Once described as being a product of the “most dangerous publisher in the world,” the Boulder, Colorado-based media house and distributor is closing its doors at the end of the year.
As noted on the company’s website, Paladin is shuttering following the death earlier this year of their co-founder and publisher, Peder Lund, and is selling off remaining inventory at greatly reduced prices. Over the decades, Paladin has marketed 800 how-to books and videos on topics like self-defense, firearms, martial arts, and survival as part of its Professional Action Library. Some are downright hokey, but others are very valuable texts, especially those on military history.
“There will be no more books or videos sold after November 29, 2017,” the company’s website says. “We are incredibly grateful to all of our amazing customers and authors for their continued loyalty and support over the decades.”
I ordered a mystery crate of 50 titles for $50 as well as a few classic volumes that I didn’t have hard copies of for basically chump change. For example, they have Maj. John L. Plaster’s excellent work on Great War snipers, which just came out and has a $40 MSRP, on sale for $6 measly dollars.
A British Army sniper demonstrates the superior ‘Hawkins’ prone firing position (right) next to another in the standard position, at the 21st Army Group sniping school near Eindhoven, 15 October 1944. Note the scoped Enfields.
Common among snipers the world over today, the ghillie suit or bush suit, traces its origin to Scottish gamekeepers with a Scotland-raised yeoman regiment, the Lovat Scouts, using them for the first time in modern combat in the Boer War.
These Highlanders, drawn largely from outdoorsmen, were described as “half wolf and half jackrabbit” in their tactics when down in the veldt and the suit draws its name from the Gaelic faerie Gille Dubh, a forest character clad in moss and leaves that hides among the trees. The use of “scrim” often from repurposed potato sacks, helped break up their outline.
What is scrim?
Scrim is nothing but a basic fabric that has a light, almost gauzy weave to it. It’s used in bookbinding (that woven fabric in the back of hardcover books), theatre and photography (to reflect light), and in simple industrial applications like making burlap sacks.
“Robe loose-shaped single-breasted robe, made of linen, complete with a fitted hood that incorporates a face mask with apertures for the mouth and eyes. The smock is dabbed and smeared with various shades of paint to achieve a random (disruptive) camouflage finish.” Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30100483
The practice continues across MoD today, using low-IR fabric to keep down detection by modern optics, because if it ain’t broke…
Pictured are Snipers from 34 Squadron, The Royal Air Force Regiment based at RAF Leeming, undertaking Live Firing Tactical Training at the Otterburn Training Area. (MoD Crown Copyright)
Ian with Forgotten Weapons looks at the classic Pattern 14 sniper rifle made for the British Army in WWI in the above.
The rifle, a P14 MK I*W(T) with a semi-adjustable 3x BSA Model 1918 telescopic sight, was an American-made sniper model chambered in .303. Used late in the war and, as McCollum notes, it was one of the most mature designs of the conflict.
These guns proved accurate and reliable enough that they went on to a long life, being used by British and Commonwealth forces in WWII and others.
Among the “others” was a stockpile of 75 guns sent to the Irish Free State by Britain in the 1930s and, after service in that country, were sold as surplus in the U.S. in the 1950s. One of these Irish P14s, a Winchester-produced variant seen in the above video with McCollum, is up for auction this month with Rock Island.
Caption: Locating a Sniper—A rifle squad from Company “D,” 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, searches for a sniper firing at the position inside the International Safety Zone in Santo Domingo. Note the M1 helmets, Korean War style flak vests and M-14.
The action in the Dominican Republic was not the pushover some often chalk it up to. In the end, Johnson lamented ordering troops into action there. The below doc from the invasion is surprisingly gritty, and directly addresses the sniper problem in the above photo.
The Russian Ministry of Defense last week released footage from testing of their next-gen long range rifle, right out of the freezer.
The T-5000 “Tochnost” (Russian for roughly “accuracy” or “precision”) has been testing recently at the Klimovsk’s Central Scientific Research Institute for Precision Machine Engineering, (the Russians really like long names) near Moscow. In the above video– don’t freak out, it is in Russian– the rifle is shown first in some sedate testing by a chill guy we’ll just call Dimitri in the prone position. He even has a shooting mat.
This all changes.
Then they toss it in the freezer at -50 C (-122 F) and leave it there to die like it’s James Bond or something. Dimitri then comes back and pulls the rifle out (we know what you are thinking: how much time passed, right?) and hit the range again, sans optics, which may not be able to take the chill.
It seems legit, as the gun ices up when it hits the air and good old Dimitri looks pretty hesitant to wrap his body around the chilly long-range rifle, but who knows. Cut to scene of Dimitri shooting the rifle in a rain booth. Poor guy, apparently all the hacking jobs were taken.
The .338 Lapua Magnum rifle is based on the Orsis T-5000, which was introduced in 7.62x51mm and .300 Win back in 2011 by TsNIITochMash for international sales. The larger Tochnost is to be used by Russian special forces “as well as for anti-terrorist and security activities,” as noted by Alexei Schyokin with the agency.
But how does it compare to the classic 7.62x54R Dragunov SVD?
Whereas the old school Dragunov, which was more of a designated marksman’s rifle anyway, could sometimes tap in at 2 MOA at 100m, the Tochnost is billed at being accurate to 0.3-0.5 MOA. The Tochnost takes a number of cues from standard Western precision rifles, for instance, it is bolt-action, has a heavy barrel on an aluminum bedding block, is CNC machined to a tolerance of less than 0.0025mm, and its chassis resembles everything from Ruger’s latest offering to the Austrian Ritter and Stark SLX-1 to the Israeli DAN .338.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Tochnost is expected to be fielded by 2020 as a dedicated sniper tool, with the current SV-98 rifles and updated SVDM/SVDS still used as DMRs– the Dragunov’s old role.
Of course, the whole thing could be vaporware as the Russians have come out with a half-dozen or more foggy sniper rifles in past years including the weird ass OTs-03 SVU bullpup 7.62x54R, the Degtyarev KSVK anti-material rifle, OSV-96, VKS (in very curious 12.7x55mm silenced), VSK-94 and VSS Vintorez (both in 9x39mm SP5/6), Lobaev SVL, SV99 (in .22LR) and Kalashnikov SVK.
And of course, there seems no shortage of SVDs popping up in the hands of local pro-Russian militias fighting for greater Putinland in places formerly Soviet.
A fighter with the separatist self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic Army stands guard at a checkpoint along a road from the town of Vuhlehirsk to Debaltseve in Ukraine, in this file photo taken on February 18, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner
Here we see the British Army’s L129A1 service rifle, sniper, better known on this side of the pond as an LMT LM308MWS. The Brits bought 3,000 of these bad boys in 2014 and are known for a sub-MOA group at 800m with match 7.62x51mm NATO ammo, which is not bad out of a 16-inch barrel. The basic optic is the Trijicon 6×48 ACOG. Also shown are the standard SA80/L-85 Enfield bayonet (note the wirecutter sheath in the top left), and the MilSight S135 Magnum Universal Night Sight (MUNS).
Not pictured is the L17A2 Schmidt & Bender 3-12 × 50 Sniper Scope for long distance work and the SureFire SOCOM762-RC husha can for when you want to spend some quiet moments in the hills looking for ISIS-types. Weight all up (with the ACOG) is 11-pounds, if carrying other sights or the can, this jumps, as does adding a bipod or scrim. She takes regular AR-10 style mags, which you will notice that the Brits use PMAGs (doesn’t everyone).
What she looks like with her shit together
With the U.S. Army looking for a new commercial-off-the-shelf Interim Combat Service Rifle (ICSR) in 7.62x51mm, you better believe guns like the LMT 308MWS are being looked at.
I got a chance to check this out in April when I was at CMP in Anniston for visit and tour (see articles here and here ICYMI) and just absolutely drooled over this bad boy.
Mmmm, smells like Kandahar
There were only 52 made and many have been scrapped. Thankfully, this one (#S6533990) was transferred to the CMP for sale on the civilian market and is complete with the NF optic, PVS22 night scope, case (which is very interestingly marked on the outside!) and accessories to include data book.
What is an XM-3?
From the DD:
These XM-3 sniper rifles used by the United States Marine Corps. In mid-2005, DARPA worked with Lt. Col. Norm Chandler’s Iron Brigade Armory (IBA) to field items to expeditionary units in Afghanistan. Since they already had a great working relationship, DARPA contracted IBA to build and test lightweight sniper rifles that incorporated the improvements the snipers desired in combat. The mission was to be lighter and smaller than the existing M40s, while having better accuracy, clip-on night vision that did not require re-zero, better optics, and better stock, and it had to be suppressed. The barrel had to be short enough to allow maneuverability yet long enough to deliver a 10” group at 1,000 yards. If the barrel was too heavy, maneuverability would decrease, yet if the barrel was too light it would only be able to shoot a few rounds before the groups started to shift due to barrel temperature. IBA tested a number of barrel lengths, ranging from 16 to 20 inches and in different contours. Each rifle with a different length was assigned an XM designator starting with XM1 through XM3. In each case, everything on the prototype rifles was kept the same except the barrel. During the final phases of testing it was found that the 18” barrels had no issues keeping up with their longer 20” brethren. The final barrel length was set at 18.5”, and the contour was a modified #7. The straight taper on the barrel was only 2” vs. 4” and the overall diameter at the muzzle was .85” vs. .980”. This helped reduce a lot of the rifle’s weight while not negatively affecting accuracy or effective range. A number of the groups at 1,000 yards were <1 MOA. The Marines of I-MEF were the first to field test the rifles at Camp Pendleton. Shortly after I-MEF took receipt of the XM-3s, the first units in II-MEF took receipt of theirs. By mid-2006 there were dozens of XM-3s in Iraq. There were 52 XM-3s made.
During the 1939-40 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, a hunter and farmer by trade by the name of Simo Hayha returned to his reserve unit and picked up 542 confirmed kills with iron sights.
While versions of Hayha’s story is well known in the West, the 192 pages of Tapio Saarelainen’s White Sniper goes past the second and third-hand accounts and brings you, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story.
It should be noted that Saarelainen is a career military officer who spent two decades training precision marksmen for the Finnish Army and even helped write that Scandinavian country’s manual for snipers. Besides this obvious resume to prepare him to write the work on Hayha, the author also met and interviewed the Winter War hero dozens of times over a five year period.
That’s a good part of what makes White Sniper such an interesting read is that it is drawn largely from first-hand accounts from a man who has been referred to as the deadliest sniper in history, but also from those who lived next to, fought alongside with, and knew the man personally. As such, it sheds insight on the man not known in the West. Such as the fact that he used his own personal Finnish-made Mosin M/28-30 rifle that he had paid for with his own funds. That his outnumbered fellow Finns, fighting alongside him in the frozen Kollaa region during that harsh winter, called him “Taika-ampuja” which translates roughly as the “Magic Shooter.” That he took almost as many moose and foxes in his life as he did Russians. That he was unassuming in later life, spending most of his time calling on old friends in his yellow VW Bettle.
Cpl. Robert Lea, a scout sniper with 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, sights in with his M40A6 Bolt Action Sniper Rifle during an unknown distance range as part of Exercise Sea Soldier. Scout snipers are Marines who are highly skilled in marksmanship and can hit long-distance targets with great precision from a hidden location. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. April Price)
Note the difference in the A6, above, and the A5, below.
The “Alpha 6” was fielded beginning last summer and brings a lot of modularity (rails) to the legacy M40A5 as well as improved ergonomics and an easily adjustable (folding!) stock which makes carry a lot more efficient.
