Standing watch

Posted on by Leave a comment

Even with the longest U.S. federal government shutdown in modern history and the cancellation of myriad Veterans Day parades, observations, and related airshows, some watches are still maintained.

At Arlington, the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as “The Old Guard,” continues to stand watch at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier 24/7 as it is considered a sacred, unquestionable duty. This perpetual watch is maintained regardless of weather or national events, and has been standing continuously since 1948.

An interview with Tomb Guards on what goes into the honor.

On a smaller level…

In Hattiesburg, for at least the past 35 years, the University of Southern Mississippi’s ROTC programs have performed a 24-hour vigil around the four granite pillars of Hattiesburg’s Veterans Memorial Park from 1100 on 10 November until the City’s Veterans Day ceremony begins the next day at 1100. The cadets take shifts in standing watch over the pillars bearing the names of the 173 individuals from the Hattiesburg area who died at war, from 1917 to the present day.

Although the “official” vigil was canceled due to the shutdown, volunteer cadets from USM’s Army and Air Force ROTC units, many not under scholarship, have begun the watch and held it overnight, with temperatures dropping into a hard freeze.

Because honor.

109 years on: bottle mail set for delivery

Posted on by Leave a comment

This interesting piece out of Australia.

Beachcombers along Wharton Beach, southeast of Perth, came across an old bottle. Sealed, it contained two yellowed and deteriorating pencil-written letters.

Carefully retrieved, they were addressed from “somewhere at sea” and detailed an outward-bound leg on the troopship HMAT Ballarat, which departed Adelaide in August 1916, bound for the Great War in Europe.

It turned out they belonged to ANZAC privates Malcolm Alexander Neville (48th Australian Infantry Battalion) and William Kirk Harley (4th Australian Light Horse).

Sadly, Neville would be killed months later in France and remains there with a white cross over his grave. Harley survived and returned home, but passed having never seen his letter again.

The families have been found and are finally set to receive their long-lost sea mail.

The beachcombers are keeping the bottle, though.

Guadalcanal Arms List

Posted on by Leave a comment

Weapons on hand for the 5th Marines, 9 November 1942, at Guadalcanal, including an interesting collection of H&R Reising submachine guns, M1928 Tommy guns, M1903 Springfields, M1911s, and Mr. Browning’s assorted .30-06 machine gun designs in M1917, M1918, and M1919 variants. Also noted are 28 beefy .50 cals, eight Lewis guns, and a whopping six Garands.

Beyond the above arsenal, of course, today is the 250th anniversary of the Corps.

Birthday message, narrated by the current Punisher, follows:

A Clear Choice: The Shield OMSsc Micro Red Dot

Posted on by Leave a comment

We came across the OMSsc while doing a review on a pistol and thought enough about it to do a separate review of the optic. Naturally, one would only do this to either be the town crier to shame the optic for poor performance, or to point out how original or pioneering it came across while in use. This review is the latter.

Springfield Armory sent us a Hellcat .380 for review purposes in August 2025 with a Shield OMSsc 4-MOA red dot installed– which has the same form factor and proven performance of the RMSc, but with a panoramic see-through top hood.

Since we spent three months running that pistol with this interesting new sight mounted, we felt a separate review of the sight was in order.

Candidly – and stay with me here – I am just not a fan of micro red dots on carry guns, despite having extensive use with both. Don’t get me wrong, I own probably 10 rifles right now with electro-optic red dots (Aimpoint PRO, Eotech XPS3, Vortex Spitfire, SIG Romeo 5) on them as well as several full-sized pistols with large mailbox-sized enclosed red dots (think ACRO, Steiner MPS, Burris Fast Fire E, etc) but have just always struggled to “find the dot” in a fast enough time on a open emitter MRD to justify losing a half-second on my draw.

I find myself faster on target when drawing a small gun from concealment when using iron sights. This may be because I’ve been shooting handguns for 40 years, with a lot of that being on guns with very poor sights (looking at you, J-frames). Micro carry red dots only came into play in the past decade, so I default to what I am comfortable using. On larger, more full-sized pistols, I can get a better grip and don’t suffer the same “bounce and adjust” when coming up on target, especially when using a big honking, almost competition-sized enclosed dot.

However, with the Shield OMSsc, I felt the time shift in bringing the dot to my eyes, a feeling more akin to using a larger sight. Cutting back on the hood without cutting back on the hood helped me to very rapidly “hook into” the dot, if you can follow.

TL;DR: I liked it and shot well with it, without having to search for the dot as much as I usually do with other open emitter red dots.

One busy Brit tanker

Posted on by Leave a comment

The Blue Ensign-flying Tide-class Royal Fleet Auxiliary fast fleet tanker Tidespring (A136) is a modern ship, commissioned in 2017.

At some 37,000 tons, the AEGIR-26 designed double-hulled auxiliary has three RAS stations, a hangar and flight deck for a Chinook-sized helicopter, and can tote 6.3 million gallons of deliverable avgas/fuel/POL while her efficient CODELOD engineering suite allows for sustained 20 knot speeds for 18,200 nm. She can carry 20 20-foot containers on deck.

Self-defense armament includes allowance for two CIWS and two 30 mm cannons, as well as additional GPMGs sprinkled around as needed.

Although manned by 63 civilians much like the MSC (although far worse paid) she can also carry 46 embarked personnel and is currently deployed 75 RFAs and 33 MoD personeel with the latter made up of an ASW-capable Merlin Mk 2 detachment from 814 (Swordfish) NAS, drone operator/maintainers and Puma UAVs from 700X NAS, and a ship’s protection detail of Royal Marines from 42 Commando.

Tidespring as seen from a Merlin Mk 2 from 814 NAS

700X NAS Puma UAV

42 Commando Royal Marines = guys you do not want to meet in the passageway

Since leaving England in April, Tidespring has sailed 36,358nm, most of that in support of the HMS Prince of Wales carrier group’s Op Highmast deployment to the Pacific, and has thus far delivered 79 replenishments while underway.

Besides PoW and her CSG25 group, Tidespring provided services to and sailed with four other allied flattop TFs– the USS America ARG, the USS George Washington CSG, the Japanese Kaga CSG, and the Indian INS Vikrant CSG.

Now, rounding the Cape of Good Hope alone on her way to the Caribbean as PoW is proceeding through Suez to the Med and home without her, Tidespring has a fourth equator crossing (no pollywogs there!) and another planned 13,457nm to go before spending Christmas deployed and a 2026 homecoming.

Legends at rest

Posted on by Leave a comment

New York City. Some 80 years ago this week, 9 November 1945, from left to right, we see the troopship USS Europa (AP-177), the Iowa-class battlewagon USS Missouri (BB-63), and the famed ocean liner RMS Queen Mary at Pier 90. The ancient three-stack Tennessee-class cruiser-turned-receiving ship, USS Seattle (IX-39) [former USS Washington, ACR-11, disarmed in 1931], is to the far right.

Mary had just delivered 11,209 troops back to the States from Southampton, who were taken directly across the river to New Jersey for demobilization.

The Europa, formerly a German Norddeutscher Lloyd liner taken in May 1945 as a war prize, had just disembarked nearly 10,000 troops herself.

Those two were always competitors.

Why looky there…

Posted on by Leave a comment

I spent the week at the Guns.com Vault in Minnesota filming podcasts with guests and friends, so you know I had to go poring through the thousands of firearms in “the stacks” of the warehouse.

I give you a 1916-marked lP08 “Lange” Luger made by DWM (Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken). The 8-inch barreled lP08 was adopted in 1913 to replace the thoroughly obsolete Reichsrevolver in use by the German field artillery.

Widely thought of as rare, they aren’t really that hard to find, as something approaching 200,000 examples were made during the Great War (~175,000 by DWM, 23,000 by the Royal Arsenal at Erfurt).

A prized trophy that was often retrieved at the last minute from piles of munitions headed to the scrap yard, I wouldn’t doubt most are still floating around out there, somewhere.

The guys in the warehouse say they see three or four a year pass through there.

And if you wish hard enough and your heart is pure, one will surely find you.

Minehunting in style

Posted on by Leave a comment

The first City-class mine countermeasures vessel in active service has arrived on station, with the Belgian mine hunter Oostende (M940) pulling into Zeebrugge earlier this week.

The soon-to-be-donated Tripartite class mine hunter Lobelia (M921) met her at sea and escorted her home.

The 1980s vintage Tripartites are being replaced in Belgian, French, and Dutch service with the City-class vessels, which, as you can see above, are a huge upgrade.

The 2,800-ton, 270-foot City class carries a BAE Bofors 40mm Mk4 DP mount forward and two FN Herstal Sea deFNder remote mounts with FN M3R .50 cal heavy machine guns (one on the starboard bridge wing and the other overlooking the port stern). There are also four multipurpose mounts for GPMGs, LRADs, and water cannons for more constabulary sort of work.

The aviation deck is designed to carry and operate a pair of 500-pound UMS Skeldar V-200 rotary UAVs, also enabling vertical replenishment, personnel insertion/extraction, and HIFR via manned helicopters.

The boats carried include a 40-foot waterjet-propelled Exail Inspector 125 sonar-equipped USV mine buster and two 23-foot RHIBs.

The Skelar UAVs and Exhail Inspector USVs are depicted in use below:

In addition to a 33-man crew, they can carry another 30 transients, including divers and security teams/marines.

Compare this to the 600-ton/169-foot Tripartites, which still rely mainly on on-board sonar and surveys to dispatch clearance divers. Their armament is a 20mm gun and four MGs.

The Belgians had 10 Tripartites and have since passed seven of them on to Pakistan, France, Ukraine, and Bulgaria, with the final three set to be donated to Bulgaria in the coming months.

The Dutch had 15 Tripartites but have passed on all but the final three to Latvia, Pakistan, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. They plan to move the last trio to Bulgaria by 2028.

France had 10 original Tripartites and has decommissioned and disposed of five, with six remaining.

The plan is to replace them all with City-class vessels, with all three countries ordering six ships each.

Wouldn’t it have been great if the 14 retired/retiring 40-year-old U.S. Navy Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships had been replaced with a dedicated design more akin to this and less, well, LCS?

Illuminating

Posted on by Leave a comment

Some 150 years ago this week: “The Grand Illumination of The British Flying and Indian Squadrons at Bombay, 8 November 1875,” on the occasion of carrying Prince Edward Albert, later King Edward VII, to India.

The Detached (or Flying) Squadron of unarmored screw ships visited the East Indies Station while on a world-wide training and flag-waving cruise, arriving in October 1875 in Bombay from Cape Town. It was the first time the squadron had visited India in three years and would remain there over winter before heading into the Pacific. The ships included the flagship HMS Narcissus, HMS Immortalité, HMS Topaze, HMS Newcastle, HMS Raleigh, and HMS Doris.

At the time, the Royal Navy was the undisputed largest fleet in the world, a title it had held since the Seven Years War in the 1760s and would retain until 1943 when surpassed by the U.S., an impressive 180-year run.

According to the Brassey’s Naval Annual for the closest year I can find (1886 with data for 1885), the Royal Navy included 55 armored ships (13 1st class, 14 2nd, 14 3rd, and 14 coastal defense) totaling some 361,000 tons compared to the next largest, that of France, which had 40 armored ships for 213,000 tons. The Royal Navy also had 130 assorted torpedo boats of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd classes. Then came a myriad of 170 unarmored sloops, gun vessels, dispatch vessels, paddle wheel gunboats, frigates, corvettes, torpedo cruisers, transports, auxiliaries, and training hulks, some dating back to Nelson. Another 23 were laid up in “fourth class reserve.”

Today’s Royal Navy is, well, much smaller.

The pipedream joy of the S&W M76

Posted on by One comment

One of my favorite American subguns is the S&W M76.

I mean, just look at it:

Developed in 1966 for the U.S. Navy SEALs, the Smith & Wesson Model 76 Submachine Gun was built to replace the famous and much more prolific M/45 “Swedish K” after U.S. supply was cut off during the Vietnam War. Production of the M76 continued until 1974, with a total of roughly 6,000 units built.

Chambered in 9mm Parabellum, the Model 76 Submachine Gun featured a simple blowback operation and had a cyclic rate of around 600–700 rounds per minute. It fed from a 36-round box magazine and had an ambidextrous selector lever allowing either full or semi-auto fire, a folding stock, optional suppressor capability, and long rifling-like grooves to allow dirt and fouling to accumulate without impacting the gun’s reliability.

Jerry Miculek, probably the nicest guy in the gun industry, gets into the Smith & Wesson Vault and lays hands on an M76 for the win.

« Older Entries Recent Entries »