legality question about ammunition .

[Rickshaw]

I think you'll find there has always been an emphasis within the US military on marksmanship and in particular, the USMC has been keen practitioners of the art.

Individual marksmanship has always been of value in the US military; but what has occasionally suffered is an appreciation specifically for snipers.

I think it is your loose use of terminology which has confused me. "Sharpshooters" are not in Commonwealth military parlance snipers. They are merely better, more accurate shooters who have shown higher than normal accuracy in their firing. Snipers are specifically trained to that role and have that title.

I'd suggest that the lack of specifically trained marksmen or "sharpshooters" is a reflection more on the normal infantry weapon in use (the M16/M4) than anything else. If your normal infantry is not expected to hit anything further than 300 metres away, then its not surprising that there is a lack of soldiers who have the training to hit targets even further away. The Warsaw Pact saw this as a problem back in the 1970s and adopted the Draganov rifle on the scale of several per platoon. NATO didn't do anything similar, as far as I am aware - in many Commonwealth Armies, snipers are a battalion resource and usually perform the roles of both reconnaissance and sniping.

I also suspect your story of ACW "sharpshooters" destroying cannon with sand as being an apocryphal story. Considering the loose fit of most muzzle-loading cannon balls and their lack of precision machining of bores, it would take an awful lot of sand or an awful lot of shots to damage such a weapon's bore.