Weapons Man

First, the poll. No fair Googling.

Not literally, of course. Being literally 10 feet tall would be quite unhealthy for a tank, a machine that lives longer on a projectile-rich battlefield if it likes to hide in defilade. But stories and artist conceptions that are spreading make the new T-14 tank and its derivatives seem unbeatable — which is probably the reason for the leaks.

Well, OK. A Heavy Weapons man, perhaps — an artillerist who once sat down, while imprisoned, to  write an engaging and technical, five-volume history of artillery, with a title as comprehensive as his intent: The Past and Future of Artillery. Remembered today for little more than his army being pantsed in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Louis Napoleon was a remarkable, erudite, and intelligent fellow. When you marvel, today, at the beauty of Paris you’re marveling mostly at the nephew’s makeover of his capital city, not the works of his uncle or of the Bourbon dynasty (although Louis was careful to preserve the best of what came before). Those big “N” monograms on the bridges of the Seine? Not the victor of Borodino (pyrrhic though that victory was) and Austerlitz, and the vanquished of Waterloo; the nephew, who was captured with his army in a German encirclement, to the chagrin of all Frenchmen then and now.

No update today, just a picture of where we are now. We’re working on the aesthetics and legibility of this beast. Color coding has been added to several of the nodes, according to a legend below the image.

At the Washington Post, a person with the comical name of Emily Wax-Thibodeaux begins a piece sententiously headlined At VA Facilities, Whistleblowers Still Fear Retaliation with an anecdote explaining just why they fear retaliation.

It’s definitely a common belief (although not a universal one) among the combat grunts of the ground services that that higher echelons of command have gotten, to use a word that doesn’t really fit the seriousness of the claim, stingy about awarding high valor awards, compared to the rate of awards in previous conflicts. Marine Major Christopher B. Mays puts it like this:

In 1967, the Army got the idea to study whether, how, and how effectively different units were using snipers in Vietnam. They restricted this study to Army units, and conventional units at that; if SF and SOG were sniping, they didn’t want to know (and, indeed, there’s little news either in the historical record or in conversations with surviving veterans that special operations units made much use of precision rifle fire, or of the other capabilities of snipers).

Tadeusz Felsztyn was an ordnance officer in the Army of the Republic of Poland during that nation’s brief flowering between the power vacuum created by the fall of the absolute monarchical empires of Germany and Russia in 1918, and the rise of their absolutist and totalitarian replacements, unconstrained by the codes of noblesse oblige or considerations of Christian morality that had stayed the hand of Kaiser and Tsar. In September, 1939 the Third Reich and its mirror image, the Soviet Union, crushed Poland under the “heel of a boot stepping on a man’s face, forever,” and it became a very unhealthy place to be a Lieutenant Colonel in Polish service, and doubly so for Tadeusz Felsztyn.

An expedition sponsored and led by investor Paul Allen has given a precise answer to a question only understood generally since 1944: where is Musashi? The general answer, of course, is, “at the bottom of the sea,” which is where most of Japan’s aircraft carriers (and naval aircraft, and naval aviators) were when the IJN’s surface combatants sortied to try to bring the US fleets to what Japanese doctrine always called for, “one decisive battle.” Japan wound up having four decisive battles, and losing all four, spectacularly.

Hey, dear readers, we’re wrapped up in a few things. A long-delayed proposal seems to have finally sold to an allied armed force and today is “oh crap, now what” day. And of course, it’s today that College Pro Painters are doing an estimate on restoring the exterior of the Manor to her 20th Century glory, and we gotta see if one of the auto paint shops around here will primer our aircraft parts for us.

Also known (at least until a certain authoress sets her lawyers on them) as the Hogwarts School of Grid-Down Medicine. We’ve always been interested in field medicine. It’s a basic fact that SF guys don’t work alone; along with the indispensable weapons men, and the sometimes indispensable team leader and team tech, there are four other enlisted specializations on the team, all of which come in handy sooner or later: engineering, communications, operations and intelligence, and, last but definitely not least, medicine. An SF medic has trained, and once he’s been around for a few years, practiced, medical treatment of his team, his indigenous troops, and often local civilians (and their livestock) in the operational area. He has become an artist; his paints are an aid bag and a sharp, developed mind, and his canvas is the sick or wounded human body. He also takes on the thankless task of training his team’s cognitively-challenged bullet-launcher operators, mad...

A People’s Republic of Massachusetts company, MarkForged, has taken an interesting position in a dispute with, who else, Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed in Austin, Texas: MarkForged has refused to sell a 3D printer, the Mark One, to Wilson or DD. Its reason? According to its attorney, they fear he will make a gun, and “only the US Government or government contractors can make guns.”

There is been few blasts like the one that blew up USS Maine in Havana harbor, on 15 February 1898, the forward magazine of the ship blew up at 9:40 PM. A crew of 355 was nearly annihilated; there were only 16 uninjured survivors, and 75 or 80 wounded ones. Because the mishap happened at night, and officers’ country was in the aft end of the ship, the officers survived at a higher rate.

Soon, Ol’ Snowdownloadin’ could have one of these of his very own! Maybe they can reuse this number — it’s cancelled. Heh.

We have been maintaining a link map of anti-gun organizations, illustrating the links between overt gun-ban organizations and the variety of crypto-banners that emerge, especially during election cycles. We expect that during the 2015-16 cycle more of these frauds will shedding their exposed and ruined old names, like a snake’s skin, and offer a new set of stripes or diamonds to the world… but it’s still the same damnable snake.

Among the more unusual and inexplicable — ah, hell, let’s just say foolhardy – loads ever manufactured for a firearm were strangely multipurpose rounds for the German World War II anti-tank rifles. These gigantic rifles fired a kinetic energy penetrator of 7.92mm from a gigantic 94mm rimless casing at blistering speeds1. But even beyond its “pinhead” appearance, the round had a peculiar feature, that is as far as we know unique in the world of ammunition.

That varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but when the Federal Government requires a felon to surrender firearms rather than transfer them, they drop into a legal shadowland where the Fed possesses them but doesn’t own them — and neither does anyone else.

Dave Shell is the President of Special Forces Association Chapter XVI, The following was Dave’s comment in a recent chapter newsletter, about a tragedy three years ago where he knew the principals, including the perpetrator, a former SF weapons man and medic who had distinguished himself in post-military life.