Canada is often a country overlooked for military prowess, but it shouldn’t be. Canada spends 22.2 billion on it’s military which for 2020 has it ranked 14th worldwide, behind countries like India, Japan, South Korea, and even Australia. With that said, the training in Canada is second to none. Their military has many elite units, and the military focus on training with decent technology rather blowing budgets on the latest and greatest.
This spreads down to Canada’s policing services, at least at their SWAT or Tactics and Rescue units across the country. The national police unit, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP for short), have a team, Emergency Response Team (ERT), which is recognized around the world for being highly precise. Even at a provincial level, like for example in Ontario where the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) reside they have units with stunning capabilities. The OPP’s Tactics and Rescue Unit (TRU) are essentially a paramilitary group with deep roots from the British SAS and FBI’s own Hostage Rescue Unit. The unit is so prestigious, it has a two-day screening process just to determine whether a candidate can apply. Even at a policing level, there is a big focus on marksmanship and all of these units have incredibly skilled snipers.
But the Canadian military has an even more skilled unit, the JTF2 or Joint Task Force 2. This is an elite special operations, that only packs about 600 personnel but it packs a punch. It is a unit designed to infiltrate and exfiltrate from operation areas with extreme precision. Pretty much all of the unit’s missions are classified. But one that is not, is a story from June 2017th where two snipers from JTF2 shot an ISIS fighter from 3.540 meters or 3,871 yards, a world record distance shot. The sniper and his spotter used a McMillan TAC-50 .50 heavy caliber sniper and the kill was verified by video.
For someone to hit this distance you would have to account for everything; windspeed, temperature, barometric pressure, bullets yaw and even the rotation of earth. But this is what JTF2 train for, day and day out, extremely precise shooting power. They delivered. For the full back story on the kill, view the video below.
Ben