As Mark Penn so presciently observed, the kids today are obsessed with snipers. And understandably so. This sort of thing is chillingly impressive:If the pirates' heads were fully exposed, it would have been an easy shot. A sniper rifle is accurate to within a "minute of angle," provided the shooter can keep his or her target in the crosshairs. That means that a good marksman can reliably hit a 1-inch target at 300 feet and reliably kill someone at 3,000 feet. The bobbing of the lifeboat would have been a factor, but snipers regularly shoot at moving targets from moving vehicles. (Advanced Navy SEAL training includes target practice from helicopters.)There are two techniques for hitting a moving target—trapping, in which the sniper holds the rifle still and waits for the target to move into the sight, and tracking, in which the sniper moves the rifle to keep the target in the sight. Trapping is the easier method and is preferred among less-experienced marksmen. However, the Navy snipers needed to strike all three pirates simultaneously. Once the countdown began, they could not allow their target to drop from their sight and wait for him to return. (Sniper teams generally count down from five and fire in unison on the T in "two.")
Target practice from helicopters. Seriously, I wasn't this good at Goldeneye. And I wasn't dealing with kickback. Or night. Or, you know, real life.David Ignatius, meanwhile, draws out an actual policy point from the operation. "The larger point (there’s always one of those lurking in op-ed land) is that we too often use a howitzer -- or an F-16 -- when a sniper rifle should be the weapon of choice. That is, the United States as a nation tends to favor big, direct deployment of military power when something more limited and discrete would make better sense."
