Sniper teams

[Mock26]

Originally Posted by HorseSoldier

The Hollywood of it is snipers are cool, but in reality the spotter needs to be at least as skilled a shooter, since besides target detection he's also the one making wind calls and the other real technical aspects of sniping. (Or as one SOTIC instructor in my old unit put it, you can teach ani chimp to pull the trigger in a week, competent spotters are much, much harder to train.)

I once saw a program about snipers and they were going over training for (if I remember correctly) British snipers. Part of that training included spotting 20 or so ordinary objects placed at varying distances, things like a spoon or a candy wrapper and such.

[Eddie]

Originally Posted by Mock26

I once saw a program about snipers and they were going over training for (if I remember correctly) British snipers. Part of that training included spotting 20 or so ordinary objects placed at varying distances, things like a spoon or a candy wrapper and such.

It's KIM training. Keep-In-Memory. You identify objects through binos and then you go do other stuff and 20 minutes, 2 hours, or some other designated timespan, then you report what you saw. Scouts do similar.

[perardua]

We know it as Kim's Game, from the Rudyard Kipling novel Kim where the main character plays it as part of his training. Most soldiers do it during basic training as part of the lessons on judging distances and general observation, but anyone in a job like sniping or recce will do it a lot more.