Re: One shot.. to multiple targets.. what changed?
Nothing has changed, except maybe the myth of the 'sniper' which resides in the public consciousness.
People change slowly; societies even slower. And militaries don't change until long after it would have been a good idea to do so.
The evolution of conflict this century has been moving steadily toward today's confused and irregular kind of warfare. Accordingly, the way our military uses 'snipers' and what it sees as a 'sniper' role has shifted somewhat away from Air-Land Battle scenarios and toward more mobile and urban warfare.
But, for the actor, the object is the same as it always was: the engagement of multiple targets has never been off the table.
Remember, irregular warfare didn't start in 2001. The roots of the current war on terror can probably be drawn back to the Napoleonic Pact. The dynamic of well-equipped armies (and their riflemen) in the Middle East has been a constant since, to my memory at least, British attempts to remove regimes in Egypt and the Sudan in 1874. Don't forget, as Many Arab nationalists haven't, that by 1885 the Mahdi uprising had taken Khartoum. What I saw of the first stages of the Iraq War reminded me a lot of what I had read about the battle of Omdurman when, in 1898, a young officer named Winston Churchill helped win an overwhelming victory in mobile (cavalry) warfare against a lesser-equipped force of what quickly became irregulars. Sound familiar?