BFBS Forces News
Published 12 May 2026For nearly 400 years a succession of Proof Masters have been making sure firearms in the UK are safe, stopping dangerous guns from being used.
Every firearm, whether it’s for military use or not, has to go through something called a proofing process.
This is a series of tests to make sure the weapon is not only made properly, but it can withstand the pressure generated by modern-day ammunition.
September 19, 2026
How Britain’s oldest Proof House still tests modern military weapons
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September 18, 2026
Guatemalan Contract St Chamond 70mm Mountain Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 May 2026Despite the French Army adopting a 65mm mountain gun in 1906, several French companies — including St Chamond and Schneider — developed their own mountain gun designs in the years before World War One. These were popular guns for foreign export, being relatively small, light, and inexpensive. St Chamond’s 70mm gun was built on the same breech design as their previous 75mm field gun, at the request of the Mexican military and famous small arms designer Manuel Mondragon. Quantities were sold to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belgium (for use in the Belgian Congo). This example is a Guatemalan one, now in the United States as a live, registered, transferrable Destructive Device.
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September 16, 2026
WWII British Tank Tech Tree
The Tank Museum
Published 8 May 2026In 1939, the Vickers Light Mark VI formed the backbone of the British tank force. It’s hard to believe that in six years technology evolved from this to the mighty Centurion.
But this journey was no walk in the park. It took blood, sweat, lots of tea and various wrong turns. So, in this video we’re going to walk you through the entire British tank family tree to reveal this process.
This is a family tree organised by type not by chronology. That means Light Tanks, Cruiser tanks, Infantry tanks and Assault tanks.
So, without further ado, this is every British tank of World War II.
00:00 | Intro
01:14 | Light Tanks
03:21 | Cruiser Tanks
12:37 | Infantry Tanks
16:08 | Assault TanksThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this film, join Paul Famojuro for the ultimate deep dive into British tanks of WWII. Over six years Britain’s tanks evolved in a number of curious directions. From the light tanks of the early war to the troubled development of the cruiser tanks concept, the slow-moving infantry tank to the hard-hitting assault tanks, each branch of this tech tree was designed to solve specific problems on the battlefield. There were some successes, just as many failures, and a whole lot of weird and wonderful tanks along the way.
Want to learn more about the British tanks of WWII? Here are some of the sources we used to make this film:
British Tanks and Fighting Vehicles 1914-1945, B.T. White. 1970
British Cruiser Tank A13 Mk I & Mk II, Peter Brown. 2015
British Infantry Tank Mk III Valentine, Parts 1 & 2 Dick Taylor. 2010
The Great Tank Scandal, David Fletcher. 2021
The Universal Tank, David Fletcher. 2021
Centurion Owner’s Workshop Manual, Simon Dunstan. 2017
The Tank Museum Guide to Matilda, Dick Taylor. 2024
The Tank Museum Guide to Comet, Dick Taylor. 2025
A13 Cruiser Mk. V Covenanter Tank. A Technical History, P.M. Knight. 2018
A38, Infantry Tank, Valiant, https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/gb…#tankmuseum #veday
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September 15, 2026
The First Military Luger: Swiss Model 1900 s/n 01
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Apr 2026The first nation to adopt the Luger was Switzerland, which began testing in late 1898 and formally accepted the Luger in May 1900. Their guns were the first Lugers to be mass produced, as they were the first order received by DWM. The first batch of 600 arrived in Switzerland in May 1901, and today we are taking a look at the very first of that batch — serial number 01. It is the first production military Luger, and that’s a pretty cool landmark.
C&Rsenal Swiss Model 1900 video: • History of WWI Primer 145: Swiss Luger 19…
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September 13, 2026
Velvet Glove and Sparrow II missiles: A Guide To Early Cold War Bomber Interception Tactics
Polyus
Published 6 Apr 2026The Velvet Glove was a semi-active guided missile system developed by the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment. Its successor, the Sparrow II was developed by Canadair in association with the US Air Force. This is the story of the development of the missiles in the context of their contemporary weapons systems.
0:00 Introduction
1:00 NORAD and continental defense
3:21 Gun approach
5:32 Rocket pod approach
7:54 Nuclear option
8:35 Interception Tactics
11:56 Guided missile approach
14:38 Velvet Glove missile development
19:30 Sparrow missile development
22:03 Arming Canada’s future fighters
25:08 Conclusion
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September 12, 2026
Model 1867 Trapdoor: A Unique Rifle for West Point Cadets
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Apr 2026When the US military academy at West Point opened in 1802, one of the things it did was train cadets in rifle drill. The cadets were as young as 14 at that time, and the standard US infantry rifle was quite long and heavy, and it was not well suited to cadet use. A series of shortened and converted rifles were used until 1830, when Springfield made its first model of rifle specifically for the cadets. From that year forward, each new service rifle was accompanied by a slightly smaller version for West Point. In 1867 the first Trapdoor Springfield (aka Allin conversion) cadet rifle was introduced.
The 1867 Cadet Trapdoor was unusual in that it was not a shortened version of the regular rifle. Instead, it used a whole bunch of unique parts, including a different lock plate, hammer, and breechblock. The barrel was reduced to 29 3/4 inches, it used the .50-55 cartridge, and it had no provision for sling swivels. Only 424 of these rifles were made before a new cadet model was introduced in 1869 which used standard parts. Two further Cadet models of the Trapdoor would follow in 1873 (the .45 caliber change) and 1884 (change to sights and other details), and these were the last cadet rifles made by Springfield. The next rifle after the 1884 Trapdoor was the Krag-Jorgenson, and by this time minimum age at West Point was up to 17 and the Krag was a much handier rifle to begin with — so a Cadet model was not necessary.
The American Society of Arms Collectors has an excellent paper on Cadet rifles written by David Hanes, which is publicly available here:
https://americansocietyofarmscollecto…
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September 9, 2026
M26 MASS (Modular Accessory Shotgun System)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Apr 2026The M26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System (MASS) was designed by C-More Products company as a new shotgun option for the US military. First prototyped in 1999, it was not actually adopted until 2012, but had been purchased in significant numbers since then. The idea is that the M26 can function as either a standalone weapon or attached under the barrel of an M4 Carbine, thus replacing a couple of different items in inventory. It weighs just 3.5 pounds in the under barrel configuration, significantly less than the Masterkey system, and is much more convenient for a breacher to carry than an M4 along with a separate Mossberg 500.
The M26 is a bolt-action 12ga shotgun that feeds from both 3- and 5-round magazines. It has folding integrated aperture sights and is envisioned for use in a wide variety of roles. Military ammunition supplies include #7.5 and #9 birdshot, classic #00 buckshot, rubber buckshot, rubber slugs, and breaching rounds (powdered metal in a wax binder). For use with breaching, the M26 includes a retractable breaching muzzle device.
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September 7, 2026
The Backbone of the Nazi Panzer War – Panzer III
World War Two
Published 5 Sep 2026The Panzer III was intended to become the backbone of Nazi Germany’s panzer divisions. Emerging from clandestine Weimar-era experimentation and formally developed from 1934, it combined mobility, a five-man crew, a three-man turret, and comprehensive radio communication in one highly effective prewar design.
In this episode, Spartacus follows the Panzerkampfwagen III from secret German-Soviet tank trials at Kama through its production and deployment in Poland, France, North Africa, and Operation Barbarossa. We examine its evolution from the 3.7 cm gun to increasingly powerful 5 cm weapons, the advantages provided by crew specialization and radio-coordinated warfare, and why the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 exposed its diminishing margins in armor and firepower.
By 1943, the Panzer III had been displaced as Germany’s principal gun tank by the more adaptable Panzer IV. Its chassis, however, found an extraordinarily productive second life beneath the Sturmgeschütz III. The Panzer III was not a failed tank. It was an effective prewar design overtaken by an armored arms race it lacked the capacity to survive. Its fate also reflected Nazi Germany’s wider strategic failure: it had built weapons for short campaigns, then unleashed a coalition war whose demands exceeded Germany’s resources.
Watch our episode on the Sd.Kfz. 251: • The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possibl…
Watch Ten Days in Sedan: • Ten Days in Sedan
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September 6, 2026
Henry Deringer’s Remarkable Percussion Pocket Pistols
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Apr 2026Henry Deringer Jr was born in Easton PA in 1786 to German parents. As a young man he apprenticed to a gunsmith, then spent 1808 working in the Virginia Manufactory making guns, and then opened his own business in 1809 at 612 North Front Street in Philadelphia. He remained there until his death in 1868, making a great many guns. Early on his work was largely in flintlock muskets, both for the Army and the commercial trade, but he became best known for his single-shot percussion pocket pistols. These guns became synonymous with his name, a feat not even accomplished by Samuel Colt.
Deringer’s pistols were available in a range of caliber from .31 to .50, but .41 was most common. Barrel length was also widely variable, from barely over an inch to 4 inches or more — but between 2 and 2.5 inches was typical. These were popular guns for self defense, easily carried in a coat pocket and generally sold in pairs. A flintlock of such a size was just unfeasible to conceal in a pocket, but the advent of the percussion system made these guns eminently practical. Obviously the most famous use of one was in Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln, but the guns were very popular before that.
In addition, Deringer became a part of trademark law when he filed suit against a sales agent, A.J. Platt, in San Francisco. Platt handled his inability to get enough pistols from Deringer to meet demand by setting up production of his own copy, complete with the marking “Deringer Philadel”. Deringer’s trademark infringement case was successful, and created a precedent for awarding a judgement based on the lost revenue suffered by the plaintiff — in Deringer’s case, $1,700 instead of his initial demand for $15,000.
Incidentally, Platt’s response after losing the case was to find a man in Philadelphia named “Derringer” and license his name, so that he could continue to make guns that his customers would not recognize as being counterfeits. This would be the basis for a further lawsuit today, but Deringer died in 1868 before pursuing the issue farther.
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September 3, 2026
The Last Tiger
The Tank Museum
Published 24 Apr 2026The war has raged for more than 5 years.
In the Essel Forest, on the north German plain, a troop of British Comet cruiser tanks halts for a brew.
A shot rings out
It’s a Tiger!
Within seconds one of the Comets is hit.
The war is far from over …
This is the story of a fascinating and dangerous moment in time – one of the last duels between the brilliant Comet and the legendary Tiger.
00:00 | Introduction
00:42 | The Last Tiger
04:55 | The Rise and Fall of the Kampfgruppen
06:40 | The British Armour
07:52 | Tiger v Comet
13:08 | April 13th 1945This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this film, join Chris Copson as he tells the story of one of the last tank duels of the Second World War. On one side, the Tiger. With its 88mm gun and almost impenetrable armour, it had inspired fear in many Allied tank crews. But on the other side, the Brits were prepared with the latest in tank technology – the Comet. Both were imposing sights on the late WWII battlefield, but who would come out on top in the depths of the Essel Forest?
Want to learn more about the Tiger and Comet tanks? Here are some of the sources we used to make this film:
Battleground, Zaloga (Ed), Osprey, 2011.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Comet, Fletcher, 2017
Encyclopaedia of British and American Tanks of WW II, Chamberlain and Ellis, Cassell 2014.
Encyclopaedia of German Tanks of WWII, Chamberlain and Doyle, Cassell 2011.
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September 1, 2026
St. Chamond 75mm field gun: From Mondragon to WW1 tanks to Israel
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Apr 2026The design for the St Chamond 75mm field gun was initially created by Mexican small arms designer Manual Mondragon, who worked extensively in artillery as well as small arms. As Mexico had no domestic artillery production capability, he worked with the engineering team at St Chamond under Emile Rimailho to complete the design, and Mexico purchased 100 of these guns by 1910, forming the backbone of Mexican Army artillery during the period. The gun is a screw breech rapid fire piece, using fully self-contained ammunition (both shrapnel and HE projectiles). It fires a 12-16 pound shell at about 1650 fps, with a range of about 6500 meters.
In September 1914 the French government panic-ordered a batch of these guns, but then reconsidered and cancelled its order in favor of simplifying logistics with just the more common Mle 1897 75mm guns. That decision changed again in 1915, with an order for 200. These were not formally classified by the French Army, but St Chamond called them the Mle 1915. The gun was identical to the original Mexican pattern except revised to use the same ammunition as the Mle 1897 (the classic “French 75”) instead of its original slightly different cartridge. These guns were initially used for general field service, but pulled off the line when it became apparent that their recoil systems were not really able to handle the stresses of the constant firing required. Instead, they were used as the main armament for the initial 210 St Chamond heavy tanks (less the first 48 that did not receive main guns). After these were used up, the Mle 1897 was used instead.
One final element of combat service for the guns took place in 1948, when Mexico sold 32 of them to Israel, where they were used in Israel’s war of independence. Three examples remain on display in Israeli museums today, more than anywhere else. The one I am looking at today is a Mexican contract piece made in 1904, registered in the US as a live and transferrable Destructive Device.
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August 31, 2026
A Fighter to Make the European Skies Nazi – Nazi Rearmament 03 – Bf 109
World War Two
Published 30 Aug 2026The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of modern warfare: how do you gain control of the air long enough for everything else to operate unhindered? Germany’s answer was a fast, heavily armed, highly advanced fighter that became the spearhead of the Luftwaffe‘s pursuit of air superiority.
In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Bf 109 from its origins in the clandestine development programs of the 1930s to its first combat missions over Spain and its emergence as one of the defining fighters of the Second World War. We examine its revolutionary design, its development and production, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, and its deployment from the opening campaigns in Poland and France to the Battle of Britain and the vast air war over the Eastern Front.
But the 109 also exposes the limits behind the image of an unstoppable German war machine. Its narrow-track landing gear made it notoriously unforgiving, its short range limited its effectiveness over Britain, and its ageing airframe became increasingly difficult to improve as the war progressed. By the later years of the war, Germany could still produce thousands of Bf 109s, but lacked the fuel, experienced pilots, industrial resources, and ultimately the air superiority needed to make those aircraft decisive.
The Bf 109 was an exceptionally advanced fighter for its time, and in the hands of an experienced pilot it remained lethal long after its first flight. But it also became a symbol of a deeper problem within the Nazi war economy: the growing inability to replace yesterday’s weapons with tomorrow’s.
This is the story of the fighter that made Blitzkrieg possible, and the machine that stayed in the sky long after Germany had lost control of it.
Never Forget.
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August 29, 2026
The Origins of Aldo Uberti and Reproduction Cowboy Guns
Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Apr 2026In 1958, Val Forgett of Navy Arms contracted with Beretta engineer Aldo Uberti to produce 1,000 reproductions of the Colt 1851 Navy revolver. That turned into the beginning of many decades of production of a wide variety of revolvers and rifles, from the LeMat to a line of Winchester lever actions. Fueled by both organized Cowboy Action competition and general widespread interest in these guns, Navy Arms grew very successful in the market, attracting many other companies who continue to exist to this day. Today I’m talking with Val Forgett’s son (also Val Forgett) about some of the interesting details of the business.
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August 25, 2026
The new missile gap – between manufacture and deployment
Edward Luttwak offers some suggestions to help explain why the vast and lavishly funded US Military-Industrial Complex seems incapable of manufacturing enough weapons to allow the US military to fight more than a brief demonstration war before running short of the things that go boom:
Royal Navy Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) in flight.
MOD photo via Wikimedia Commons.
It is a strange thing indeed that among the countless stories about America’s shortage of long-range weapons — a truly crippling scarcity that now both limits President Trump’s strike options against the Islamic Republic, and might weaken responses to other looming threats — I have not found one that raises the most elementary question of all: why?
Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.
Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile, though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks. Air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece, were also used, along with Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.
What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defence fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.
[…]
Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.
But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.
This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against the vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.
Of course, it’s always a possible explanation that the big defence contractors felt the need for another boost in their income, so it wouldn’t take much to persuade friends in the War Department or in the US Navy to toss a few more TLAMs at Iranian positions …
