Russian Women Sniper Movies

BATTLE FOR SEVASTOPOL - Movie Trailer (20th Century Fox)
EAST LAND TOURS
Iaman found this movie to be captivating.

Battle for Sevastopol is a 2015 biographical war film about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a young Soviet Ukrainian who joined the Red Army to fight the Nazi invasion of the USSR and became one of the deadliest snipers in World War II. - Wikipedia

Sevastopol is a major Russian naval base on the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. In the actual conflict, the Soviets held off the Axis forces (Germany & Romania) for six months but were eventually overrun with over 100,000 Soviet soldiers killed.

Famous Soviet woman sniper? Reminds me of this movie:


Enemy At The Gates - Trailer
Enemy at the Gates is a war film about the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and 1943. The main characters are Soviet snipers Vasily Zaytsev and Tania Chernova.

Update September 2023 replaced first trailer.

Drone Wars

Iaman is poking around on Quora, and comes across this question:

What do soldiers do when they are pinned by a sniper who is out of their firing range?

Which prompted this answer from David Hambling:

SwitchBlade (aka ‘the flying shotgun’) is made for exactly this situation. It's a five-pound lethal portable drone that can be launched from its tube from behind cover, and can fly for 15 minutes (range of several miles), send back visual and IR imagery to locate a target — then destroy it with a hand-grenade sized warhead in a kamikaze attack. Over 4000 have been used by US special forces in Afghanistan. The LMAMS program will roll them out to more US forces from 2018.

Details here - Visit Aerovironment Inc.

AeroVironment’s new tube-launched, man-portable Switchblade UAV. AeroVironment photo

Several other nations have their own versions of the lethal portable drone. The Chinese CL-901, which is somewhat larger, was announced last year and is available on the export market, as is the Polish Warmate. This Israelis are leaders in the field of drones, and produce a number of models, the most notable of which is the ROTEM-L, a quadcopter carrying an explosive warhead, which is useful in urban canyons and other tight spaces which might be difficult for a fixed-wing craft like the Switchblade. This is apparently already in service with some Israeli Special Forces units.

Israel Aerospace Industries’ “Rotem”

Expect to see a lot more like this over the next couple of years. They can even be deployed by non-state actors; ISIS have made their own mini-kamikaze fleet from modified commercial drones. They are great anti-sniper weapons, but this also suggests the way the future is going: the sniper will not be shooting at you with a rifle, but will be several miles away, behind cover, launching a series of lethal drones of his own.

And that’s when we start getting into swarm battles between attacking and defending drones….

Update February 2019 replaced missing images.

I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War.

Story from Esquire by BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT

Photograph by Brian Mockenhaupt

A few months ago, I found a Web site loaded with pictures and videos from Iraq, the sort that usually aren't seen on the news. I watched insurgent snipers shoot American soldiers and car bombs disintegrate markets, accompanied by tinny music and loud, rhythmic chanting, the soundtrack of the propaganda campaigns. Video cameras focused on empty stretches of road, building anticipation. Humvees rolled into view and the explosions brought mushroom clouds of dirt and smoke and chunks of metal spinning through the air. Other videos and pictures showed insurgents shot dead while planting roadside bombs or killed in firefights and the remains of suicide bombers, people how they're not meant to be seen, no longer whole. The images sickened me, but their familiarity pulled me in, giving comfort, and I couldn't stop. I clicked through more frames, hungry for it. This must be what a shot of dope feels like after a long stretch of sobriety. Soothing and nauseating and colored by everything that has come before. My body tingled and my stomach ached, hollow. I stood on weak legs and walked into the kitchen to make dinner. I sliced half an onion before putting the knife down and watching slight tremors run through my hand. The shakiness lingered. I drank a beer. And as I leaned against this kitchen counter, in this house, in America, my life felt very foreign.

Read the rest: I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War. - Esquire 

New Sniper Rifle

Being able to hit the mark at long distances means holding very still while you are squeezing the trigger. People being built the way they are with finger bones connected to hand bones connected to arm bones, and muscles likewise, squeezing the trigger means your whole body is moving. The motion might be imperceptible, but an imperceptible movement can still throw your aim off enough to cause you to miss your target. Moving the tip of the barrel one thousandth of an inch translates to one inch at 500 yards. This gun is crazy. The scope is full of computerized video gear. Making a shot takes two steps. The first step is to "mark" the target. Basically, you tell the computer what you want to hit by selecting a spot on a video image. The second step is to make the shot, basically just like you would without all the fancy electronic gizmos. You try and hold the cross hairs on the target and you squeeze the trigger. For a human operated gun, the cross hairs are going to be bobbing and weaving all over the place. With a regular gun, you just keep squeezing the trigger and hope that when it goes off the crosshairs are on the target. With this gun, you squeeze the trigger and when the crosshairs coincide with the spot you previously marked, the gun goes off.
Story on ars technica dot com.

Picture of the Day!

Queen Elizabeth II meets a camouflaged sniper from the Household Cavalry at Combermere Barracks on November 26, 2012 in Windsor, England. From Military Photos dot net.

Update September 2017 replaced missing picture.

Capital Punishment

We watched an old episode of Law & Order on TV the other night. It started off with the execution of a man by lethal injection. They made sure it was plain that he was guilty and deserved to die. The next day I read a passage in Otherland about a lethal injection execution from the viewpoint of the executee. No wonder I'm writing about this.

I am of two minds on Capital Punishment. On one hand there are people who certainly deserve to die, and I am sure the threat of execution does provide a deterrent effect. On the other hand getting someone executed in the Justice system is a disaster. It costs millions of dollars to go through all the required legal contortions, and then it seems like half the time they end up executing the wrong person anyway. (I was gonna say "the wrong guy", but let's give the girls a fair shot, shall we?) I say just lock them up and save us all a lot of grief. No more money wasted on capital punishment appeals, no more executing the wrong guy. No more hair pulling and gnashing of teeth. Well, that last may be asking a bit much.

And then there's lethal injection. Who thought this up? To my mind it is the worst of all possible methods. Endless waiting, being strapped down to a table, not even a chair. And then we use some kind of procedure that looks like something out of a doctors office. What the heck is up with that? No wonder people aren't getting their kids inoculated anymore. Seems to me a bullet in the head would be the most humane way of killing a person. Pull the trigger, and bang, it's all over. You wouldn't even need straps or a chair or any special equipment. Any officer's service revolver would do the trick. Might be a little messier, but death is generally pretty messy.

All I can figure is that there are some closet sadists out there who really want the victim (executee?) to suffer. I can understand that. Instant death often seems to be too good for what some of these people have done. But they aren't allowed to actually torture someone, so they clothe their horrendous execution procedure in weasel words.

Reminds me of a scene from Full Metal Jacket where a team sends one of their men across an open field to check out some buildings. He gets taken down by a sniper. The shot only injures him and he's screaming. The sniper keeps firing intermittently and hitting him, but not killing him, which puts pressure on his teammates to do something. Eventually they track down the sniper and shoot her. She is disabled but not dead and is asking the Americans to shoot her. They stand around a bit arguing the merits of letting her suffer (payback for what she did), but the squad leader ends up shooting and killing her, sparing her further misery.

And while we are talking about confusing humanity with sadism, there was a story I read about horse racing a while back. Can't remember the name of it. But there are race tracks and there are race tracks. Some of them are well run, and some are a little scruffy around the edges, in more ways than one. The protagonist, who works at a "respectable" track relates the tale of a horse that had the misfortune to break a leg at one of the scruffier tracks. It happened on the home stretch, right in front of the Grandstand. They executed the horse on the spot, with a gun. The protagonist derides them for their behavior, saying something to the effect that they could have at least taken the horse around back where it would be out of sight before they "put it down".

Whose welfare was he concerned about? Certainly not the horse's, he's gotten a broken leg, he's not going to get up again. Standard procedure in Western Civilization is put down an injured animal if there is no hope of recovery. So he wants the horse to lie there in misery while he is hauled off behind some barn for the coup-de-grace? Seems like he's more concerned about the sensitivities of the patrons, which I can understand, they are ones who are funding this operation. But don't call it "being humane". Matter of fact, I think all horses who are injured racing should be executed in front of the Grandstand. Maybe then some pressure would be brought to bear on those people who are breeding fragile animals. And make no mistake, some thoroughbreds are very fragile. That's what happens when all you are concerned about is winning.

Soviet Women Snipers

Top 10 Female Soviet Snipers Of WW2
Breda went shooting, one thing led to another, and here we are.

Update: somewhere I read that the Soviets held snipers in high regard, especially compared to the Americans, who regarded sniping as something less than honorable. Of course, now that I have finally gotten around to deciding to include this bit of info, I can't find it. Bah.

Update January 2017 replaced missing video with similar one. At least I hope it's similar.

We don't need no steenking royalty.

Seems like ever since I was a kid the Presidency has become more and more like Royalty and less and less like an elected official. President cannot go anywhere without an entourage the size of an army. Streets get shut down, traffic gets rerouted, snipers on rooftops, security drones everywhere. I know some people thrive on this kind of nonsense, but it annoys me. So what if the President gets assassinated? We have a Vice President, and if he gets knocked off, we have someone to step in and take his place. All this pomp and protocol is beginning to smell like royalty. I mean he ain't no king or nothin'.