Tag Archives: Kampfschwimmer

Neptuns Dunklen Söhnen, with blasters by FN

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The Austrian Army this week released a behind-the-scenes look at a little-known frogman unit in the landlocked country, complete with a cameo by FN.

In terms of size, it is thought that the country only maintains about 50 such divers for use in rivers and lakes in the Alpine country. While Austria hasn’t had a coastline since 1918, the nation does have 40 large lakes including Lake Constance on its Western border with Switzerland and Germany, as well as the immense Danube River system which runs through the country. With that, Austria’s combat swimmers (Kampfschwimmers) are highly trained, with its members taking three years to earn their badge.

Besides their Glock 17 pistols– Austria was the first country to adopt the now-iconic handgun as the P80– and Steyr AUG (StG 77) bullpup rifles, the Kampfschwimmer also field the FN P90 in 5.7 NATO.

Austria’s commandos adopted the P90 about 15 years ago, replacing the Steyr MPi 69 sub-gun as a close-in weapon, and augmenting the B&T TMP.

More in my column at Guns.com.

Those pesky German froggers. You never know where they are gonna pop up

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The Kampfschwimmer units are the rough equivalent of the U.S. Navy SEALS and, as noted in a video from the German military, they really dig that Heckler & Koch.

The above spot is in German, but relax if your Deutsch ist rusty because you could fit all the dialog onto a fortune cookie strip. The gist is: innocent German citizens are in deep sauerkraut somewhere sketchy and the KSM get tasked to pull them out before bad guys with Kalashnikovs can do weird scheisse to them.

After jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, the German frogmen are taken aboard a sneaky little Type 212 diesel-electric submarine — which has a convenient compartment for combat swimmers while their gear gets passed out via 533mm torpedo tube. Then, said KSM platoon pops up silently all spec ops pimp in the shallow water offshore and moves in. That’s when you see the beauty that is tricked-out HK MP7 SMGs along with G38 and G36 rifles and other assorted goodies right from the Willy Wonka of precision steel schmidt that is Oberndorf am Neckar.

After finding the good guys, then checking their names and mother’s names, the group exfils under the cover of snipers armed with what looks like HK417s in 7.62x51mm, dusting some Eurotrash clowns in a tiny pursuit vehicle.

“Request for hot extract” is universal.