In my opinion, there are three levels of extreme fear that can be brought into the hearts of enemy personnel. Possibly, however, technology being what it is these days, there has to be counter measures in the works and made available that could swing the advantage to the hunted - and so forth and so on.
Snipers, however, by their very nature are very personal which is what makes them so fearsome. There is virtually no counter measure available. There are no wizbang electronic gizmos that can detect or warn that a well trained sniper is within striking distance and you're being stalked; and that individual can easily make any adjustments required on the fly. If that well trained & competent sniper has you in his sights there is no antidote or counter measure other than a miss on his part. Also that sniper is in all likelihood going to be far away and impossible to see and detect. Out of absolutely nowhere without hearing a sound you're feet are 'drumming the ground'.
I will digress a bit here. I always get a kick out of hearing that one is more likely to get hit by lightning than attacked by a shark. Yeah, that may be so, however, if that lightning bolt misses it doesn't respond "aw shit, I missed, I'm going to go back and try again". On the other hand that shark looks at things very 'personally'. There's a diff.
Snipers are on the first level. Why are snipers fearsome? Because you can’t know when one of these would fly into your tender flesh.
How about this then?
Even if you can somehow know one of these:
is flying towards you, chances are, you’re still going to die. Bullets often only injure (assuming it hits in the first place, snipers do miss). Explosives bring more likely death. You also know that the bullet will kill only one person on impact, but this strike will kill off a lot of your mates as well.
We have:
The fearsome signaler and his radio pack. Behind him, you have artillery bombardments and airstrikes.
However, there is still a higher level of fear. Something that has made not only combat troops, but also the military experts and generals of certain countries, very worried. It’s not yet a big enough threat, but there is a lot of potential.
Airstrikes are fearsome, but you can hide from them. You can have hideouts and dugouts to minimize the destruction. You can make use of structures and buildings, and civilian communities if the enemy is humane. You can remain hidden. The signaler and scouts can’t see through walls. They are human flesh and need to think about their own lives as well.
Now, I wish to present a much cheaper but more effective weapon, even more fearsome and deadly than the explosives behind the signaler.
Drones.
A lot of airstrikes are no longer delivered by manned aircraft. They feature UAVs (Unmanned aerial vehicles) like this:
The world has already witnessed how effective these are. Now I want to direct your attention to another type of drones.
Compared to missile launchers and artillery, these are more accurately delivered, more numerous, significantly cheaper, and so much smaller and lighter to deploy (like a hamster compared to a rhino). There are two kinds of handheld drones currently issued to combatants that I wish to talk about.
The first is surveillance and spy drones, which do the job much better (and safer) than human scouts. They are small and can reach almost anywhere, and have devices like infrared sensors in addition to their cameras.
Black Hornet Nano, used for reconnaissance.
(Obviously there are gigantic surveillance drones too.)
The second type carries bombs, which can be flown to an exact position and detonated. It’s like “kamikaze”, but with unmanned craft instead of manned craft. These drones can be controlled by something nearly the same size and weight as an iPad, and you don’t really need much training to handle them.
There are methods to disrupt the drones, but it’s unlikely you will have the devices at hand and be able to spot the drones in time. It’s also troublesome when you run into swarms of drones.
That’s why the US developed this badass weapon called THOR. It was released in mid-2019. I think the most feared soldier should be the one using a keyboard, and social media, to spread their web of lies and deceit. Their weapon of choice is dialect between those who think for themselves, and those who choose to follow what happens to be trending on their choice of social media. In the end we all lose. There’s only one way out. If you want to escape it’s time to start searching your Heart until you find it. Good Luck!
So, the most feared soldiers on the battlefield are: commonplace soldiers who have been issued drones. During the Civil War, one of my great-grandfathers was a sharpshooter for almost two years in General Cleburne’s Whitworth Rifles group and was involved in an incredible amount of combat. He refused to claim or even acknowledge ever killing anyone.
I see some of the drones that the military uses are not actually classified as drones. Although they really are UAVs, they might actually be classified as loitering munition. So they might still be more precisely called missiles. But as they are in practice drones and not the traditional missiles or shells, I prefer to keep calling them drones or UAVs.
Picture Source multiple websites
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