Balancing the defensive mindset against the offensive mindset in Airsoft.

Today I found myself quoted on a French Paintball site. Of course, where better to learn as a Paintball sniper than to come here? The tactics and ideas are the same regardless of the equipment.

I’ll translate :

“Attack all you like, but if you can’t defend yourself then you’re not going to be attacking effectively as you spend half the day walking back to the respawn.”

The original article “Using Cover and Defence” was a look at how to use hard and soft cover to make yourself harder to kill, which is an important skill as a sniper of course. But I think in addition to the art of staying hidden, the whole mindset to defend throughout a game is something a lot of players are losing.

In the early days of Airsoft, at least as I experienced it, it didn’t actually matter whether you won or lost. Nobody cared and very few places actually kept any kind of score between teams. The fun was entirely in the experience. Certainly since the dawn of YouTube channels and more noticeably since COVID, the emphasis has changed towards winning and unfortunately sometimes it’s winning at all costs, which is partly why we have an increase in people cheating.

To win, you need to score points one way or another and there will be a team objective usually to win the game or end the round, depending on how your site structures games. On an individual level though, scoring usually means only one thing – kills. Kills are our currency, and we measure ourselves against our teammates’ highest kill score. And that is why there’s so much focus on the guns at the moment.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve been effective in a game. 100 kills with 100 deaths doesn’t mean you’ve achieved objectives or helped your team much, just that you traded fire a lot with the enemy team. Was the objective just to grab a flag? You probably didn’t need to get bogged down in a firefight, for example.

I look at the way players set themselves up for games now. Guns must fire further and faster, expending more bb’s for more kills and have the biggest mags possible. Even a few “snipers” I’ve seen have turned their backs on sniper rifles in favour of fully automatic weapons. Gameplay is faster too, with a lot more running at the enemy and trying to be as aggressive as possible, with knee slides and shouting and a complete disregard for camouflage or patience. The skill of defending seems to have been lost, perhaps because it makes for less exciting game footage. We like all the bravado and cheering but what was once a careful game of chess with guns is now akin to a chaotic bar brawl, also with guns.

There is rarely the patience with some teams to just sit and hold an objective; often some player will “get bored” and then jump up and run off in search of some trigger time. Ambushes are rare because nobody can sit still for that long. And many are just too addicted to shooting the white stuff everywhere that they’re not even playing with their team. In terms of achieving team objectives, the team must be able to attack and defend in different phases as required, and have the discipline to sit tight if it gives their team the advantage. Nothing is worse than trying to assault a well-defended position, but in recent years the resolve to hold that position for more than ten minutes has dissipated.

I mentioned ambushes above – I love setting up ambushes. Correctly predicting the enemy path, luring them into a killzone where they stand absolutely no chance, is way more satisfying than hosing 5000 rounds out of a Krytac LMG in the general direction until you hear someone say “HIT”.

We all have games where one team has to sit and defend with one life until they’re all dead, and those games feel like they’re finishing much quicker now not only because of advances in weapon technology, but simply because the defending team makes so many god damn mistakes. At any point in any game, there is always one team attacking and one defending somewhere along the line, so it makes sense to be equally adept at both. This is where reading the “Using Cover and Defence” article comes in, but also camouflage and concealment of you and your kit comes into it a lot too. Not saying everyone needs a ghillie; there’s a crazy amount of Russian-style leaf suits at Milsims these days and most aren’t as effective as BDU’s anyway especially if you’re on the move. It’s understanding how to break up shape, move quietly, and pick the right route through the site that keeps you hidden, not a load of flappy brown polyester. The opposite, wearing brightly coloured accents on your gear or flannel lumberjack shirts, or something from a Halloween bargain bin, is also not going to keep you alive very long, although some players do have a thing for getting shot at.

As a sniper, primarily, the whole idea of defending anything at all is unnatural – with a single-shot bolt-action rifle it’s simply not possible unless the enemy attack consists of one player and you land the shot the first time. The sniper technically is an offensive-only role, albeit a very precise one. But for snipers in particular, we have to rely on defensive play to keep ourselves alive. Getting hit undoes all that effort you put into dragging your ghillied ass half way across the site into a good hide position. It then means that the enemy knows your position, not just now but in future games as well. That one shot you wanted to deliver to a particular player is now going to have to wait another 30 minutes while you walk back to respawn, reset yourself and try again with the added weight of frustration that you just got beat.

A lot of it does come down to patience. Not over-exposing yourself (or just exposing yourself), not giving the enemy anything to shoot at or just staying undetected until the right moment. For snipers, the hardest lesson for most to learn is that sometimes you don’t need to take the shot at all. Shoot when the odds are in your favour, and if there’s a risk of detection, it’s often a good idea to just take your finger off the trigger and stay still. Forget your camera footage, forget any kind of “kills” scoreboard. I’ve watched snipers in big games take up really good positions, denying the enemy the area and the ability to move, locking a flank down or scoring a couple of good kills, only to suddenly, inexplicably stand up (immediately spotted) and then start advancing towards the enemy line like it’s 1815 again*.

*Napoleonic War reference

It’s something I’ll probably expand on a lot more in the near future, because while everyone else is building killer rifle setups and teaching breaching techniques, I’m equally as interested in the skills needed to be a very difficult opponent to attack or hit, which of course is the other 50% of the game. The defensive side is too often overlooked. There’s a difference between a player who shoots a lot, and a good player – learn to sit still, control the game, let the enemy make the mistake first.

And if you really need to get your fix of seeing bb’s fly, just go to the range at lunch and run through a few mags.