For use when wearing a cape (or jacket), the Drac is an old school tactic misdirection/deflection draw from concealment as demonstrated by Steve Fisher of Sentinel Concepts. It looks kinda silly for a second, but it provides a good dynamic draw that incorporates moving an outer garment while bringing the support hand into play effectively.
Hey buddy, got some 7.62×39?
In a 31-day period between 27 Feb and 28 March this year, the Royal Australian Navy Adelaide-class frigate HMAS Darwin (FFG-04), French Navy FREMM-class destroyer FS Provence (D652), and the Cyclone-class patrol craft USS Sirocco (PC-6) impounded the following from three separate stateless dhows:
-5,500 AK-47 assault rifles,
-309 rocket-propelled grenade launchers,
-49 PKM general purpose machine guns,
-39 PKM spare barrels
-64 Dragunov SVD sniper rifles
-21 DShK and KPV type heavy machine guns
-20 60mm mortars
It was determined that the munitions originated in Iran and were likely bound for Houthi insurgents in Yemen, where U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are leading an 11-nation coalition against the Houthi, which are supported by Iran and Hezbollah.
More photos and details in my column at Guns.com
Das HK G28E im Cal. 7.62mmx51 Foto: © Tomas Moll
The modern U.S. Army’s flirtation with dedicated sniper rifles is now in about it’s 99th year, if you disregard the brief fling with the Sharps used by Hiram Berdan’s United States Sharpshooters during the Civil War. Over that time, Big Green kept the same more or less standard rifle in service for decades: The M1903 in both World Wars, the M1C/D in Korea, the M21 in Vietnam (augmented by a few Winchester Model 70 and Remington 700 target guns pressed into sevice).
In the 1980s, the Army went with a supped up Remmy 700 heavy barrel, designated the M24, and has been using it for roughly the past 30~ years, being augmented by the remaining M21/DMRs and some new AR-10-based Knights Armarment M110 semi-autos in recent years.
Well, now it seems that is about to change as a $44 million contract was announced Friday to Heckler & Koch Defense Inc. for up to 3,673 Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper System (CSASS) units along with spares, accessories and support. This works out to about $12,000 per rifle system, which sounds like a lot but if it includes optics, et. al may actually be a bargain.
The good folks over at The Firearm Blog talk about the HK in question– the G28E.
The CSASS program aimed to address issues of size and length with the original SASS program that was won by Knight’s Armament Company in 2005, resulting in the M110. The CSASS solicitation appears to combine the concept of a carbine-length 7.62mm semiautomatic support weapon adopted by the British Army and New Zealand Defence Forces with the optionally suppressed flexibility of the original M110 SASS weapon.
The G28E is based on Heckler & Koch’s G28 designated marksman’s rifle designed for the Bundeswehr, itself in turn based on the HK 417 7.62 caliber bigger brother to the HK 416. The G28E incorporates a large, lightweight octagonal KeyMod-like rail with seven sets of mounting positions for attachment of rail segments and accessories.
Now the Army currently has about 15,000 precision rifles of all types (M21/M110/M24) and just dropped some serious skrilla on 2,520 revamped .300 Win Mag caliber M24s, dubbed the M2010 Enhanced Sniper Rifle in 2014 so it’s doubtful the new HK rifle will make a clean sweep of the service’s needs, but I could see the lingering Vietnam-era M21 and its DMR’d M14 cousins finally being put to pasture while the M24s/2010s/110s head to Guard and Reserve units.
We shall see…
I had a really interesting interview last week with Mae from C&Rsenal, primarily about their massive Mauser M1918 T-Geweher anti-tank rifle, but also about curios and relics in general.
Photo by C&Rsenal
(U.S. Coast Guard photo courtesy of Air Station Traverse City)
Piper, the wildlife control canine at the Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City, Mich., checks the area for pests as aircrews from Coast Guard Air Station Traverse City in an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter and the Royal Canadian Air Force in a CH-146 Griffon take off during a joint search-and-rescue training exercise at the airport Oct. 17, 2015. The Coast Guard routinely partners with local and international agencies to ensure solidarity when conducting rescue operations together.
“K-9 Piper is a seven year old Border Collie trained in and is charged with wildlife control while on duty. This includes chasing all sorts of birds and detecting/tracking mammals on/in the ground. K-9 Piper works tirelessly year round to ensure aircraft arrive/depart safely, including United States Coast Guard Air Station Traverse City assets.”
Piper has been nominated for this year’s American Humane Association Hero Dog Awards in the “Emerging Heroes” category and is a working dog.
However, he seems to be taking his newfound celebrity status in stride.
Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, and the like that produced them.
Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of RV Pitchforth
Roland Vivian Pitchforth was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire on 25 April 1895. Studying at the Wakefield School of Art and Leeds College, his formal art education was interrupted by the Great War when Pitchforth volunteered for Wakefield’s own 106th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery.
After seeing the elephant on the Western Front, from which he always carried a hearing loss, he soon became an art instructor himself, teaching at the Clapham School of Art, St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920s and 1930s while producing very British watercolors.
Floods circa 1935 Roland Vivian Pitchforth, From the Tate
View of Harbour – Folkestone circa 1920 Roland Vivian Pitchforth 1895-1982 Bequeathed by the artist 1983. In the Tate collection.
When the Second World War came, the still spry 43-year-old partially deaf art teacher volunteered once more and became an official war artist for the Ministry of Information, and then later for the Admiralty, under the aegis of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee as a temporary captain in the Royal Marines
In the early months of his appointment, he painted coastal boats and seaplanes in action and traveled on convoys to the Azores and Gibraltar, often seeing combat first hand while armed with only a sketchbook.
3 Kingfisher seaplanes stand in an aerodrome consisting of corrugated metal hangars painted with camouflage patterns Pitchforth, Roland Vivian
Seafox heading down a slipway, surrounded by sailors. Ahead, a second plane is already in the water
Protection Pits for Dispersed Aircraft, Lee-on-Solent, note the landbased float-less Kingfisher in the foreground and the Swordfish in the back
Grey-colored Swordfish sitting on a runway, facing away from the artist Pitchforth, Roland Vivian note the contrasting shadows
Hurricane Test Pilots, Henlow
Activities begin as soon as the mist blows out to Sea, 1942. In the foreground, a Short Sunderland prepares for take-off on a calm sea. To the right there is a dense wall of pink-colored mist, and further out to sea there are three large ships. This is one of the more artistic war paintings I have seen.
HMS Brecon escorting an Aircraft carrier from Algiers. Brecon (L76) was a 1,900-ton Hunt-class destroyer of the Royal Navy that was present at almost every major amphibious landing in the Med and took part in the sinking of the German submarines U-450 and U-407.
A Parachute-landing 1940
Motor Gun-boats going on Operations 1943 note the calm turquoise sea
Night Exercises in Plymouth Sound
Motor Gun-boats in a Night Action
HM Submarine Torbay in Dry Dock at Plymouth, 1942. A T-class sub, Torbay, (N79) had the misfortune of being involved in two incidents regarded by many as war crimes when her skipper was accused of ordering his crew to fire on Axis troops as they swam in the water during Med ops.
HMS Eskimo and other Destroyers Fitting Out at Durban. Note how the bollard frames the work and if you didn’t know better, would think is the subject. Eskimo (F75) was a Tribal-class destroyer that was a bruiser. She fought in Norway (losing her bow at Narvik), the Mediterranean (being blown apart by German dive-bombers), the English Channel and in Burma. She chalked up U-971.
He also covered the war effort at home and the Blitz firsthand when he wasn’t white-knuckling destroyers at sea.
The bomb damaged House of Commons in Westminster after an air raid, 1941
View inside a bombed telephone exchange, filled with piles of wires and rubble 1941
Post office building 1941
The City Temple Church, London, EC4
Snack Time in a Factory 1941
Towards the end of the war, Pitchforth spent most of 1944 in the Med and was sent out to the Far East, witnessing the end-game of the Burma campaign.
Convoy leaving Gibraltar 1944
Loading an English Carrier and the French Cruiser ‘Gloire’ at Algiers. This watercolor is particularly interesting for its depiction of ‘dazzle’ painting, a technique designed to disguise the hulls of ships and render them less visible as targets. On 18 September 1940, Gloire’was intercepted by the British and brought to port in Casablanca where she was neutralized and worked with the Allies the rest of the war. Notably, she remained in service into 1958, spending most of her post-WWII life in Indochine waters.
He made numerous watercolors of Colombo Harbor in Ceylon before joining the combined amphibious and airborne attack on Rangoon with the commandos during which he improvised a scheme for painting camouflage on the amphibious landing craft to minimize the threat of airborne attack.
First British Troops in Rangoon 1945. Note the landing craft
Picking up a severe lung infection in Burma, he was invalided out in South Africa and remained there until able to travel again in 1948, returning to London.
Cruiser HMS Enterprise at Simonstown, South Africa: Christmas 1945. Enterprise (D52) was an obsolete 7500-ton WWI-era Emerald-class light cruiser that carried Ethiopian King Haile Selassie into exile in 1937. Brought out of retirement during WWII she was used for escort duties and naval gunfire support, firing over 9,000 rounds on D-Day alone. Ironically, the old behemoth even sank a German torpedo boat with a torpedo, which is the ultimate in irony. When Pitchforth ran across her, she was in the last days of her service, helping return British troops from Asia and Africa before being broken up. Pitchford was in South Africa at this time recovering from his own war aliments. In many ways when he painted this work, Pitchforth and Enterprise were the same.
Now in his 50s and a veteran of both World Wars, Pitchforth returned to teaching for another 20 years, and was made a Senior at the Royal Academy and a member of the Royal Watercolour Society.
He passed in 1982 at age 87.
The Imperial War Museum has 90~ pieces of his art online, many in high rez, while other works are in the MoD collection the GAC, indexed through Art UK and at the Tate in Liverpool.
Thank you for your work, sir.
Flint, Michigan’s Mildred Doran had a tragic aviation story which in the end turned out just as mysterious as the more recognizable Amelia Earhart.
The engine behind the rakish Ms. Doran is a 200hp Wright R-790 Whirlwind, the only one on her Buhl CA-5 Air Sedan that she (attempted) to make Hawaii in.
As noted by local historian Gary Flinn:
Doran, 22, taught fifth grade in Caro in the 1920s. A graduate of what is now Eastern Michigan University, Doran caught the aviation bug as many other aspiring fliers did after Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris.
She became a novice pilot after a few hours of flight experience, flying out of Lincoln Airport — an airstrip with a hangar at the southeast corner of South Saginaw and Maple roads in Grand Blanc Township.
The pretty, brown-haired schoolmarm (to use the old-fashioned term) found a sponsor for her flying in the airport’s owner, Lincoln Oil Co.
Doran (and a two man crew) was sponsored in the Dole Air Race (aka the Dole Derby) from California to Hawaii in 1927.
Dubbed the Miss Doran, the Buhl CA-5 Air Sedan, NC2915, was flown by John “Auggy” Pedlar, navigated by Naval Aviator Lieutenant Vilas R. Knope, with Doran herself, who remember had a pilot’s license, listed only as “passenger.” This was still 1927, after all.
The crew of Miss Doran, left to right, John “Auggy” Pedlar, Mildred Doran and Lieutenant Vilas R. Knope, United States Navy. (San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives)
The single-engined Buhl CA-5 has a range of 725~ miles.
It was a 2,400 mile flight to Honolulu and had never before had been crossed by a civilian airplane. (The first crossing, by an Army Atlantic-Fokker C-2 trimotor, the Bird of Paradise, crewed by 1st Lt. Lester J. Maitland and 1st Lt. Albert F. Hegenberger, had only been done that June in a feat for which the crew received the Mackay Trophy.)
Almost all of them ran into grief of one sort or another.
“The pretty Mildred Doran had her share, but she smiled it all away. She was 22, a girl with hazel eyes, olive skin and dark curly hair, a Michigan State College graduate who had been teaching the fifth grate in Caro, Mich., until the Dole fever caught her.
Mildred wore five fraternity pins on her olive-drab flying suit, but when she was asked, she said she wasn’t in love. The boys who gave them to her were just dancing partners, Mildred said.”
Miss Mildred Doran “Life is nothing but a chance.” Note the Lincoln Oil patch on her arm and the fraternity pins on her pocket. (San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives)
The race was pretty tragic.
In the below newsreel from the time entitled, “Death Dogged the Dolebirds: Pioneer Pacific Fliers Wrote Tragic Chapter in Air History” you can get the gist from the title alone.
Looking at the numbers, 18 aircraft entered.
-3 cracked up before race day
-Only 8 made it off the ground the day of the race in front of a crowd of 100,000 persons
-2 soon crashed on take off
–Woolaroc, a Travel Air 5000 aircraft, NX869, made it to Hawaii 26 hours later to claim first prize
–Aloha, a Breese-Wilde 5 Monoplane, NX914, made it 28 hours later to pick up second.
-There was no third place winner, as the other aircraft, including Miss Doran, disappeared en route.
Miss Doran, Buhl CA-5 Air Sedan NX2915, takes off from Oakland, California, 16 August 1927. (San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives)
In the end, of the 15 men and one woman who took off that day in August 1927, 10 lost their lives.
A 42-ship task force never found a trace of the lost plane.
Vernon Dalhart, the first million-selling country and western recording artist, wrote and recorded a song, “The Fate of Mildred Doran” after her disappearance.
On January 11, 1935, Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California, reversing the route of the doomed Dole racers and likely flying near the watery grave of the Miss Doran at some point.
Back in Michigan, a gas station/memorial built by Lincoln Oil, the Doran Tower, was erected in Miss Doran’s memory. However, as Gary Finn notes, it changed hands, became a flower shop, and in 1973 was torn down and the land put up for sale.
It’s now a Dave’s Country Oven.
U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Houston unveiled the latest addition to their Dolphin Stable: CG6581, a MH-65D complete in classic 1970s aviation scheme.
“CG6581 is painted with a throwback color scheme and tail logo in honor of Coast Guard Aviation’s 100th year anniversary. A big thank you goes out to the Aviation Logistics Center (ALC) for delivering this beauty. Also, this aircraft is not just for show but is fully operational, so keep a look out for CG6581 in the skies over Houston!”
It seems the senior sea service (the Coast Guard traces its origin back to 1790 while the modern Navy, not counting Washington’s cruisers and the Continental Navy, wasn’t authorized by Congress until 1795) has a lot more throwbacks in the pipeline.
Dig the HC-144 in 1930s blue and yellow scheme with meatball roundels to the left and the Vietnam camo to the far right.
Greg Ellifritz over at Active Response Training has a good piece up about the most commonly broken parts on your typical Glock.
It’s good stuff as I can vouch as being an agency and later company armorer for years handling literally hundreds upon hundreds of SIG P-series guns, the most common issues with those were losing sights (get a sight pusher!) split recoil springs (replace every 5,000 rounds regardless), worn out mag springs (rotate, rotate, rotate) and the occasional spun take down lever that just keeps turning but doesn’t engage.
So when Greg talks Glock, listen, as he has seen it.
“I’ve broken almost every Glock I’ve ever owned. No manufacturer is immune from this reality: If you shoot the gun enough, it will break. A gun is a mechanical device and it can fail at any time. I liken it to a car. Even if you buy the best car in the world, eventually it will break down.”
Well it looks like budget gun maker SCCY has dropped their long standing and unique for the industry replacement program for stolen guns because, well, they think they are getting gamed on it.
In an open letter posted to their site last week.
“Recently we were contacted by the BATFE in regard to an unusual amount of SCCY pistols becoming traced pistols as the result of being used in criminal activity. The unusual part of the traces is not based on sheer numbers but, rather, in the ‘time to crime”. That is, the amount of time it took a firearm to move from its’ sale/transfer to a crime scene. Further research indicated that this phenomena may be an unintended consequence of our theft warranty.
Therefore, although we regret it, the above has led SCCY, as a responsible corporate citizen, to the decision that this program must be drawn to a close. We realize that the majority of people who have contacted SCCY in regard to stolen firearms are honest law abiding firearms owners and this is another instance where a few bad apples have spoiled it for honest citizens. However, in the interest of the public’s safety and welfare we have no choice but to abolish this program.”
Doh.