Although bolt-action Mosin Nagants were the primary sniper rifle of the Soviet Red Army during World War II, the advantages of a semiauto were not overlooked.

We sat with a small group of American soldiers trying to beat the brutal afternoon heat in Kuwait. He was a young sniper; his "broken TV" shoulder patching indicated he was from the Army's well-respected 3rd Infantry Division. He was on his way home from Iraq on leave. I too was headed back after being embedded with the 3/7th Cav in Iraq and was spending my last day in the Middle East interviewing as many soldiers as possible.

Lighting a cigarette, he took a long drag before handing back my tattered, green MRE matchbook. In his exhale, he responded to an earlier question, "Naw, the M24 is accurate and all, but it only holds five rounds and is a bolt gun. I don't want to leave the wire with just a five-shot bolt gun; I want a semiauto.

"With an M24 you can zap a Hajji laying an IED," he said quite matter-of-factly, "With a scoped M14, if you're quick, you can get the whole team. That's a big difference. Remember, once you fire that first shot, Hajji isn't gonna just stand around like they did a couple years ago. It's not about 'one shot, one kill' like everyone talks; it's about killing as many of them as possible to save American and Iraqi lives. A semiauto is a big advantage, especially with the distances we're talking about in Iraq. Engagement distances are relatively close for sniping, you don't need a 1/2-MOA bolt gun."

Although his face was young, his eyes were old, and he spoke with the authority of one who had been and done. More importantly, he was repeating what I had heard numerous times before from many other soldiers and civilian contractors serving in Iraq. Although the bolt-action precision rifle has long been the darling of the U.S. sniper community, a large number of American soldiers today would rather have a good semiauto. That this flies in the face of what for so long has been simply accepted as fact does not particularly surprise me for several reasons.

First and foremost, historically, the U.S. military has never placed much emphasis on sniping or sniper equipment. If it did, organizations like AmericanSnipers.org wouldn't exist. Second, the U.S. military's last involvement in a protracted war ended 35 years ago, so many hard-learned lessons have been forgotten. Third, the U.S. sniper community is fairly closed-minded. Last, the Remington Model 700--nothing more than a sporting rifle dating from the 1960s--is cheap, easy to accurize, and suitable for law enforcement engagements.

The words spoken by U.S. service men in Iraq regarding sniping and sniper rifles were not new to me. Actually, they echoed, almost verbatim, the words of Russian snipers I interviewed years ago. Veterans of Russia's wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, many of whom had served in the Spetsnaz (Russian special forces), greatly preferred a semiauto sniper rifle to a bolt gun. Some of the Russian snipers I interviewed had used both in combat in Chechnya, the bolt-action SV-98 (Snaiperskaya Vintovka 1998, also known as Sniper Rifle Model 1998) and semiautomatic SVD (Snaiperskaya Vintovka Dragunova, AKA Dragunov Sniper Rifle).

Designed by Russian competition rifle guru Vladimir Stronskiy, the SV-98 proved capable of 1/2-MOA accuracy with 7N14 sniper ammunition during my testing in Russia. On the other hand, with its long, thin, nonfreefloated barrel, the SVD is perhaps a 11/2-MOA gun when fed the same ammunition.