Articles by Herschel Smith

I have been watching (perhaps not closely enough).  This is the first time I’ve seen anything other than COMBLOC weapons.

It also appears to have a nice charging handle (perhaps a Raptor charging handle?).

TFB.

It’s compatible with AR-15 lowers, and with the package comes a magazine and buffer and buffer spring.  The cost is $350.

I still think the wise move is to wait and get a feel for its performance (e.g., rimfire cartridges tend to get rim-locked, tend to be too weak to hold the slide back, etc.).

But I have to say that the price point is right.  They haven’t overpriced the upper.

Via Chicago Boyz, this Twitter post.

Here is the link.

As correctly pointed out by some of you, Ukrainian troops seems to flooded the area north of Kyiv. That's the reason why the Russian advance is stagnating there. #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar #Kyiv https://t.co/aHRDDu1EC4 pic.twitter.com/ZUmQMRlvAh

— MilitaryLand.net (@Militarylandnet) March 4, 2022

He also observes that Ukraine has allowed the reservoirs to flood the region, and further makes the prediction that while Kiev might still be taken, these troops and this equipment won’t be involved.

They’re stuck in mud, likely for months.  They are likely out of fuel, out of food, and with batteries dead.

Read the entire post.

This is the winter thaw.  The spring rains have yet to arrive.

This is intended to be a tactical analysis.  If true, it suggests that mechanized warfare still suffers from the same sort of thing it always has.

I am currently reading this book (a gift from my oldest son).

Mud affects everything from mechanized machinery to infantry health.  It rots feet, keeps boots wet, cracks the boots when it dries, causes gangrene, messes up grease and bearings, breaks tank tracks, causes trucks to get stuck, and if it buries tanks to the point of sucking up to the underside of the vehicle, causes them to be immobile.  Mud contains bacteria and pathogens that can kill troops.

Mud is the enemy of warfare, or the friend, depending upon your perspective.

Via WRSA, this dumb commentary was seen.

What actually happened was:

At 11:11 AM Moscow time (about an hour ago) the authorities of Zaporozhye Region announced that Zaporozhskaya AES is under control of the Russian forces.

At 6:20 AM Moscow time the fire at the administrative building at Zaporozhskaya AES was extinguished with no casualties. It was probably set on purpose to create the media picture of “Europe’s largest nuke plant on fire!”

At 5:36 AM Moscow time the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the fire in the area of Zaporozhskaya AES did not affect any of the main equipment at the plant.

At 4:47 AM Moscow time president Zelensky goes live to announce that the Russians are trying to create a new Chernobyl. A likely story, that.

Between 3:51 AM and 3:59 AM Moscow time fire crews were on site putting out the fire. Apparently, there wasn’t a lot for them to do.

Between 2:00 AM and 3:30 AM Moscow time there was a shootout at the power plant’s administrative building. Somehow it resulted in a fire at the administrative building.

So much for a new Chernobyl.

He has no idea what happened.  He just made that up.

Unless there is a failure investigation team on site, running fault tree analysis and MORT evaluations, and unless that team has access to event recorder logs dumping to computer point IDs (and retrievable and uncompressed), no one at the moment knows the sequence of events.  I know.  I’ve done these evaluations before for both routine events and accidents.

No one said it was a new Chernobyl (at least, one who was has any intelligence and no know who talked to me for an analysis of the situation).

What I said was very specific, and I’ll add to it here.  I suggested that the fire was either in the auxiliary building (the worst place it could be) or the service building.  Fire can spread from building to building and from nuclear unit to nuclear unit.  I further described the accident at Chernobyl at least in basic detail.  At Chernobyl, the test engineer bypassed the electrical control system that is designed to account for the fact that the reactor can have an overall positive power coefficient.  Worse still, the steam explosion blew the building apart, allowing the unmitigated escape of radioactive fission products to the environment and workers (as well as the public).

That was likely not to be exactly the same situation here.  I won’t go on about how an accident might proceed, except to say that it might involve loss of essential power MCCs, loss of emergency power supply D/Gs, loss of SFP cooling equipment, loss of SSCs necessary for the ultimate heat sink, or a host of other things.

The details aren’t the point.  It could have happened.  It was dumb then to shoot at nuclear power plants and it’s still just as dumb today.  Furthermore, regarding fire, American reactors are designed with fire protection in mind.  Here we aren’t talking about fire hoses.  We’re talking about safety train separation.  For example, you can’t have redundant trains of equipment in the same fire zone, or any other component that could lead to a common mode failure.

We have 10 CFR 50 Appendix R for that, or more recently NFPA-805.  I do not know that this plant was designed to that criteria, probably not, and certainly not upgraded to NFPA-805 or other PRA (risk-based) considerations.

Additionally, to say that a fire at the admin building wasn’t significant is stupid because the author is stupid.  Suppose that the EQ engineer has all of his records and calculations in the admin building pertaining to radiation dose to equipment and TLAA (time limited aging analysis).  They now have no capability for traceability of SSCs in the plant as it pertains to aging analysis and required replacement intervals.  From the perspective of EQ, it’s a disaster.

To say that something didn’t happen and fail to acknowledge that it could have is dumb.  That makes the quality of everything else this writer says suspect.

I don’t claim to be a doctor, nurse practitioner, tax accountant or lawyer.  I’m a nuclear engineer and have been one my entire career.  This writer should refrain from making commentary about engineering until he gets education, training and experience.

In other words, stay out of my shop, boob.  Write and ask if you have questions and you may learn something.

On fire with tracer rounds flying around.

2:40 AM — Zaporizhska nuclear power plant. More small arms fire & RPG shots. Building is definitely on fire pic.twitter.com/hSMGHcmW3E

— Hugo Kaaman (@HKaaman) March 4, 2022

I have earned a living as a nuclear engineer for 43 years doing everything from systems engineering to reactor engineering and particle transport and radiation shielding and activation calculations.  I can’t even begin to tell you how idiotic, ignorant, stupid, vulgar, unwise, wrongheaded, witless, irresponsible, lamebrained, and knuckleheaded this move was.

Only an uneducated nitwit, a lunkheaded fool and crackpot would order such a thing or even participate in it.

Now let’s be clear.  Commercial reactors don’t explode like nuclear weapons.  They just don’t.  American made nuclear reactors must be designed with an overall negative power coefficient by the Code of Federal Regulations.

Not so for Russian designed reactors.  I developed and presented training years ago to the Department of Energy safety analysis engineers on Chernobyl.  The problem with that accident is that the reactor design could (and did) have an overall positive power coefficient because of its positive void coefficient (here is the stipulation – assuming that the electronic controls work, this has been accounted for by automatic reactor control).  The precursor to the accident was that an electrical engineer bypassed that automatic protection circuitry for the purpose of a test and plant management let him do it without a documented safety analysis.

Even then it didn’t explode.  It was a steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion.  Nonetheless, the core melted and the radiological source term caused a problem for an awful lot of people.  Today I would gladly take a walk around the exterior of the plant.  Then, not so much.

Even if the reactor was shut down upon the assault by Russian forces, there is still core cooling to consider, as well as thousands of metric tonnes of spent fuel in the pools.  A SRO (Senior Reactor Operator) and RO, along with equipment operators, must be on shift 24 hours per day.

Nuclear reactors (especially as designed and built in America) are inherently safe, clean and efficient, and produce carbon free power.  America will go nuclear or suffer life without power, because solar cannot even begin to compete with nuclear in terms of powering industry.  Russian reactors are inherently safe too, mostly, that is, until some dunderhead goes shooting at safety systems and kills plant operators.  That’s why nuclear power plants have the most intensive security of virtually any place on earth.  I’ve seen it first hand.

But the security wouldn’t be able to stop an assault like this.

I … just … can’t … even … begin … to … tell … you … how … stupid … this … is!  Well, stupid or wicked.  Words fail me.

But, Putin … and Russia’s military apparatus.  So there.  You can sign me up for being highly pissed at Putin and his military apparatchiks.  While the responsible ones among us are trying to convince people of the rightful need for nuclear, they have to go and muddle this up, even if it’s only because of wrongheaded thinking by people who don’t understand the physics of nuclear energy and are frightened because of that.  Even if the plant is under control right now, the psychology of this is damaging.

First, as I’ve said before, no one keeps closer track of money and statistics than actuaries who work at insurance companies, not even Las Vegas mathematicians.

This report is bracing.

Since the beginning of the plandemic, the powers-that-be have told us to “follow the science.” But perhaps a better indicator of what’s really happening would be to follow the money. And if you really want to get an accurate view, the money to follow is in life insurance. They know about death better than anyone. It’s what they do.

We reported in January about the insurance executive caught admitting there had been an inexplicable 40% increase in mortalities in 2022. They tried to walk that back, but the cat was out of the bag and it has been verified as being true. Now, a former Blackrock portfolio manager has taken the insurance cover-up and blown it wide open.

During an interview with Kristi Leigh, Edward Dowd gave us multiple bombshells. One that may have been missed came at around the 27-minute mark when he revealed plenty of evidence of mortality dramatically increasing.

“Bottom line is, they saw an acceleration in mortality in the second half of 2021, okay. Given the ‘miracle vaccines,’ that should not have occurred.”

He detailed how OneAmerica CEO Scott Davison revealed the facts during a Chamber of Commerce meeting. The information was not supposed to get out to the public, but it did and it blew up.

“In fact, he put some meat on the bones,” Dowd said. “He said a 10% increase would be a three-standard deviation event. 40% is a once-in-200-year flood. And what you need to understand about insurance companies is they make their money giving whole life policies because they can predict death rates, which are pretty steady.

Second, there is this very important video that details how researchers have determined that mRNA enters the liver, enters the nucleus of the cells, and gets converted into DNA.  At the moment, they have numerous concerns: genomic toxicity, various cancers, the placenta route, and auto immune diseases.  Here is the original paper.

Finally, via WRSA, this is a very important Epoch Times article entitled The Truth is Coming Out about Covid Deaths.

When this is all said and done, there will be many people who knew and will be culpable, and many in the medical community who suspected and said nothing, and then there will be the victims.  The people who knew should be held to account.  The people who suspected and said nothing violated their oaths and should leave the profession.

It’s his video so he gets to say what he wants to.  I would add the following.  I like the BCM, but I wouldn’t recommend Colt.

I would recommend against a low tier AR and steer you towards: Rock River Arms, BCM, LaRue, Aeroprecision, or Daniel Defense.  Those are all going to cost in the upper tier price range, but it will be worth it in the long run.

As for hand guards, I have both KeyMod and MLok.  They both work.  I like KeyMod better, but that’s just me.

News to no one who watches and listens.

Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association says Ukraine should not hand out weapons to its citizens in case a child gets hurt.

Maria Butina condemned the embattled country’s leadership for dishing out more than 18,000 guns to civilian volunteers in an effort to drive back Russian invaders.

But that is apparently not acceptable for the convicted spy, who told Russian state media TV show Vremya Pokazhet on Saturday that “people don’t know how to handle them and a child might be killed at home”.

Gosh.  You mean the NRA is anti-gun?

I guess support for red flag laws, the NFA, GCA, bump stock ban, the Hughes Amendment, and AWB is for the children too.

News of War.

As the war in Ukraine continues, thousands of anti-tank missiles are on their way to the war-torn country from NATO member states and other countries to repel invading Russian military hardware and forces.

A total of 18 countries will be sending military support to Kyiv following a plea by Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov to send the besieged nation anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles.

“We need as much Stinger [anti-aircraft] and anti-tank weapons as possible,” said Reznikov, seated at a conference table with a Ukrainian flag behind him. “In order to provide for reliable procurement of equipment, you may deliver it to Poland. From there we will transport them across the land and quickly saturate our defense.”

Here’s the thing about tank columns.  First, they must be able to sustain with both fuel and food, as well as other issues such as medical care, communications, batteries, power supply, etc.  That means ensuring security for lines of logistics.  Splitting off formations or splintering the column means you cannot do that.

Second, unless they splinter off, they are vulnerable to assault and loss of the entire column in the formation.

Third, the comms must be secure such that the enemy doesn’t know what you’re doing in advance.  The U.S. ensures this with encrypted communications going through MilStar uplinks.

Based on my reading assignments, the Ukrainians have so far caused huge problems for the tank formations because of two weapons: the Javelin, and Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones.  Of course, these are both stand-off weapon systems.

This is fortunate for the Russians because if they had faced down a couple of A-10s, the formation would already have been destroyed by now and it would just have been a matter of collecting bodies to send home.

Never forget the Iraq Highway of Death.

At that time it was mainly helicopters and A-10s (with A-10s doing most of the heavy lifting).  Thus far the Russians haven’t been able to ensure security for logistics, have already tried to splinter their columns (that led to disaster), and finally, they aren’t able to engage in secure comms.

More and more evidence is emerging that the Russian forces rely on civilian radios and mobile phones for their communications. Our source in one invading unit confirms this.

This photograph is said to show a civilian radio captured by Ukrainians.https://t.co/ppwYktFsaD

— CIT (en) (@CITeam_en) February 28, 2022

Even in the first Iraq war, the M1A1 tanks used crisscrossing routes and other modern tank warfare tactics (here think Marine Corps satellite patrols) to avoid enemy fire and never give them a chance to lay in fires against U.S. tanks (see the Battle of Medina Ridge).  What the Russians are currently pursuing is more akin to tank warfare as it was planned half a century ago.

They can still win, but this will get much more bloody in either case.  But the Russians aren’t fighting German tank columns in WWII.  They’re fighting Javelins and drones.  A lot has happened in 70 years.

This is entirely intended to be a tactical analysis.  Please refrain from geopolitical remarks in the comments.

Learn from these mistakes.

Ammoland.

The Senate is taking swift action on constitutional carry as they previously promised. On Wednesday, at 1:00 PM, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear House Bill 272. After that, it will receive a final vote on the Senate floor on Thursday. Please contact your state senator and ask them to SUPPORT House Bill 272.

Uh oh.  Boss Hogg (Bobby Timmons) won’t be happy.  The good news is that he may blow a gasket before he tries to repeal the second amendment.

Do the right thing folks.  Don’t strike out.

Prior: Alabama House Passes Permitless Carry Bill