Weapons Man

All she asked was a little more publicity for the ugly ones. Col. Lynette Arnhart, one of the paper-shufflers managing the Army’s shuffle to the bright sunlit uplands of True Gender Equity® (however the Womyn define that at any given moment), took exception to a picture supplied by Army flacks to an Army-related publication: the female soldier was “too pretty.” It wasn’t fair to the Ugly Sisterhood.  Arnhart bitched (no pun intended) that the soldier, CPL Kristine Tejada, was, “a pretty woman, wearing makeup while on deployed duty.” She snarked that such a photo “may even make people ask if breaking a nail is considered hazardous duty.” Tough talk from Arnhardt, whose Army career in the ever-demanding Adjutant General’s Corps has threatened her with such hardships as a copier out of toner, and having to work with an outdated version of PowerPoint. She’s an over-the-hill PR dolly herself, and bitter about it.

Now, we would never put such a story before our readers, male and female alike, without answering the question: what do these two soldiers look like? So, here is a scan of the article, with the very picture of CPL Tejada that brought out COL Arnhart’s claws:

Here’s an FBI video about the FBI Reference Firearms Collection. It’s a mixed bag of guns they study, and historical guns like Ma and Pa Barker’s and John Dillinger’s.

Most of the guns come from closed and legally finalized FBI cases. Any time the FBI gets a gun different from the ones they already have, they add it. The collection has outgrown its home several times.

The ATF also maintains a reference collection, but apparently the two agencies never got the kindergarten memo on sharing one’s toys.

Bonus: the examiner at roughly four minutes in, and intermittently from there to the end, is firing, albeit semi-automatically, a rare select-fire Glock 18, and then performing a function check on the cleared G18.

…and that’s why this post is up five hours late.

We owe you a TW3 from each of the last two weeks. The story they have to tell is kind of ugly… sorry bout that.

This week we flagged a bit midweek and came back to finish, if not strong, at least adequately. Part of the reason for fewer posts was the time the last (for now) SAW history post consumed. And before anyone else asks (someone already has), it would take a lot of new research and effort to turn that into a worthwhile book.

As we pen this, we still owe the TW3 for last week, and will probably rush through this and make it a rather minimalist TW3. Sorry about that.

The links are live; to find the posts scroll down. Enjoy!

A little bit of an oddity: a lowpost count (20) but a quite decent word count (over 18,000). We are exceeding the post count desired metric of 19 still, but not by much!

The mean post size was a robust 932, even with a couple of small posts (one only 34 words), because we had seven posts that had a word count of over 1,000 including one 3,000 and one 2,000-word story. The median was 615.

Comment level was normal, with 85 comments as of press time, and almost all post

We spend a lot of time inveighing against low-budget films that depend on CGI. See for example, our review of. Or. Or. You get the idea. Can you do a good film on a low budget? Fortress is the answer to that question. It has believable and distinct characters, great acting from previous unknowns, a credible plot, an excellent script both in story and dialog, and is set in an underserved, as it were, campaign, at an understudied time of the war.

We liked it. We liked it a lot. We actually used it to clear Kid’s brain of the trauma from watching the Worst Movie We Have Ever Seen, Hypothermia, a horror flick set on a Maine lake that had one thing too few — a Steven King story without Steven King is the very definition of hubris – and two too many — a “monster” that was a guy in a latex suit, a la 1952 Japanese horror films, and a climax in which the Last Surviving Humans negotiate with and appease the voracious thing. (Imagine Jaws, without the M1 and air tank and plus a soliloquy abou

That’s the message from an unnamed command master chief to SEALs in the field:

DALLAS, November 4, 2013 – Former Navy Seal Carl Higbie claims a senior enlisted advisor has banned “Don’t Tread On Me” uniform patches for active-duty operators. Per Higbie’s Daily Caller column, an email circulated on October 22 advising personnel to wear only an American flag patch on their right shoulder. The correspondence was forwarded to him by multiple active SEALs.

“You are no longer authorized to wear the “Don’t Tread On Me” patch. Again the only patch authorized for wear is the American flag on the right shoulder. Please pass the word to all,” the email reportedly said. The Navy Jack is a very popular symbol among SEALs, Marines and Navy personnel, including but not limited to conservatives, constitutionalists and libertarians.

The flag features a rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread On Me,” against 13 red and white horizontal stripes. Continental marines carried the message into battle ag

The US Army hadn’t ever adopted a gun from Belgium until the M249 SAW (which is now made in the USA, but was always a Belgian design). The US has a reputation for not accepting foreign weapons, but historically that’s not entirely true. The first muskets owed a great deal of design featured to the French Charlevilles that armed so many continentals. The Minié ball that made the rifle musket of the Civil War so lethal was invented… in Belgium. We bought the Krag from Norway, and the Springfield 03 was a license-built development of the German Mauser.

M249 as originally issued, in use in the Gulf War. DOD Photo,

In the 20th Century, Belgian guns came close several times before they grasped the brass ring of an American contract. The FN FAL was a finalist, test weapons being produced in the States (by Harrington and Richardson) as the experimental T48. The FN MAG was briefly

Let’s look at gun ownership in large and ill-run jurisdictions. The Washington Times’s Emily Miller describes the latest brainstorm from the City of Crackheads and Congressmen, and a police force that wants to know where every law-abiding citizen’s gun is, but which makes scant efforts to disarm violent felons, and is too inept (or too unmotivated) to close most homicide cases. Miller is the lady who made herself famous by actually trying to get a gun license all through the run-around produced by DC’s incompetent, lazy politicians and police. She writes:

The latest gun-control scheme that starts on Jan. 1 will force every legal firearm owner in the nation’s capital to go in person to police headquarters to renew their registration certificates.

The Metropolitan Police Department filed proposed rules last week to enact this absurd law, and citizens have until Dec. 15 to

Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago today. Unlike almost any other possible character, he had the means, motive and opportunity. The longstanding conspiracy theories are bunk. I don’t know how many people have claimed the shot was “impossible.” Really? We could do it. You could do it. Range under 100m, scoped (if second-rate) rifle, slow-moving but steadily-moving target. Piece of cake. The difference is, of course, you wouldn’t do it. And we wouldn’t do it. Because we’re not bat guano crazy Communists like Lee Oswald, a guy who was so pro-Soviet he went there to stay, and so pro-Fidelista he tried to go there — and they wouldn’t have him. (We covered some of that last month).

Nonetheless, conspiracy theories thrive. On the 50th anniversary of the murder, one of the first events we personally remember, comes the New York Times and Washington Post to suggest… right-wingers did it. Or enabled it. Or something. Yeah, suuure. D

An F89 LMG in a test rig at DSTO, as part of these tests.

Here’s an Australian study that looked into the effects of flash suppressors on machine gun accuracy (burst dispersion). Australia uses a locally-made variation of the FN Minimi, with some local modifications including, significantly, a parallel-sided rather than tapered barrel, as the F89 in the squad automatic/LMG role. The F89 closely resembles an early (pre-Product Improvement Package) M249 SAW.

Many people wonder why, since SF are usually pretty good at what they do, we don’t just create more. The answer is, absent a WWII-level mobilization, we probably can’t. When we joined SF in 1980 there were seven Special Forces Groups: 3 Active, 2 Guard and 2 Reserve. When we retired in 2010 there were seven SF Groups, although there were now 5 Active (the 1st and 3rd Groups were reactivated) and 2 Guard (the 2 Reserve Groups were disbanded by Clinton SecDef Les Aspin, who wanted to disband two Active groups “because there’ll never be an insurgency, and those guys will just get us into a war.” Aspin was one of those guys who was so bright, he was stupid. They’re legion in DC). The latest initiative was to expand all the groups, the Active groups first, by a fourth operational battalion, which would have created, in theory, 72 ODA plus a few other teams (ODBs and SOT-As) that could be deployed behind enemy by each group, in theory. In practice, just as all ODAs are not at full 12-man strength all of the time, adding 18 mo

First, there were Q-ships. These came about in both world wars as German submariners preferred, at first, to surface, give merchant sailors time to abandon ship, and sink the ship with economical deck-gun fire rather than a costly torpedo. So the British, and later other nations, disguised vast arrays of quick-firing weaponry as deck cargo on impressed merchantmen, staffed them with sailors disguised by scroungy clothing, and went a-trolling for U-Boats. End result — some U-boats sunk, lots of merchant sailors drowned in subsequent torpedo attacks instead. Then, there was Q, who had normal looking machinery stuffed with all kinds of mischief. “Do bring it back in one piece, this time, would you, Bond?” Now, there’s Q-line Shelving, which doesn’t just hold your books and knickknacks, it also hides your arsenal. Somewhere, the actor who played Q, Desmond Llewlyn (who in real life, as a Welch Fusiliers subaltern, was one of the incorrigible escapers confined in Colditz!) is smiling.

Yeah, we’ve been a bit weak on weapons and strong on the war, vets, and SF themes this week. So sue us, because we’re going “there” again on the W4 this week. Rather than saying much about this site, we’ll just advise you to go there. Tom Sileo highlights the troops fighting the war — mostly, the casualties — and their families. As he says:

This website is about valiant U.S. troops who do their duty – largely without media attention or fanfare – and how a nation at war cannot afford to stand idly by.

American soldiers* making sacrifices like these shouldn’t be unknown. That’s why all of you should know The Unknown Soldiers.

Tom also writes:

I haven’t served in uniform. The closest I’ve been to war are in places like the hosp

Thing is, you can’t breathe the stuff. Back in December of last year, a fuzzy-thinking environmentalist tried. Sigh. Yet another premature death caused by easy access to handguns and drowning, but mostly by drowning.

Rebecca Tarbotton, executive director of the environmental group Rainforest Action Network, died Wednesday while caught in the surf in Mexico near Puerto Vallarta. She was 39.

“The coroner ruled cause of death as asphyxiation from water she breathed in while swimming,” the Rainforest Action Network said in a statement issued Friday.

via Environmental Leader Rebecca Tarbotton Dies In Ocean Mishap At Age 39 – Forbes.

You know, if she’d let the evil industrialists plow down the stinkin’ rainforests

Saylor (with cane), Cole, cadet, the goblets, cadet, Thatcher, historian CV Glines. doolittleraider.com

It was a daring raid, militarily a tiny pinprick but psychologically a tremendous blow — and to thinking Japanese officers, a warning that their Empire had no roof, and a harbinger of the devastation that the 20th Air Force would bring to their nation, even as Navy submarines starved Japan literally of food, and figuratively of war materials. A small force of medium bombers, launched improbably from the aircraft carrier Hornet, bombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities, shocking the Japanese public as much as the military government.

Last week, the few survivors still able — Doolitte’s Crew #1 copilot, then-lieutenant Richard Cole; 

This is what Special Forces looked like in the mid-1980s, or what the command wanted people to think it looked like.

This is a film of the abbreviated introduction to a Gabriel Demonstration. From very early on, Special Forces had a demonstration area on Fort Bragg where a model A-Team displayed their skills to VIPs, the press, and interested members of the public. It was named, later, after James A. Gabriel, the first SF soldier killed in Vietnam. A 1960s-vintage Gabriel Demonstration is well depicted in the John Wayne movie The Green Berets. 

The “…working command of English” gag was a very longstanding Gabriel quip. There was usually one or more guys on that team (and on any SF team) who fit the bill.

While this film contains no dates, it’s possible to narrow it down based on what the guys are wearing. They’re in the ERDL camouflage uniform with straight pockets, which replaced an earlier slant-pocket uniform. It can be distinguished from the lightweight BDU in several ways: it has smaller camouflage blotches (the BDU is a simplified version of the same pattern, 1.6x larger); it was available in two color schemes, a tan-based on

Pro sports events often open with a jet flyover at the climax of the national anthem, but the current national command authority says budget cuts (almost to 2012 levels! Quel horreur!) have made this impossible, so they took their own figurative football and went home. So what happens without the flyover? Citizens who built their own planes do it. And they don’t even mess with the Thunderbirds’ 6-plane show, or the larger spectacles of the Red Arrows or the Canadian Snowflakes Snowbirds — they send 49 planes over.

(The 50th guy was probably getting up-periscoped by TSA or Customs). This happened in October. The President and SecDef have been holding airshows and flyovers hostage in an attempt to wring more spending out of Congress, even though the DOD is still funded at higher levels than last year. Apparently the theory is that people jonesing for an F-16 fix will phone up their Congressman and demand unrestricted submarine warfare tax expenditures. Not really sure it works that way, but those guys are the expert pol

Going through some of the high-minded but empty-headed writings of the Small Arms Survey, an NGO sponsored by a Swiss do-gooder institute that’s an offshoot of the League of Nations that prevented European war (wait… what?) one is shocked by some of the moronic drivel written there. All the usual suspects of hack advocacy are there: “many experts say” without naming one such expert; “it is generally accepted” followed by some tendentious, extreme, and woolly-headed assertion; or “the peer-reviewed literature generally” prior to repeating some assumption that underlies a raft of bad research.

It is hackery wrapped in bad faith,  shackled by an anchor chain of dishonesty to an anchor of cold-rolled fable, and then dropped into the trackless depths of the Sea of Lies, taking you along for the ride if you’re so unwise as to latch on.

You know what to do.

Remember the Ventilarian Creed: “The preachers would sing to you of God, and the holy men would lead you to God. But only ammunition can make you God.”

Amen.

Anti-gun extremists want to ban guns because of “gun deaths,” which turn out to be mostly suicides, with a number of lawful homicides of gents who just-flat-need-killin’ by police and badly-chosen “victims”. But the idea that a suicide needs a gun is a remarkable idea that flies in the face of logic, experience, and international health data.

It’s possible that the fatality described here, by Glenn Pew of the aviation website AvWeb, is accidental, but our money’s on suicide:

A passenger reportedly fell from a Piper PA-46 Thursday soon after departure from Tamiami Airport, but authorities could not immediately confirm the incident took place because they could not find a body. According to the FAA, the pilot told air traffic controllers that the passenger “opened the backdoor and he just fell out the plane” Reuters reported. The aircraft was eight miles southeast of the ai