Well, 3refs, I don't know why Wellington would have found colonial snipers offensive, because Wellington himself when he was fighting the French in Spain used very effective units of rifle-bearing marksmen dressed in green who were great at picking off enemy officers and using guerilla warfare tactics. They had rifled guns that were good for long range sniping.

And the other thing that occurs to me is...it's the Americans and British and other coalition troops who are analogous to the British troops in 1776. You guys are the foreigners who are occuping a distant land against the will of many of its people, and it is the people who were born there who are fighting a guerrilla war (and a civil war too) against the occupying army and against each other...which is what the colonists were doing in the American revolution. Loyalists were fighting against revolutionaries. Revolutionaries were fighting against loyalists and British.

Troops like Blackwater employs are similar to mercenaries of any age. They do it primarily for the money.