasoned and needs to be maybe delighted in and you see that a million times like when you're you know if you're working in link 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 or and or a sniper get complete vapor lock when they're trying to do something and they like to think left is right and right is left or but a good spot or a good observer can really is a force multiplier yeah you need if you need to have the physical attributes to pull the trigger without moving the rifle and all the things right I have to do but you know more and more even though we train like that in 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 soft world is you know whatever fashion run as fast you can and where you're going to be and then everybody is on the rifle everybody is shooting yeah well let's let's talk about some of the misconceptions people have about snipers because there's many out there it one of them I think is exactly what you're saying that people still have in their mind this idea of like Carlos Hathcock in 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 uh in their armed first time in the 80s I was a machine gunner so we are like usually in the support by fire position for you know raids and things like that and so you have all free guns for the Petula gnar all together you're like talking in 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 but not 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 soulcrusher to whoever you're shooting at you know especially with the level of the cat 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 mo is how good shears guys are the how much opportunity that like especially guys in in soft whether the Rangers or SF dudes have ability to go and train with instructors and shoot it places that aren't you know rein 66 on Fort Bragg or you know or Burroughs range on Fort Benning so getting all those different looks and rain and everything else so I mean there I would say our modern sniping capabilities are the best that they've ever been and I don't I can't I don't think there's anybody that does it as well as this as a u.s. guys present since you have all this experience to 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's nice work even long-range shooting when it comes to that yeah I mean I 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 the time is shot between his heartbeat and you know [ __ ] like that well maybe I was ever able to kind of time my shop between a heartbeat and and also you know for the for the modern for the modern sniper the fact that like shooting is really not a huge part it's 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 only assets that that guy can bring to the fight his ability to see the whole battlefield his ability you've leveraged 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 then it's all field craft right you know trying to learn the actual business and deal with the job yeah I think one of the misconceptions that you could take a regular sniper and when I say regular sniper I mean any given soft sniper not-not-not like a naturally gifted person or you know who's just nailing it or somebody who shoots for fun all the time issue competitively whatever else but you know that I think that if you have a sniper that can shoot a minute of angle at 600 are we talking to your meters anymore I don't remember it but it's 600 yards that's that's a competent that's a competent sniper oh absolutely you know that's that I actually you know a good answer the question about misnomers is the accuracy of the system you know you see lots of like advertisements out there for both rifles and ammunition every wants something a quarter many I mean and we've been able to because of technology you can instrument everything we can measure almost everything you know but we can measure muzzle velocities with reportable radar units there's a formal radar units of five six hundred dollars maybe and you can flight you can track the base of that bullet the first fifty yards so you're getting I mean laboratory level velocity measurements so of course on Facebook or 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 then guys claim levels of accuracy I've got a quarter minute gun I've got a half minute done I've got this like a when in reality like I said day if you have if you have like an m110 with m1 18 LR ammunition or if you know the sniper ammunition know that the army uses and that rifle and you are even shooting 1.5 minutes an angle or about you know call it about point 4 mils 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 yeah you know not on a three shot group you know and we were at when I was at A&E when we tested rifles we test like in 30 hunters or you aggregate groups to like hundred shoppers then you look at the data and you then then at that point like if so many times they have a quarter minute rifle all day every day you know will shoot 20 shots at 600 meters and if it's more or less you let me know yeah that would be super event yeah but that's it's almost unattainable play so a minute to a minute half is as good as it ever needs to be honestly right for people who are like watching they're totally baffled to play people out there what do you what do you mean when you say a minute of angle so minute of angle and mills are angular measurements that we use in shooting so we use them for a couple reasons we use them to calibrate how much the sights movie clips we clip the scope so you click a scope there's a little tube and then of a telescope on rifle and when you click the knobs whether it's left to 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 the to do you move the strike of the round up right we'll say up on the scope and that come up click ten clicks on the scope it actually moves that erector tube down in the side of the scope so I move the erector troupe down now I'm pointing lower so but I'm going to put the crosshairs on the target it makes me raise the muzzle right so up and down those measurements we use chart views minute of angle or middle on the military stuff is pretty much all mil which is a milliradian and minute an angle stands for is is if you look at a 360 degrees of a circle each circle had each degree at 60 minutes so 60 times 360 is 21600 so that means that if you look at a pie chart there's 20 1,600 little minutes of angle all the way around such much more accurate than a 360 degree compass right so you know in artillery you might use angles but you know for small arms though the ballistics that our trajectory doesn't really go that far so we need a much farther much of a much finer adjustment and minute of angle is handy because it's linear and it tends to line up with like statute measurements so like one minute an angle that little angle at a hundred yards or 100 meters is about one inch and at 200 it's two inches so if I were to say that rifle shoots one minute an angle and I'm shooting at 600 meters I should expect about a six-inch group at 600 that's what the weapon system itself is capable right well then you have to account of course for the person behind the gun right there like if you can do you can deep dive like Army Research Institute like ARL RI they've done all kinds of instrumented Studies on what dude can do really yeah so physiologically yeah so they have a they take these numbers they factor immense it is in total weapon system so I think I remember reading one time that they expected a trained military sniper to be able to point a group of about 0.2 or 0.3 Mills really yeah which is about a minute of angle a little bit less than that 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 about without factoring in how the rifle shoots are the precision of the ammunition his total group size of you know about 1 mil which at 300 meters is point three meters which is about about 12 13 inches about 13 inches so then II would expect that without any other but that guys physical ability to point the rifle is about a 13 inch group so and that's you know they take these yeah you know these big eggheads 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 one on the ammeter be able shoot this well now is that is that are they talking about the average pert the average infantry guy right or are they talking about a person that you've trained up and I'm not sure I mean there's those metrics exist that's kind of what was my point so like you know it may not be one maybe point nine point eight but like I remember going into week we did some work and AM you with the Army Research Institute they they instrumented my guys right really yeah so they did all kinds of stuff like they put like these bands on the guy's chest to see how how fast they breathe under stress or when they're calm measuring pulse rate measuring blood pressure and they would have my guys who are some of the best shooters in the world they would have my guys shoot different positions do different things and now 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 they would go out and they would do the same measurements unlike a basic training at Sand Hill and then they they they would I think they brought guys over from Kelly Hill if you're got scaled Hill their dad 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 those guys they all have a you know you're usually the dumbest town in the room I usually was the everybody's got more degrees than a thermometer so yeah so so okay so if we're saying that a standard sniper yeah 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 how do you good how does that compare to a national-level shooter an olympic-level shooter can't parry 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 after at the Army marksmanship unit part of our competitive thing that we did was 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 EP hasn't shows you guys shut that down well you know if they have a check what does shut down the range is like guys on jet skis okay like who's also bad give me the Keystone lat and why they drive right where people are showing right so Coast Guard going it what could go wrong but we we had a program before the jiwa 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 attacks we would get them attached to the ANU and that got spearheaded by the third range of time started the tune which i think set that kind of the standard for at least been the ranger regiment of how that was supposed to happen Jackie were you remember of that group say just like some you know mountains of manual and real legends in that community of those guys are running that so we took two guys first two guys per second Italian 2013 and we did that for a couple of years so these are guys that they're really good shots like they're really good everything that they do they have to be to be in that job you know it's great for my guys cuz 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 a me that were recruited specifically to come and shoot for the Army Marine unit right so so now they're like next to you know some a real freakin Ranger and they got to see like oh okay well actually we have guys that that intrigued them enough they went and did sfas or they did other stuff in the army because they got motivated advice so there are also Rangers that went over to him you know better than a 25 mile road you know beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick so but the biggest thing was watching those guys try to make those that 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 had we've had guys from group different different guys from group be attached to us and in that same sort of program over the years the rate those got that those guys learned mm-hmm is their curve is the fastest I've ever seen that of anybody you know the guys we hired for a and you guys were recruited you know they got maybe start shooting there's like 12 years old you know just like his local shooting team and Pennsylvanian or something that nobody was in 1718 we would approach him and say hey you want to come in the army and shoot for the ham you they go through basic training they go through AIT they didn't report directly the AMU that's private and so I had guys so like we had a mutual friend Jared vanassa and so jared was one of those guys so jared showed up shot like a summer for us he was a team leader he was in 75 and so he he finagled and he's like hey i kind of want to go over to amu for a couple 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 hey and I would tell I don't tell these guys that we we'd have that it was priest everyone you get a guy that just couldn't do it and that's it that's like a physiological thing we one guy he was from he was an aggressor at in mountains every understand right so we have we had a couple of those guys come down one year but I think before four or five of them and this guy he was awesome he was a physical animal and freaking great soldier but he physically couldn't stand still yeah like I'm like dude just stand there and don't move the knee personality if you don't he's like yeah my dad used to like like whack the crap out of him because I was like holding the flashlight he's working on the tractor suck from Kansas or something and like the life would be perfect he just was incapable of statements though so you do get those guys yeah but ordinarily you could if somebody wants to do it shooting you can teach you 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 uh there is a a misconception within the military and one that I think I had as well that you know this competition shooting is a bunch of [ __ ] you know this stuff will work we're gonna go out to the flat range I'm gonna have to sling around her arm and we're gonna shoot this goods yard lines like this is [ __ ] this isn't how it works on operations right but Jarvan analysts 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 gonna make you a better combat sniper I think that's true you know the caveats to that are obviously for a competition shooting its competition shooting rightly so like hey I've got like I've got a wideout of a certain way or I have to send certain way because that's the rule right right and I have to use a sling because I'm not allowed to stabilize the rifle and the other right right so but working within that construct you're really training sort of pure marksmanship you're your training you're still training side alignment you're still training trigger control you're still training reading the wind all those things so current time is your time I mean now if you look across the board I mean I mean I know lots of guys in Special Operations and they're all shooting USPSA than they are right you know they're shooting PRS they're shooting the precision rifle series so and those like hey you're putting your body into unconventional positions you're shooting it steel under time pressure yeah nobody you're not in a tactical environment you're not they're not wearing full kit you're not having doing it at night but you know steel sharpens steel and competition shooting with fur those 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 meeting or as you know so they want to do well they you know they it was the funniest thing sometimes you go to camp Perry and there do some like that little fifty year old girl that were like with the [ __ ] yeah and he said the Reaver and he's like what [ __ ] yeah so yeah that guy would then go were Carver's not about your dental books bro yeah so but the ability to see the you know you've got as you as you guys know you guys are both snipers you know when you go to the range you're not the range maybe a half a day you got a couple of cans ammo you meet your training objectives or whatever it is you go have to get dumped on the right though you're going after the true your cast you're going out there just to work some drills shoot movers but then you're done right so in you know and once summer the guys would join us like in June and then we would take these guys all the way to August which is why pretty much ended when the war got going because you know just can't really expect units to let let they're one of the best assets go for a half of months right but they would see more of these sort of situations these simulations of like wind we're having to solve these problems of reading the way in making choices you know 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 shot ended up there was I moving no I wasn't moving was the wind blowing the wind is blowing which way is it blowing holy [ __ ] didn't see that next shot wins doing the same now I'm going to aim upwind that much because that's how far it was down one last time let me shoot the shot you see the result and then that whole decision loop starts again and that training of figuring that out is huge huge for guys so I think there's value in it do you find it speeding up the more guys absolutely absolutely I mean yeah I mean any competitive shoe thing is its own rabbit hole I mean I won't defend it too hard because like it could be a thing you know I okay well I I've got this jacket and I've got to do this to do that like you know is that is what he's about is that what it's about and it's that evening that guy you know what being a ranger wasn't really about having a high and tight you know what I'm talking about pure accuracy are the people at a national level that are competing a national level are they shootin a half-minute of course so when I was good and I wasn't a fat [ __ ] like I am now when I was good and another elite level shooters at thousand yards you know we'd shoot these these prone rifles they're you know the cow for inner Winchester Magnum then 65 to 80 for only seven millimeter Magnum right guys so I you know crosshairs and I mind move my hold using a sling without any other support was about two maybe two three inches out of thousand yards that's how much of a crosshair remove and that's probably typical within that now guys that were shooting standing what that day 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 shooting as well I said that I think that's one of the one of the misconceptions you know like I think that people think of soft guys as being these awesome hand to hand guys awesome Pistoleros awesome you know snipers are these deer there but amazed how 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 times you prefer you don't communicate that you have to do and as a sniper 80% the job is mission planning is getting in and more importantly getting out once you've taken that shot so so to think that your standard even them even you know Special Operations sniper is a world-class shot if that person is not if he is not like a competitive shooter right you know they're shooting at a high level at a high functional level that the job requirement 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 right but the reality is we would have these training periods where you know you're out at the range for days straight and then you're not at the range at all for two months so it's very what you said unless you're seeing here sitting there in your waiting for range control come on open the range well then then you've got to get everything closed up so rage can control can come out and close the range yeah and it's like I got the other responsibilities right have right you know being here everyone qualifications right current and the tactical stuff right ability and that brings up a really important point that I always try to make to guys you know when I well I still do have the opportunity to to work with guys trained now and the one thing I try to transmit is that when 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 get the dunny leave but take a pause while you're there and work on marks we should yeah it's a huge thing like is what look at your hold and now now now you're not in a sling with a giant rifle and a you know a $3,000 scope or they are now they're actually more expensive now the scopes at the sniper staff but but if you have your movement as this try to get your movement smaller make small adjustments move make a small adjustment to your bag yeah or your bipod set up the way you want to set up and try experiment so we're 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 reins a lot of times and say I got a new scope I've got to get the scope zero that the 100-meter zero I have to true my ballistics 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 March it is super important yeah when I was an 18 Bravo I think I used to drive my team a little nuts because I have them do dry fire drills at the range before we start shooting it's not a bad idea I mean it can sound like a kind of ad we're going back there BRM kind of a dated thing to do but you know you should be watching your crosshair and you should know exactly where that crosshair is root I mean that's what 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 an angle in 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 that me the other ones were a little left or right line they weren't bad shots or so on the in the center scoring rings but I knew where they were and so when I got on the range especially the young guys you like we're that one break Med Center perfect yeah like every shot Center yeah like are you sure because you're not protecting yourself right because that that can that actually has real effects to the accuracy of your zero right if you're not breaking in exactly in the middle if you're bringing 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 through the next time where's your shot gonna 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 the accuracy these different weapon systems so you know in mills you know milliradian arrayed there is 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 1 1 of anything say 1 meter or 1 mile or a thousand meters and you draw a circle that circle is going to have a radius of 2 times pi times the radius so 3 this is 1 your your circle is going to have a radius of six point two eight three radiance so great think of a radius kind of like a sixth of a like a pizza slice you know around there and a milliradian 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 radio it's a thousandth of whatever the radius is so if I'm shooting out a thousand meters one mill is one meter out of thousand years old right-handed if I'm shooting out a thousand yards one mill is one yard at a thousand yards right so my experience tells me that a really good st. m110 and shooter is probably out to say 800 meters 900 meters is probably good for about between point two of 24 Mildred sighs like point two point three that's a fantastic doubtful and shooter and ammo they could be as big as say up two points X and not be dead lined and be within the acceptable margins for a performance right so that means that my group size a thousand meters is say point three mils that means it's three tenths of a meter so it's point three of a meter so it's 30 centimeters right that right so no solder so you've got if there's like about 39 inches in the meter so 10% of a meter is like three point nine inches yeah so it's three times three point nine so that means that that it's best that gun is shooting around all those twelve inches yeah a thousand meters yeah twelve inches they say is shooting at 12 inches that's that's the spread you can be naturally occurring spread run 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 zua at distance and say my gun doesn't shoot 12 interstate shoots 18 or 20 inches which is more realistic at a thousand 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 yeah I'm poisoning my dad right so because there's a way that these ballistics solvers work where you have to take you have to take your your your your impact that you can see and you're comparing it against the impact that's predicted uh-huh that's essentially what you do so then you're trying to align those two things so like okay I know where the bullet hit bolt doesn't lie and I know how much elevation I used in my scope whether I'm holding on my ballistic type reticle 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're trying to get a line because what you're trying to do is you're trying to predict where that bullets gonna hit at any range mm-hmm so my dad is skewed I need to correct my dad but when you see a lot operationally you know when when you're out there with a guy and he has like like be his left because he misses the wind hits right because he misses the wind he hits low he finally hits the center of the target like once or twice he's like okay I'm good yeah that's like da mad 9.8 Mills and let me correct myself like but if he shot like another 10 shots right the whole group might be point three points almost like my advice is if you're doing if you have confidence in in the ballistic information you're inputting into your device you have to really be mindful of what your sizes and don't don't let hubris get you like so the new guy that's Denny moon it's perfect the middle way 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 gonna 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 so mate 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 you got a turn mind signal and all this stuff and after a while a lot it becomes wrote and I feel like shooting is the same way in the sense that once you start getting your breathing fine-tuned once you start getting your trigger squeeze fine-tuned once you start then the eye then the reticle a lot of times like the 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 I don't think well then let's even get into what constitutes a kill and in sniper operations when you take a shot at a guy from 800 yards away and you just see that silhouette disappear now did that guy get killed or did he just like drop to the ground and like move the cover right I mean II didn't even before that I'm you know when when you're asking a new shooter where where was that reticle when that round run-off when that trigger broke and I and I feel like it takes a while it takes a little time behind the gun before like the world slows down enough where you don't mean that you're actually yeah it's like where you first start off you're like but that bit where you you're like okay that was low right right yeah you know right I mean the things 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 a lot where if you're if guys are training in terrain so where they're not lying on a flat ground on fort benning perfectly flat they're like this mmm keeping the rifle and your sights level they're a huge deal yeah because inducing can't into a shooting platform will cause errors so I mean what basically the way it works very simply is if the rifles can't it to the right shots will go low into the right and it scans to the left shots will go low in to the left because you got your axe sabor 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 mob which work great little bubble level but yeah I'm all kinds of stuff from there there's even levels or electronic so you have a green light if it's low but they like a degree or two and a red light if it's not love yeah right a lot of some of my competitive shooters use it as now so just rifle but if it can it can fool you so I mean I'm shot like lying in a in a in a creek bed hmm up at a target and like I think my crosshairs are level I think everything's level and the guy I machine with is like dude look at your love and like um completely numb right Mike holy [ __ ] it messes with your mess with your your sense of what it is so 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 one of your zero has been knocked off yeah and the more you shoot the certainly 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 and AM you all the time where you'd see guys scores for like that but they'd start dipping down complacency yeah you're just you're 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 off the rifles loaded or not scrap like that really basic stuff yeah never doing sensible going back I mean a ball and dummy drills are amazing when that happens because it really uncovers shows you what a [ __ ] you can be a matter saying yeah yeah I mean I happens to me too I you know um sometimes I do an intentionally like fun I was shooting at camp very last year I had a round that had like a bad primer so when I pull the trigger nothing happened right so I'm like this I'm a thousand yards you know I'm like doing really well I'm trying to win this national championship and I unloaded I Drive far about ten times like okay go back so yeah all the stems of me everything in shooting is like very perishable I mean I a good 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 was but I worked relentlessly I was tenacious and I still meant for assess obsessive so let it I shall I got so I would but but if you're like that the skills fall off pretty quick unless you maintain it so I'm not being tenacious we have not discussed your origin story yet so like you you joined how old were you when you join the army and 17 okay now were you already shooting competitively at that time or not no not not in our 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 early 60s it was a really good shooter won a lot of champions so it's kind of thing we kind of grew up around well I will say is a little Mossberg at 22 and my dad welded on a front sight post from an m1 garand on this wall spent 22 and cut the stop down and like put like a set of like of sites that kind of look like sight so like an M 1 or M 4 time 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 what never 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're a kid over here when I was a kid okay you know my brother and my sister all but that would take us out range and we'd go upstate my grandfather wasn't it was never we never shot just the kind of like you just wink plink yeah we're 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 but my dad you know there's a there's a an exercise called shadow box which is like what is really old marksmanship training tool so what you do is it's kind of dated because we don't use iron sights anymore in military marksmanship you know everything is an object yeah well you know there's lots of arguments jimmies rustled well there's lots of good arguments to say that you know it's also the modern optics don't break me amount yah and the Marine Corps did a huge study on the RC o or a con is the eight cards built like a tank and they just don't break that out so you know you only have a certain amount of time to Train Joe and what what should you use training out go into combat yeah yeah now the concept of shooting that in science is probably important because pistols have a manual sighting system and you know lots of machine guns do crucial weapons do you know crucial weapons have optics on them too but so kind of knowing that principle is but the way the shadowbox work is you'd put a rifle in a rest and so it was like pointing somewhere right so if you align the sights perfectly the sights were pointing at one spot out there and then what you would do is you would like to have a piece of paper and you'd have like a bull's-eye and like a like a MIDI on two or three inch discs with a hole in the middle and you'd move the bullseye around so the guy would tell you that's perfect so I have a perfect sight picture you know center mass sights are aligned and then you just take a pencil and you make a hole through the bullseye member this is best yeah all right the shadow box right so I remember my dad doing shadow box with me with an m1 garand when I was five years old I don't know so I would so I I was a good shot I get I didn't really get a chance to to do because back when I was sorry I went through basic training and I ended up after volunteering after Airborne School at 2nd Ranger Battalion and I was a weapon squad you know I was kind of a little guy I was like five seven five eight and wait about 140 pounds so of course what he do you put down weapons right up or mortar yeah exactly brake is sold out yeah what they did so there were like when I graduate school I was a I was a gunner and at a gun team but it was all I was always interested in marksmanship always trying to show when I got out of the army I got out in 89 early 89 and I started shooting competitively because I initially did it as way it's been some time 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 [ __ ] when you're a kid right so I got oh I was it awesome okay so I said hey dad you got all these rifles downstairs and all this shooting equipment like why don't you try doing it let's do it again I'll do it with you you can teach me how to do it and way to spend time with him so I started doing that 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 and I made their all National Guard rifle team and I was shooting at the national championships I was on that team for a year my army marched 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 this is really funny too because the way I you were the first Ranger I ever met actually a long mm-hmm because your mom golfed on the golf course that I went on as a kid I was a professional semi-professional weed whacker at the quanta konchol of course I remember meaning you as a young man I think I asked you you know mm I was like hey yep this nice young kitty what's it's gonna be a ranger you want to talk to him y-yeah I was home on leave and I think I have some like so are you good athlete you know should be running or you're under marching having bull can you do calvary 18 yeah I like so he's dealing show up be able to run being able to run this private briefing I can get you out a lot of freaking problem this is true and like be strong don't be a quitter read the guy that selects yourself don't let somebody else deselect you make sure that you're the guy that deselect yourself all very good advice and don't quit and you'll be fine yeah and then about I don't know you're so later I'm in my office at Fort Benning one of my best friends who is jerath analyst it's like hey him do you know this [ __ ] guy says he knows what he's like yes she 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 because I'm like he's just looking for another reason yeah yeah yeah it's 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 now that's that's don't get it do you I don't go and buy a car at your squad leader 2nd battalion 2nd battalion well I don't want to get into it I mean what I tell you a lifestyle chooses you I will tell you this I was when I went through a rip in the like the think 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 the Italian level grip they did so we were in probably I don't know it couldn't be more than four or five total rep classes regimental Ripper classes have been conducted so when we got out to Fort Lewis they're like et go through this thing yeah I mean that was part of the when you got there's a young dude so rip is Ranger indoctrination program yes I don't think it's called grasp okay yeah I mean it's a it's a much better I mean they like everything everything evolves and you know they have a much better product now yeah you're they're assessing so I think and their training guy has lots more members of SS smoke session we do training really well yeah it was just a seed yeah if you would quit and if you could do the metrics I don't remember a lot about it yeah I don't either I remember it sucked yeah but that's about all I remember well yeah so yeah so yeah it was a small army and and and obviously in like Ranger Regiment it's in any of those units they are very small so you you kind of run into guys over and over again the different sort of stages so it's very interesting we have some questions that we should get your milk yeah 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 can ask just about iTunes just about every day or so well it's the number one okay let's go to Andrews big 20 belt thank you very much Adrian thank you everybody and animals opinion which form sniper rifle would he use it he had to go into an elite international sniper competition to defend America's honor when enroute his rifle was purloined by a cheating for national laughing this sounds super specific yeah well um you know I've I've used I've got a chance to use a multitude of these rifles but you know the the British rifle is a great rifle the AI rifles are great action the National that's the British right it's a good platform yes and you know the depending on caliber you know the the larger caliber rifles like the Canadian rifle you know the use of prairie gun works or at least they did you know a 338 Lapua prairie gun works PDW it's a Canadian company it's a fantastic rifle to our current of the the rifle Beck just got selected for SOCOM the advanced sniper rifle is made by Barrett the mrad which is a bolt-action rifles if you see if you hear matter people immediately think of 50 Cal 50 Cal you know for the whole pub m82 giant clunky shame that's not particularly active but these mr ads are very good rifles and they're extremely accurate yeah the walnut and you know what what caliber what do they shoot so it the the rifle that got selected for SOCOM it'll be the mark 22 is the nomenclature has been given it and it gets a change barrel system so the rifle will come with and now I'm not giving anything away that's not open source there's a three three eight Norma Magnum which is an anti material around huh does that replace the physicality and no not really nothing can the the thing about think about 50 caliber which I think it will probably stick around for a bit is because the size of the cartridge you can do a lot with the bullet construction so you can have multi-purpose round scenario you know you can have you know the raw foods right yeah yeah ralphus which actually is made by the company I work for where they cost like twenty-five dollars of poverty I'm not sure street price is probably something like that but that's a that is a explosive armor-piercing incendiary fragmentation round in a 50 caliber so you start scaling down the size of the projectile there's only so much engineers can do with that so three three you know you can have a great armor-piercing round you can have a an API round which which is decent with it but you're not going to get any of the multi-purpose certain aspects AP is armor-piercing and Simeon Cindy airy right so you know so but so the episode will come with a three three Norma it'll come with a 300 Norma which is going to be the primary sort of anti-personnel barrel and that 300 or not is a very high-performance cartridge it shoots a 215 grain bullet at close to three thousand feet per second so if you want to compare it to like where a 7.62 the drop out to a thousand meters is like a 300 Norma drop out to a thousand meters the bullet is dropping I don't know I'm probably just swagging this year but it's probably dropping out a thousand liters probably about two meters less so in my own man so what that does is that increases the hit from the right and that's where 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 a m110 or the 7.62 semi-automatic sniper rifle that's currently in use you know I'll just say 600 meters you know yeah probably about a 90% hit probability you go out to 800 meters and the probability goes down and you go out to a thousand meters goes down eight or 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 is that mostly due to the drop in like the velocity of the drop and you know performance at the end or is it mostly due to the arc and and your hit percentage like the flatter around the better chance it's both so if you want to talk about trajectory in that part you know that's kind of that danger spaces that's Ryan that'd be I'll use yeah so I forgot you have kind of a rising branch and a following branch of dangerous trees and what danger space means is if I have my sight 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 it 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 so with a 300 normal like I might be able to hit everything from my 350 meters up to like 650 700 meters just by holding Center max over 300 buddy I might be able to only hit to about 550 meters maybe like six hundred ten meters so the length those numbers are absolute I'm just pulling out my ass literally so but the the how big your danger space is is is a is a is a factor of how ballistically affected the cartridges and also that will coincide with velocity and the Bulls performance how less the wind bullet the wind drifts in the wind right or how how much it drifts in the winter should say faster there was another question Dave Alex Bennett yet actually he said he's a EAS cousin had a question that we have we have four question Alex all right Alex he says hi from via his cousin I actually don't know who this dude is but he said what's your favorite story about Jared Ben Dallas 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 with that 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 whole story was so he lived with me and my wife fer almost a year before they bought their house in Columbus and when his wife was pregnant so they were Jared was deployed and so he said Katy was staying with us and so we would kind of carpool to 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 he left he left regiment to go take over NCOIC 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 lottery when he got there and when he left is completely different burger and that really it really reflected current stuff and it was going on because he had just come back from janazah so anyway we were in the car and we're leaving Fort Benning out towards the main gate and a car comes on the rampe so this guy's come in from like Kelly he'll like third ID out there and he like swerves right in front of us right you can fight so I think Jarrod was driving and so it's like a road region thing sucks and I'm like dude raagh bay rum post just just relax like this he's getting so mad so injured was one of these guys were he is probably the last guy you ever want to fight vanoss was like yeah 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 regiments start started up their combatives program Jared was one of the guys that would go and train with the Gracie's and he kind of brought the hiepro he brought the jujitsu thing back to regimen and helped stand up the whole regimental program with the other guys that did so very very capable guy that boxed and all that stuff yeah Sonne you carried a Karambit with them overseas yeah right so anyway this guys were doing things so like this right so this guy's next to us and everyone's flipping each other off I'm like can we just get off post right not a great fighter son like okay so like I don't wanna be the guy to get punched in the face while you're beating out another guy out the other guy beats me up so anyway they kind of do by mutual hand signals that pullover thing there were so jared pulls over this goggles and jared reaches over in the glove compartment open the glove compartment and pulls out a mouthpiece you carry not this is like you'd never know and he gets out of the car puts the mouthpiece in starts walking towards the guys car that guy like watched him white pretty muscles in like starts like stretching out again he probably delicious that's my favorite gem something don't fight a guy who has cauliflower ears who carries his own yeah mousies that's probably good advice let's hear from Andrew Dunbar does the Army marksmanship unit have a biathlon program like are they training an American Simo hyah finish so so biathlon is a Winter Olympic sport so the the army mark should be in it trains the Summer Olympic precision sports so that's like a rifle there's a missile events the shot the Olympic shotgun events the small bore rifle events now the the u.s. biathlon team they their shooters come down to Fort Benning and the gunsmith Sam you did a little work on their rifles and help support them by finds a very interesting thing so I got to meet the US by fun 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 whoa I can ski I mean I did like the mandatory learn how to cross-country ski and the army thing you know only woods like muck creek up in up in Washington and he's like okay forget it I'm like what do you mean I'm like I could use like it doesn't matter so he's like listen I put it to you this way you can take a guy that's a world-class skier like a limpet level skier so if the guy doesn't even look a team but he's still in the top like 30 eyes and the best shooter in the world who's Bennett and the say that guy is never shot a rifle before never even picked up the round and the best year in the world that knows how to put on cross-country skis and like go and that guy missing every targeting 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 in shooting so the guys that win are the guys that shoot okay yeah or she's good and their walk last years so you can take a world-class skier and train them up to the standard bands quicker than you could take a world-class shooter and train I don't think you could yeah yeah you so what they the people they recruit from Athlon are the guys that aren't making like the national team okay and the peel those dudes off cos are still like crazy good ski right and the only thing was like watch the biathlon every single one of those guys when they cross and the like as fit as marathoners they all throw up yeah so here's like who trains are shooting program right so they're not the focus on they train in a different way because it's very interesting you know for for sort of static sort of you know the traditional precision events like the Olympics have and that we my team did they hand you you're trying to stand still you're trying to bring the heart rate down and do all these things you're you're the you're the leaf floating down the street all right 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 injury so it's all stress right so what from my understanding is though they'll be on a treadmill and they'll run a treadmill they'll get the heart rate up to where they're normally act like 170 beats a minute when they're coming off of a skiing thing and then that's when they'll jump down and we'll transudate stress you 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 so you watch them shoot in like MTV the Olympics whatever if you can see that if the guys in his rhythm he's like pink pink Vicky it's like right so there really is a meter it's a chaos and the guy who this is or feat holds beyond where where he's supposed to shoot he's screwed you'll see him miss like all the time okay so you know they get it or they're like Sam Ohio was a finnish sniper that killed you know 400 to 500 Russians during the winter or from like 1994 tea and you know it was like you know this uh you know of woodshop 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 used of boys and a rifle and he thought that an optic would give his position away he killed all those guys you know to the close range okay like maybe 100 like 300 meters and they the Russians almost I had to take out on almost an entire grid square with our children just to take him out he survived the war if you look at pictures of him this whole this whole head looks sideways cuz he was his whole face was like shattered I think he got shot in the face or shrapnel whatever in his face but he's a Finnish hero he's up in uh there's a great movie I think I mentioned it on another episode we did it's called the lunar war yeah finished movie about that I mean it's pretty pretty incredible stuff yeah I mean it's a I mean F as an aside that's like not the rabbit hole tonight me but that's a great conflict to study because they didn't have a lot of technology but what they did have was they have a pretty highly trained group of guys they had knowledge of the terrain they can operate in the winter and they're finding an army of conscripts in his right as a very small country going up against the Russian bear now they end up losing the war but they held out for but it was long it was pretty painful to to the Russians because it was before World War two it really kicked off so they were like on their own never there they were [ __ ] I think and everyone knew they were gonna lose but right so they still have a pretty good I mean they have a very good III do with Finland walk as my company is from over there and so it's you know it's still a it's still a very big part of their cultural identity is sumo he's a you know he's a bad sausage thing i Andrew on that note with a biathlon everyone 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 worship unit we had many soldiers that represented the Olympics represented the United States in the Olympics so yeah on a normal quadrennial we would have that you were you know between three years of husband's five or six soldiers shooting the Olympics and that's really why the army marched unit was formed was by executive order by President Eisenhower 1956 yeah so prior to that the the Soviet bloc the Eastern Bloc countries were winning all the Olympic medals because for propaganda dislike with chess Soviet Union used all the sports as a way to basically Express the dominance of right of communism and of their system over the decadent West items general s so they had dogs weren't pure so is that right so just like the Soviet hockey team like the 1980 Olympics these were all professional players and but because of the way that they were actually in the Russian army so they weren't actually 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 is like the same stuff that's come out about their skiing team their uh their Olympic weightlifting team so they're trying to 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 the u.s. started dominating Olympic shooting so all through the 1960s and into the 1970s US shooters dominated and loved the shooting competition I think the number of Olympic medals that amu shooters have one is up around 30 Wow so that's a sergeant in the army who like shoots like a seaman yeah and goes and shoots for the goes of shoots in the Olympic so you have to go through all the same things to make him look a teen shooting at civilians or that's what they want to do too so we work I work shoulder-to-shoulder with Olympians all the time and so I would say what's that light is that there isn't when it starts talking about Olympic 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 asked you know shotguns feature or trap shooter or you know three positions small-bore sugar you're fighting for one of two slots against your own teammates right maybe there's you know 10 or 12 guys on one section only to those guys to go to the Olympics and you're also competing against the civilians and once you get to that level like the difference between those shooters oh yeah what it's mental is whether they yeah really and it's really who has a good day and who doesn't have a good day so the biggest thing about Olympic shooting if any of those types of like skill events the Olympics is tiny when your performance so your best performance is on the day when you need it yeah so this pure is a ssin 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 I'm for like a marathon or whatever you kind of run a certain way you sort of have miles sort of frequency in order to get to where on game day you have your best one shooting is the same way except that it's mainly all mental so you have to you don't want to hit like trace or burn out on your performance your ability to focus so you and so that's where the coaching aspect of it comes in to where you're working mental management programs with guys you're trying to coax the best performance out of the guys possible so they're also 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 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 your shooting somewhere in Asia and from your from the East Coast United States you know main interior circadian rhythms wrong so laughs like we we had guys come in from we had some guys came in from NASA talk about sleep studies and astronauts of how to get best performance out of out of shooters based on how much sleep they have and like optimum sleeping conditions and how to do all that stuff and nutritionists and having like manage guys like blood sugar had a manager mental state and it's a whole thing when you get to that level it's it's every so they briefed on like VA strategy of like smoking a Cohiba cigar out of the range before shooting I mean you know so their name is part of a ritual right if it's part of it 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 if you're a guy who gets up in a Maureen tricks like two cups of coffee and you're under way they're shooting match yeah not gonna have a cup of coffee yeah like cuz if you don't it's gonna change it's gonna yeah because if I you know I drink a couple of cups a cup of coffee a day if I don't have coffee I start feeling it and 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 so I need to have at least a couple beers a night just to keep me regular you know so they done studies divorce very various experiments for this and like the fifties and sixties 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 out because there's a whole list of banned substances and like alcohol wasn't one of the bad substances so they're experimented with like very small amounts of like vodka or whatever was to try to get a guy to calm down yeah I've ever they even went so far as to experiment with like having guys gonna do fights before they had to shoot so there's a story but yeah Potter V adrenaline was like this ah man exactly you might be like this might be an apocryphal story but the way it goes like in the late 50s early 60s the Russians would they were going they would pick a fight with somebody like maybe the best shooter on the US team they just started needling the guy needle in a needle and then to get the USU to blow up then the Russia shooter would like go over the top and scream rant and rave I'm gonna kill you Bubba and that would be like that's that guy's problem and if you know I've never been like a fight I'm a downside of that of that adrenaline you're just like washed out emotionally and that's what 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 before and all of a sudden you get like adrenaline like oh man I could do it and at that point you get adrenaline physiologically now you're like writing alignment 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 masturbating before a first date in order to I like that analogy things I love you the point and then okay DJ asked selling that capability especially in conventional battalions is crucial not Oh selling that capability I guess what you was asking about the capability of like long-range shooting in battalions yeah or competition style shooting not the usual training especially in mech 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 do probably the best training and a competition aside that an operational sniper to do is the precision rifle style shooting which is extremely popular now so PRS or you know there's like national rifle the PRS but essentially what it is is you bolt-action rifles all rights are fairly target sights fairly small it's two minutes an angle unless both things matches the target size is about one minute of angles that means that if you should be in a target 500 yards it's a five inch wide please yeah small target and you know guys are shooting you know all kinds of hotrod calibers that are extremely politically efficient and you know you're know most of these stages are not on your belly with bipods with a SAN saw 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 the involve like physical duress like you have to run up to the stage in order to kind of smoke your l-look your heart rates elevated so rewards fitness and 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 top of the small group small size of the targets so you have to make a quick win call and figure out what am I going to do am I going to hold them the right edge the woods coming out of the right am i holding the target right am i gonna 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 sure TD decisions you're waiting to shoot you're watching conditions you're looking at the other shooters you're talking about how the guys shooting you're watching them so you're wargaming stages and that's a great training tool because it keeps you sort of like you know mentally nimble's 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 Auto cry pants and full of velcro and stuff like that so but those rifles are extremely accurate guys are loading their own ammunition they're measuring the powder to within a kernel of powder crazy [ __ ] and that's a 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 you know two dozen guys that they do that on the weekends I want to grind through some like the last couple questions because we have some other big topics I wanted to get into actually that you would suggested that are really good but Andrew wanted to know the people who are in the president's hundred tab walk around like they're hot stuff are they kind of treated like a kid who wins the science fair the president's hundred tab is is a Martian ship award every year at the national championships there's a pistol match and a rifle match and it's a stage as a fire pit slots there are stages right those are stages and it's it's a traditional kind of course of fire and the top 100 shooters at the end of the match are awarded the Presidential 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 dad wears presents under Special Forces and you know Ranger tab and then the last the last revision to AR 670 - one changed in uniform regulations yes that's the regulation of hash plus wear uniform you know your sideburns are ones when they're dealing feed - fun right yeah your sideburns are one one millionth of an inch - all right your mustache is it tapered down it doesn't look enough like you know the guy from The Addams Family Mercury right so so I think the the president's arms app is now the lowest tab just the throat oh yeah so I was reached qualified and I had presents under tab so I I wore my Ranger tab and my president under tab underneath it looks dumb it's it's the it's so the haters say here's my thing so anyway at the amu if you didn't earn your president's hundred tab within about two years or three years being on team you probably weren't doing your job they might and my job 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 in other environments I don't know I can't speak to that it is a is war right because they only get out a hundred a year and I know the rifle side there's about 13 14 hundred competitors that go out for it every year and of those competitors most of them have already gotten the award before so I think they get out about 15 to 20 new ones a year really that's it yeah so the other like 75 got guys I always assumed it was like a hundred have you know have earned off for so yours not out of the mix if you have it's like you know you don't get mustard stains when I was you know so when I was when I was in the army and I was shooting you know I'd have a guys like then so like this sucks you're shooting a little you already have it like yeah my job is to keep you out dude yeah make you earn it oh yeah thank god yeah yeah I've got another person that aspect flash like I think when I was in the Army I probably saw one person with presidents 100 tab and I don't think they walked around like they're hot [ __ ] cuz after wise you you see you just actually pain in the ass so you have to explain it constantly yeah and you have do you have like people coming up trying to make uniform corrections like a their sergeant so I don't actually start making up stories about it so guys like president Park said what's that like were you like to guard you but my action what it is is they take the top two bodyguards and we have two in each state so I'm part of the jury so we have two in each states with a president sir sure the president comes to the state for like campaign event they bring us out health guard that's awesome guys like yeah yeah so I you know you have to stay on top of it you know yeah to maintain all your revenue codes and what now like I also don't think that anybody looked at him like the like the kid who won the scientific like I mean that in any organization especially once you get into like the the tiered unison where people have badges or or tabs or anything else like that there's always a certain amount of envy Devin Tabitha Jen be like you know you see somebody with Pathfinder badge or you know president's 100 or you know you see something with somebody or you see somebody with something you don't have you like hmm that's the I mean that's the that's the thing the Marines always would say there the army guys like you guys have patches for everything you know everyone's just debris actually it's not a bad perspective right honestly because you do the whole sniff test that ya already got army guys do all the time at your shoulder yeah yeah the very first thing I come in like scoot around see if you have a tab and let you screw around on your right shoulder Chicago yeah yeah I mean that's something that we definitely do in the Army and it's probably not a great thing but that's art that's 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 want to get my route yeah well good smoke then you finally get a seat at the back of the deuce and a half and then depends where you're at to because like in Ranger Battalion having a Ranger tab nobody nobody can't play so that's a analogy so having a range of time a range of time is like having a presence in town right emu 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 harder 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 their grenade toss I think yeah yeah it's the grenade time if you have space and timing on the 50 Cal would you have got me on yeah Ian asks in the faster-paced environments these days do you pre build a range card or just estimate range rapidly so good question um it depends on like how like if I'm doing if I'm 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 um there's some ways of dealing that some both you know if we're talking about like a military environment there's ways of trainings that you can you can deal with target and unknown ranges quickly and enough to do a lot of calculations there are some drills that you can do based on on the optics that are on sniper rifles that you know hey if this - this fits within my crosshair from here to here then I can I know that I can hold here in the crosshair and hit this are guaranteed oh yeah right so you can have some of those things but those those tend to really run out of gas at around six seven hundred donors 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 so it with range cards what I would do is and especially some of this is 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 reticle what I was going to dial on the scope I would have some wind notes so what was the wind was 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 I mean like the the SVD scope that has like that grid in it well yeah I mean the the modern scopes have they have they have Windows so there is something there time-of-flight dots is what they are and it's out there guys can look at it and and and and find out how it works but essentially once you know your bullets performance that dot might represent before mile-per-hour wind so if I'm holding in the reticle for elevation okay I could put this dot next to where I'm holding on the line if I hold is 4 mils so at the 4 mil line that first dot might be 4 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 gonna be blowing yeah so you know again I was raised as a as as a you know assistant gunner and a machine gunner so that whole concept of like almost doing like a range car beforehand it's very valuable yeah it's really effective but I mean I haven't I haven't operated in any kind of capacity of cyber for like a decade now so I'm not familiar with in the 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 a note 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 right yeah all your shots can be close enough that they're making me snap shots anyways that um and if you're set up where you need the range and you need to know the ranges generally you're gonna have the time to set up a range card because you're really not talking about nowadays live laser rangefinders and there's ways of mitigating that to like you know if I can dial and this is you know what you know what was old is now new again so you know when I was when I when I first started like doing this sort of military merchant ships everything the sniper stuff you know some of the optics guys would dial 300 meters zero where you die yeah I wonder jarred zero and you would use body holes yeah you can still you this some of those techniques so you know if you're if you're at a position you off deal you think I'm only dealing with targets I have to say five or six hundred I might put a 300 meter zero on the rifle and know where to hold have these other distances again and 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 third way with Chester as a sniper caliber is going away completely within so so talking a little bit about what a 300 meter zero is what a 500 meter zero isn't like what why that's important well the concept of zeroing means that you are your [ __ ] code weight is saying the strength of the round to your point of aim so if I had a 300 meter zero that means that like the center of my crosshair 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 100 out to say eleven twelve thirteen hundred yards or meters so you have to make adjustments to that so if I have a hundred meters zero which is kind of standard in the precision rifle world hundred or hundred meter if you're working in yards you have our yard zero working the meters hundred meters zero and that's my baseline and I know either through experience of going out of shooting and gathering data or if I'm using a ballistic solver you know what tronic format whether it's on a wind meter that has ballistic stuff in it or you know there's I mean on my phone I probably got five or six different ballistics hours I have never used say get down those tunes and you type in ballistics on iTunes and you see all the ones that come up right after yourself a team house in every car there's dozens on well we'll get back to some questions in a few but there are some other topics you have brought up and a lot I didn't want to learn fall by the wayside one of them you touched on a couple times already is at 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 shut I wonder if you could talk a little bit about um maybe maybe the way to talk about it is the way it's evolved over the last ten or so 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 sniper the evolution of sniper stuff technology wise training wise is very static almost the same is like from Vietnam I really didn't change much I mean we've got some different weapon systems yeah and then 24 but m24 had a mil reticle and had minute of angle adjustments the elevation was and annual clicks and the windage was happening enamel clicks and the reticle was mils but did that make sense anybody but it was like that for 20 years right how guys trained and you know so like so back in the 90s or the 80s or the 70s if you were a sniper what you did was again your primary job is you have to engage the target and unknown distance so target pops up how far away's that's argue well how do I do that well I have to figure out how far away it is by I can like you interrogate it with a device I can use a mil relation formulas that's basically how big the target is and my scope my reticle and I can apply a mathematical formula I know how big the target is and that will give me the range that's re now now that I have arranged 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 who start out 100 meters and you zero and when you're zero you you take the little screw out of your scope cap and you set that to 0 of 1 meter boom and then you go and you shoot 150 meters and your record okay I need like one plus one click I don't under 50 meters you run it now and you got 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 whenever he had all that crap written down your dope yeah in your dope book yeah everybody count around this big dope book siren right so the big change happened when the ability to predict trajectories with electronics came about so first ballistic solvers were these things called 8tracks and it was kind of a pretty large it's like a giant Palm Pilot like the mortar ballistic computer well it was a bit was like a pop I like that and it had ballistic software like on a flash driver or in it and the way it worked was you shot a hundred meters zero and then in conditions and then you typed into the solver all the info on the rifle so how fast the bullet is going what golden I'm shooting so you had an input a ballistic coefficient of the boy the height above the bore all this stuff and then when you're shooting at your target you had an input the current atmospheric data because there'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 some of the firing pin strikes the 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 ballistics everything that happens that bullet when it leaves the barrel - it's time to the flight till it hits target and terminal ballistics is what happens that's full it when a hip starting it comes right so it's like glass shooting and what happens like the hunting bullet how Wells do when it hits a deer or a person or how well it doesn't ballistic gel all these things so these solvers would solve predictions based on equations and algorithms with all this atmospheric data say okay it's 75 degrees a thousand feet above sea level humidity is like 25% bumble ball you add it you put all this stuff in and then the solver would go if your target 750 meters you need to come 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 what people's like evolutionary quantum leap and it's not otherwise you would have 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 this right you've collected it at that one time in place and unless you can predict how that trajectory changes so at Fort Benning Georgia on our range elevation was about 300 feet above sea level so if I get my data at 300 rebuffs helo 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 10,000 feet above when many of my sniper partner Joe got to Afghanistan from Benning we had to come up a minute of angle right so like how do you predict that so that was the biggest evolutionary thing so and then once once the solver thing started then the accuracy of the data so how do we get this data more accurate so that 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 anomaly 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 so you have a wind meter and it's got a bunch of solver and these wood meters have atmospheric collection things on so now the meter can tell you it's how many degrees it's not this much right basically the atmospheric pressure is 29.92 now it 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 Wentz who is a hundred-pound brain dude and he was a champion competitive shooter and he decided that he wanted to start figuring this stuff out instrumented measure it so all the way now we've evolved tournament to a science it is a science then so his his companies applied ballistics so now we are at a point where so if a company comes out with a new bullet for today or Sierra or Lapua a burger comes out the new bullets there is now they will shoot that bullet across Doppler radar that can measure time of flight data offer the base of that bullet like maybe get a hundred pings on that bullet out to like 1500 meters Wow mm really yeah and now instead of making guesses at what the bullets trajectory looks like because hey we have a ballistic coefficient which is an expression of the bullets ability to penetrate the air Blissey coefficient is given that 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 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 a solver so now your soccer knows the exact all you have to know is input is like my sites are this high over the door Mike what muzzle velocity is X what the color atmospherics are and we're not pushing this first shot hit this hit probability out now - I mean for real if you have a unit cartridge that's capable of it we're getting first-round hits for close enough that it's already where you're right on it out of thirty four thirty five hundred yards and beyond so mo let me just throw this out at yet some of the longest record sniper shots in the field yeah jtf2 2017 3540 meters Special Forces sniper with a barrett in 2012 two thousand eight hundred fifteen meters this looks like a british sniper with a AI l115 83 mm 475 meters that was in 2009 right this why these guys were able to reach out to these likes it's part of it I think part of it is there's now calibers there's not accurate sniper systems that are ballistically effective out of those ranges so Rick the Canadians are using 50 caliber right so they're using a effectively chromatically 50 caliber the Brits might be using 50 caliber up using 338 Lapua these are cartridges relatively new for sniping three freight Lapua is a very effective cartridge it shoots at 250 green bullet at you know two thousand nine hundred and fifty feet per second wow it's fast let me if you think about how fast is three thousand feet per second 3,000 feet per second how fast that is that at a thousand yards the in a vacuum where there's no air air resistance the bullet takes one second to go a thousand yards if 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 oh but it's a 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 you're 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 are 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 that they have out there they both those countries militaries have a really long marksmanship lineage and they take it seriously for real with with this data so back back in the old days like you know 97 and right not and before 2000 um one thing that was always drilled into our head was the Cold War is cold war is is it that is it is it figured into like does it matter is it is it not as significant as we used to be led to believe so is it fed into this this snap wall so not really so I mean cold border means so the very first shot take out of the rifle where does it hit right I have found that cold bore more and 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 in consider all this and it's you know as we say that the the out on everything when you're in military structure is like situationally dependent Metis sorry right so it depends on situation so if I know that every time I go out my first shot is like point to Mills low I have to factor that in in my first shot I have to hold a point to those hot in that first shot and you know if you're you know the whole data collection thing snipers still do that right you know you should still be doing that if you're serious about craft whether you're a competitive shooter civilian sugar 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 could 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 or I can I can measure my velocity so at say you know 70 degrees Fahrenheit my velocity is 2,600 feet per second and 85 degrees Fahrenheit my velocities 2,650 feet per second and I'm like 20 degrees Fahrenheit my muzzle velocity is like two thousand five hundred and ten feet per second for example I can enter those data points into my solver and then when the sabra reads 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 do the solvers have I mean do they do they figure for cold or is it or is that something I don't do what I use usually don't so it's more of a you know yeah it's more of a thing that I know like I shot this 2-mile competition a couple years ago and this one particular rifle it was a mechanical thing whether it was like how its set in the bending of the rifle after the first shot but the first shot was always like about a minute of angle high okay always yeah so the very first shot I ate one minute an angle low and afterwards I held center so for people who don't know what that is a cold bar 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 you're not heating up your barrel or doing whatever you know whatever they say you know the colder barrel may be the round travel slower or or whatever yeah then they say like a lot of these things are kind of obsolete with modern weapons right I mean we used to have like a breaking-in period with guns and well you still really you need to break into guns yeah the the higher the caliber is the more simmer so somebody's really high-performance calibers like six five cream or 300 Norma that are now being used or will be used in military systems you you do experience where the velocity of the barrel will change until the barrel is seasoned and that's a certain number based on you know the based on how the powder of the how it fouls everything so it is that term season to mean 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 things couple different you know theories about it one theory is is you are changing the bore the condition the bore so it's after its first made it might have some like little marks on it from tooling and you shooting it smooth those tooling marks out another is the just the fire and heat that comes out of a run of a rifle cartridge the the temperature and prep the temperature out of a fired round is actually higher than the melting point Steele really so when you shoot a round out of your 308 or 300 Winchester Magnum the temperature the temperature caused by the powder burning is greater than the melting point of steel so your melting or eroding the steel and the chamber of the 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 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 isn't that a bad thing there's an edifice but that velocity will typically in most rifles that we regardless of caliber they'll typically speed up a bit from a brand new barrel they just screw on or just get the rifle you buy it from you know your local gunsmith or gun shop and you take it out and after 100 rounds a lot of guys or tooling around some guys will realize that the velocity is speeding up does that have anything to do at all with like what type of stock you got whether you have like a floating stock or like like is it is it's more let's go somewhere in the browser so that internal 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 turbine a camera inside the chamber you can't know we can instrument chambers with pressure we know that's one thing that industry that we do is you can measure pressure by a couple different ways of you basically have a transducer or somewhere in the chamber area and when the rifle fires if that pressure can basically pushes on a piezo crystal that causes a piezoelectric Rifles it'll cause the voltage change and then that message can be interpreted as pressure that's amazing so and that's all technology we've been able to do that for decades and decades or so but but you can do all that you can actually even see the pressure curve where relative to where that 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 when our that peak pressure is relative to wherever it is in the bore but you still can't see mm-hmm what that bullet actually looks like as it's engaging the lands and grooves in the rifle you can assess not healthy the modern state of special-operations yeah I think just to try to summarize it's become much more of a science look for a fee yeah no it's okay it's become much more of a science yeah you've been able to take many more measurements than you were in the past and enter them into computational beeper gideon and pewter the ability to predict is much greater the tools that the guys have to help with that prediction is of both the solvers and wind meters the caliber and the ammunition and the weapons platforms are much better there are more precise than more ballistically effective than they were 20 years ago and you know if you look at if you will 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 action based precision of the rifle and then that error is stacked on to what's my range what is my what is my range estimation what's the what's the word for it you know 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 right foot the gun platform oh really so mounted to the rifle is a range estimator there's a laser rangefinder and some laser rangefinders mounted in line with the rifle also give a ballistic prediction so now the things that I had to do with the Kestrel in 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 doubt 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 yeah it's all integrated right it's integrated and all those aspects of it and I think the biggest change is the ability for guys operate in limited visibility so the night vision is bright so the just the rap the advancement of how and you know how fast night vision changes you can buy the the hotness yeah in two years it's obsolete yeah now they got color night vision yeah I'm just crazy so all that stuff without getting too specific but there's so that level of ability and they let them the ability to illuminate the target Billy and see the target and the ability to spot at night using different techniques and different equipment has you know has just exploded so that those that's probably the so names on that note you said you'd like to talk also about the advanced sniper rifle that ASR program and maybe that's great and also into right what's the future of snipe so this scout talks about the future of like Special Operations sniper so the ASR 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 aware Special Operations guys are gonna get a rifle with two calibers had never been fielded before that then those those calibers there's 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 expect expectation is the head coach they have you would our gun suits would give me a brand new thousand or a rifle how well I expected to shoot that's how all these writers should but it has to be fielded in you know all the the conditions that you know those guys up in Mishawaka and I have to put the put combat rifles the right and the biggest changes the ability to change now so in watch what what purpose does that serve so one can't you so the system is you know it I think you know comes with about three pin it's it's kind of spec to come with three barrels and one barrel is a training barrel and then one barrel is an anti-personnel barrel and then the other barrel is an enzymes that are out there okay so the inside material barrel is a separate caliber with a separate projectile that has very very good armor penetration ability and the 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 train every day for a month and shoot ten thousand rounds through because there's a trade-off the higher performance that your cartridge is usually the less barrel life you have okay so there's a the training barrel is designed a guy can still train all this core competencies it can do the mechanical work of marksmanship he can still train how to read the wind because the the thing is with these solvers that we have now all you have to do is work well I have to worry about is the wind speed you don't have to memorize dope anymore so when I train guys for shooting I trained them to to try to always capture the what the total wind speed is never mind you know when I first started shooting competition shooting yeah one of these old-timers at amu I was like hey startin how much wind is blowing out there and he looks at her spot scope he looks up the wind flags and takes some you know grass there's like it's about four minutes I'm like well why why is it four minutes away goes well it just is I'm like well how do you know he's like cool you know it looks like it is he'll you know the Mirage is doing that you got that flag and there's this four minutes man just shoot the four minutes and I was like okay well I don't have like 20 years to write do this show I want to learn it like right now so and that's really the way that the sovereign so I don't care what the bullets performance is as long as I can tell me as human being with the wind speed is what the direction is and those two things together the direction and the velocity will give you the total crosswind of the earth that's out there what does I have the total crosswind I can use my solver I could use my reticle I could just shoot a mile per hour of wind so a big one of the 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 we need to use it and you go I'm using like four mils of wind that does me zero good right I can do nothing with that information right but if you go a mile I'm using six miles an hour it's 6 miles an hour for your rifle it's 6 miles down from our life right so inculcating that and training guys to think of wind speed as a total velocity number it's don't really worry about memorizing clicks or mills or AI stuff because your solver tell you that you're a little cheat sheet your data card could say that and there's all kinds of these there's kinds of the shorthand rule of thumb formulas that have been developed that were 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 certain mile an hour wind because of this sort of short sort of short-handed sort of formula so this this is art project yes it's designed to replace the 110 the wind mag the whatever it I know it's designed to replace the m24 in 24 and replace its design replace the the 2010 okay so the xm2010 which is 300 Chester Magnum ASR across SOCOM is designed to replace this rifle don't you why are they replacing the 300 why didn't they decide they needed to do that so the 300 Winchester Magnum is a great cartridge it's very ballistically effective but you know so 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 need to the capability so what happened was one of the big changes with the way the system was set up the design was a bunch of operational guys within SOCOM got together and said okay this is what we think right looks like and this is what we want as a system the three are one mag it is pretty good out to a thousand meters or maybe 1,100 meters and actually beyond if the guy is 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 training a guy to be a journalist or or you know or somebody else that's really really good and reading weighing or shooting like I want to take my average guy right and make him as effective as like a stud right at that after that range the only way to do that with like long-range shooting a sniping is to increase the ballistic performance of the cartridge just as you're gonna 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 if marksmanship may be of military marksmanship maybe of sniper operations and I remember when the scar came alright like really in 2009 I think we were messing her we started messing around with it at my unit and I thought it was like a revelation I thought it's great yeah but kind of fell by the wayside man no one really gives a [ __ ] about the scar I mean yeah I mean well I mean this rifle is modular I mean you can change calibers than a few minutes that's a moderate thing and you know the you know the buttstock closes like what I was thinkin of the barrels changing out the caliber yes barrel change and calibers changing out you no longer have to send I mean back in the old days with an m24 once that thing stopped shooting you had to send it to Remington so that you turn the rifle into the armor and their arms like you're right it sucks I gotta turn around I gotta send this thing to rent it alright yeah the cerise you know again the Marines are ahead of the army a lot in worship all through history this current market ship training that's going on the code revision of marksmanship were for bigger me martinsia a lot of that was heavily influenced by vertical by army guys going to marine symposiums going to see Marine training and taking those lessons learned the Marines do marker ship great I mean then I you talking to guys from like boot camp yeah oh you're talking about the ice you know I shot the Pedley against the Marine Corps rifle team for you know over a decade and my job was to like kick those guys in the dick yeah every time I break but they do mark [ __ ] institutionally River I'll tell you like in Marine Corps boot camp we I can't remember four it's two weeks of Royce it's just snapping in show every single day dry firing with with the tradition and slave to they default to so they're no longer you know the the really static Napa shooting they've evolved their programs to 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 that there's super smart guys and they're doing the same thing that the Army's do those but its fundamentals like stay with me through through everything yes because of that snappy that period of snapping in right oh absolutely yeah so but yeah that 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 this happening put it on there it takes it takes the operator two minutes to do that so you know at a certain point especially a long deployment or something happens you know you're jumping it and something goes right yeah and now you have a you have a rifle that you can't shoot it's a freaking tomato snake you can change it out in the field that's a huge thing yes sir that's amazing the other subject I want to get into before we take a few more questions I think people will be really fascinated by is ultra-long range marksmanship you were talking about once you get pushing out past 1500 meters you're one of the guys out there are really you know aiming for 2 miles out well some of those record-setting shots in the field that I mentioned earlier we spent I think a lot of time talking about the friction so far that snipers or long-range marksman encounter the the wind distance ie 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 I'm shooting you how to say 600 meters I know that I don't really have to resolve I don't have to be like anal prize like win nerd you know if I'm only sure you have the 600 meters I know that depending on my caliber I might just be able to hold the right edge of an inside muscle in it for five miles an hour win with a 7-6 - if I hold the right edge of an IPSec after about 600 meters I'm probably going to get a hit whether it's anywhere on the edge depth - downwind and the for the further 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 wind reading now that level of confidence and my granularity I've had two beers okay let me say anymore but the that level that level of confidence isn't required if you're shooting on this side of eight hundred even a thousand meters I mean if you're if your job is to get hints on target get into women within two miles an hour of a total offense probably okay and if I'm at 500 meters and then getting to win within four miles an hour of the win it's probably okay to get hits but if I start pushing out beyond the transonic range of that bullet so tread so velocities supersonic transonic subside right so supersonic is anything above well it's technically anything about Mach one right but if you remember sort of chuck yeager you know you know go through all the vibrations and you know all the test pilots that were killed there's a zone between about Mach 0.82 about Mach 1.2 which is very unstable so the bullet goes through a lot of turbulence in that zone so if you're shooting after near that zone you're ballistic performance your bullet starts degrading extreme let's get a lot of wobble or what happens to it well some boats do some bold stuff so well we'll design bullets are stable through transonic okay poorly designed bullets are not so an example of a bullet that the and it's a goal that was in my army competitive ammunition so when the army shot 308 for everything in 14 days right they the the m85 2 was competitive shooting ammunition and it was loaded with 168 green sierra matchking uh-huh 168 grain sara 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 arrow might be likely hold an arrow and word analysis that the 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 kinda goes end over end right with a bullet we can't put fletchings on a bullet so we spin a bullet for gyroscopic stability so the center of pressure and the center of gravity is almost there far enough apart that bullet is stable when center pressure will move what on on RPMs okay so that's so that's them as it slows down at 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 kick have a 308 if you shot that thing past about eight hundred yards they would tumble into the target and this was our long-range ammo but it was right it was marksmanship yeah instead of the Box not for combat use right but it was it was unstable yeah as soon as it got below Mach 1.2 it was unstable it would tumble they would y'all he'd see both looks like this wow there's like an imprint like a Bugs Bunny imprint of a bullet in the paper you probably you wouldn't want to get hit and it's a this is a whole other conversation for another time but there's a big misconception that five five six tumbles well yeah I mean yeah I mean it's not really normal bullets do not pump no they don't any bullets will make it when they hit media minute mediums whether it's a gel or something where they tend to yaw and bullets tender most bullets tend to break apart some bullets are purpose-built to maintain their mass you know both that are solid monolithic bullets you look at some of these bullets guys go shoot like dangerous game with their like solid copper bullets in there they're designed to like retain all their weight and is bore as deep as they can into dangerous game and five five six because it's if you hit it's a treatment high velocity in remission and nishan 5.56 you know you're talking about velocities excess of 3,000 feet per second and so when it's turning because that velocity it y'all is 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 in a straight line was it hit somebody it would like take a right turn or a left turn to did incredible damage but that damage was caused just by velocity and things that we know about apnea by shooting high-velocity projectiles at like at gel and water you could see bullets create a shot annotation a cavitation effects so but yeah both that if it's tumbling it's do something wrong right so but like so that sort of dynamic instability of the 160th that was like that cat the range then you can you can use that both yeah so I both designs come a long way to where now bullets are stable through that well was i bullet will still and hit point first it'll maintain that same attitude it'll follow the nose of the boat tail will align with the bullet trajectory so though 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 you shooting so the starter caliber is probably a 3/3 lop okay which is funny because like in the regular world that's like the biggest thing like so there's 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 fourth of July and the targets 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 seventeen hundred and sixty yards in a mile so the final target is like three thousand five hundred and twenty yards so the caliber you're talking about is three separate on man-shaped man-sized elements so they work out to about one minute of annual targets load up distance gotcha so at that range it's one minute an angle is you know thirty six inches or whatever there's a two minute angle target you know then it's like two yards across right you know 72 inches around so but the biggest difference is you have to be able to refine the wind to within 15 degrees and one by one hour so as a matter of fact we were talking earlier about you know some tactic or 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 window the windows directly from your back that Mirage doesn't appear to have any movement it kind of goes straight up it's called a boil in 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 though I know the wind is coming from somewhere in your direction I would turn my spotting scope or my binoculars and so the wind boiled and that is the actual direction so just talk about what kind of resolution or fidelity you need I would actually have a compass or I'll take the compass on my iPhone and I'll shoot as when at the target I'll find the boil I'll shoot as without the oil I'll get the Delta between those two degrees and so if it's like a 59 degree wind relative to my my sort of my my direction of fire I'll type in the sine of 59 degrees so 59 degrees and the sine is 0.85 seven so that's an 86% winds so the notion of a simple of a full value and a half value into my value and that's like kindergartner [ __ ] for what you're doing you can't do it like that because the target so the 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 talk through them about four you know it's a six hundred meters and if six an IPSec like size target is about four miles an hour across if you're using it freely if you're using like a six five pre-war it's about six miles an hour of wind across that means that and zero I hit the edge and at six it's down one inch right so when you're talking so even these are really large calories you're shooting though at 375 cheytac with a 379 grain burger bullet with a muzzle velocity of two thousand eight hundred fifty feet per second so for 379 grain bullet that's more than double the weight right of a lot of other conventional projectiles that we're shooting right and the muzzle velocity is faster than what like a seven six - is that a sniper rifle so in normal very high ballistically effective projectiles but the bullet is in the air like eight or nine cents the maximum maximum so the highest bullet is in trajectory is around six hundred feet some books like six or nine feet in the air so what now after 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 six hundred feet up in the air right 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 dynamic stuff right it's very rare that you're gonna have kind of a hoe genius wind from you to the target those ranges so a good way to visualize it is like taking a bucket 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 think out like what's predominant when maybe what's the wind forecast at what's the winds 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 move the time of the day could cause the air moves so if I'm sure you across the valley and it's in the evening as air cools down air goes downhill and as air heats up arrow goes uphill so if you're out the desert shooting there's a range out in Phoenix that we shoot competitions on and you go out that way you know 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 gonna suck it so bad with 25 miles an hour and then at 9 o'clock in the morning just died the wind guys because it's heated up all the air yeah and all that air moving up is causing that wind so wind will go up and down hill across down valleys a down terrain so you have to look at that so you're making all these assumptions based on experience based on guesses because with wind I've 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 in there nuts another factor to is like finally I have weather coming I have to start be able to make some predictions about what the wind is gonna 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 Underground or any of these absolutely hey one o'clock the woods going to be at this angle at this mile an hour relax all military guys you've got guys that are pained be weather men in the in the military yeah so use those guys as a resource mmm like before you go into an area ask them what the winds gonna be doing and the pretty when you're shooting out at two months yeah all of these ballistic computers we've been talking about your weather meters here are the levels you have on the guns are they helping you at two miles or is there still a little bit of an art and 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 think about group size so if I have one minute of angle gun that means that at two miles in best-case scenario my gun has a group size of about forty inches now if my target is like a 36 inch plate that means that my group if I have a perfectly centered group I'm gonna miss right 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 how shot go low I tend you have to hold back the your inclination to hold 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 apps the extreme outer edge of the group that's one thing the other part of the other the the main challenge in the shooting extremely long range is seeing the impact that's the hardest part yeah and that I think is where there's the biggest opportunity for advancement in that game is new technology to spot rounds those ranges passed around fifteen sixteen hundred meters you cannot see a 30 caliber bullet hit the ground he's can there's not enough there's not enough mass - it lets you know perfectly like a dry sandy area you can see the dust pop up but if any kind of edge any Gratton ich 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 bowl goes into a dark spot you're not seeing it and a thing that we use a lot in in shooting is watching the trace like the Boeing right you've seen that yeah so the trace is formed by the bullet going downrange supersonically and actually causes like a little bit of like a shockwave and you can see that kind of looks like a invisible boat going down when I was in sniper section and I didn't know damn thing everybody was described to me is like you remember in the matrix when they shoot the guns exactly a little wave behind the bullet yeah it's the matrix it looks like the nature right well that's great but when you're bullet if the apex of your trajectory is like three four hundred five hundred feet in the air you can't see it anymore right it's so yeah it's going yeah and you're not gonna 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 ranges gunmen bigger calibers and bigger calibers and bigger calibers so like the current 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 net down to point four one six that shoots like a 500 or 550 grain bullet at you know close to 3,000 feet per second so there are unusable 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 mouth is 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 kick it has so one of the worst things you can shoot it's a fifty caliber bolt-action sniper rifle with a suppressor that is kick your ass it's painful that it hurts a lot because there's nowhere for that force to go except straight back and it's punching it just drives straight through it's like an impulse it just never stops and so 50 Cal it's a that's a problem 50 caliber in military sniping these guys if you shoot too much you know physically [ __ ] out well and you get things like the touch retinas yeah and it'll [ __ ] you and not only that but your spotter always you know it's especially if you're shooting it in like the kind of an arid environment yeah yeah you know you shoot it you look back in your spotter like the Scopes like knocked over it's a place to be is right behind the rifle everybody else it's having a bad yeah yeah and they're very loud you have to use like double hearing protection earplugs and you know air box and whatever so so these in order extreme long shooting is it's all those things that make it very tough yeah the prediction is difficult because they have an actor ballistic model you have to have shot that bullet and being 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 yeah the prediction issue you have just the precision of the rifle issue I mean you know if you have a great shooting rifle 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 can apply to the bullet itself to see where it impacts they're working on it yeah I was gonna ask you about about the whole Muslim breaking things like that cuz I remember going down the steel sniper course and shooting the 301 I for the first time and you know guys were building those up with as much foam and pack because I mean it would just bruise lose the hell out of your shoulder and moving them to these these larger caliber weapons how are they managing recoil with those and every it's it's 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 where which is a sport you know and a lot of guys do it and you want there's videos out there if you just look on YouTube of like a PRS shooter shooting a caliber like you know a six millimeter caliber kind of good looks 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 it really doesn't move really yeah so the I deal with these muzzle brakes they're so good now that you can shoot 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 firing that boom you can cheat and you can actually see the trace through your own optic go in you can spot your own index and that is the bad as the big yeah multiplier if you're shooting by yourself your ability to make corrections and sponsor and impacts but that's only possible with the use of these brakes and yeah because I mean we've got to that point with a 308 because you know it wasn't that it wasn't that bad big of a round and you know you you dial it in tight enough and everything like that secure enough and you can like put it round after round after round once 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 a lot of that is skill and all those training and you know technique that's a very important thing to practice rushing but you muzzle brake technologies really yes so any other pressure technology is really I mean and almost all shooting now police in the military Ronon is all done supposed there's almost no unsuppressed shooting done so training zeroing everything is done and suppressed really yes so that actually adds in some complexities so because with a suppressor suppressor you know the way a suppressor works is it kind of distributes the gas 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 based is more or less though the gases escaping supersonically from the barrel and that creates that sound that lab report well your suppressors kind of slowed down the migration of the gasses out of the barrel and lets them leave and a it angles and it baffles them off so you're you're eliminating that sort of that reporter the problem is all the gas gets run through a suppressor and suppressors get hot mm-hmm so be shooting any sort of sustained fire after 10-15 shots there's so much heat that suppressor that's so hot that it causes so much Mirage so you can you have a hard time seeing your target right so I mean that is a that's that's that's that's something that guys out the MIDI I mean guys have there's all kinds of Rube Goldberg things like I've seen guys like this little fan like blowing on this I'm not on the guy suppressor there's different types of coverage 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 help that so you know if you have your scope three three-and-a-half four inches which is actually fairly common out in these modern systems because really yeah the scopes are really big they have large objective lenses they you know fifty six millimeter objective lenses the tube you know back in the old days up to of the scope was an inch or even seven eight so now there are thirty hundred thirty four millimeter they're big what power scope are you using for ultra long range sure so you know I use at night seven to thirty five seven to thirty five okay yeah 525 seven to thirty five those are usually the power rangers guys are using got some more questions in here I just wanted to get to because I know what we're taking out a lot of your time and in chinos I'm not picking up no it's a plant I don't know I'm a picker you know through I am I was born this way alright even came back with about a strange car that says I've build bridge carts 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 it 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 twelve O'Clock win 2-0 a three o'clock wind is 100 percent 30 degrees or one o'clock is 50 percent two o'clock win or sixty degrees is about 87 percent so you can apply those percentages to your his base whole so he says okay I've got five miles an hour written down personally I prefer if you're gonna do a system like that I prefer to use like four eight twelve because five is a hard number to divide into for the divided in three right but if I have a four mile an hour so if I have a wind hole if I write down a four mile an hour hold and they might have a eight mile that whole if I divide my four by two which is easy I have a two mile on hold and I buy that again by two I have one if I act by double four I have eight if I double it and add half I have ten so even numbers are always easier to manipulate then then odd numbers mathematically speaking and most of 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 will 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 found another hole that if I'm on an hour this is my five mile an hour Duke will tell me maybe I'm it's a drift of three minutes four minutes an angle and it's a one o'clock win I just divided my dope so I take 50% of four minutes and angles two minutes and 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 or you can apply the arithmetic to your to your full value dope and you're gonna get the same thing but the important thing you have to do in both scenarios is know what those angles are you know so my sort of mush my amended making it easy to do over then I run for taking your head my wind values my angles the way I do it is so twelve o'clock is zero I'm a fifteen degrees or ever half an hour so twelve o'clock is zero fifteen degrees is 25% what o'clock or thirty degrees is 50% forty five degrees or 1:30 is effectively seventy five percent the sign of that is 0.71 I rounded up to 75 2 o'clock wind is sixty degrees it's 87 percent I rounded up to 90 because it's easy to take a tenth office and write it right and then anything past two I call full value because the wind percentage for a 230 wind is like 0.96 you might as well call it full that right so if you started two o'clock if you round everything to 100% past two o'clock you're probably only going to be off you know less than five six percent of the wind and those are that's that's law students notice 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 six percent that's 10 miles an hour or nine point four 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 that consolidate all sniper schools in one location so you guys have been talking about the SEAL sniper course the Marines have their scout sniper of course there's sodic or now the Special Forces sniper course sniper school there of any sniper course all these different schools should they be consolidated in one location you know no so number one every school there whoever uns customer is they have they have their own culture right yeah so the Marine Corps has their culture it's good that my range of training Marines right but maybe course 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 probably Rangers so now and the basic the basic part been a sniper course is probably the you know it is a baseline course it's a great course the guys down at 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 go to fly it's if sick you know for Bragg the Special Forces type of course you're getting into other things that are the capabilities that they want a Special Operations sniper to be able to do cuz so much so dick anymore guys know they change the name of you sorry and so you know you I think that the sniper school should serve its customer and and what they need out of that die so you know yeah the best example is the for penny stock of course that's like the basic course that's like you know the basic basic level that anybody with a Bravo for skill identifier and the Army is expected to be at and I've been graduate a really good product that guy is super capable but you know at subset they do more stuff of like movie targets they might do stuff with that you know how does how does how does that sniper operationally work with guys that are learning friends assaulting but they yeah they have at least the last I knew they had the collects who is between the Special Forces sniper course in sephardic so it was the snipers ringing directly with the assaulters which is how they're supposed to arm overseas you know when they deploy yeah I mean yeah you know I know Pio Pio eyes change and things like that but you know if that's a capability that they want and they can train it like that it's you know it's so I don't I don't think no I don't think they should all be consolidated because you're not really getting the product from the customer Alex asks what are the differences and challenges of working with non-military units like that FBI HRT US Secret Service cat to counter assault team I believe and private organizations like nuclear security folks so I've done some training with folks like that um most of those guys are former soft guys almost all of us so you know if you're working with Department of Energy there's a number using the new security guys yep they're all Rangers SF yeah seals JSON as JSON so it's really the same the challenges are sometimes their gear is dissimilar from something that you work with before they may want a specific capability trained they may have a metric they have to meet I did some law enforcement training and I did some training with FBI I I haven't worked with HRT but I've worked with like various FBI field offices SWAT time SWAT team stuff and you know those guys they have a lot they have some liability issues and I've work with regular local law to look with our ro it's going to be very hard liability they have actually like hey bro check it out for real I might be in a court room right right there's like a you know a high-paid what men determine if they're FBI they're gonna be in a courtroom regardless yeah because it's part of an investigation so you know depending on they may want to work on they'd be able to work on like a short range stuff they may want to work on limited visibility you tell or the training to whatever the requirements are but within most of those organizations you know u.s. marshals or do ii whoever invariably they're almost like you owe it dude you know you so you play the you knows the guy yeah right away and you know they're all former sokka's yeah a lot of a lot of law enforcement isn't it generally it's more is short it tends to be short range and they're growing morph like fast pyrolysis and things like that I mean the average law enforcement shot I think the number changes based on engagement centimeters but it's it's it's no great it's no greater than about EDR oh really oh yeah so most of those most of those law enforcement you know interdictions that happen probably happened between about 50 and like any other missive versus non-permissive environment and they're getting one shot yeah 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 right uncommanded yeah that's it that's what they want on that guy and be able to do quick peel suits be able to something military guys don't do a lot of military guys do train it but like counting down the chute yeah that happens a lot of coordination yeah coordinating snipers right so multiple snipers so whether it's whether it's the guy that's running the whole deal the SWAT commander is on radio and he's telling guys countdown you know that takes training yeah the first time that you tell you teach you guys to do that or you're putting them on a clock you're giving them they've got a voice in their head what have to shoot they shoot like a can of smash that yeah it's not them they're not a lot of jerking the trigger yes so that's something that has to be true yeah hundred percent I want this one that's tank engine aspect hammered [ __ ] that's a technical yeah you're gonna love this one is the 1993 movie sniper a faithful depiction of snipers or the most faithful depiction of snipers you know I really enjoyed the movie sniper drivers been saying you got a respects of it yeah you know who's trying you know I mean you know fine exact things like that the burrs off the block yeah I you know there were some elements of that movie which I think were accurate others which were grossly inaccurate so but the movies shooter and the Wahlberg the Wahlberg movie 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 the all the maths right typically so you know which is why you know it's got the guy like use cover to cheeto does like 4.1 what the hell man it's nice three-point like you know write the letter together you know my meatloaf ranked that day so so yeah I think nowadays guys are really they're really careful because they know that people that want to watch the movies are probably the guys are gonna call shenanigans right on that's and the audience's like I mean there is an audience for those films that are like much smarter than they were you know 20 years ago lousiest yeah yeah dude so the guy might be sure he's interested in he might be watching the movie with us with his the listening gear seals Carrie but before you know I mean you see that across the border like that that SEAL team series it's out right now you know there's there's legitimate soft veterans like working in and on that show yeah you can tell I mean obviously it's TV show and all TV shooters are like really hokey and so yeah yeah but you can tell just by the way that the guys kind of do their thing or the gear the kid or how they talk about the can't be later how they hold their gun it's pretty legit because they know that they 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 so I want to watch that show have real life experiences they're bouncing that stuff off right right right right so don't be talking mad [ __ ] in the comments section right now yeah I have the I've had the privilege of being like being a technical adviser 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 the scene and in the scene they're gonna do this what do you think about that and so they'll send me like a thing and I'll make some some recommendations about well it might be more realistic if you change this you state you tell them hey we're shooting at this range in this wind or whatever there's an author named John Ringo oh yeah I read all this book so handsome John's John's a pretty good friend of mine and so in his his riddle the sci-fi books when I was in the army right so his series about the guy that is a like a Navy SEAL and ends up like being a warlord essentially in Georgia I help John with a couple of scenes and that and I think he roped me in into it's at least one of the books as a Catholic called prize yeah Andrew says by John read the books how do you think 3d printing will affect military vendors like are you're finished over war it's worried about 3d printing as the sea change event in their industry I kid about his finish over awards that's a term I use personally smack out of us know me or I must have talked to him before um 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 NASA does it I've talked to an engineer like they will like if they need a partnership for a space shuttle or rocket it's a metal 3d printer you can't 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 most 3d printers are pretty true to ply walking my right but what that does it's prototyping so we actually use 3d printing at the ambient for improvements whenever to prototype something if it works so 3d printing has changed that for a little special prefer typing the way bullets are being made and cartridge cases things like that are being made are still more or less traditional way I will say the biggest single change in advancement in an ammunition manufacturing is polymer cases and Multi multi component cases the other case where it's made up of two different materials may be part of the cases metal from the case of polymer and you can rapidly change the dimensions of that cartridge case because you're just talking about extruding plastic or changing the shape yeah and you can hold plastic to ridiculous tolerances and it's lighter it cap it keeps less heat and up in the in the weapon system so polymer is probably the the next big thing especially in military steps for casing yeah I mean right now to handle the pressure though it can yeah there's a man and Sophie 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 you can sort by about three cans of polymer it's the same weight as two cans of conventional 50 yeah so you start thinking about those applications with aircraft and full weights of ammunition and full weights of of fuel that's a meaningful meaningful change yeah especially the library like a little Bergersen like that lighter birds and you know in difficult to read situations what do you use the gauge wind in the absence of trees flag smoke and Mirage what do you resort to next so you know there's a there's a there's a there's a chart that you know it's been in every marketing manual since the Civil War and it's you know says something like zero to three miles an hour you can see smoke begin to drift four to four to six or four to you can feel the wind on your face and things like that so there's always something to look at the way you just have to find it so for example if you can't see mirages in front of you because you're shooting over dead space so you're on a hilltop and your targets on another hilltop you got a valley dead space the way my rajesh 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 with less Mirage there is the sea so I'm sure you're like a cliff and I look out there I'll be like 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 can see Mirage just remember that if I look this way and the wind is blowing this way and I turned back around that way the wind relative to be looking this ways out of the right when it so I'm back around this way it's not even left right so there's usually something to look at what I know for example if I stand flat-footed on the ground the wind buffeting of the wind kind of you know you're sitting there also the wind like takes you a little bit off your balance for me that's like 14 miles an hour but I know when I can feel the wind in my beard so the dirt is very important from when we did addition it was 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 you can see if you can and if it's permissive you can send a spot around in there you could send around maybe in front of your target that the target can't see or behind the target so where you can just shoot low and look at some splash look at the dust drift so those are some techniques you can use to obviously the situation Bennet shoot the competition sometimes it's worth it to burn one low just to catch the wind yeah to go back on the tourney because like a lot of these PRS matches the target has like dead space behind it so if you miss left or right you can't see [ __ ] the bullets going so guys will burn one low catch the wind go on the target do you feel it like to make up for that 20 years that people don't have to spend at the range if somebody carries like an ax nomina 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 call it the N denominator okay it's four that's a good idea and actually something I recommend when I train guys so when I was in the Army you know around town and I was a sergeant first class and it was great I privates privates are awesome because you can have them do all kinds of [ __ ] so what I would do is I would send the guy downrange with a radio and like a windier and I might stand next to that bush and I look at the bush to my by those you my spotting scope and I looked at my head that say myself that looks like it's eight miles narrow man like what's the wind reader what's the way neither saying is like it says five miles an hour sorry Mike oh so that's not fine that's not it's five yeah so calibrate my eye so I tell guys complete competition shooters and those are guys get like two walkie talkies II by it you know Home Depot or Target get two in meters some by nose and like walk a couple hundred yards minute yeah and like talk back and forth what's you know trying to estimate the win in the guys position stand next to some long grass stand next to some veg then next to a flag whatever it is and try to figure out what the wind is doing at that guy today change yeah it's this same concept it's like your range estimation I think it's this well the range estimator the laser estimator actually says yeah 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 we talked about that before before we're on so I was a video that will just put up for supporters of the strain later on we actually talked to actually I'm all to answer that question like very much in depth yeah so andrew has a question he we missed how does a competitor's a competitive lifespan compared to the normal athletic career so again shooting is a sport that is very long with depends on this depends on the shooting sport right so if it's like Olympic style shooting guys can shoot into their 40s and 50s enter a style like prone long-range there's guys winning national championships in their 70s at the Olympic level for like you know small more and enter air rifle air pistol you're probably not getting too far past 40 it's more about was an inseam I T good for one day two days but that kind of aggregates and adds up but I mean the oldest Olympian that ever won a medal wasn't she really do you know how old they were um so there was an event that's not held anymore it was actually long range shooting in like 1896 London Olympics and I think the dude was in his 60s Wow why don't look as amazing yeah I mean : you might have a shot at it with : well I know what is it about is it that your eyes start going it's that yeah I start going you're resting you're resting heart rate goes up maybe the guys don't handle heat very well I mean you're shooting outside a lot of these events so it's really hot your ability just uh just to weather that stuff you've been a 95 degree 90 degree I keep all day you're probably in your eyesight is cheering I psyched 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 besides I'm a young guy yes so mo I got a question I mean we've taken up a lot of your time you should probably start ramping up fairly soon but I want to play devil's advocate with you for a moment uh 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 these big brains of the Pentagon and the way technology is dancing they're gonna say what what the [ __ ] do we really need you guys for we have all these advances in drone technology and is our we have these these cameras that can see you know a goats ballsack from five miles away we got drones that can fire I mean now they have it what do they call that that ninja Hellfire missile with the blades come out and they kill the guy inside the car without any explosion I mean that isn't the sniper of the future our Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile loaded with cement hitting some guy in the forehead what the hell do we need these snipers for what do they do as we progress into this century um 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 weapons system if I have a platform that if I press the button it interrogate 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 maybe I can keep an identifier on it and it keeps it in there snipers are a very cost-effective tool number one you know I remember when the Iraq war started and you know there's all you know reporter reporters were invented and he's got this one group of guys was getting taken fire from the cruiser of position and was like maybe 3 400 meters away these guys are getting on their Humvees are on the downslope and they freaking bring a dude out with a javelin and they smoke this machine gun bunker with a javelin and their life that was awesome but you could just hear the groaning you know at the command line was like they did what with a missile yeah they shot a machine-gun nest about $80,000 so in terms of cost effective things 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 Salters or assault a manoeuvring elephant yeah that has a thinking guy behind that knows what those guys are doing is huge that's a huge force multiplier I don't think that will ever go away you know all the reconnaissance and intelligence assets that a sniper can bring to it you know if it's not stalking like Carlos did Wilander little girl maybe it's driving a drone and they're being able to take that feed and then integrate it with the systems that you currently have so I think having having having guys that has 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 roee right you know it's not Dresden we can't just bomb an entire city there's not stalling around so that ability to be discriminant and have our OE and that's a huge part part of the way that you know we do now and probably will continue to do warfare where the enemy is just integrated the civilian population absolutely so who how do you get that guy you you're not gonna you know yeah you can caught me if we have drone technology that can there's but in real time how do you do that that's a sniper absolutely that's it's amazing just how far it's come in listening you talk about how data-driven it is more so than I mean it always was to an extent but now yeah it's just incredible some of the the sensors you have to almost two point sometimes it's too much like III would say this whenever I trained military guys that I would say hey man what's your data for nine hours if they have to go 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 when Dave and when Dave was a sniper when you were sniper like having next to your buttstock yeah or how to not take your book like that stuff's not bad that's the one thing that I think is a is an issue with this data-driven sort of you know goddamn millennials but the that that's you know Millennials by the way we find in the war get emails the monitor all kinds of [ __ ] so I got my nails are okay in my book from a Gen X [ __ ] kids yeah but but that that you know losing that as a as a core competency of having stuff memorized you can be nimble yeah that's important so as long as guys you're doing that those room basics those sort of things that you should be doing for due diligence if you're a professional if you if you if you honor your craft and I think the technology was great just supplements that so mo I you know you've been super gracious with your time coming down here and I know this tonight I mean this has been like literally this dude just gave us and all of you guys watching a master class long-range marksmanship and if you were to invoice us I shudder to God ya know we could go another three hours easily this is just such a huge time maybe would love to have you on again sometime yeah be my pleasure yeah well we'll wake up either you know in person or digitally I love ya 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 ah no I don't really have a shingle out publicly usually the stuff that I do in training stuff you don't do many interviews is is military stuff but I work for a company which makes some products so the company I work for is Lapua burner bullets and Vito glory powder and SK rimfire ammunition so we make all those products on the military BD guy for all that stuff but I would look at our you know the burner ammunition factory loaded ammunition is probably so the best factory ammunition you can buy in the world our products you know there are all leaders in the industry whether it's a burglar bought a lock or cartridge case burglar ammunition veto for a powder all that stuff so check all that stuff out you know our our our brand you know Frank in Brussels 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 on pride ourselves on being the best and then all those segments so you want to drive an m5 the world do you want to try a Pinto with four LS one motor in it you know you want the F a Morris Minor yes guys thank you everyone who joined us tonight we had a whole bunch of people watching live and now everyone else will be able to check this out it'll be on YouTube you know until EMP takes us all out it'll be up on soundcloud now now we're up on my tune we are on iTunes yeah for the team house on iTunes we are there we've only included episodes with interviews in them you know and nobody wants to listen to just yet and all the future ones will show all the future ones yeah and if you are part of our patreon thank you very much we have some footage that we recorded earlier with em all for that if you're not a member of our patreon please help us pay our rent one dollar a month the link is down in description and please subscribe to our channel hit the bell of the notification if you haven't already did you say that no but I'm glad you threw down yeah and thanks Ari that we didn't get to all the other questions that weren't separate the separate are the team house and we just we didn't have time well I'm available if any of those questions that are in the subreddit if I can just vector me in on that okay happy to answer any all right yeah I'm an open book thank you so much on their like them yeah it's great my pleasure realize sorry 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 about cheese puffs like I love cheese puffs they're so good they aren't good right it's the texture I'm dying to talk to you about comic books and Dungeons & Dragons and you know I don't know I was a dungeon master hey this is what we have almost stopped come play with us our wolf figure yeah No bring your kids I bring my daughter down there and play yeah um but yeah that's my only real claim to fame otherwise I'm just you know yeah a podcast guy I guess but no this has been great Happy New Year everybody thank you yeah and uh oh this Friday we have a gift for you also we actually had two live streams this week so we have emigrations here Italy and on Friday at 8 p.m. we have Jeff Kirkham from ready man joining us it'll be remote but join us on he's got a lot of new fun stuff going on if you've seen his past interviews or whatnot so it'll be it'll be great so thanks guys all right that's a wrap

Channel: The Team House

Views: 7,479

Keywords: Trump, CIA, JSOC, SOF, Special Operations, COIN, Tier One, Military Thriller, Thriller, novel, Amazon, sniper, marksmanship, shooting, long range, carbine, combat marksmanship, Army, Emil Praslick

Id: NTcWCEHgBFw

Length: 183min 27sec (11007 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/IainHutch]

Thanks to Emil for his time and knowledge on this one.

​

I'm hoping he catches up to this as I do have a couple of specific questions.

With your AMU hat on: at what point is a barrel shot out? I've replaced a couple and universally sorta second guessed whether it was truly done or whether a really good cleaning job or maybe a recrown or another ladder test could bring it back, but made the call that "it's worth the cost of a new one to not have doubts in my mind."

Load buildup: do you have a method you use that you prefer?

Barrel weight vs accuracy: If handloaded and a good node is there actually that much difference going to a heavier contour in your opinion? I've always found it easier to find a node in the heavier barrels but not necessarily any more accurate than the light contours. And that seems to be counter to "old timer wisdom"

With your Lapua hat on: I'm very stunned to see 300 Norma selected, particularly when most of NATO has standardized on 338 Lapua (which I can testify, is terrifyingly capable)

Thanks so much, I actually signed up for reddit specifically for this, really appreciate your knowledge here.

[u/42111]

46:00 Origin story.

2:37:00 Working with law enforcement marksman.

It’s late guys, I’ll update the timestamp of the other questions tomorrow.