laststandonzombieisland

Somewhere, a scale modeler is going to have a heart attack trying to recreate this as a diorama.

Official caption: Soldiers assigned to the 1st Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, maneuver in an M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle in a force-on-force exercise during Combined Resolve at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, Oct. 17, 2026. The Combined Resolve series is the Army’s premier warfighting and transformation laboratory, producing measurable lethality improvements through rapid technology integration and data-driven evaluation.

Speaking of which, what happened to the widespread availability of scale model kits?

When I was a kid, I spent weeks saving chores allowance for the latest F-4 Phantom by Revell, a Tamiya British Centurion tank kit (with Masami Onishi’s amazing box art you could keep to hang on the wall!), or Testor’s HMS Trafalgar vs. Soviet Oscar SSGN at the local big box, which always had a good 16- or 20-foot section to browse.

Now, even dedicated hobby stores only have a paltry 4 feet of scale models, and they are always just cars and Star Wars.

Not even the obligatory Bismarck, Arizona, or P-51 models to overlook any more.

These kids.

I fear they will never feel the joy of trying to weather a freshly applied paint job or turn leftover sprue into something amazing at the cost of a few fingertips. That was the fun of a T-34 kit, after all– trying to find a scale bathtub to tie to the back and making realistic mud in the tracks!

Soapbox time over. Get back to work.