Archive for the 'War & Warfare' Category

First, the Army is intending to deploy tank rounds intended for drones. See here.

The U.S. military is thinking about drones. Doctrine usually doesn’t survive first contact, but at least it’s a start. I especially approve of the shot shells for tanks.https://t.co/HOGeDehsWE

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) July 13, 2025

Second, Big Country Expat has been doing some thinking about the more quick and easy to develop stuff.

Now, as far as (and I know this’s going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon,) but I have a COTS idea that could be implemented right here, and right now… As I discussed with Herschel last evening or the night before…

My Idea utilizes pre-existing stuff… In this case it’d be the M7/M243 LVOSS or Light Vehicle Obscuration Smoke System to dispense an anti-drone package. The anti-drone rounds would be new, but easily and cheaply made/manufatured.

I make my own ‘timed/fused’ fireworks legally here for holidays for my 37mm Launcher… If -I- can make them here, utilizing a glue gun, some black powder, and learning how to time my visco?

So easy, even an Airborne Infantryman can do it LOL.

As it is, currently, the LVOSS is/was used to ‘throw mad amounts of smoke’ in Iraq and Afghanistan during ‘negative crowd issues’ i.e. protests and/or riots. The launchers themselves individually look like this:

Each tube on a M7 launch tube is 66mm in diameter wide round, and about 5.75 inches (the round itself) in the pic above long… meaning the overall length is about 7.28 inches long, but the Boomy-Boom part of the round itself is about 5.75 inches by 66mm which is 2.6 inches wide. The round has the capacity in that picture of having a 19oz payload…

Remove that Red Phosphorous/Butyl Rubber Smoke Composition?

Replace that and Load the shell with #4 Turkey Shot?

Well the payload for the above-stated round is 19 ounces.

The math said a comparable 19-ounce load of #4 lead shot would contain approximately 2,584 pellets. #4 lead shot contains about 136 pellets per ounce. Therefore, 19 ounces * 136 pellets/ounce equals roughly 2584 pellets.

Finally, there is the extremely high tech.

🚨 Here’s What Leonidas, the U.S. Army’s New Microwave Defense System, Is Capable Of.

No bullets. No missiles. No sound.

The Leonidas system uses high-powered microwave bursts to instantly disable enemy drones mid-air by frying their electronics — not jamming, but physically… pic.twitter.com/rG2gT7KMJM

— Defence Index (@Defence_Index) July 15, 2025

So for microdrones, if you want to be capable of defense in a real-time big war, this has become a rich man’s game.

Source.

One company to have sprung up since the conflict began is Himera, which makes electronic warfare-resistant walkie-talkies.

Its products include the G1 Pro — a tactical handheld radio — and the B1 repeater, which extends communication ranges.

Despite only having launched in 2022, the company has quickly caught the attention of the defense tech industry, as well as the US military.

The product’s major selling point is that it offers a potential solution to one of the defining challenges of the war in Ukraine — electronic warfare.

Its products include the G1 Pro — a tactical handheld radio — and the B1 repeater, which extends communication ranges.

Despite only having launched in 2022, the company has quickly caught the attention of the defense tech industry, as well as the US military.

The product’s major selling point is that it offers a potential solution to one of the defining challenges of the war in Ukraine — electronic warfare.

The G1 is EW-resistant, using frequency-hopping technology to help evade electronic warfare interference, which seeks to disrupt and jam certain signals like GPS, radio, and video.

Reticulate Micro, which supplies Himera’s radios in the US, announced the first US delivery of G1 Pro radios to the US Air Force in October 2024.

The company said the Air Force would test the G1 Pro alongside Reticulate’s Video Assured Secure Transmission (VAST) technology, which delivers real-time video streaming.

“We take the best from both worlds,” he said. “We provide all the tactical relevant functionality like low probability of detection, low probability of interception, and low probability of jamming, which you don’t find in commercial spec solutions.”

Cool. When do I get to buy one? Here is the web site. It’s not clear whether this would be import-controlled.

My last day in Vietnam.

Eyewitness account of the Alamo.  I had not actually know how brutal, bloody, and awful that battle was, with no quarter given or asked for.

The siege of Bastogne.

Operation Market Garden.

I hope to give you a number of stories and videos I found interesting. Not all of the study of warfare is about the current state of drones in the skies.

Operation Wandering Soul – Vietnam War

Rare Photos of the Vietnam War

Saratoga – The Victory that Changed the American Revolution (although I really think the battle of Cowpens should take that honorific title)

A Stolen Plane Crash that Almost Ended WWII

Hitler’s House

Hitler’s Personal Train and its Fate

The First POW to Escape the Vietnam War

History’s Most Infamous Double Agent

The Nazi Spy Chief Who Brought Down Hitler

Inside the B-17 Flying Fortress

The Architect of the Final Solution

The Battle of Midway

None of these are documentary level stuff like you would find over the Military Channel, but they’re fit for a few minutes of watching.

Patrick Lancaster, an American journalist embedded with Russian troops, films an insane getaway from an armed drone as they take it down with shotguns. pic.twitter.com/HdwaLgZ90Y

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 26, 2025

I’ve brought this up before and most readers were less than enthusiastic. In fact, my suggestion was pretty much panned. It wasn’t a suggestion that was supposed to fix everything all of the time, just another option.

Well, it would appear that sometimes, that option works.

Although I would have chosen a semiautomatic design, probably something with a long barrel like the Beretta 1301 Comp Pro with a magazine extension.

Link.

This is a short video that asks a false hypothetical. There is almost no need to respond, but I’ll do it anyway just in case another stupid “historian” is tempted to raise the same question.

England had no chance of winning the American war of independence. Washington had fought Clinton’s troops to a standstill in the North. The only strategy the English saw forward was to send Cornwallis South to the port of Charleston, take S.C. (where they were told that there were loyalists), co-opt the support of the loyalists, retain the South, and then eventually encircle Washington.

It had no chance at all of working. The battle of Kings Mountain proved that. It was a battle of loyalists versus patriots (the over mountain men). The over mountain men had stupidly been told (by the British) that the British were coming for them. The men were harvesting crops at the time and couldn’t go to meet the British (or loyalist forces), so they sent their sons into battle. The women stood on the sides of the streets and sang hymns as their sons went off to battle. They travelled mostly at night, but virtually continuously. The average age of the fighters sent by the families to fight the loyalists was 14 years old.

They lost very few fighters, but the loyalist forces were dealt a staggering defeat. Thus ended Cornwallis’s plan to use the loyalists. His position in S.C. was no more secure. He couldn’t maintain logistics to far flung outposts because fighters using insurgent tactics were harassing them. A number of battles occurred, but eventually it all came to a head at the battle of Cowpens, where Cornwallis lost a third of his army.

Another third was in the infirmary, sick with heat exhaustion, diseases borne by mosquitos, and wounds inflicted by insurgent fighters. Cornwallis took the remaining healthy third of his army to transport the ailing third from the infirmary and headed into N.C., targeting Yorktown for resupply and reinforcements. His forces were harassed all through N.C. on the way to Yorktown, with fighters shooting from behind trees and then melting into the bush, never to be seen again (until the next skirmish, of course).

The French were there waiting at Yorktown to bombard them from the sea, but they may not have been. In the end it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the war, just prolonged it.

South Carolina was a foreboding place for the British to be. There are ticks, snakes (rattlesnakes, water moccasins and copperheads), chiggers, mosquitos, leeches, red ants, and vermin of all sorts, the swamp mud and water will eat your feet off without proper protection, and the swamp is the blackest of black at night without a single ray of light. Once dark, you’d better not move. You’ll get bitten by a snake, snapping turtle or crayfish, or step into a fire ant mound or hole where yellow jackets nest.

There is both life springing into the landscape coupled with the smell of rot and decay. The days are brutally hot and humid, and the nights are so humid that you’ll freeze to death in moderate temperatures. There is no relief from the humidity, not even in the winter. It’s a bad place to have an infection while in the bush.

The storms will blow and wash away virtually anything you have planted or built. There are rivers and swamps everywhere impeding your travel, juxtaposed by mountains in the upstate that will exhaust weary travelers and foot soldiers. You can’t drink any of the water you see. The noises coming from the swamps and bush at night are troubling enough to interfere with your sleep. All the while, the British were being fought by boys who grew up in this beautiful hellscape and knew how to navigate and survive it – and disappear into it like a ghost or phantom, apparitions with no form beyond a few seconds before melting into the darkness and sounds of various hundreds of types of animals and insects.

If you’ve ever spent time in the low state of S.C., you know what I mean when I say this. Cornwallis and his troops were doomed from the minute they set foot onto the shores of S.C.

They never had a chance.

Source.

U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned from her position on Tuesday after her evasive testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Monday, the Associated Press reports.

Well, bye. Maybe for good.

I predict: She knows too much. She is now in danger. Like the folks associated with Blackrock and Austin Private Wealth who shorted Trump’s stock the day before the assassination attempt.

One comment at the link above: “I cannot believe how very few people (almost nobody) are talking about how the AR15 is laying 15 feet from where the sniper shot the 20 year old kid. That kid did not even have a rifle in his hands when the sniper took out his brain pan. Did he even fire a shot?”

Yeah, I mentioned it. But I estimated 20′.

I’m not going to get too far into the theories yet about everything else associated with the ugly event that unfolded a few days ago, but I have always followed some basic rules for thought. Among the most basic is the need for consistency. I don’t believe narratives – I believe data. After all, I’m an engineer.

There is an idiot writing for Slate named Myke Cole who penned a commentary titled “Was Thomas Crooks a Good Shot? He Didn’t Need to be.” I’ll let you go read the article for yourself, but there are a number of false statements such as the lack of recoil of the AR-15 being good for not jolting the rifle out of position. Specifically, he states “My experience shooting my M4 was that it was incredibly stable, aptly counteracting the recoil that throws shots off.”

Recoil doesn’t throw a shot off. Recoil may make it more difficult to regain sight picture, but it doesn’t throw a shot off. The bullet has long left the barrel before the shooter’s shoulder moves backwards from recoil (or before, say, a bolt action gun rotates about the pivot point and the barrel moves up).

Furthermore, thank goodness the shooter was using a crappy AR-15 build rather than a Tikka bolt action hunting rifle in 6.5CM, .308, Winchester .270 or 300 Win Mag. A Tikka is a << MOA rifle, whereas that crappy AR he was shooting was probably a 2-3 MOA gun.

Anyway, the narrative is apparently that this shooter was so bad that he was thrown off the shooting team in school for being dangerous, but so good because of using an AR-15 that he could take a single cold bore shot and come within 1 MOA of killing the president (without him turning his head), but then so bad (and here is the real rub for me) that a man on the very back row of the bleachers to Trump’s very left (looking at the stage) was shot and killed. That poor man was a long, long ways from Trump.

If something is inconsistent, it cannot be true. Remember what I said about having rules for my life? I don’t believe things that are inconsistent. This had bothered me since the shooting. I never accepted that we know the full story, and we may never know the full story. But there is a reason that man on the back row of the bleachers perished that day, and it wasn’t because the shooter was good, or bad, or so good, or so bad, or was using an AR-15.

There is much more to this story, and you know it. We all know it, the FedGov knows that we know it, and they can’t make up lies fast enough to cover this up. Trump’s team never requested more SS protection. But oops, now that we’re being investigated, we regret to inform you that we lied and maybe they really did request more SS assets. So sorry.

The Secret Service, after initially denying turning down requests for additional security, is now acknowledging some may have been rejected.

Now acknowledging means we lied and we want to cover that up as some sort of confusion before the investigation castigates us. But now, on to the things I have concluded thus far that make some sense of the poor man in the last row of the bleachers being shot.

Eleven shots were fired that day. Not 6, not 7, not 8, not 9, not 10, but eleven shots. Eleven shots were fired that day. It would be interesting to have examined the weapon the shooter used, and to recover the bullets he shot if possible, and mostly to have recovered the spent brass from the roof. But as local LEOs pressure washed the roof that very day, we will never know. Someone knows, but not us. Not you and me. I doubt there were eleven spent brass casings on the roof.

Next, the shots were fired at four different and distinct distances that day. Not one, not two, not three, but four different distances. What? They didn’t really think we weren’t going to analyze the audio signatures from that day? I will have to say that while not conclusive, I’m not so sure that the figure on the water tower wasn’t a human. But as of yet we don’t know. After all, while the shooter used a drone, the SS had no assets in the air.

There was an open window in the building adjacent to the roof of the building the shooter was on, and more troubling, the single image I’ve seen of the roof of the building shows the shooter’s rifle being some distance away from the shooter (I estimate 20′).

You can fill in the blanks for what we don’t know, or do know, or suspect, but we already know the things I said above. The narrative they have posited is inconsistent and thus cannot be true. There were eleven shots fired that day. Those shots were fired from at least four different distances.

There was more than one shooter (the would-be assassin) or two shooters (the would-be assassin plus the sniper team who took him out).

Prove me wrong.

Fox News.

She said the Secret Service was aware of the security vulnerabilities presented by the building Crooks took a sniper’s position on to aim at Trump. However, a decision was made not to place any personnel on the roof.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside,” she said.

I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. First of all, men work on sloped roofs all day, every day, in America. Second, this is the secret service. It’s their jobs. Third, the most insulting thing is that she expects us to swallow this explanation, which is obviously fabricated. No decent SS agent would have objected to this assignment.

Finally, if you really want to be safe on a sloped roof, use a lanyard. I can teach them how to do it, but that isn’t necessary. They already know. So none of that is necessary. They know how to ensconce on sloped roofs. They know how to use lanyards. They aren’t concerned about SS agents falling off of roofs. They didn’t refuse to position agents on that roof because it’s sloped.

There is also this disturbing tidbit.

“I’m being told that the shooter was actually identified as a potential person of suspicion. Units started responding to seek that individual out,” Cheatle told ABC News. “Unfortunately, with the rapid succession of how things unfolded, by the time that individual was eventually located, they were on the rooftop and were able to fire off at the former president.”

“Rapid succession of events.” Again, how insulting that she expects us to swallow this ridiculous explanation.

“Slow down shooter, we can’t respond quickly enough. Give us time, for God’s sake.”

In the aftermath, TNR published a silly article advocating banning AR-15s. But of course. Don’t consider the fact that the shooter could have used a Tikka .300 Win Mag or .308 bolt action and probably done better.

And don’t consider the fact that the sniper team that took him out was using Remington 730 Win Mag bolt action rifles. This does answer my questions, though, about equipment that team used. I got the glass right (Night Force). I didn’t get the rifle right. I didn’t have a close enough image to tell.

I doubt they were using .50 though. They were probably using 300 Win Mag or 300 PRC.

UPDATE: WiscoDave sends these images. Good juxtaposition.