Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Dec 2025The T31 was John Garand’s last project during his employment at Springfield Armory. It was proposed in 1948 as a bullpup configuration rifle to minimize muzzle blast and flash. It was a select-fire rifle with a 20-round detachable box magazine and basically every aspect of the design was unorthodox. The original gas system was more pneumatic than anything else, with the whole handguard tube filling with gas when it cycled. The recoil spring is a clockwork type in the buttstock, and the bolt uses a tilting wedge to lock.
At initial testing it ran into reliability problems after 2300 rounds. Upon disassembly, the found nearly an entire pound of powder fouling in the gas tube. This led to the gun being rebuilt with a tappet type gas system, and that’s the gun we have today to look at. Only two examples were made before Garand retired in 1953, and nobody took over the project when he left.
(more…)
April 29, 2026
T31: Garand’s Bizarre Bullpup
April 18, 2026
The First M60 Prototype: FG42 + MG42 = T44
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Dec 2025The FG-42 caught the attention of a lot of countries at the end of World War Two. The British and Swiss both used it as the starting point for some developments. The US went one step simpler, and simply cut up a captured FG-42 to make into the T44, the first prototype of what would become the M60 machine gun.
This project was done in 1946 by the Bridge Tool & Die Company, who spent about six months reinforcing an FG42 and adding an MG42 feed system to it to create an unholy hybrid kludge of a gun. It was, however, successful enough to justify continuing the project. Only this one example was made before moving on to much more practical models built from the ground up instead of hacking up captured German guns.
(more…)
March 23, 2026
The REAL History of Worcestershire Sauce (and a few others …)
Tweedy Misc
Published 20 Nov 2025A look into the history of Worcestershire Sauce, and some other related sauces and condiments originating in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In doing so I try to understand whether Lea and Perrins created something brand new in their Worcestershire Sauce of the 1830s, or whether it was more an evolution of other similar styles of sauce which already existed at that time like Harvey’s Sauce, and Reading Sauce … and in turn do both of those owe something to an even earlier condiment — Quin’s Sauce …?
I also debunk an oft retold (particularly here in YouTube) story about Baron Sandys returning from a post as the Governor of Bengal being the inspiration for Lea and Perrins’ Worcestershire Sauce — it’s almost certainly not true.
0:00 Introduction
0:55 What is Worcestershire Sauce?
1:22 Ingredients and Recipes
3:01 History of Worcestershire Sauce
6:33 Food in Georgian England
7:51 Hare Soup!
8:22 Harvey’s Sauce
11:00 Reading Sauce
13:21 Quin’s Sauce
14:49 Yorkshire Relish
16:04 Henderson’s Relish
17:02 Conclusion
He also posted an addendum to this video.
March 11, 2026
Foldy-Glock: The Full Conceal M3D (History and Shooting)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Oct 2025Full Conceal was a company that designed a folding Glock. The intent was to create a pistol that could be easily, discreetly, and safely carried in a pocket but still offer the handing and capability of a full size service pistol. They did this by cutting off the grip of a Glock 19 (M3D) or Glock 43 (M3S) and rebuilding it with a hinged trigger guard. An extended magazine could be then carried parallel to the barrel, folded up to render the trigger safe and giving it the profile of a big cell phone instead of pistol.
The M3D and M3S were shown as prototypes at SHOT 2017 and began shipping in early 2018. In October 2020 the company filed for bankruptcy and in June 2021 its assets were sold at auction. The problem was that the guns were simply too expensive for their target market. The company tried to reduce costs by developing their own slides and frame instead of using commercial Glocks, but this was too little too late to save them financially.
(more…)
February 25, 2026
Bommarito: America’s First Toggle-Locked Battle Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Oct 2025Designed by Giuseppe Bommarito, this was one of the many independent rifle designs submitted to the US War Department in the 1910s hoping for military adoption. It is a short recoil operated, toggle-locked system chambered for .30-06 and using detachable 20-round magazines. It was tested (without much success) at Springfield and remained in development until 1918.
See a more complete article including original disassembly photos here:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/m1-g…Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this truly unique specimen from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts:
https://www.nps.gov/spar/index.htm
(more…)
January 29, 2026
The steel industry in North America didn’t die … but it had to re-invent itself
When I first started paying attention to the news in the early 70s, one of the big stories both in the US and in Canada was the plight of the steel industry. It had been an enormously important part of the industrial economy for over a century, but every new story painted the picture blacker. Mergers, plant closings, consolidations, bankruptcies, and layoffs were consistent themes. Yet there is still a significant steel industry in North America. Tim Worstall explains what happened:
Dofasco’s steel plant on the harbourfront in Hamilton, Ontario
A little digression. To make steel from iron ore you use a blast furnace first. This uses coke (from coal), iron ore and limestone (moderns might use more than just limestone) to produce pig iron. You feed the pig iron into a basic oxygen furnace to make the steel. Yes, we can get much more complicated than that but let’s not.
The US now makes mebbe 20 million tonnes of pig iron a year. Imports are up, a bit, but nowhere near enough to make up the difference. That’s the big change because that’s from the 80 and 90 million tonnes a year of the 1970s. The change is the same whether we measure by domestic production of pig iron or by apparent consumption. Well, the change is the same either way close enough for this to be the big point to make.
What’s actually happened is a change in technology, not a change in trade. Nucor is now 50% or so of US steel output (no, not US Steel, but US steel). Nucor has never used a blast furnace in its corporate life. It collects scrap steel and makes new steel by recycling that. It skips, entirely, the blast and BoF stages. Back in the 1950s Nucor was a couple of scrap yards and a gleam in the corporate eye — now it’s that half the market.
Again, yes, we can get more complex if we wish to. But this is the basic pencil sketch. Yep, we’re more economic in our use of steel these days. Imports of steel are up and so is the importation of things made with steel. But the real change in the steel business over the past 60 to 80 years is the replacement of the steel making business with the steel recycling business. We don’t — and by this I mean the rich countries in general — make all that much steel these days. We recycle an awful lot of steel these days. And that’s what’s really changed.
That’s also what has near entirely screwed over the steel industry of places like Gary, Indiana. For they ran those basic steel making processes, iron ore in, basic steel out. Which isn’t something that has been replaced by imports, it’s something that has been replaced by just not doing it at all.1
Arnade goes on to point out that there are plenty of people still using steel to do things with, make things out of, which is all entirely true. But this idea that the Japanese, or China, killed the traditional US steel industry just isn’t true, not at all. It was Nucor.
All of which makes it just so much fun when it’s Nucor that shouts the loudest about the need for tariffs on steel imports. For Nucor points to the collapse of the traditional industry as its proof. Yet Nucor benefits from those tariffs — they can charge higher domestic prices as a result — even while Nucor is in fact the cause of the traditional collapse.
- “not at all” is rhetorical hyperbole, not a factual statement.
January 20, 2026
The US Navy’s twenty years to forget
CDR Salamander takes a wincing glance back at the ship development programs the US Navy planned to implement early in the 2000s and how they all failed to meet even minimal expectations:
20 years seems like a long time, but in many ways it is not. As we look forward to what our fleet will look like at mid-century, we should look back to what we were all promised in January of 2005 that was going to transform into the Navy of the 21st century.
There were four ship classes that were going to be the surface fleet that we were promised at the time, were going to ensure America’s dominance at sea for the next half century.
(NB: most of the hypertext links below go to the tags from my OG Blog that predate my move to Substack three years ago. Those will point you towards my writing two decades ago or so on these programs at the time, if you are so interested.)
LCS. We were once supposed to get 55 of the marketing/consultancy-named Littoral Combat Ship. We’ll wind up with 25. Not suitable for combat in the littorals, but steps are being made to get some use out of them … somehow.
DDG-1000. We were once going to have 32 of these. We got three. Its main weapon, the two 155mm guns, were never made operational and are being removed. The ships are being turned into weapons demonstrators for Conventional Prompt Strike. I hear great things about the engineering plant, but they have yet to do a proper deployment, nine and a half years after the commissioning of hull-1.
Ford Class CVN. A dozen years ago, we thought it would deploy with UAVs as you can see below (pause for a moment in honor of the martyred X-47B, the greatest crime of the Obama Era Navy), but no. Hull-1 took 8 years to commission. Hull-2 will take 12. Can’t seem to have a workable CHT system.
CG(X). In 2005, we thought we would build at least 19. Complete loss of control of the program to the point it was put out of its misery. We still don’t have a proper carrier escort. Looks like the Japanese will build what we should have, and the only hope we have now is … BBG-1.
Why dig all this institutional shame and dishonor up, again? Simple, we need to be humble, and the leaders today need to hoist onboard the errors of the past.
Now, back to last week. For our fleet of the 2030s and on to face the world’s largest navy (in 2005 it was the US Navy. Now it is the People’s Liberation Army Navy. Well done everyone), there are three ships right now that we have to ponder as our future surface force.
January 19, 2026
Regulating the clankers
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Kevin T. Frazier and Antoine Langrée consider how artificial intelligence can be regulated by state and federal bodies:
Yes, I’m still 12
President Donald Trump’s executive order on artificial intelligence invites analysis of a question so complex that it rarely gets asked: “What exactly do states have the authority to regulate?”
The current, somewhat trite answer is, “The residuary powers reserved under the Tenth Amendment”. Omitting the legalese, that means that states can do whatever the federal government cannot.
States have the power to look out for the health, safety, and welfare of their residents. Thus, for instance, they have the power to address local concerns through zoning laws, professional certifications via licensing regimes, and ensure public safety through law enforcement. These authorities make up what’s often referred to as a state’s “police powers”.
While this generic reading of state power is not necessarily wrong, it’s imprecise. As the AI Litigation Task Force created by Trump’s EO starts its work, a more specific answer is warranted.
The task force is charged with challenging “unconstitutional, preempted, or otherwise unlawful State AI laws that harm innovation”. Reading between these lines, its mission is to contest state laws that interfere with the Administration’s vision for a national AI policy framework. This isn’t an unlimited charge, though. Federal courts reviewing state laws will only strike them down if they fail to align with the Constitution’s allocation of authority or otherwise prove unlawful.
Many stakeholders in AI debates liberally interpret the authorities afforded to states. Based on concerns of existential risk to humanity and the idea that states must protect the health of their citizens, state legislators have proposed and enacted laws that impose significant obligations on the development of AI. Some assume they must have this right, since protecting the lives of their residents is a core priority and unquestioned authority of state governments. After all, since the founding, states have been able to enforce quarantines out of a concern for public health — aren’t aggressive AI laws just extensions of such public health measures, but tailored to the threat of modern threats?
It’s not that simple. States’ police powers are reasonably broad, but not unlimited. States must respect both an upper bound — the purview of enumerated powers reserved for federal authority — and a lower bound—the rights retained by the states’ citizens. These constraints have been tested in litigation throughout our Constitution’s history, notably when state law conflicts with the federal government’s exclusive authority over interstate commerce and when states unduly limit the freedoms of their residents.
These notions are relatively blurry and highly contextual. As national regulatory policy evolves, so too does the extent of preemption. The Lochner era, for example, was a paradigm shift for state police power: as courts expansively interpreted the individual liberty to contract, states’ police power over health, labor protections, and market regulation shrank significantly — only to be restored later. Likewise, individual liberties and valid justifications for their abridgment have evolved to fit developments in civil rights law — from Brown v. Board to Dobbs and Lawrence.
Despite these significant changes in context, the constitutionality of states’ exercise of their police powers follows a bounded framework. This can be observed in the jurisprudence on public health measures — a prime example of police powers. Quarantine orders, from nineteenth-century epidemics to Covid-19, have a direct link to protecting local communities — one of the most important elements of state police powers. They respect the upper and lower bounds of police powers. First, they are geographically specific: they only affect local residents or people coming into local communities. Second, they directly reduce the risk to state residents: quarantines are known solutions to real threats to the health and safety of local communities. They infringe the individual liberties only insofar as is necessary to protect state residents’ vital interests.
January 17, 2026
QotD: The introduction of tanks on the western front did not break the trench stalemate
Where the Germans tried tactics, the British tried tools. If the problems were trenches, what was needed was a trench removal machine: the tank.
In theory, a good tank ought to be effectively immune to machine-gun fire, able to cross trenches without slowing and physically protect the infantry (who could advance huddled behind the mass of it), all while bringing its own firepower to the battle. Tracked armored vehicles had been an idea considered casually by a number of the pre-war powers but not seriously attempted. The British put the first serious effort into tank development with the Landship Committee, formed in February of 1915; the first real tanks, 49 British Mark I tanks, made their first battlefield appearance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Reliability proved to be a problem: of the 49 tanks that stepped off on the attack on September 15th, only 3 were operational on the 16th, mostly due to mechanical failures and breakdowns.
Nevertheless there was promise in the idea that was clearly recognized and a major effort to show what tanks could do what attempted at Cambrai in November of 1917; this time hundreds of tanks were deployed and they had a real impact, breaking through the barbed wire and scattering the initial German defenses. But then came the inevitable German counter-attacks and most of the ground taken was lost. It was obvious that tanks had great potential; the French had by 1917 already developed their own, the light Renault FT tank, which would end up being the most successful tank of the war despite its small size (it is the first tank to have its main armament in a rotating turret and so in some sense the first “real” tank). This was hardly an under-invested in technology. So did tanks break the trench stalemate?
No.
It’s understandable that many people have the impression that they did. Interwar armored doctrine, particularly German Maneuver Warfare (bewegungskrieg) and Soviet Deep Battle both aimed to use the mobility and striking power of tanks in concentrated actions to break the trench stalemate in future wars (the two doctrines are not identical, mind you, but in this they share an objective). But these were doctrines constructed around the performance capabilities of interwar tanks, particularly by two countries (Germany and the USSR) who were not saddled with large numbers of WWI era tanks (and so could premise their doctrine entirely on more advanced models). The Panzer II, with a 24.5mph top speed and an operational range of around 100 miles, depending on conditions, was actually in a position to race the train and win; the same of course true of the Soviet interwar T-26 light tank (19.3mph on roads, 81-150 mile operational range). Such tanks could have radios for coordination and communication on the move (something not done with WWI tanks or even French tanks in WWII).
By contrast, that Renault FT had a top speed of 4.3mph and an operational range of just 37 miles. The British Mark V tank, introduced in 1918, moved at only 5mph and had just 45 miles of range. Such tanks struggled to keep up with the infantry; they certainly were not going to win any race the infantry could not. It is little surprise that the French, posed with the doctrinal problem of having to make use of the many thousands of WWI tanks they had, settled on a doctrine whereby most tanks would simply be the armored gauntlet stretched over the infantry’s fist: it was all those tanks could do! The sort of tank that could do more than just dent the trench-lines (the same way a good infiltration assault with infantry could) were a decade or more away when the war ended.
Moreover, of course, the doctrine – briefly the systems of thinking and patterns of training, habit and action – to actually pull off what tanks would do in 1939 and 1940 were also years away. It seems absurd to fault World War I era commanders for not coming up with a novel tactical and operational system in 1918 for using vehicles that wouldn’t exist for another 15 years and yet more so assuming that they would get it right (since there were quite a number of different ideas post-war about how tanks ought to be used and while many of them seemed plausible, not all of them were practical or effective in the field). It is hard to see how any amount of support into R&D or doctrine was going to make tanks capable of breakthroughs even in the late 1920s or early 1930s (honestly, look at the “best” tanks of the early 1930s; they’re still not up to the task in most cases) much less by 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
January 15, 2026
Pauly/Roux Pistols: The First Self-Contained Cartridges
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Aug 2025Samuel Pauly is the largely unrecognized father of the modern self-contained cartridge. In 1808 he patented a cartridge with a metal base that held a priming compound and attached to a paper or metal cartridge body holding powder and projectile. He followed this with an 1812 patent for a gun to fire the cartridges. What makes Pauly’s original system particularly interesting is that he did not use mechanical percussion (ie, hammer or striker) to ignite the primer compound, but rather a “fire pump”. A spring loaded plunger compressed air on top of the primer, heating it enough to detonate the compound in the same way that a diesel engine works. This was not a commercially successful system, though, and Pauly left Paris for London in 1814.
Pauly’s shop was taken over by Henri Roux, who continued making guns under the Pauly name while also improving the cartridges. These two pistols were made around 1820 and use a Roux cartridge with a mechanical striker hitting the primer compound in a Pauly-style cartridge case.
For more information, I recommend Georg Priestel’s free book Jean Samuel Pauly, Henri Roux, and Successors – Their Inventions From 1812 to 1882 available here:
https://aaronnewcomer.com/document/je…
(more…)
January 13, 2026
The History of SPAM
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Jul 2025Sliced SPAM layered with cream cheese filling, sliced and served with potato salad and tomatoes
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1951SPAM. The iconic canned meat product. Beloved by some, reviled by others, SPAM was buoyed by a very successful marketing blitz by the Hormel company starting in the 1930s. There were radio and magazine ads, The Hormel Girls (a singing group), and recipes.
I’m not the biggest fan of SPAM, and this recipe turned out way too salty for me. If you want to make the historical recipe, go ahead and follow it, but I would personally opt for the reduced sodium SPAM and cut out the salt in the cream cheese mixture. If you like SPAM, definitely try this out! It’s super flavorful, but it’s just not to my taste.
Tender, pure-pork SPAM joins with a zesty cream cheese mixture for memorable eating. Serve for supper or lunch — or as a noteworthy appetizer.
SPAM ‘n’ Cheese Ribbon Loaf
Cut in 8 slices……1 whole SPAM
Mix together……1 (3-oz.) package cream cheese (softened with a little milk)
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. grated onion
1 tbsp. minced parsley
1/4 tsp. salt
Spread between……slices of SPAM
Chill……4 hours (or longer; overnight if desired). Slice and serve. Good with deviled eggs or potato salad.Economical all-meat buy! No bone, no waste. SPAM is all meat … juicy pork shoulder and mild, tender ham, with Hormel’s unequalled seasonings.
— Hormel advertisement, 1951
January 12, 2026
A Modern Integrally Suppressed Pistol for Everyone: The SilencerCo Maxim 9
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Aug 2025SilencerCo announced the Maxim-9 pistol in late 2015. Having gone through some huge growth of the past few years, the company wanted to expand its capabilities and thought that the time was right for a modern integrally suppressed pistol. It was a unique new design of modern semiautomatic pistol build from the ground up to be integrally suppressed. The action is a proprietary delayed blowback system with all of the moving parts in the back half of the slide. This leaves the front of the gun dedicated entirely to suppressor volume.
The guns were released at SHOT Show 2017, and were relatively slow sellers, because of the high price and the required NFA registration. The expected passage of the Hearing Protection Act around that time would have been a huge boon for sales, but did not ultimately happen. Still, production continued until tapering off in early 2021 as SilencerCo shifted priority to regular suppressor manufacture in the face of a boom in demand.
The project may not have been a massive success for SilencerCo, but it was still a worthy endeavor that they do not regret. It helped mature the company, forcing them to embrace new proficiency in things like GD&T and advanced quality control machinery. And the pistol is, in fact, very cool.
(more…)
December 9, 2025
Krieghoff’s Bizarre Prototype FG42 Proposal
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Jul 2025When the Luftwaffe was looking for its new universal paratrooper rifle, six different German arms companies were asked to submit proposals. Only two actually did; Krieghoff and Rheinmetall. Krieghoff designed this very interesting system, clearly optimized to reduce weight and length as required by the design brief. It uses a tiny vertically traveling locking block and an unusual gas trap system combined with an under-barrel piston. The total number made is unknown, but both fixed- and folding-stock models were produced (the German museum at Koblenz has a fixed-stock example on display). This particular example appears to have been tested after the war by engineers at Springfield Armory by drilling a hole in the gas tube to measure pressure while it cycled.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this rare prototype from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts:
December 3, 2025
The clankers aren’t going away
In the National Post, Colby Cosh says that we should think of the clankers as they exist right now in the same way we consider verifiably insane people:
The market-liberal economist/pundit Noah Smith has written a fun “stranger in a strange land” essay about his unusual fondness for the emerging species of “generative” artificial-intelligence bots. Smith points out that 100 years of science fiction has prepared us all to have convenient, convincingly intelligent, multilingual automaton life assistants; they are an accepted part of the background of almost all imagined futures, with exceptions like Frank Herbert’s Dune universe (wherein even basic mathematical computing is outlawed on religious principle).
Now these creatures have appeared in our midst overnight, and Smith feels delight, but he acknowledges that the public reaction is mostly dominated by hostility and suspicion. The rule that technological advancements are in general good, even if they have some bad initial effects, seems to apply only in retrospect: we laugh at the Luddites of old, little suspecting that we might just be the same people at a different cusp of progress.
The caveat about “bad initial effects” is extremely important (as is remembering that the Luddites really were personally endangered by progress). Technological leaps creating social fracture and mass violence are a real feature of history going back to the Neolithic Revolution. The printing press set off an orgy of religious wars, aviation created strategic bombing and the carnage of the First World War (along with its 19th-century nationalist and imperialist preludes) couldn’t have happened without railways and the telegraph. Twentieth-century fascism and communism can both be understood as mass-media phenomena, as consequences of asymmetrical human adoption of mass media. I’m sure some of you are keeping one eye on the horrible AI-driven mini-arms-race happening in Ukraine, as the interceptor drones and the attack drones of both sides in the war co-evolve at warp speed, and, like me, you wonder about the implications for the entire political order of the world.
Those news stories are a reminder that Darwin never sleeps, and that you don’t get to take a nap break from history — but also that our species survived these crises and has (so far!) prevailed, escaping the old Malthusian prison to arrive at a period of relative plenty and peace even for the worst-off. In any event, technological leaps are one-way doors: the only way out is through.
Consumer artificial intelligences really are marvels, but you’ve heard me emphasize that they are to be regarded for the moment as insane, and to be trusted only as far as you would trust a genuinely insane human being. We don’t yet know whether, or to what degree, this feature of generative AIs can be corrected.
Full disclosure, while I’ve used Elon Musk’s Grok a few times to generate images to accompany stories here on the blog, I do not use clankers to generate text and I can’t imagine doing so in the immediate future. One of the better signs that we’ll be able to adapt to clankers being omnipresent (as tech bros seem to be all of one mind that they need to add AI to everything they can, accelerating the enshittification of so much technology) was this little anecdote reposted on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
Update, 4 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
November 21, 2025
URZ: Czech Prototype Universal Modular Weapon
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jul 2025The URZ (Univerzální Ruční Zbraň, or Universal Hand Weapon) was a 1966 project designed by Jiří Čermák (designer of the vz.58 rifle). He envisioned a weapons system family with largely interchangeable elements that could be configured as a service rifle, carbine, light machine gun, vehicular machine gun, or precision rifle. The Czech military was not interested, but Čermák was able to convince the government to allow its development for export instead.
The design is a delayed-blowback system using rollers, and belt-fed. The first few examples were made in 7.62x39mm, but development switched to 7.62x51mm NATO in a rather surprising move. Presumably this was intended for sale to unaligned nations who were interested in the NATO cartridge, but still — seeing its development in then-communist Czechoslovakia is pretty unusual. Ultimately only 9 examples were built before the project was abandoned.
Thanks to the Czech Military History Institute (VHU) for graciously giving me access to this one-of-a-kind prototype to film for you! If you have the opportunity, don’t miss seeing their museums in Prague:
https://www.vhu.cz/en/english-summary/
(more…)
