In the Army, Personal Security Detail duty is either collateral part-time stuff (for visiting dignitaries or when deployed overseas for leadership at the brigade level and higher) or dedicated full-time stuff (for like SACEUR, Commander UNC/CFC/USFK, et. al). In the former, it can be as simple as a squad-sized element detailed from a regular platoon with their standard battle rattle, in the latter, it is typically specially-trained MP/CID types (or even special ops guys, Schwartzkopf was famously protected by a plainclothes detail from Delta during the Gulf War) with purpose-dedicated equipment.
The Army has long provided a 2-3 week PSD course at Fort Leonard Wood for just such a skill qualifier.
A U.S. member of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe Security Detachment shoots with a Heckler and Koch 9mm MP5 submachine gun at close distance during a Criminal Investigation Command protective services qualification at the Training Support Center Benelux 25-meter indoor range in Chièvres, Belgium, Jan. 14, 2015. (U.S. Army photo by Visual Information Specialist Pierre-Etienne Courtejoie/Released)
It’s that latter type of PSD that is seeing the Army planning to award a flurry of small contracts to 10 different firearm companies for what it is terming “Sub Compact Weapons” for those occasions when it is preferable to have something more serious than a handgun under your jacket to sweep gremlins away.
A synopsis of the contract award says the Army is looking for a commercially-available (COTS) design to meet the branch’s need for a “highly concealable” SCW, “capable of engaging threat personnel with a high volume of lethal and accurate fires at close range with minimal collateral damage.”
The awards, ranging from $8,500 to $39,060 include a small quantity of 9mm weapons with along with magazines, cleaning kits, suppressors, spare parts and other tools and accessories if needed.
And they have some pretty interesting weapons on the table to T&E.
I have to admit, the Sig MPX is a heck of a fun gun to shoot (Photo; Chris Eger)
SureFire’s MasterFire is a rapid-deploy holster designed specifically to interface with most railed handguns equipped with a SureFire H-Series (XH15, X300UH, X400UH) weapon mounted light and an optional Ryder suppressor without dismounting the latter. The holster’s light activation switch can be set to automatically activate the weapon light and/or mounted laser when the handgun is drawn.
And according to SF, they have been used in a night combat jump…
Dismounted 3d Cavalry troopers train for operations at Tampa, Florida, prior to embarking for Cuba. 8 June 1898, during the Spanish American War.
Look at all those saddle ring Krag rifles. Coupled with the bedrolls and broad campaign hats, you would think these men closer to Civil War troopers under Gen. Sheridan than ready to fight a colonial war against the rinds of the Spanish Empire.
As a twist of fate, the 3rd, along with four other Regular Army cavalry regiments (including the segregated black 10th Cav) and the Rough Riders of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry, was under the command of Maj. Gen (of Volunteers) Joesph Wheeler (USMA 1859). Prior to that command, Wheeler had been a Lt. Gen. in the Confederate Army of all things, so the sight of so many blue-coated cavalrymen, who shipped to Cuba without their horses due to a lack of transport, had to be familiar in a way.
Brig. Gen. Christopher Donahue, U.S. Army Infantry School Commandant, details how Fort Benning and U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command is improving the Soldier Lethality with a new marksmanship qualification course, a test pilot to extend OSUT and by incorporating cyber and space technology into urban (and subterranean) combat training.
Of course, it would be nice if 10 percent of M4A1s out there didn’t fire when changing the selector switch, but hey.
A U.S. Army Machine Gun Team from Company A, Ninth Machine Gun Battalion, 6th Infantry Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, AEF, man a machine gun set up in railroad shop in Chateau Thierry, France, on June 7, 1918, 100 years ago today.
This was during the Aisne Defensive, which in days saw the entire division take to the front line for the first time and three weeks later switched to holding the southern crossing of the Marne against the Germans even when surrounding units retreated.
Although the U.S. military had access to a number of machine guns going into WWI– including the 25-pound Model 1909 Benet Mercie, which was cranky but proved its worth in repelling Villa’s raid on Columbus, NM in 1916; as well as the 35-pound Colt-Browning M1895 “Potato Digger” which was mass-produced by Marlin during the war; and the excellent 28-pound Lewis light machine gun– the American Expeditionary Force to France was armed in large part with 7,000 French Mle 1914 Hotchkiss machine gun of the example shown above.
A 53-pound weapon, it was far from “light” though it was designed by the same Mssrs. Benet and Mercie as the M1909, but it was simple (just 32 parts, assembled with no pins or screws) and reliable. Fed through a 30-round metal strip, a three-man crew could keep em coming enough to get a 120~ round-per-minute cyclic rate and keep it up until the ammo ran out which it made a good complement to the vaunted (but twice as heavy) Browning Model 1917A1 water-cooled machine gun.
Though the U.S. Army would replace the M1914 with the much better Browning M1919 in the 1920s, the “Mitrailleuse Hotchkiss modèle 1914” remained in use with other countries through WWII and even into the 1950s and later with the Chinese and in various Latin American countries.
The unit shown above, the 9th Machine Gun Battalion was formed just for the war in October 1917 and fought with the 3rd ID through Chateau Thierry, and the Meuse-Argonne, leaving a number of its brave gunners “Over There.”
General Pershing called the stand of the 3rd ID along the Marne “one of the most brilliant pages of our military annals,” and today the division is known, of course, as “The Rock of the Marne.”
Sgt. 1st Class Adam Sokolowski in the Falling Plates, his last event to win the Bianchi Cup last week. (Photos: U.S. Army)
The U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit cleaned house at the 2018 World Action Pistol Championship with the unit’s SFC Adam Sokolowski walking away with the overall win.
The big showing by Sokolowski, who chalked up a perfect score of 1920-176X, means that he has cleared all three Bianchi Cup divisions — Open, Metallic and Production — in the span of three years. Besides picking up the cup itself, Sokolowski last week won 1st Place in Multigun Champion with a score of 3822-329X, as well as Service Champion, High Master, and Moving Target Event (Open), competing against 174 athletes from eight countries.
Can you say, upgrade?
The competition was held in Hallsville, Missouri this past weekend at the Green Valley Rifle & Pistol Club.
FORT GORDON, Ga. – Spc. Alexander Musarra, Company B, 782nd Military Intelligence Battalion, from Miami, Florida, is shown here firing his M4A1 carbine rifle during the Stress Shoot Exercise which was an event on day one of the 780th MI Brigade’s Best Warrior Competition, April 23.
Saftey of use message:
A small number (881 out of 259,000) of M16/M4 weapons have been found to potentially have an unintended discharge while manipulating the selector.
An additional step in the updated Function Check will readily determine if your M16/M4 is affected.
If your M16/M4 passes the additional steps to the Function Check to inspect for this problem, there is absolutely no need to change Immediate Action procedures.
The previous Immediate Action procedure (“SPORTS”) has been since replaced with an improved procedure described in TC 3-22.9. TACOM and the published Technical Manuals have not yet updated to the new standard.
SOUM #18-004 alerted the field of an unintended discharge on an M4A1 PIP’ed (Product Improvement Program) weapons that occurred when the operator pulled the trigger with the selector switch between the SEMI and AUTO detents (outside of detent). The weapon did not fire when the operator pulled the trigger and instead fired when the selector was moved further. As a result of this incident, an on-going investigation determined that there is the potential for all carbines and rifles noted above, to behave in this way.
First, this potential mechanical problem is uncommon. The Army has converted 259,000 M4s to M4A1s in the past three years with the M4 carbine product improvement program. Out of 259,000, 881 have been found to exhibit this problem.
Second, TACOM’s updated Function Check will easily determine if your M16/M4 is one of those of the small number affected.
So American Rifleman recently got a chance to take a look behind the curtain at the milsurp windfall now secured in “largest bank vault in Calhoun County, Alabama” to see just what the military passed down. The cache amounted to some 96 crates of guns from two different sources from within the Army, some 8,000 pistols all told.
Like I suspected, some 1,500 seem to have come from “The Army’s Attic” at the U.S. Army’s Museum Support Center at Anniston Army Depot where I saw them crated up and ready to transfer last year and include a lot of sweet vintage M1911s.
Others were arsenal reworked in the 1970s/80s and carry a heavy gray park, but are sure to be sweet shooters.
The Army’s 7th Engineer Dive Detachment on a recent recovery mission they conducted in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency off the coast of Nha Trang, Vietnam.
From The Army:
NHA TRANG, Vietnam — Full of sediment from the bottom of the sea, a gray metal basket slowly rose out of the turquoise water. While it appeared to only contain muck, it offered hope to the U.S. military divers waiting to inspect its contents.
The divers — mainly from the Army’s 7th Engineer Dive Detachment — were archaeologists of sorts. As they sifted through the mud the consistency of wet cement, the divers searched for personal effects or aircraft wreckage to prove they were on the right path.
The ultimate discovery, though, would be the remains of the six Soldiers who went missing after their Chinook helicopter crashed off the coast here during the Vietnam War.
Each year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency oversees more than 70 joint missions around the world in search of the remains of American service members at former combat zones. In Vietnam, there are still over 1,200 service members who have not yet been found.
Some of those operations are underwater recovery missions, which rely heavily on the Army’s small diving force.
“Everybody in the military signs up to go to war. We fight the nation’s battles. That’s what we do,” said Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Kratsas, the agency’s only master diver. “But I know if I ever got killed in battle somewhere, I would want my remains brought home to my family and I know they would want the same.”
ZERO VISIBILITY
As the most senior diver on the recent 45-day mission near Nha Trang in southern Vietnam, Kratsas helped ensure the safety of the divers who plunged 80 feet into the dark waters.
Depending on the weather, four two-man teams from the dive detachment spent about an hour each day on the sea floor. While hidden beneath the waves, they used 8-inch vacuum systems to dredge sediment within specified grids of the archaeological site.
At times, the divers stood on the sea floor buried in thick silt up to their shoulders. Divers sucked out the silt until they reached the hard-packed seabed, where pieces of the helicopter had been resting for decades.
The next day, much of the silt had to be dredged out again due to the sea currents that brought in more.
The painstaking efforts of these underwater missions, especially in the murky waters off the coast of Vietnam, are repeated daily in hopes to reunite those lost in war with their loved ones.
“We do exactly what the land team does,” said Kratsas, 46, of Lordstown, Ohio. “We dig a hole in the earth, we put it in a bucket and we screen it. The same exact process that they do, except ours is at 80 feet and we can’t see it.”
Side-scan sonar and magnetometer work helps pinpoint metal objects on the sea floor to better focus diving operations. But sites can often cover a vast area, particularly if an aircraft or ship has broken into pieces.
A site’s depth can also limit how long a diver can safely stay under the water. At 80 feet below, the Army divers only had 55 minutes to work during each dive. Once back on the floating barge, they were rushed into a pressurized chamber to ward off chances of a decompression illness by gradually returning them to normal air pressure.
“Bottom time is definitely a premium,” said Spc. Lamar Fidel, a diver with the detachment, which falls under the 8th Theater Sustainment Command in Hawaii. “That’s where we make our money.”
In a previous mission, Fidel said they were able to dive for about six hours at a time. That site, which was in search of two pilots from an F-4 Phantom fighter jet that crashed in the Gulf of Tonkin near northern Vietnam, was only about 20 feet deep.
It was also Fidel’s most memorable diving mission so far.
For 14 years, he said, the agency had gone to the site unable to recover any human remains. Then last year, using the work of past missions, his team discovered a bone that led to the identification of one of the missing pilots.
“As soon as you see that, that hits you right in the heart,” said Fidel, 28, of Atlanta. “It makes you realize what you did … wasn’t all for nothing.”
EXCLUSIVE GROUP
While DPAA depends on Army divers for many of its missions, there are only about 150 of them across the service.
The small, elite career field has a high failure rate of roughly 60 to 80 percent for those training to become a diver. Much of the reasoning behind the tough entry course is that lives are always at stake during missions.
“Every time we get in the water, you have a chance of having a diving-related casualty,” said Staff Sgt. Les Schiltz, a diving supervisor assigned to the agency.
The deeper a person dives, the more at risk they are to suffer from a decompression illness. The two main problems divers face are decompression sickness, or the “bends,” and an arterial gas embolism. While the “bends” results from bubbles growing in tissue and causing local damage, the latter can have bubbles travel through the arteries and block blood flow. It can eventually lead to death.
Divers also need to watch out for sharks, jellyfish and other dangerous marine life.
“There are a lot of things in the water that can hurt you,” Schiltz said. “You plan accordingly, you look ahead to where you’re going to be, and you try to mitigate all those risks as much as you can.”
The thrill of diving often outweighs the dangers for many of the Soldiers. When under the water, Schiltz, 28, of Vernal, Utah, says it is like being in a different world.
“It’s probably the same reason someone will explain to you why they skydive or why they snowboard off cliffs,” he said. “There’s always a danger to it and that just makes it even better.”
Army divers are tasked to do a variety of missions that can have them repairing ships and ports or conducting underwater surveys. For many divers, though, the recovery missions have the most impact on them.
“It takes you to a more emotional point in your life,” Schiltz said.
While every diver wants to be the one who discovers the remains of a service member, the master diver describes the somber event as a shared win whenever it happens.
“Everybody’s out here to do one job and just because you happen to be the one diver on the job when you find something, it’s not you that found it,” Kratsas said. “It was a team effort.”
When not diving, Soldiers have several side jobs to keep operations afloat. They monitor oxygen levels and depth of fellow divers or serve as back-up divers to assist in an emergency. They also tend to umbilical cords that connect divers to the barge or help run a water pump for the suction hose.
When a basket is brought up to the barge, they all scoop out the sediment into buckets and screen it.
Some divers are surprised by the condition of some items pulled from the water. Even if items are buried at sea for a long time, salt water can sometimes preserve them better than at land sites where the acidity of soil breaks them down faster.
“A lot of times the wreckage is in such good condition, you can still read serial numbers,” said Capt. Ezra Swanson, who served as the team leader for the recent mission.
Pieces of an aircraft can also put things into perspective for the divers when they hold them in their hands.
“The last time someone was with that, it was the aircrew when they were going down,” said Swanson, 30, of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. “It’s like a connection between you and that crew.”
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE
Decades of sediment often buries human remains in an underwater tomb. To unearth them, dig sites are properly logged with historical data from previous missions.
Dive teams may pick up where they left off before or continue another team’s work at a site. An underwater archaeologist will direct a team where to dredge using grids, typically 2 by 4 meters wide, which are marked off on the seabed.
Similar to the guessing game of “Battleship,” if a certain grid has a successful hit with evidence being dredged up from it, divers will concentrate on nearby grids.
Even one fragment, such as a bone or tooth, could solve a case if it can be identified by laboratory staff back at the DPAA headquarters on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
“Sometimes you only find small fragments, but with today’s technology and with DNA [testing], we can still get a lot of information even from tiny little bits,” said Piotr Bojakowski, an underwater archaeologist with the agency.
Personal effects, such as rings, wallets or dog tags, can also produce a strong case for identification.
Since the recovery process can be slow and methodical, Bojakowski will remind divers to stay patient to ensure no evidence is overlooked.
“Take your time, don’t rush the process,” he tells them. “It’s more important that you do screening properly and find this small piece than to rush it through. Because once you lose it, we will never find it again.”
If years of careful research do not provide clues of human remains at a site, the agency may be forced to redirect efforts elsewhere.
“It’s a difficult, difficult decision to make,” Bojakowski said. “The ideal situation is to find the remains and material evidence. But providing an answer that the remains are not at the site is also an answer to some degree. Sometimes that’s the only answer we can get.”
Despite the long, hot days that had baskets come up empty during their recent mission, the Soldiers still kept at it for weeks. And when the time comes again, they will likely return to the same spot to do the same work.
To them, the mission is bigger than themselves.
“They know the cost and the sacrifice and have a very high appreciation for the guys who lost their lives,” said Swanson, the team leader. “They’re willing to push through the challenges and make sure they do everything they can to bring those guys home.”
The Civilian Marksmanship Program is looking to expand the reach of its Small Arms Firing School beyond its regular schedule, which is held annually at the National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, the CMP Travel Games at Oklahoma City Gun Club, Camp Butner – North Carolina, CMP Talladega – Alabama, New England Games at Camp Ethan Allen – Vermont and the Ben Avery Shooting Facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
Currently, the CMP welcomes 400 to 800 attendees each year at the national Small Arms Firing School at Camp Perry as part of the National Matches. CMP travel games SAFS programs serve between 40 and 100 participants per event. The CMP provides rifles and ammunition for all SAFS programs, home and away.
As a part of our firearms safety and marksmanship mission, with an emphasis on youth, the CMP is looking for a few more qualified sites around the U.S. to host the classroom program of instruction and 200-yard Excellence-In-Competition rifle match to reach those who lack the time or means to travel to a current CMP instruction site. The SAFS EIC rifle match is the only match which allows a beginning competitor to earn four leg points toward a Distinguished Rifleman Badge – the highest honor most marksmen seek to achieve in our sport. Firing the match is not a requirement of the class.
The CMP will provide instructional and administrative staffing to conduct the classroom activities, rifle match staging, squadding, firing, awards, and record-keeping.
SAFS Remote Location Training Course and Match Criteria
Classroom
Appropriate seating accommodations for the size of the group your club/range expects to accommodate – minimum 20, maximum 50 participants
Overhead lighting and electrical outlet(s) to supply laptop PC and projector
Projection screen and 6′ or 8′ demonstration table
Attendee accessibility, parking, restroom(s) in the vicinity
Participants age 16 and over
Rifle Range
CMP Affiliated Club preferred, but not mandatory
Minimum 10 firing points
Volunteers to assist with range safety, labor, firing line and target line maintenance
Porta-johns or restrooms, running water in the vicinity, preferred
Responsible range owner-operator/approved range superintendent, insurance coverage
Secured, established range fan, safety danger zone identified
200-yard high power range with safety berms, range flags, easily-accessible roads, trails, etc.
Well-maintained pit-served targets or easily-accessible walk-up targets to accommodate standard NRA SR 200-yard targets and cardboard backers
Raised firing line, grass-covered, concrete or other suitable surface for three-position shooting
Range communication system preferred – loudspeakers, chief range officer tower, (or pickup truck bed). Range to pits communication if pit-equipped. (Communications equipment can be provided by CMP if necessary)
A medical facility, 911-ready, first-aid, medic in close proximity
Housing, hotel/motel/restaurant accommodations in the area for CMP staff and event attendees from out of town, etc.
If your range facility would like to be considered by the CMP to schedule a future Small Arms Firing School and rifle match and your facility meets the criteria listed above, respond via email to CMP special projects coordinator, Amy Cantu, at acantu@thecmp.org, or by phone at 419-635-2141, ext. 602.
