re: US Military question(s): Do all branches train snipers?

Please please... for his sake....

If he’s getting interest from the academies (yes they’re a bit SJW) but he should absolutely go that route. Officer life is 10,000x better than enlisted life in every way. Plus an academy education is on-par with Ivy League from an employer perspective, so even if he opts out after 4 years; he will likely be set for life. I was getting interest from the Naval academy, and chose to enlist. Biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Just a nugget of info. Pass it along if you’d like.

Yes all branches have “snipers” their mission set are all going to vary depending on the branch and what job they are doing.

There are several schools involved in becoming a sniper and many of them are shared. His branch selection should be based on what he wants to do.

I'll add another perspective: I was an infantry officer who utilized our snipers all the time both in combat and in training.

If your kid is dead set on doing it, tell him to prioritize the service, branch, and (if Army) unit that he really wants to be a part of and go from there. To be a sniper, that means infantry (whether Army or Corps), but he really needs to understand that sniper billets are usually temporary, very competitive, and typically don't last past E-5 or E-6. To the bigger military and the people who make decisions, you are just another asset to be deployed like company mortars or UAV's. You are special insofar as you have a skill that many others do not, but, for example, medics are more valuable, and comms guys probably more critical. Your skill is only valuable because you have the training, and for every one of you, there are 100 behind you that want to do the same thing and are probably 95+% as effective as you are doing it given the same training and opportunity. Unless you are Carlos Hathcock, you will both come out of a regular infantry unit position and rotate back to a regular line unit position after your relatively brief stint behind the scope is finished.

Being a sniper isn't a fantasy, but it is a short-lived, mechanical skill set that doesn't really out-live its usefulness in the particular unit you happen to be a part of. If you want to do really cool shite in the military over your career (especially in elite units), learn not only weapon systems, but learn how to program an MBITR blind-folded, understand how satellite comms work, learn a new language or two, train to be qualified like a medic (but not tagged as a medic), learn how operations planning works both in the military and civilian worlds, understand targeting processes, know how to stack assets (something in particular the best NCOs I ever worked with all were absolutely exceptional at).

The kid needs to know that being a sniper will eventually be a function and a skill set, not a dream. That reality almost certainly doesn't live up to the expectations. But the life of a soldier can be awesomely rewarding if the person approaches it the right way.

No one thinks of the them. It was renamed persuasion marksman.