Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 15, 2024While the US never adopted a significant variation of the M1 Garand (excluding sniper models), testing continued on new iterations and features throughout the war. By the time the war ended, the US military had some specific ideas about what it wanted in a new service rifle. That being, something lighter, capable of automatic fire, and to have one single platform replace the M1 Carbine, M3A1 Grease Gun, M1 Garand, and M1918A2 BAR. New rifles to meet these requirements were developed by Springfield, Remington, and Winchester, ultimately competing against the FN FAL for US service use. The Springfield T44E4 won out (barely) and was adopted on May 1, 1957 as the M14 rifle.
Production of the M14 was plagued by problems, largely due to quality control lapses. Early in production there were heat treatment problems that led to sheared looking lugs and broken receivers. Once those were addressed, the main problem became one of accuracy, with a shocking number of M14s failing to meet the 5.6 MOA minimum accuracy standard. Ultimately production ended in 1963 with 1.38 million M14s produced, and the M16 took over as the new American service rifle.
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July 25, 2024
M14: America’s Worst Service Rifle – What Went Wrong?
July 24, 2024
Chieftain V T-62 | Operation Nasr, Iran – Iraq War, 1981
The Tank Museum
Published Apr 13, 2024Two tanks designed to fight each other in Northern Europe would face each other during the Iran-Iraq war in 1981. On one side, the British built Chieftain MBT. On the other, the Soviet-built T-62.
In this video, we examine what happened during Operation Nasr to find out which tank came out on top …
00:00 | Intro
01:19 | Meet the Tanks
02:15 | The T-62
03:26 | The Chieftain
06:21 | From Paper to the Battlefield
09:25 | The Outcome and Findings
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July 22, 2024
Chinese Type 50 PPSh: Founding “Gun City” in Manchuria
Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 12, 2024One of the first new weapons adopted and used by the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army after the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war was the Type 50, a copy of the Soviet PPSh-41. The story of its manufacture begins at the Japanese-occupied Mukden Arsenal. It was briefly occupied by the Soviets in 1945 before coming under control of the CCP. It was a huge manufacturing complex at the time, making artillery, small arms, ammunition, and more. A Nationalist bombing raid in 1949 led to the production being distributed among three separate smaller facilities, and the small remote town of Bei’an was chosen to become the new small arms factory site.
The town became so heavily focused on weapons manufacture that it gained the nickname of “Gun City”. The factory was formally named #626, and given the cover name of Qinghua Tool Company. It initially began with production of the Type 38 Arisaka, Type 24 Mauser (the Chiang Kai Shek rifle), the M1 Carbine (a failed project), and the Type 50 copy of the PPSh. In the spring of 1951 in response to UN advances northward in Korea, production was ordered to scale up on the Type 50, to 7500-9000 per month. This took a couple of months to achieve, but in June 1951 the first large shipment of the guns left the factory, and by December 1953 a total of 358,000 had been made. At that point, production shifted to the Type 54, a copy of the PPS-43.
The Type 50 is a close copy of the Russian Shpagin, but differs in a couple of details. The Chinese used a rear aperture sight, and the sights were placed slightly farther forward than on Russian guns. They are also generally very well made — better than most Russia wartime examples.
For many more cool small arms stories, check out WWII After WWII:
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com
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July 21, 2024
“Since 2012, NATO has experienced a revival and a return to relevance that would make any washed up 80’s movie star turn green with envy”
Big Serge considers where NATO came from, where it is now, and where it might be going:
NATO, in its original conception, was designed to resolve a very particular security dilemma in Western Europe. In the immediate wake of World War Two, Western Europe — specifically Britain and France — had to consider how it might be possible to mount a defense against the colossal Soviet forces that were now conveniently forward deployed in Central Germany. The 1948 “Western Union Defense Organization” (WUDO), which included the aforementioned Anglo-French allies along with the Netherlands and Belgium, was created with an eye to this problem. With the rapid demobilization of American armies in Europe, however, it was obvious that this threadbare European alliance had dismal prospects in the unthinkable event of war with the Soviet Union. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the supreme commander of WUDO forces, was asked what the Soviets would it would take for the Red Army to attack and push through all the way to the Atlantic, and famously replied: “Shoes”.
NATO, therefore, was an attempt to resolve the total strategic overmatch on the European continent through two expedients. The first of these, obviously was America’s membership, which brought both formal American security commitments as well as permanent American military deployments in Europe. The second strategic boost provided by NATO concerned Germany. Even after being ravaged by war and dismembered by the allied occupation, Western Germany remained the most populous and potentially powerful state in Western Europe. From the beginning, it was clear (particularly to the Americans and the British) that any sustainable strategy for deterring or fighting the Red Army would have to make use of German manpower — but this implied, axiomatically, that West Germany would have to be economically rehabilitated and rearmed. The prospect of *intentionally* rearming Germany was immensely upsetting to the French, for obvious reasons given the events of 1940-44. [NR: And 1914-18, and especially, 1870-71.]
The first NATO summit conference
NATO thus solved two major obstacles to a sustainable and viable defense of Western Europe, in that it formally and permanently tied the United States into the European defense architecture, and it provided a mechanism to rearm West Germany without allowing for the possibility of a truly autonomous and revanchist German foreign policy.
In many ways, NATO can be seen as a total reversal of the Versailles system which had doomed Europe after the First World War by guaranteeing the Second. The interwar period saw the Anglo-French alliance pitted against an adversarial Germany without American assistance; NATO ensured American commitment to European defense and rehabilitated Germany into a valuable partner — providing the command architecture to rearm Germany and mobilize German resources without allowing Germany to conduct an independent foreign policy.
Thus, the popular formulation, coined by the first General Secretary of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, that NATO existed to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”. This statement, however, has frequently been misinterpreted. The idea of “keeping the Americans in” was not a plot by Washington to dominate the continent, but a contrivance by the Europeans to keep America engaged in their defense. As for “keeping the Germans down”, this is pithily stated but not entirely accurate — the entire point of adding West Germany to NATO was to allow it to rebuild and rearm in the interests of collective western defense. For the United States, NATO made sense as a way to mobilize European resources and calcify the “front” in Europe, in the context of a broader geopolitical struggle with the USSR.
This is what NATO was for. It was a mechanism for formalizing an American security commitment in Europe and mobilizing German resources to deter the USSR, and it worked — the frontline of the Cold War in Europe remained static up until the collapse of the Soviet Union due to the naïve and self-destructive political visions of one Mikhail Gorbachev.
But what is NATO for now? What purpose does it serve in the context of a broader American grand strategy? More to the point, does such a grand strategy exist, and is it coherent? These are questions worth asking.
Britain’s Weird Vietnam War
Real Time History
Published Mar 15, 2024Fall 1945: the Second World War is over, but there is fresh fighting in Vietnam. Now, former enemies become allies as British-Indian troops, French Commandos, and surrendered Japanese soldiers join in a rag-tag alliance against Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in Saigon. The outcome will shape Vietnam’s future for decades to come, in Great Britain’s weird Vietnam War.
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July 16, 2024
This Jet Age – Farnborough Airshow, 1953
spottydog4477
Published Dec 25, 2009
July 10, 2024
Two World Wars: Finnish C96 “Ukko-Mauser”
Forgotten Weapons
Published Mar 27, 2024A decent number of C96 Mauser pistols were present in Finland’s civil war, many of them coming into the country with the Finnish Jaegers, and others from a variety of sources, commercial and Russian. They were used by both the Reds and the Whites, and in both 9x19mm and 7.63x25mm. After the end of the civil war, when the military was standardizing, the C96s were handed over to the Civil Guard, where they generally remained until recalled to army inventories in 1939. They once again saw service in the Winter War and Continuation War, and went into military stores afterwards until eventually being surplussed as obsolete.
One of the interesting aspects of Finnish C96s is that many of them come from the so-called “Scandinavian Contract” batch (for which no contract has actually turned up). These appear to be guns made in 7.63mm that were numbered as part of the early production in the Prussian “Red 9” series, probably for delivery to specific German units or partner forces during World War One.
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June 28, 2024
Why the iconic RPG-7 is a weapon of choice for soldiers and militias
Forces News
Published Mar 15, 2024The RPG-7 has been used by armies, insurgents and terrorist organisations from all over the world, and has been produced more than nine million times.
The rocket-propelled grenade launcher can be used against a variety of targets, including armoured vehicles, fortified and sheltered positions, helicopters and infantry.
“Even the most basic RPG-7 round from the ’60s will penetrate the minimum of 26cm of rolled homogenous armour, which is your basic tank armour,” said Jonathan Ferguson, the keeper of firearms and artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds.
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June 20, 2024
Canadian Armed Forces – Snow Machines
Ontario Regiment Museum
Published Mar 7, 2024During the TANK SATURDAY — Winter Warfare event in 2024, we had special guests from the Hussars Military Vehicle Club. They brought their fully restored CAF Arctic equipment to the museum and spoke to our visitors about the history and use of these unique vehicles.
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June 19, 2024
Soviet America in decay
At The Free Press, Niall Ferguson invites us to consider that America, not China, has taken the place of the Soviet Union in the post-Soviet world:
The witty phrase “late Soviet America” was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we’re in — the second one — heats up.
I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, I tried to show how the People’s Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.
This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival, firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It’s also a technological competitor — the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It’s a military rival, with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it’s a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we — and not the Chinese — might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”
I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day — perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?
Yes, I know what you are going to say.
There is a world of difference between the dysfunctional planned economy that Stalin built and bequeathed his heirs, which collapsed as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform it, and the dynamic market economy that we Americans take pride in.
The Soviet system squandered resources and all but guaranteed shortages of consumer goods. The Soviet healthcare system was crippled by dilapidated hospitals and chronic shortages of equipment. There was grinding poverty, hunger, and child labor.
In America today, such conditions exist only in the bottom quintile of the economic distribution — though the extent to which they do exist is truly appalling. Infant mortality in the late Soviet Union was around 25 per 1,000. The figure for the U.S. in 2021 was 5.4, but for single mothers in the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia it is 13 per 1,000.
The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible.
Take a closer look.
June 13, 2024
Debunking the “miraculous” Marshall Plan
If you’ve read anything about the state of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, you’ll undoubtedly have heard of the way the Marshall Plan did wonders to get (western) Germany and the other battle-devastated nations back on their feet economically. At FEE, Christian Monson suggest that you’ve been provided with a very rosy scenario that doesn’t actually accord with the facts:
Konrad Adenauer in conversation with Ludwig Erhard.
KAS-ACDP/Peter Bouserath, CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE via Wikimedia Commons.
Unfortunately, the ubiquity of the myth that the Marshall Plan rebuilt Germany is proof that state-controlled education favors propaganda over economic literacy. Despite the fact that most modern historians don’t give the Marshall Plan much credit at all for rebuilding Germany and attribute to it less than 5 percent of Germany’s national income during its implementation, standard history textbooks still place it at the forefront of the discussion about post-war reconstruction.
Consider this section from McDougal Littell’s World History (p. 968), the textbook I was given in high school:
This assistance program, called the Marshall Plan, would provide food, machinery, and other materials to rebuild Western Europe. As Congress debated the $12.5 billion program in 1948, the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. Congress immediately voted approval. The plan was a spectacular success.
Of course, the textbook makes no mention of the actual cause of the Wirtschaftwunder: sound economic policy. That’s because, for the state, the Marshall Plan makes great statist mythology.
Not only is it frequently brought up to justify the United States getting involved in foreign conflicts, but it simply gives support for central planning. Just look at the economic miracle the government was able to create with easy credit, they say.
And of course, admitting that the billions of dollars pumped into Germany after WWII accomplished next to nothing, especially when compared to something as simple as sound money, would be tantamount to admitting that the government spends most of its time making itself needed when it isn’t and thereby doing little besides getting in the way.
The Inconvenient Truth of Currency Reform
You are unlikely to find the real cause of the Wirtschaftwunder mentioned in any high school history textbook, but here is what it was. In 1948, the economist and future Chancellor of West Germany Ludwig Erhard was chosen by the occupational Bizonal Economic Council as their Director of Economics. He went on to liberalize the West German economy with a number of good policies, the most important being currency reform.
The currency in Germany immediately after WWII was still the Reichsmark, and both the Nazis and then the occupying Soviet authorities had increased the amount in circulation significantly. As a result, by 1948 the Reichsmark was so worthless that people had turned to using cigarettes and coffee as money.
To give people a true store of value so that they could calculate economic costs accurately, assess risk and invest in the future, Erhard created the Deutsche Mark, West Germany’s new currency. Like ripping off a bandaid, he decreased the money supply by 93 percent overnight.
It’s also worth noting that while Erhard, following his school of Ordoliberalism, did form a central bank, it was at least designed independent from the government and followed a hard-money policy (preserving a stable amount of money) through the length of the Wirtschaftswunder. In fact, the original Bank Deutsche Länder was rather limited in scope until it was reorganized as the considerably more centralized Bundesbank in 1957, incidentally when Germany’s economic miracle began to lose steam.
Other notable liberal policies instituted by Erhard included removing all price controls and lowering taxes from the Nazis’ absurd 85 percent to 18 percent. The American occupational authorities opposed these reforms, but Erhard went through with them anyway. This liberalization had an immediate effect. The black market disappeared almost overnight, and in one year, industrial output almost doubled.
Perhaps most poignantly, unemployment dropped from more than 10 percent to around 1 percent by the end of the 1950s. Normally the government tries to justify currency manipulation as a means to eliminate unemployment, but the Wirtschaftwunder is evidence that sound money does the job far better.
June 10, 2024
South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” falters
Niccolo Soldo’s weekly roundup included a lengthy section on the recent election results in South Africa and what they might mean for the nation’s short- and medium-term stability:
Being a teen, the issue of South African Apartheid didn’t really fit all that well within the overarching Cold War paradigm. Unlike most other global issues, this one didn’t break down cleanly between the “freedom-loving West” and the “dictatorial, oppressive communist bloc”, as the push to dismantle the regime came from western liberals who were in agreement with the reds.
This slight bit of complexity did not faze most people, as Apartheid was seen as a relic of an older world, one to be consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history. It’s elimination did fit well enough into the Post-Berlin Wall world, one in which freedom and democracy were to reign supreme. This was more than enough reason for almost all people to cheer the release of Nelson Mandela and applaud South Africa’s embrace of western liberal democracy.
In the early 1990s, men once again dared to flirt with utopian ideas, and South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” was to be its centrepiece: out with authoritarianism, racism, ethnocentrism, etc., and in with multiracialism, multiethnicity, democracy and individual liberty. We could all leave the past where it belonged (in the past) and live in peace and harmony, as democracy would defend it, secure it, and preserve it. South Africa would lead the way, and would in fact teach us westerners how it is to be done.
Oddly enough, South Africa quickly fell off of the radar of mainstream media in the West when it failed to live up to these lofty goals. Rather than living up to the hype of being the “Rainbow Nation”, it instead was quickly mired in the politics of corruption and race, showing itself to be all too human, just like the rest of us. South Africa had failed to immediately resolve its inherent internal tensions, whether they be racial, economic, ethnic, or ideological, and by extension it had failed to deliver its promise to western liberals. “Out of sight, out of mind” became the best practice, replacing the utopianism of the first half of the 1990s.
Granted, a lot of grace was given to South Africa by western media so long as Nelson Mandela remained in office (and even after that), but the failures were plainly evident to see: an explosion in crime and in corruption were its most obvious characteristics, ones that could not be brushed under the carpet. The African National Congress (ANC), the party that would deliver the promise of the Rainbow Nation, was instead shown to be little more than a powerful engine of corruption and patronage. Luckily for the ANC, it was fueled in large part by the legacy of Mandela and the goodwill that he had accumulated over the years while he sat in prison.
The post-Mandela era has not been kind to the ANC (nor to South Africa as a whole), as the party could no longer hide behind his fading legacy, and could no longer cash in on the goodwill that came from it. It could “put up”, and would it not “shut up”. The ANC over time became a lumbering beast, too big to slay, but too slow to destroy its opposition when compared to its nimble youth.
What has the party delivered in its three decades of power? It did help dismantle Apartheid, but it did not deliver economic prosperity and opportunity to all. Instead, it simply swapped out elites where it could, preferring to keep the new ones in house. An inability to tame crime and to keep the national power grid running has turned the country into a bit of a joke, especially when it is lumped into the BRICS group alongside Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Despite its abundance of natural wealth, South Africa has been economically mismanaged.
South Africa is an important country to watch for the simple reason that there is so much tinder lying around, ready to be set ablaze. Luckily for South Africans, dire projections of widespread civil strife have not come to pass. Unluckily for South Africans, their national trajectory is headed in the wrong direction. Last week’s national elections saw the ANC lose their parliamentary majority for the first time ever, and the only way to read the results is to conclude that no matter how one may feel about this very corrupt party, it is an ominous sign.
May 12, 2024
The fascinating story of HMS Challenger (K07)
Sir Humphrey pens a long blog post about a late Cold War Royal Navy ship — officially just a “diving support vessel”, but apparently much more capable — most naval fans may never have heard about:
HMS Challenger (K07) at Kiel, West Germany in 1985.
Photo by John Cook via Wikimedia Commons.
The story of HMS Challenger remains one of the most unusual of all post war Royal Navy vessels. Born in the late Cold War, she was in the eyes of the public a “white elephant” commissioned and never operationally used and sold after just a few years’ service at the end of the Cold War. She was to the few public that had heard of her, “the Warship that never was”. But revealing files in the National Archives tell a story of a ship that was designed to fill a range of highly secretive intelligence support functions and clandestine espionage activity that, had she been successful, would have made her perhaps one of the most vital intelligence collection assets in the UK. This article is about the untold story of HMS Challenger and why she deserves far more recognition than enjoyed to date.
The background of the Challenger story can be traced to the mid 1970s when the Royal Navy used the, by then positively venerable, warship HMS Reclaim to conduct diving support work. The Reclaim, commissioned in 1949 was the last warship in the RN to be designed and fitted with sails, that were occasionally used. Employed in diving support and salvage ops for 30 years, she was a vital asset for the recovery of crashed aircraft, support to diving and other assorted duties. But by 1975 she was also very old and out of date and requiring replacement (she paid off as the oldest operational vessel in the Royal Navy in 1979).
To replace her the Royal Navy developed Naval Staff Requirement 7003 and 7741, which were approved in 1976. These requirements set out the need for a replacement and the capabilities that were required. By this stage of the Cold War the world was a very different place both operationally and technologically from when HMS Reclaim entered service. There were significantly more undersea cables laid across the Atlantic, while the SOSUS network (a deep-water network of sonar systems intended to detect Russian submarines) had been delivered and expanded into UK waters in the early 1970s under project BACK SCRATCH. Additionally the Royal Navy had introduced a few years previously the Resolution class SSBN, which by 1976 had four submarines providing a Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD) with their Polaris missiles, as well as wider nuclear submarine operations. At the same time new technology was emerging including better diving capability, the rise of miniature submarines capable of both operating at immense depths and also the rise of rescue submarines for stranded nuclear submarines. Additionally technology had improved increasing the ability to recover items from the seabed.
When brought together this provided the RN with the opportunity to think afresh about how to replace Reclaim. The result was a set of requirements that were defined as follows:
The objective of NSR 7003 was to provide the Royal Navy with a Vessel and equipment capable of carrying out seabed operations. The requirement … is to find, inspect, work on and recover items on the seabed at all depths down to 300m with some capability to greater depths.
The specific missions for which the requirement was looking to cater for broke down into three main areas:
- Inspection, neutralisation or recovery of military equipment, including weapons;
- Operations in support of national offshore interests including research;
- Assistance with submarine escape and rescue and with underwater salvage
This represented a significant leap forward compared to Reclaim, which was limited to diving at up to 90m in very limited conditions, and would have provided the Royal Navy with an entirely new level of capabilities.
The decision was taken to proceed with the requirement and Challenger was ordered in 1979 and commissioned in 1983. What then follows is a sorry story of a ship being brought into service and having practically everything that could go wrong, going wrong. This article will not go into any depth on the story of what failed, as to do so would be a lengthy story. Suffice to say that a combination of faulty equipment, manufacturing challenges, fires and other damages and the reality that technical aspirations were not matched by practical delivery in reality meant that Challenger never really became operational.
Used for a series of trials until the late 1980s to prove her systems and see if they would work, she struggled to achieve what was expected of her. She had some success recovering toxic chemicals from the seabed from a sunken merchant ship in the 1980s and then conducting other demonstrations, such as deep diving and supporting submarine rescue trials. But she never lived up to the expectations placed on her, and at a time when the costs required to get her to the level of capability were far too high, and the defence budget was under pressure at a point when the Warsaw Pact threat was rapidly collapsing, the decision was taken to pay her off as a failed experiment even before the wider Options for Change plan was announced. This much is widely known to the public, but what is nowhere near as well known is the missions that Challenger was intended to carry out. Had she been successful, it would have made a very real difference to RN capabilities.
Why did the Royal Navy seem so determined to make a success of Challenger for so many years, to the extent of throwing ever more money at her, given these problems? In short because the missions she was designed to do made it worthwhile. Files in the archives clearly show that beyond the public line of “research” she was designed to carry out exceptionally sensitive missions. Although the original Naval Staff Requirement focused on three areas, by the time she entered service, this had expanded to at least 9 (possibly more). These were:
- Strategic Deterrent Force Security
- Seabed surveillance device support
- Nuclear weapon recovery
- Recovery of security and military sensitive material
- Crashed military aircraft recovery
- Submarine escape and rescue operations
- Salvage operations
- MOD research and data collection for other than intelligence agencies
- Miscellaneous operations in support of other government agencies
It can be seen that far from being just a diving support platform, Challenger was in fact an absolutely central part in providing assurance to the protection of CASD and ensuring the security of the nuclear deterrent and SOSUS. How would she have done this?
The files show that in the 1980s the UK had a different attitude to the US about protection of these routes due to geographic differences.
QotD: What is Putin’s endgame in Ukraine?
It would appear that Putin, Xi, etc. are coming to see themselves as the leaders in a worldwide battle against Juggalisme. That might be wishcasting — they are practical men, after all, and let me state, unequivocally and for the record, that I do NOT want to be ruled by Russians or Chinese. They are not my people. Nonetheless, it does seem clear they understand that the source of their problems is beyond what we think of as geopolitics. The United States is “agreement incapable”, as I guess the term d’art is, because it’s not rational, or even predictably irrational.
That was the monarchist critique of representative government that hit closest to home: Foreign policy needs to be supple and responsive; it must be able to move quickly, to make big changes in narrow time windows. In a real crisis, you simply don’t have time to convene a Parliament to debate stuff. N.b. they were saying this in the late 18th century; it’s so much worse now. And another observation from that time that is even truer today: A “democratic” foreign policy can never be consistent. You simply can’t plan long-term when there’s partial to complete governmental overhaul every few years.
That the US managed to muddle through for as long as it did was really a combo of two things: time (as a function of distance), and a near-peer enemy.
Neither of those is integral to the system, and neither is within the system’s control. Until recently, American foreign policy had to take into account the fact that on-the-spot commanders would have to make decisions on their own recognizance. Even with phone communications, the man on the ground in the Fulda Gap has to make decisions basically without reference to Washington. It forced him to be conservative — in other words, it discouraged adventurism.
Same way with the near-peer enemy. The looming shadow of the USSR forced regular reality checks inside the US Apparat. A whole bunch of possibilities were foreclosed by default — our response to any given situation had to take the likely Soviet reaction into account. As with the time/distance factor, this forced a kind of conservatism that looked a lot like sclerosis, but at least it deterred adventurism.
The history of the later 20th century is the history of those constraints being removed. In Vietnam, for instance, you had LBJ and McNamara sitting in a room in the White House, personally directing airstrikes in near-realtime. If “news” reports are to be believed, Obama was on the horn with that SEAL team going after Bin Laden right up to the very moment the chopper landed. Knowing these things are technically possible is catnip to politicians — they already assume they’re omnicompetent, and so now they want to be “advising” the commanding general even as the battle rages.
And if that’s catnip, then the end of the USSR was catnip on steroids. Why not play fuck-fuck games everywhere, all at once? Who’s gonna stop us? China? They chose to pass. They saw what happened to the USSR when it locked itself into an ideological death spiral vis-a-vis the Struggle Against International Capitalism. American policymakers only understand Soviet-style bluff and bluster. The Chinese play the long game.
NOT because they’re Inscrutable Orientals, I hasten to add — they’re as Juggalicious as our Clowns, in their way — but because the generation currently in power came up hard, and so they are adults. That’s all. They are not spoiled, petulant children. The next generation of Chinese leadership — assuming we live to see it — will really be something, and not in a good way.
So, what does Putin want? I dunno, and I’m not sure he knows, because I’m not sure he can know. I’m sure his broadest goal is “to stop getting fucked with by idiots”, but how can that be achieved? There shall be no durable peace in this world until there is Regime Change in [Washington, DC], and I’m not talking about the other half of the Uniparty winning an election or two. I think Putin knows that, but what can he really do about it? I think he’s going to be forced to annex a fair amount of territory and set up a totally demilitarized buffer zone. It won’t work, but it’s the least-worst practical option.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2024-02-09.
May 5, 2024
M98kF1 ZF41: Norway Recycles Germany’s Worst Sniper Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jan 29, 2024When Germany capitulated at the end of World War Two, several hundred thousand German soldiers were stuck in Norway (thanks to the efforts of the Norwegian Resistance preventing them from moving south to reinforce against Allied landings in Normandy). These solders’ arms were surrendered to the Norwegians, and they formed the basis of Norwegian Army and Home Guard armaments for many years. With hundreds of thousands of K98k rifles to choose from, the Norwegians were able to pick out plenty in good condition. This included 400 ZF41 DMR/sniper rifles that were kept intact and taken into Norwegian service. Three different branches used the rifles, and they are marked on the chamber with either HAER (Army), FLY (Air Force), or K.ART (Naval Artillery).
In 1950, Norway began to get US military aid in .30-06, and they decided to rebarrel these Mausers to that cartridge. The process began in 1952 and they were all converted by the end of 1956. The new barrels are marked “KAL 7.62”, for 7.62x63mm. There was only a small amount of experimental further conversion to 7.62mm NATO. The ZF-41 models like this one were also given a new serial number tag riveted onto the scope mount with the rifle’s serial number (150001 through 150400).
Converted Mausers served in the Home Guard until the early 1970s, when they were replaced by the AG3 (HK91).
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