Kevin O’Brien Monthly Archives: February 2013 It starts off looking like another banster wet dream, the stale old gun turn-in/buyback. (And, how can they buy it back if they didn’t sell it in the first place? But the biggest problem with these is never the grammar). Newsradio 560 WGAN: Three Maine communities have a few more guns …
Monthly Archives: March 2013 This is not entirely a weapons site, but it’s worth checking out. Herschel Smith has long been an interesting read on COIN and the long war. He was a Marine Captain when he started the Journal amidst the first flowering of milblogs. We don’t always agree with him (or anybody else) …
Monthly Archives: January 2013 Plump Air Force chicks, the future of ground combat (l.); GEN Martin Dempsey (r.) . DOD photo At a press conference introducing his opening of all combat positions to women, legislation be damned, lame-duck SecDef Leon Panetta also insisted, “[L]et me be clear, we’re not talking about reducing the qualifications for …
Monthly Archives: November 2012 As we’ve commented before, after a war, the high tech, iconic weapons of the conflict pass through a long period in which they’re “old junk” before someone realizes that they’re rare and deserving of preservation. This is what happened to the B-29 bomber, a plane once produced in such masses that …
A Heinkel 111 tests the defensive flamethrower. February 9, 1940 at Tarnewitz. LuftArchiv.de picture. Somebody actually did do this, and imagine our lack of surprise that it was the Germans in World War II, those same whacky guys who never let mere impracticality stand in the way of weapons development. These are the same guys …
The book being the Manual for Courts Martial, or its modern descendant, the Uniform Code of Miliytary Justice. We’ve covered the Case of the Micturating Marines before here, here and here. Three enlisted Marines, including the dumb cluck who videotaped the incident, have received nonjudicial punishment (under Article 15, UCMJ), and two staff NCOs are …
Monthly Archives: October 2012 China’s “War with Japan” Theme Park The Atlantic’s Brian Fung picked up an amazing photo essay by Jason Lee of Reuters. Lee apparently visited a Chinese theme park that puts the attendees in the role of Mao Tse-Tung’s (we use Wade-Giles here, as used in Free China, so sue us) 8th …
Monthly Archives: October 2012 Once again, there are too many people acting rashly, incompetently, or just plain criminally with weapons for everybody to get his own post. So we’ll jumble them together, beginning, say, with the idjits and advancing through the skells and whackos to the hardened prestoopnicks. Something just smells wrong about this one …
… here in the Northern hemisphere, Soon the trees will start to change color (in some combinations of altitude and water table, some of the maples have already started). And we shan’t otherwise be posting today, but will be back on the job on Monday. This entry was posted in Administrivia on August 26, 2012 …
Monthly Archives: June 2012 Hard work in Japanese military archives by retired professor Taketoshi Yamamoto from Waseda University has unearthed information long thought lost about the training of Imperial Japan’s elite military intelligence operators during what Americans see as the run-up to World War II, but what was for Japan already a wartime period (with China and …