Tag Archives: GWOT

Leopards in the Mist

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No, it is not early morning on the Savannah, but “Danske Leoparder et Letland,” i.e., Royal Danish Army KMW Rheinmetall Leopard 2A7DKs of I Panserbataljon, Jydske Dragonregiment (I/JDR) in Latvia on a NATO deployment getting a live fire ex underway recently.

And that Rh-120 L/55 A1 120mm main gun does growl.

Also note the SAAB Barracuda anti-IR camo system installed.

A closer look:

Of note, the “Blue Dragoons” of I/JDR, Denmark’s sole tank unit and home to 44 Leopard 2s, has a long and storied history going back to 1657, but held on to their horses until 1932. They have been operating successive versions of the Kampfpanzer Leopard since the 1970s.

They are somewhat famous in modern times for the “Mouse Ate the Cat” engagement in Bosnia in 1994, where they just went ham on some particularly dreaded and troublesome Serb positions and bagged at least one T-55 in the process.

They have also completed deployments to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq in modern times, and have a reputation for being eager to let their tracks (and guns) run free when needed.

Black beret clad in British Armored Corps fashion, their motto is Virtute Vincitur (“He is overcome by strength”).

SEAL Vet Holds Class on SOPMOD History

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Every gun nerd knows about SOPMOD. SOPMOD refers to Special Operations Peculiar MODification kit.

This stuff:

The purpose behind SOPMOD is to provide rifles with the flexibility and versatility to adapt basic issue weapons to meet mission-specific requirements.

It started off a lot less high-speed. 

Retired Navy SEAL Mark “Coch” Cochiolo talks about his career in SOPMOD, with a great 11-minute show and tell below going from the old days of pipe-clamping Maglights on MP5s, and drilling eye-bolts through handguards to where we are at today.

Inside Al Qaeda’s hard drives

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A stash of data yields up insights about the business of terrorism
By Renny McPherson
July 17, 2011

When Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound on May 2, the ensuing coverage focused on how the death of Al Qaeda’s leader might undercut terrorism worldwide. But the raid accomplished more than bin Laden’s removal: It yielded several computers, nearly a dozen hard drives, and about 100 other data-storage devices. Speaking on “Meet the Press” the weekend after the raid, presidential national security adviser Tom Donilon called it “the largest cache of intelligence derived from the scene of any single terrorist.”

After combing over this huge pool of data, a task force of analysts has already produced hundreds of intelligence reports geared to a primary goal: hunting down Al Qaeda operatives. Meanwhile, however, there is a second and longer-term task ahead. If studied diligently enough, the captured data is likely to provide an unparalleled look at how Al Qaeda functions. And that information may be as essential to disrupting Al Qaeda’s activities as it was to kill bin Laden.

I speak from experience, because I was part of a team at the RAND Corporation that performed a multiyear analysis of a similar, albeit much smaller, data dump – the data seized from Al Qaeda in Iraq. Over four years, we sought to provide as clear a picture as possible of Al Qaeda in Iraq for military commanders and intelligence officials. We mined information from two sources: declassified documents found on a hard drive at a residence in Julaybah, Iraq, in 2007 by Iraqi Awakening forces, and documents discovered by a patrol of Marines in Tuzliyah, Anbar, Iraq, in that same year. Based on this data, we were able to build a portrait of Al Qaeda in Iraq as a business – and a business that ran quite differently than conventional wisdom would suggest.

For more _ http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2011/07/17/inside_al_qaedas_hard_drives/?page=2

Danish Tanks Slug Taliban

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In war you see odd combinations.

During World War One there was a unit of the Austrian Army that was composed of Ukrainian soldiers led by Austrian officers. Neither spoke the other’s languages so operations were conducted in English as both sides had a passing knowledge of it. The officers had learned it in university and the soldiers had been studying it with an eye towards immigration. This unit fought the Russians in a war that began when a Bosnian terrorist shot an Austrian prince and his Czech wife.

Those men would be amazed by another story of an oddball combination that somehow makes sense. Recently, as part of the Global War on Terrorism, Danish forces engaged Taliban irregulars in Afghanistan. The Danes used German made Leopard tanks in the first combat by a Danish force since the Yugoslav morass of the last decade.

These hardy Danes were of course operating under the aegis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). No one pointed out that the Atlantic Ocean (or any ocean for that matter) is no where near landlocked Afghanistan. Another irony is the fact that those Leopard tanks were designed to destroy the same Soviet tanks that the Taliban grew up fighting against a generation ago.

But then again, the truth is stranger than fiction.