An international team of scientists from NATO member and partner countries met in rural Germany to carry out field trials on a variety of camouflage materials. The ultimate goal for the future, is creating camouflage systems able to elude hyperspectral cameras.
The above makes me think about the increased use in NATO of SAAB’s Barracuda system, which helps mitigate a post or vehicle’s infrared, thermal and radar signature.
As a kid who grew up with surrounded by stacks of vintage 1960 and 1970s “Mens” magazines compiled by my slightly older uncles and handed down along with other, older sci-fi titles from the 1950s that came from my grandfather, I am a fan of pulp fiction publications of the 20th Century.
If you are like-minded, check out the 11,000-title strong Pulp Magazine Archive, which is, by the way, free.
There is also:
You are welcome!
Over the past few years, the Australian and Indian military have been utilizing robotic, autonomous targets to up their training game. Now, the U.S. Army and Marines are expanding their use as well.
The devices, supplied by Marathon Targets, look a little silly but as any practical or 3-gun competitor will vouch for, nailing a moving target is immensely harder and better training than spending a lot of lead equity zipping rounds through static paper targets.
According to the manufacturer, tests carried out by the Marines determined that those using the targets “developed a 104 percent increase in combat accuracy within a 24 hour period” while the US Army’s Research Institute “measured a 3.7 times increase in range throughput compared to traditional training methods.”
More in my column at Guns.com.
The Libyan National Army (LNA) has taken delivery of the flagship Al-Karama (Dignity) offshore patrol vessel, the former Irish vessel LÉ Aisling.
The LNA released a video on May 17 showing the arrival of the vessel at Benghazi naval base. It was welcomed by the head of the Libyan navy, Commodore Faraj Al-Mahdawi Al-Tarhouni, military advisor Major General Abdullah Aoun and other dignitaries.
The Libyan National Army, led by Khalifa Haftar, controls much of eastern Libya and named the new vessel after the operation to secure Benghazi in 2014.
“The arrival of this vessel is a qualitative leap for our fleet and another success of our armed forces added to the chain of successes locally and internationally,” the LNA said, adding the vessel would be used to protect Libya’s territorial waters and fight against terrorism, human trafficking and illegal immigration.
LÉ Aisling was built in Ireland in 1979 and from 1980 was in Irish Naval Service as a patrol vessel until decommissioned in June 2016. It was sold to Dutch broker Dick van der Kamp for 110,000 euros in March 2017 at auction and subsequently offered for resale for 685,000 euros. The vessel sailed over 625,000 nautical miles during its years of active service.
According to IHS Jane’s, the Aisling was re-registered by Universal Satcom Services FZE based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in April. It sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar at the beginning of May on its delivery voyage.
The Emer-class offshore patrol vessel is 214-feet long and displaces 1,020 tons. Top speed is 16kts and crew complement is 46. It appears she was delivered to Libya without weapons, although the latter have many at hand they could equip her with.
Named after a style of visionary dream poem, the former Irish Navy’s offshore patrol vessel was built at Verolme Cork Dockyard (and the last greyhull to leave that yard).
Armed with a single 40mm Bofors L70, a couple of 20mm GAMBO cannon and some 7.62mm GPMGs, Aisling made a name for herself in a running battle with the Spanish fishing trawler Sonia (330-tons) in 1984, firing 600~ rounds in warning shots while the Spanish vessel attempted repeatedly to ram. Sonia later sank after Aisling broke contact.
The same year she captured the trawler, Marita Ann, sailing with 160 guns (including some stolen M2 Brownings via National Guard armories) and 71,000 rounds of ammo aboard rumored to have been sent to the IRA by connections of Whitey Bulger.
She also responded to the Air India Flight 182 disaster and others lost at sea.
Class leader LÉ Emer (P21) commissioned into the Nigerian Navy as a training ship and renamed NNS Prosperity in 2015 after a Nigerian businessman’s scheme to use her as a personal yacht fell through. Sister LÉ Aoife (P22) was donated to Malta as P62 in 2015 to help that country pluck migrant refugees from the Med. The half-sister and prototype to the Emer-class, the one-off LÉ Deirdre (P20), was stricken in 2003 and, after a career as a yacht, was scrapped in Florida in 2014.
USS Tautog (SS-199), photographed from an altitude of 300 feet off the Florida coast by airship ZP-31 on 29 May 1945. Note the scoreboard painted on her conning tower.
Tautog (skippers: Willingham, Sieglaff, Basket, Higgs), one of a dozen Tambor-class submarines commissoned in the twilight before Pearl Harbor, was credited with sinking an amazing 26 Japanese ships, for a total of 72,606 tons across 13 war patrols in the Pacific. The “Terrible T” was ranked second by number of ships and 11th by tonnage on the tally sheets. This doesn’t include the number of ships she mauled but got away, such as the Japanese light cruiser Natori, which managed to somehow limp away with her stern and rudders shot off.
Description: USS Tautog (SS 199), World War II Battle Flag. NHHC Photograph Collection, NH 63790-KN (Color).
Tautog was decommissioned on 8 December 1945 with just five years under her keel, used for a decade as a pierside trainer at Naval Reserve Training Center, Milwaukee, and scrapped in 1959.
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.
More in my column at Guns.com.
A couple of URD SBR builds from Jim Fuller’s Rifle Dynamics in Las Vegas. The top rifle is a Pacnoir barrel, the bottom was done with a Vepr barrel and a refinished Romanian wood foregrip.
“The 74 URD, the fighting rifle perfected, no matter how you configure it the size weight and handling characteristics of this rifle performs beyond all others,” they say.
According to RD, the guns shoot just fine for the shorty barrels.
(“W)e have yet to get chronograph readings on these but they are hitting man-sized targets out to 500 yards, with the 11.5″ barrel the velocity loss is minimal. With 60 grn Wolf they hold about 2MOA, with Hornaday 1MOA @100yards.”
Yikes.
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.”
While armored vehicles were not often the focus of the Vietnam conflict, full-sized main battle tanks did get a chance to do more than guard gates on occasion.
Such as a sharp engagement some 50 years ago today.
This painting shows 4 Australian Centurions of C Squadron, 1st Armoured Regiment in Bien Hoa Province, South Vietnam 26 May 1968. The tanks let out to clear some NVA bunkers situated around the base from whence attacks were being staged on the Aussie’s base.
The battles of Fire Support Base Coral and Balmoral, during the Tet Offensive, are stuff of legend in the Australian Army.
An armored troop made up from the 1st Armoured Regiment (1 Armd Regt) was deployed on active service to South Vietnam in May 1965 and, through several rotations supported by the regiment, remained in country until withdrawn from Vietnam in September 1971. In that time, 58 Centurions had served in Southeast Asia with 42 damaged in battle– six were beyond repair. Two crewmen had been killed in action.
The regiment is still around, and today is the only armored unit in the Australian Army to be equipped with the M1A1 Abrams.
More the past several months, I have been alternating my carry between Smith’s Compact M2.0 (available in any color you want as long as you want black) and Glock’s 19X (which is in a really sweet Coyote scheme), but now there may be something a little neater out there. Featuring Truglo TFX night sights and an FDE finish, Smith & Wesson’s newest .45ACP M2.0 pistol has a lot to offer right out of the box, and looks good doing it.
The M&P45 M2.0 in FDE completes the hat-trick started by the M&P9 and M&P40 (Photos: S&W)
Announced earlier this week, the newest variant of the M&P45 joins the company’s previous 9mm and .40-caliber offerings in the FDE stable of second generation Military & Police series semi-auto handguns. Besides the obvious finish characteristics, the factory-standard Truglos offer encapsulated tritium and fiber optics for use in either day or nighttime conditions.
More on the new Smith in my column at Guns.com
