Shock Factor by Jack Coughlin Page A

Mag’s capabilities. Long ago, his father had taught him to use a slow, steady pull on the trigger. He mirrored that lesson as he laid the crosshairs on his running target. Muhammad was moving laterally across Kyle’s field of view, an almost ninety-degree angle. In novels and movies, this seems like a piece of cake. Pull the trigger and the target drops.
    Baloney. Kyle faced a significant challenge by Muhammad’s sudden bolt to freedom. Here’s why:
    Hollywood aside, shooting a moving target is no easy feat for a sniper no matter the range. There are two ways to do it: tracking and ambush. The tracking method requires following the target and keeping your crosshairs on him. To do it, you need to know your range to the target, the speed of the target, and the angle at which he is moving to your barrel. Then you set the crosshairs not on him, but in front of him. We call that “mil lead”
    Mil lead is one of the quirky things about long-range precision marksmanship that makes it both an art and a science. Every sniper’s mil lead is different. Even if the target is moving at the same speed and angle, no two snipers will need the same amount of lead to hit him.
    When we train to hit moving targets, we keep detailed notes in our data books. The more we practice, the more data we develop and the better we can pinpoint the mil lead we need. It is a repetitive, sometimes frustrating task that is complicated by a couple of additional factors.
    First, in the field we will never know exactly how fast a target is moving. So, for humans, we have three types of leads we practice based on average speed sets. The first is a “walking lead.” Every human walks at a different pace, but that pace is within a speed range that we can use to guesstimate our lead.
    A “jogging lead” is used against men who are walking unusually fast or loping. This requires a little more lead. The last we call the “run lead,” which we employ against men sprinting on the battlefield.
    Through training and dedicated data mining, each sniper figures out how much lead he will need for each speed. We know those calculations off the top of our heads, so in combat we don’t need cheat sheets for this type of shot. Though I’ve been out of the game since 2005, I can still remember my run lead is two and three-quarter mils at three hundred yards. These are things we snipers never forget.
    Complex enough? We’re only halfway there. Speed is only one part of the equation. The other is the angle of the target’s line of movement to your rifle. Let’s say our target is running across a street within our field of view. He’s moving perpendicular to our sniper team. That’s the most acute angle we have to deal with and because of that it will require the most lead. My run lead is two and three-quarter mils at three hundred yards only if the target is moving ninety degrees from me across my field of view.
    If your target is moving diagonally from you, or toward you, that requires smaller mil leads. The less acute the angle, the less mils you’ll need to get on your target. The lead also changes depending on whether the target is moving toward your rifle or away from it.
    In combat, there’s no way to tell exactly what the angle of our targets are. This is why training is so crucial. The more we practice, the better we get at guesstimating the angle, and the more accurate we become. We write everything down and memorize it, so that in combat we have instant recall and can calculate our shot placement as accurately as possible.
    There’s another complication to this equation. Right-handed snipers use their right eye in the scope. Their leads are different if the target is moving left to right versus right to left. The phenomenon is the opposite for left-handed shooters. I’ve never really figured out why this is the case, but it is a universal truth. Not only does each sniper have to