The Taliban's New Old Sniper Rifle: The Pride Of Britain

Now, wealthy drug lords are buying expensive hunting and sniper rifles for their militias, but so far, the Taliban Snipers appear to be using grandpa's old Lee-Enfield.

“Afghans Rediscover The Lee-Enfield” by James Dunnigan, strategypage.com, January 22, 2009

A scrimmage in a Border StationÑ
A canter down some dark defileÑ
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezailÑ
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

“Arithmetic on the Frontier,” Rudyard Kipling, 1886

Kipling’s famous stanza about Britain’s Second Afghan War (1878–1880) came to mind when reading this article by James Dunnigan on strategypage.com. Kipling, of course, is noting the vicious irony of war that a peasant with a crummy weapon and deadeye aim can take out the most sophisticated warrior the world has ever seen.

That irony takes yet another twist when the late British Empire’s most emblematic small arm, the Lee-Enfield rifle, is the antiquated implement with which Kipling’s “cheaper man” of today is killing the more-expensive members of ISAF.

Mr. Dunnigan’s article notes that the Lee-Enfield’s wider adoption may mean a resurgence in the long-hallowed Afghan tradition of long-range aimed fire after a temporary infatuation with spray-and-pray Kalashnikov tactics.

What was not noticed much outside of Afghanistan, was that this shift in weaponry brought to an end a long Afghan tradition of precision, long range shooting. Before the 1980s, this skill was treasured for both hunting and warfare. When doing neither, Afghan men played games centered on marksmanship. One, for example, involved a group of men chipping in and buying a goat. The animal was then tethered to a rock, often on a hill, and then the half dozen or so men moved several hundred meters away and drew lots to see who would fire in what order. The first man to drop the goat, won it.

If so, it’s a bad sign for ISAF, as determined skilled snipers are one of the most difficult guerilla opponents to ferret out as well as some of the most dangerous. The Afghans’ will to fight Ñ whomever Ñ has a long pedigree. A former colleague was in the Pentagon when the Russians invaded the land in 1980. A friend of his started laughing. When asked why, the friend replied, “The Russians are idiots. They’ve just invaded a country full of men who’d rather fight than f---.”

Whatever the priority of recreational activities among the Pashtun, the martial arts, and particularly that of long-distance shooting, have long roots in a country dominated by high mountains and open plains.

In Kipling’s poem, the expensively-educated officer is dropped by a cheap jezail. Jezails were handmade smooth-bore muskets frequently cobbled together (though sometimes with exquisite craftsmanship) from parts. Even given that they were generally longer-barreled than many muskets and generally used with a firing rest, the accuracy with which they were shot at great distances bespoke a tremendous amount of skill on the part of the man behind the trigger.

If today’s Afghans are able to muster that type of shooting with a Lee-Enfield, they’ll be fearsome snipers. The Lee-Enfield is, of course, the .303 caliber (7.7x56mmR) bolt-action rifle which served the British Empire at its height (1895–1956). Marrying the patented box magazine and straight-pull bolt action of the Scots-born American inventor James Paris Lee, and an innovative rifling system from the Enfield arsenal, the Lee-Enfield became a universally admired weapon, beloved by the troops who carried it.

That this would become so was not at all obvious when the updated “Rifle, Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield Mark 1” was introduced in 1903 to universal disdain. Too short for marksmen! Too long for cavalrymen! And, in Ian Hogg‘s paraphrase of the heated criticism, “an abortionate device developed by unscrupulous government technicians by robbing wherever possible every good feature from other rifles and then ruining them.”

In the event, the bolt action proved so well-designed and smooth that a well-trained soldier could deliver aimed fire at an incredible rateÑ30 rounds per minute or moreÑnosing the SMLE ahead of its great rival, the Mauser bolt action (and its American clone), as the greatest bolt-action combat rifle in history. There are many stories of German soldiers on the Western Front believing themselves to be under machine-gun fire when, in fact, they faced British infantrymen firing salvos from their SMLEs. The First World War ended any controversy over the Lee-Enfield’s suitability for combat. It proved rugged, powerful, and accurate enough that derivatives served as the British Army’s sniper rifle until 1982.

Over fourteen million Lee-Enfields were produced over the weapon’s lifetime, with who knows how many counterfeits in and on the peripheries of the British Empire. It is most unfortunate for ISAF troops, and those who support them, that their Afghan enemies will be sighting in on them with such a superb weapon.

ERRATUM:

“Ploughman’s” comment below is partially correct. I erred in referring to the Lee-Enfield as a straight-pull bolt-action, which is a term of art properly referring to rifles like the Canadian Ross rifle to which “Ploughman” refers, the Austro-Hungarian Steyr-Mannlicher M1895, and James Paris Lee’s contemporary M1895 [U.S.] Navy rifle, in which the bolt is pulled straight back with no rotation.

The Lee-Enfield has a turning bolt, but one which rotates less than the Mauser. The Mauser bolt action requires a 90° turn, and the Lee bolt only requires a 60° turn which, in addition to its cocking when the bolt is closed (as opposed to the Mauser’s cocking when it opens), makes operating the bolt measurably smoother and faster than the Mauser’s (which, it should be noted, is an excellent action).

I should have written, perhaps, that the Lee-Enfield has a “straighter pull” than the Mauser, but that would still likely have engendered some confusion among knowledgeable readers. I regret the error.