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I should hope so; sometimes in such a situation if you delay fifteen minutes you lose your opportunity. If we didn't trust those men, then they damned well shouldn't be in there. This ain't no ping-pong game; they're there to destroy our enemy. I'm happy to learn that they're being permitted to do so -- and I have no doubt that it's severely affecting Taliban morale. If they spot a group of Taliban soldiers (say, loitering around the entrance to a cave) then one of the preferred weapons is the Barret M82A1 sniper rifle. With a published range of 1.5 kilometers (and probably more than that) it's a semi-automatic .50 caliber rifle firing a slug which weighs 43 grams. It's actually designed to take out armored vehicles; it can't harm a tank but it can definitely take out an APC or a truck when used by a well-trained man. He'll have studied all the equipment he's likely to face and will know ahead of time where to shoot for maximum effect. It's really designed to take out equipment. Needless to say, it's quite capable of killing a man. It's the ground-unit equivalent of bombing: it kills without presenting a target for retaliation. What the Taliban have been hoping for all along was a general ground engagement with US forces where both sides were within range of the other side's weapons. Then they'd show us, or so they thought. So finally we are fighting on the ground, and again we're using weapons and tactics against which the Taliban have no defense and no ability to retaliate. To constantly lose men and not be able to shoot back is terribly demoralizing, even for soldiers. For warriors it must be hell. (discuss) |
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