DOD Buzz has some thoughts on the weapon platform used by the SEAL Snipers who took out the pirates:

And let’s not get carried away with the sea state, says DT contributor Joe Buff. A multi-thousand ton destroyer is a pretty stable platform in any but the most tumultuous sea states and makes dialing in a shot on an admittedly tossing life raft more doable — a smart platform for the Team to operate from.

Well sure a big ship is a more stable platform, but that does not make it any less of a feat of marksmanship. Missing could have meant the difference between the American captain surviving and being executed by the frightened pirates.

We also have some information — unconfirmed, though we’re working on it — about how the shots were taken and what was used. Our firearms expert Eric Poole who writes for Tactical-Life posits that the snipers were using the MK-11 .308 sniper system manufactured by Knights Armament Co. This weapon is awesome, by the way (I’ve shot it a few times myself) and, if this is indeed what the shooters used, would mark a major, high-profile departure from legacy thinking about sniping which holds bolt-action rifles as the Gold Standard or marksmanship.

I also said that I though the Mk 11 was the likely weapons system.

Bolt actions and semi-auto’s can both be made accurate enough. Bolt actions can be made more accurate cheaper, but semi-autos give a much better rate of fire. The Army is sticking with the M24 Sniper Weapons System, based on the Remington 700 bolt action, for now because of cost.

Poole figures the DevGru frogmen removed the “overpowered” standard-issue Leupold scopes and opted for the Aimpoint CCO augmented by the PVS-14 night vision monocular. Though the SEAL version of the MK-11 Mod 0 is issued with suppressors, it’s unclear whether the operators used them, but I’d bet a million bucks they did.

Good point about scopes. The range was relatively close, so I don’t think the sound suppression of a suppressor would make a huge difference to the situation, but the decrease in recoil would be advantageous when making followup shots at a moving target. I think it is safe to assume these guys know now their weapons performs when suppressed (unlike video games, in real life suppressors make no change to the external ballistics of the projectile, but it does change the weight balance of the firearm)

One other question (among many) remains open…were there three shots or four? Poole reasons, and Allen and I agree, that someone had to shoot through the lifeboat window first, then fire the kill shots. My limited knowledge of ballistics leads me to believe the snipers could not rely on the effectiveness of the one window shot to actually strike the target where it was aimed based in the potential deflection of hitting that probably plastic (glass) window.

There are a lot of things we do not know.

Thanks to Paul for the link.