Horses To Motorcycles To Drones

Michael Cessna May 29, 2026

Logistics is one of those murky things a lot of people see, but have no idea what the terms mean. “Logistics“, in its most basic form, is acquiring, storing, issuing and moving “stuff” – all the little “bits-n-bobs” that keep any complex organization moving and functional. And that is no less true with guerrilla armies than it is with major-state militaries.

Military analysts usually tend to focus on the weapons and combat vehicles – the RPG, the tank, the drone – while underweighting the system that delivers those weapons to the right place at the right time. In the Sahel, that analytical blind spot is proving costly. The jihadist forces operating across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have not succeeded because they have better weapons than the Malian Army or the Russian Africa Corps. They have succeeded because they have built a more coherent logistics and operational system – and because they have evolved that system rapidly, deliberately, and in direct response to what their enemies have deployed against them.

Understanding how that system works is more useful than cataloging which towns have fallen this week.

The Platforms: Motorbikes And Technicals

The foundational tactical decision JNIM and its affiliated groups made was the replacement of the ancestral horse with the motorbike. This is not a trivial observation. The Fulani and Tuareg peoples of the Sahel have been mounted raiders and pastoralists for centuries – mobility is culturally embedded in their operational DNA. The motorbike preserves that mobility while adding range, speed, and cargo capacity that no horse can match across the Sahel’s distances.

The standard JNIM assault unit documented in multiple engagements consists of approximately 50 motorbikes carrying 100 fighters, supported by technicals – pickup trucks mounting machine guns or light crew-served weapons. The unit concentrates rapidly on an objective, strikes from multiple directions simultaneously in the early morning hours before garrison troops are fully alert, and disperses equally rapidly into the surrounding terrain before air assets can respond. The Sahel’s immensity works in their favor: 50 motorbikes scattering in 50 directions across a landscape the size of Western Europe present a targeting problem that helicopter gunships and drones cannot efficiently solve. By the time Russian or Malian aircraft arrive on station, the attacking force has already dissolved back into the population and the landscape.

*Jihadist pickup truck in Timbuktu in 2012. Photo by “Magrebia”, via Flickr. CCA/2.0 Generic.*

This dispersion discipline is not accidental. It is a practiced tactical response to the one genuine advantage government forces hold – airpower. The attackers do not stand and fight when aircraft arrive. They scatter, reassemble elsewhere, and attack again.

The Intelligence Layer: HUMINT Over TECHINT

One of the most analytically significant aspects of JNIM’s operational approach is its intelligence architecture. Where the Africa Corps relies on technical intelligence – drone surveillance, signals intercept, aerial ISR – JNIM operates through deep human networks embedded in the communities it controls or influences.

The car bomb that drove through multiple checkpoints at Kati on April 25, 2026, killing Mali’s Defense Minister, required precise knowledge of checkpoint locations, shift patterns, internal base layout, and the physical location of senior government figures within the compound. That intelligence could not have been collected remotely. Someone – or multiple someones – with access to the base provided it. The attack’s success was an intelligence failure before it was a security failure.

This HUMINT advantage is structural, not accidental. JNIM recruits heavily from Fulani communities that have experienced systematic abuses from both government forces and Russian contractors – communities that have rational grievances and existing social networks that the group can tap. The Institute for Economics and Peace’s 2025 Global Terrorism Index documented that JNIM’s attacks resulted in 1,454 deaths in 2024, a 46% increase from the year before, with an average lethality of ten deaths per attack. That lethality reflects targeting precision, not random violence — and precision requires intelligence.

The Drone Revolution

The most significant tactical evolution of the past two years has been JNIM’s integration of commercial drones into its operational system – and the speed of that integration is striking. The group’s first documented drone activity occurred in Bandiagara, Mali, in September 2023. By July 2025, a Policy Center for the New South analysis documented over two dozen confirmed drone incidents, with 82% occurring since March 2025. The acceleration from first use to routine employment took less than 24 months.

The drones serve multiple functions. As ISR platforms, they allow JNIM commanders to conduct reconnaissance of fortified positions, assess garrison strength, and monitor government force movements before committing attack units. The April 25 FLA assault on Kidal opened with drone strikes on armored vehicles to pin down the garrison – a tactic directly parallel to what Ukrainian forces have been doing to Russian armor since 2022. As strike platforms, FPV drones have been used against Malian Army convoys, the Bayraktar TB2 drone control center at Kidal, and even against the Africa Corps’ own drone relay stations.

*Drone hexcopter with camera. 2014 Public Domain image courtesy of Pixabay.*

The technical barrier to entry is now minimal. Commercial drones paired with consumer-accessible software and offline AI are sufficient to conduct operations with genuine tactical effect. A group that can afford motorbikes can afford drones. And the asymmetry is brutal: a $500 commercial drone with a modified payload can destroy a vehicle worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and ground an entire convoy.

Existing government countermeasures have not kept pace. JNIM’s ability to strike secured military sites – including the Kati base that houses the Malian head of state – demonstrates that no fixed position in the country can be considered reliably protected from drone observation and attack.

The Strategic Layer: Economic Warfare

Perhaps the most sophisticated element of JNIM’s operational system is its use of economic warfare as a strategic tool. Since September 2025, the group has imposed a fuel blockade on Bamako – not by occupying the capital, but by systematically attacking fuel tankers on the road corridors from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. The blockade required no dramatic military action. It required sustained, coordinated interdiction of a single critical logistics node – fuel supply – that the Malian government cannot function without.

The effect on the capital was immediate and visible: fuel shortages, price spikes, and the diversion of military resources from offensive operations to convoy escort duty. The Africa Corps, theoretically Mali’s elite counterinsurgency force, spent significant operational capacity protecting tanker trucks rather than pursuing insurgent groups. The insurgents had converted their mobility advantage into a strategic economic lever without ever needing to win a conventional battle.

The broader lesson is one that military analysts have consistently under-weighted: insurgent success in the Sahel is not primarily a function of weapons or even tactical skill. It is a function of organizational coherence, intelligence depth, economic understanding of the adversary’s vulnerabilities, and the patience to build a parallel administrative and governance structure in the spaces the state has abandoned. JNIM now administers territory. It collects taxes, in the form of “zakat“. It adjudicates disputes. It bans secular music and enforces its interpretation of Sharia law in towns it controls.

It is, in the most uncomfortable analytical sense, governing. And governments, however brutal, are considerably harder to defeat than armed bands.

*The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To*

Bear Trap: Russia’s African Disaster

Michael Cessna May 8, 2026

There is a photograph – actually a drone image, captured by Azawadi rebel forces – of a Malian Army forward operating base somewhere in the Sahel. It is a large square of compacted dirt berm, perhaps 300 meters on a side, with a scattering of structures inside and no meaningful standoff from the surrounding terrain. It looks, as one analyst put it, like something a child might construct with Lincoln Logs. No overlapping fields of fire. No depth. No overhead cover. Wide open to drone observation from any direction. It is, in the bluntest possible assessment, not a fortification. It is a target with a flag on it.

Aerial view of a Malian Army forward operating base in the Sahel region, as photographed by an Azawadi Liberation Front drone during the 2026 offensive. Precise date and location undisclosed. Image released via open-source social media channels. Public Domain.

That image tells you most of what you need to know about why Russia’s African adventure is failing – and why it was always going to fail.

How It Started

When Mali’s military junta expelled French forces in 2022 and invited Wagner Group mercenaries to fill the security vacuum, Moscow portrayed the arrangement as a sovereign, non-colonial alternative to Western intervention. The narrative was carefully constructed: France had failed after nearly a decade of Operation Barkhane. The United Nations mission MINUSMA had failed. Russia, unburdened by colonial guilt and uninterested in human rights lecturing, would succeed where the West had not.

The opening force package was approximately 1,000 Wagner mercenaries. Mali is a country of 1.24 million square kilometers – roughly the size of Western Europe. The math was not encouraging from the start.

*Russian mercenaries in Africa, 2019. Photo by Florence Maïguélé, CorbeauNews. CCA/4.0 International.*

*Map of West Africa, 2024. Map author WikiUser Rowanwindwhistler. CCA/4.0 International.*

Wagner’s initial operational focus was not counterinsurgency in any meaningful sense. It was regime protection and resource extraction – concentrating in Bamako to shield the junta, while securing gold mining operations in the north. This is the model Russia has used across Africa: armed presence as a business arrangement, with strategic minerals as partial payment. The security of the population was, at best, a secondary consideration. At worst, it was actively counterproductive. Between January 2024 and Wagner’s exit in June 2025, Wagner and Malian soldiers caused more than 1,440 civilian casualties – four times the number of deaths and injuries attributed to JNIM jihadist forces during the same period.

In counterinsurgency operations, killing the population you are supposed to be protecting is not a viable long-term strategy.

The July 2024 ambush at Tinzaouatène was the first major indicator that the arrangement was structurally unsound. A Wagner convoy moving to secure a gold mining site was ambushed in the desert by Tuareg rebels of what would become the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA). Local sources claimed 84 Wagner fighters and 47 Malian soldiers killed, in effect, the complete destruction of Wagner’s 13th detachment. Wagner survivors later accused Malian intelligence of deliberately underestimating rebel numbers. Malian officers accused the Russians of ignoring chains of command and treating them with open contempt. As one senior Malian officer told The Sentry research organization: “We have gone from the frying pan to the fire.” The ambush reverberated far beyond the Sahel: for years, Wagner’s brand across Africa had rested on a carefully cultivated reputation for ruthless effectiveness – the force that succeeded where Western armies hesitated. Tinzaouatène punctured that reputation in a single afternoon, and the puncture was public: drone footage of the aftermath circulated across social media within hours, reaching every junta government on the continent that had been weighing a Russian security arrangement.

*Touareg tribesman in Algiers (Algeria). 2015 photo by WikiUser Amine loua. CCA/4.0 International.*

How It’s Going

After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defense absorbed Wagner’s African operations into a new entity called the Africa Corps – named, with what can only be described as either spectacular historical tone-deafness, or a badly mismanaged sense of humor – after the Wehrmacht’s North African expeditionary force of WW2. Roughly 70-80% of the Africa Corps was composed of former Wagner fighters. The same men, the same doctrine, the same fundamental mismatch between the mission and the force available – now with a Ministry of Defense letterhead.

The total Russian force in Mali reached approximately 2,000 personnel by late 2024. Two thousand troops, in a country the size of Western Europe, facing two converging insurgencies – JNIM’s Fulani-recruited jihadist network operating across the center and south, and the Tuareg-led FLA pressing from the north – that had demonstrated the ability to coordinate operations despite having no particular affection for each other.

The structural intelligence failure compounded everything else. The Small Wars Journal published a detailed analysis in March 2026 noting that Africa Corps operated as a TECHINT-rich, HUMINT-poor force – capable of drone strikes and signals intelligence, but systematically unable to cultivate the human networks necessary to understand insurgent intent before it materialized as an attack. The coercion-based approach to information gathering – intimidation and violence rather than community trust – actively destroyed the conditions necessary for effective intelligence collection…something all the more remarkable, given the widespread availability of afteraction reports from the mid-1990’s to today. JNIM’s ongoing fuel blockade of Bamako, which required sustained preparation, coordinated logistics, and expansion into southern Mali where the group had previously had minimal presence, was not detected until it was already operational.

The Fall Of Kidal

On April 25, 2026, JNIM launched a coordinated assault on Kati – the largest military base in the Bamako region, home to senior government figures including Mali’s Defense Minister. A car bomb driven through multiple checkpoints into the residential sector killed Defense Minister Sadio Camara and mortally wounded the chief of intelligence. The operation required insider knowledge that the junta has not publicly explained.

Simultaneously, the FLA launched its main offensive against Kidal — the strategic northern city that Wagner had captured in November 2023 in what was supposed to be the high-water mark of the Russian intervention. Within hours, FLA forces had overrun the city’s checkpoints, the police station, and the governor’s palace. The Russian Africa Corps garrison, unable to expect reinforcements with every available aircraft pinned down responding to the Bamako diversionary attacks, negotiated an exit — paying their way out of encirclement and withdrawing north in a convoy of trucks that included Tornado-G multiple rocket launchers and a D-30 howitzer.

*Map of the Mali War, to early 2026. Map author WikiUser Borysk5. CCA/4.0 International.*

They left behind a fully operational drone control substation, relay equipment, and a command post. The symbolism was not lost on anyone.

“It is the most consequential battlefield setback Russia’s African project has suffered,” said Justyna Gudzowska of The Sentry. “It is a major reputational and political blow,” inverting the idea that the Russian model was working.

The Structural Problem Russia Cannot Solve

The Carnegie Endowment’s analysis of the situation, published in March 2026, identified the core issue with precision: Russia is repeating France’s mistakes, favoring a heavy military hand without a political strategy to address the root causes of violence, all while simultaneously being less competent than France in the military dimension…an “achievement”, all by itself.

The Tuareg question has generated five rebellions since Malian independence in 1960. Every external power that has intervened in Mali – France included – has addressed the symptom without touching the cause. The Malian junta’s refusal to consider meaningful autonomy arrangements for the north, combined with its expulsion of the regional security architecture that might have provided some coordinating function, has left the country with fewer tools to address the insurgency than it had in 2021.

Russia has not brought a political strategy. It has brought mercenaries, helicopter gunships, and a mining concession model that has consistently generated civilian casualties faster than it generates security. The instability it was hired to contain is now pushing southward toward the West African coast – toward Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Togo, countries with the region’s largest populations and most developed economies.

That dirt berm in the drone photograph is not just a poorly built fortification. It is a precise architectural expression of the entire Russian strategic approach in the Sahel: a perimeter with no depth, no overlapping fields of fire, wide open to observation, and apparently designed by people who have never seriously considered what happens when the enemy actually arrives.

They arrived on April 25th.

The RPG-7: The Titan of the Man-Portable Anti-Tank World – Tools of the Trade

Michael Cessna April 3, 2026

Last week, we looked at the M72 LAW – a 1963 American design that refused to die, and recently earned a genuine second act through Norwegian engineering ingenuity. This week, we look at the weapon on the other side of that Cold War equation: the RPG-7. Where the M72 is the more elegant solution – lighter, more sophisticated, but ultimately more expensive to produce – the RPG-7 is the Soviet answer to the same problem, while coming from a fundamentally different philosophy about what this sort of weapon system is supposed to be.

The weapon’s full designation is Ruchnoy Protivotankovy Granatomyot-7 – “Hand-held Anti-tank Grenade Launcher, Model 7” – though the English backronym “Rocket-Propelled Grenade” has stuck hard enough that most people have forgotten it was ever anything else. Development began in 1958, to replace its predecessor, the RPG-2 the weapon was formally adopted by the Soviet Army in 1961, and it has not stopped being produced or used since. Over nine million units have been manufactured. It has seen combat in more than 80 countries. It is, without serious competition, the most widely distributed anti-armor weapon in the history of warfare.

Design Philosophy

The RPG-7’s design lineage is still the same as the M72 – the US bazooka, and the German Panzerfaust, both attempting to solve the fundamental problem of giving infantry a fighting chance against armor at range – but the Soviet solution diverged sharply at the design level. Where the M72 is disposable and self-contained, like the Panzerfaust, the RPG-7 is reusable like the bazooka. The launcher tube – a 40mm steel tube, wood-wrapped for heat protection, weighing about 15 pounds – is a permanent asset. The rocket-propelled grenades are loaded separately at the muzzle, with the oversized warhead protruding forward of the tube in the weapon’s distinctive silhouette.

*A Romanian soldier aiming a AG-7 (licensed RPG-7 copy) during a military exercise of the romanian 191st Infantry Battalion. Photo by Dragoş Anghelache. CCA/3.0*

This reusability carries real tactical implications. A squad equipped with RPG-7s can carry multiple warhead types for the same launcher – anti-armor, anti-structure, thermobaric, fragmentation – and select the appropriate round for the target. The M72 gives you one round per tube. The RPG-7 gives you one launcher and as many rounds as your ammunition bearers can carry (typically three spare rounds per carrier). For conventional Soviet infantry doctrine, which envisioned massive combined-arms engagements against NATO armor in Central Europe, this made sense. One RPG-7 per motorized rifle squad (https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1998/infantry-rpg.htm) was the standard Soviet assignment – a number that irregular forces consistently exceeded in practice, if at all possible.

*Some RPG-7 Ammunition types. Image by LivePi3.14, 2005. CCA/4.0 International*

The weapon does, however, present real limitations that deserve honest acknowledgment. A 1976 U.S. Army evaluation found that in an 11 km/h crosswind, a gunner firing at a stationary, tank-sized target could not expect a first-round hit more than 50% of the time at 180 meters. The backblast, while less dangerous than many Western counterparts in confined spaces – Soviet doctrine allowed firing from inside rooms with only two meters of standoff – is still substantial and signature-generating. And the weapon’s effective anti-armor range tops out around 300 meters against a moving target, limiting its utility as armor protection has advanced.

But its strengths are formidable, and they are the strengths that matter most in the environments where most of the world’s actual fighting gets done.

A Polish and US soldier load an RPG-7 during combined live-fire training at Drawsko Pomorskie Training Area in Drawsko Pomorskie, Poland, Oct. 29, 2016. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Lauren Harrah. Public Domain.

Combat Record

The RPG-7’s first confirmed combat use was during the Six-Day War in 1967, and it has barely paused since. In Vietnam, it became the primary tool of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against American armor and, critically, helicopters – a use case the weapon was never designed for, but adapted to with lethal effectiveness. In Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, the Mujahideen employed it as their weapon of choice against Soviet armor, APCs, trucks, and helicopters, averaging one RPG for every ten to twelve fighters in the field…or, roughly one RPG-7 per squad.

The Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 produced the RPG-7’s most famous moment in American military consciousness: Somali militiamen used the weapon to shoot down two U.S. Army MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, triggering the events immortalized in the 1999 book and 2001 movie “Black Hawk Down“. The irony runs deep – the CIA had taught Afghan Mujahideen how to use the RPG-7 against Soviet helicopters during the 1980s, and the technique came back to haunt the US military.

In Chechnya, the weapon demonstrated what disciplined urban employment looked like. Chechen hunter-killer teams of three to four fighters – an RPG gunner, a machine gunner, and a sniper – simultaneously engaged single Russian armored vehicles from multiple elevations, including ground level, second and third stories, and basements, while the sniper and machine gunner suppressed supporting infantry. Russian armored columns in Grozny during the first Chechen war may have lost 100 tanks and 250 armored fighting vehicles. This is the tactical template that every urban army has had to study since.

In Ukraine today, the weapon is in simultaneous use by both sides – Ukrainians firing Soviet-designed RPG-7s against Soviet-designed tanks, while Russian forces do the same. Texas-based AirTronic USA has supplied a modernized American variant, the PSRL-1, to Ukrainian forces – a US-built RPG-7 derivative, fighting Russian armor. The symmetry is almost poetic.

*PSRL-1 (modified American copy of the Soviet/Russian RPG-7) in use during training by soldiers of the National Guard of Ukraine. Photo by ngu.gov.ua. CCA/4.0 Int’l.*

The Broader Point

The RPG-7 costs somewhere under $500 per launcher. Warheads run roughly $100 to $500 per round depending on type. A single M1 Abrams main battle tank costs approximately $10 million. The math here is not complicated, and it is precisely that math that drives procurement decisions in most of the world’s militaries – not the ones planning to fight peer adversaries across the Fulda Gap, but the ones planning to fight the wars that actually happen: insurgencies, urban battles, and asymmetric confrontations where the side with the RPG-7 does not need to win every engagement, only enough of them, among other modes of warfare.

The M72 and the RPG-7 are mirror images of the same Cold War problem, solved by two different industrial philosophies. One is elegant, lightweight, and disposable. The other is crude, heavy, reloadable, and has outlasted every attempt to declare it obsolete. Both are still operating on the world’s battlefields today.

Next time: the Carl-Gustaf — the recoilless rifle that splits the difference.

ZOMBIE TRAINS

Michael Cessna March 13, 2026

Military planning is weird. While most people view the field as planning to simply “blow stuff up and kill people“, that only makes up a vanishingly small sliver of the field. “Military planning“, as such, encompasses planning that considers what amounts to every other field that you can imagine…just with a particular focus. This is because military officers are – or were – not at all the cartoon characters they are frequently portrayed as in popular media.

As a result, composing a military plan – especially at the higher levels – usually takes into account things most civilian planners never have to think about at any scale. Case in point…

In that vein, here’s a Cold War planning problem that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: what do you do with your railroad network after the bombs fall?

While this sounds like the setup for a bad science fiction novel, planners in the Soviet Union took it with deadly seriousness – and their answer was one of the more quietly ingenious contingency programs of the entire Cold War era. They called it the “Strategic Steam Reserve“, and by the 1970’s it amounted to thousands of carefully maintained steam locomotives, pre-positioned across the length and breadth of the USSR, ready to rise from their cold storage like iron zombies to keep the country moving when everything modern had stopped working.

The Problem

To understand why this was so vital, requiring a massive diversion of money and resources, you have to understand how utterly dependent the Soviet Union was – and, in the form of modern Russia, is – on its rail network. The Trans-Siberian Railway was not merely a transportation asset…it was the central nervous system of a continent-spanning state. Break that spine, and Moscow’s control over its eastern territories, all the way to the Pacific, collapses. This was true in the 1960’s and it remains largely true of modern Russia today.

Through the 1950’s and into the 1960’s, as part of the nation’s recovery from the destruction of the Second World War, Soviet railways completed a rapid transition from steam to diesel and electric railroad systems. It was the right call operationally – diesel locomotives are faster, more fuel-efficient, and required far less infrastructure support than steam. But the transition created a new vulnerability that Soviet planners were not prepared to ignore. A nuclear exchange, or even a large-scale conventional assault on infrastructure, posed two catastrophic risks to a modernized diesel and electric network.

*View of the refinery explosion in Catano, Puerto Rico, 2009. CCA/3.0*

First, a disrupted fuel supply chain could ground diesel locomotives almost immediately. Second – and much more troubling to Soviet military planners – the later discovery that the electromagnetic pulses generated by nuclear detonations could destroy the solid-state electronics increasingly embedded in modern motive power. An electrified network with no electricity, and diesel locomotives with fried control systems, is a very expensive collection of unusable metal.

A steam locomotive, by contrast, is magnificently indifferent to electromagnetic pulses. It has no sensitive electronics to fry. It runs on fire, water, and mechanical ingenuity – technologies that were already ancient when the first Bolshevik fired up a nationalized engine in 1917. Coal works. Wood works. Siberia, as one observer noted, is covered in wood. And while contaminated surface water would be undrinkable after a nuclear exchange, it is perfectly adequate for generating steam.

The Reserve Itself

The Strategic Steam Reserve consisted of withdrawn steam locomotives maintained in working order for potential use in a national emergency. The program was structured with genuine military rigor. Locomotives were dispersed to special depots across the country – deliberately sited in rural and mountainous areas away from likely nuclear target sets. Some engines were kept indoors in controlled environments to reduce rust and degradation. Many more were simply parked wherever space existed: in yards, on sidings, in tunnels, beside forgotten branch lines.

Critically, these were not museum pieces; they were maintained as “operational assets“. Mechanics periodically fired up the engines and ran them under load. Dedicated cadres of engineers were trained in steam operations long after those skills had vanished from the mainstream railway workforce – and those specialists were deliberately kept dispersed so that a single strike couldn’t eliminate the entire knowledge base at once. The reserve was structured along military readiness standards, with some locomotives capable of being operational within 12 to 24 hours, others requiring several days of preparation, and a long-term cold storage tier beyond that.

The locomotive types kept in reserve reflected Soviet engineering pragmatism: the workhorse SO series, valued for reliability and ease of field maintenance; the powerful FD series freight locomotives; the postwar L series; and the more sophisticated P36 passenger engines. The reserve also absorbed significant numbers of captured German Kriegslokomotive Class 52 engines – over 6,000 of which had been built during the war against Germany – many of which ended up rusting in Soviet reserve lines, waiting for a call that never came.

*Steam locomotive FD20-1679 at train parade during Expo 1520 railway exhibition in 2017 on railway test circuit in Shcherbinka, Moscow, Russia. 2017 photo. Public Domain.*

Secrecy & Aftermath

The existence of the program was classified throughout the Cold War. Western intelligence had only fragmentary knowledge of the depot locations, which were kept off civilian maps. Even within the USSR, knowledge was compartmentalized, and workers assigned to the reserves were sworn to secrecy under conditions comparable to military installations. It was not until the post-Soviet years that researchers and railway enthusiasts began uncovering the remains of reserve depots, often finding locomotives still intact – heavily rusted, vandalized, sitting in forgotten sheds or overgrown sidings. Those are the source of the striking photographs of abandoned Soviet steam engines with red stars that circulate online.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 effectively ended the program. Economic chaos, loss of strategic direction, and the privatization of the railway system meant that most reserve locomotives were either scrapped or sold off. By the time researchers began documenting what remained near cities like Roslavl, only a handful of engines survived in any condition – and the Russian government was considering scrapping those, too.

The idea was not uniquely Soviet. Sweden and Finland maintained their own strategic steam reserves during the Cold War, structured against the possibility of a Soviet invasion rather than nuclear exchange. Britain is rumored to have done the same – but despite decades of enthusiast mythology and at least one BBC Radio investigation, no evidence of an official British reserve has ever surfaced.

The Verdict

It is easy, in retrospect, to smile at the image of stolid Soviet planners earnestly cataloging steam locomotives as strategic assets while American engineers were designing MIRV warheads and advanced satellites. But their logic was sound. The Soviets were solving a real problem – how do you maintain national cohesion and logistical function in a post-nuclear environment where modern infrastructure has failed? – and they solved it with the tools available. For a nation held together by rail, the answer was to keep the old iron breathing, just in case.

The zombie trains never rolled in earnest. They quietly rotted away in their sidings while the Cold War ended around them. But the thinking behind them deserves more credit than it typically gets.

Yemen’s Inevitable Divorce

Michael Cessna December 12, 2025

Nations are odd things. They are difficult to found and internally fractious, but resist splitting up again when irreconcilable differences happen. Moreover, international “clubs” – like the United Nations – are loathe to accept new nations, unless those nations navigate the wholly articial, Twister-like rules which those clubs set. Conversely, said clubs steadfastly refuse to accept any new nation declaring its existance, whether they have effective control and administration over their territory or not.

And, this is especially true when the state in question has absolutely no collective identity, but was artificially constructed by former European colonial masters who drew lines on a map in a smoking room in some European capital, ignoring what people lived where, caring solely for natural terrain features like rivers, lakes and mountains that required little effort to delineate, because those doing the drawing had a croquet match to attend at the lawn party outside.

The question isn’t whether Yemen will split into two countries again — it’s whether the international community will finally acknowledge what’s already happened on the ground. The entity we call “Yemen” exists primarily on maps and in UN resolutions, while the actual territory operates as separate political systems with different governments, currencies, and security forces. The reunification experiment that began in 1990 is effectively over. What remains for the “international community” is deciding how to make it official without looking like complete morons.

And it isn’t as though precedents do not exist for this sort of thing: The most successful modern national partition remains Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Divorce” in 1993. Unlike Yugoslavia’s violent disintegration, Czech and Slovak leaders negotiated a peaceful split despite polls showing most citizens preferred staying united. The separation was orderly: assets divided, treaties apportioned, borders established without dispute. Both successor states joined NATO and the EU, maintaining close economic ties and visa-free travel. The key difference? Political leaders committed to negotiated settlement rather than violence, no external powers had strong interests in preventing partition, and both populations were relatively homogeneous within their territories. It remains the gold standard for how national separations should work — and how rarely they actually do.

Understanding why requires looking back at how these “two Yemens” came to exist in the first place, and why their marriage was probably doomed from the start.

The Original Split

Modern North Yemen emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, becoming an independent kingdom in 1918 under Imam Yahya. It remained a conservative, tribally-organized monarchy until a 1962 military coup sparked an eight-year civil war that eventually established the Yemen Arab Republic — backed by Egypt and the Soviet Union against Saudi-supported royalists. The north was predominantly Zaydi Shia in religious orientation, though more moderate than Iranian Twelver Shiism, with a strong tribal structure and conservative social organization.

*Ahmad bin Yahya Hamidaddin (1891 – 18 September 1962) was the penultimate king of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen from 1948 to 1962. Public Domain.*

South Yemen followed a completely different trajectory. After the British withdrawal from Aden in 1967, Marxist revolutionaries established the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen — the only officially Marxist state in the Arab world. It was militantly secular, Soviet-aligned, and attempted rapid socialist transformation. The South’s population was more Sunni, more urbanized – centered around the port city of Aden – and ideologically committed to state-directed modernization. The two countries even fought a brief war in 1979.

These weren’t minor cultural differences. They represented fundamentally incompatible visions of governance, society, and Yemen’s place in the world.

The Unlikely Marriage

Reunification in 1990 was driven more by desperation than genuine reconciliation. The Soviet Union was collapsing, cutting off South Yemen’s economic lifeline. North Yemen’s economy was struggling. Both governments faced internal dissent and saw unification as a solution to their separate crises. President Ali Abdullah Saleh from the north and Ali Salim al-Beidh from the south negotiated a merger that papered over fundamental incompatibilities with promises of power-sharing and federal governance.

It lasted exactly four years before armed conflict erupted. The 1994 civil war saw northern forces, backed by Saudi Arabia and conservative tribal militias, defeat southern separatists decisively. What followed wasn’t genuine reunification but northern domination. Saleh’s government systematically marginalized southern politicians, appropriated southern oil revenues, and installed northern military commanders in southern territories. Resentment festered for two decades.

*Yemen’s government army entering Aden Goveronate during the civil war, July 1994. Public Domain.*

The Breaking Point

The “Arab Spring” reached Yemen in 2011, forcing Saleh from power but leaving underlying tensions unresolved. The Houthi movement — a Zaydi revivalist group from northern Yemen with Iranian backing — capitalized on the chaos. By 2014, they had seized the capital of Sanaa. When they pushed south toward Aden in 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention that continues today.

The conflict crystallized existing divisions. The Houthis control most of the north, operating what is effectively a separate state with its own governance, military, and foreign policy — as demonstrated by their attacks on Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Hamas. The Southern Transitional Council (STC), formed in 2017, controls much of the south including Aden, with UAE backing. They issue their own currency, operate separate security forces, and openly advocate for southern independence.

The internationally recognized government, meanwhile, barely controls anything and operates primarily from Saudi Arabia. This is a government in name only.

The October 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor — killing 17 American sailors — illustrated Yemen’s role as a base for transnational extremism long before the current crisis. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) thrived in the ungoverned spaces created by weak central authority and competing factions. The current fragmentation has only worsened this problem, with AQAP and ISIS affiliates operating in territories neither Houthis nor STC fully control.

Why This Matters Beyond Yemen

The Houthi campaign against Red Sea shipping has demonstrated that a Yemeni faction can significantly disrupt global commerce even without international recognition. Their anti-ship and ballistic missiles, as well as “kamaikaze” drones, supplied by the Islamic of Iran, have forced naval deployments by the United States and European powers. A formally partitioned Yemen wouldn’t change these capabilities — it would simply acknowledge political reality.

*A map of the Houthi engagements with commercial ships from various countries during the Gaza War. 2023 Map by WikiUser Ecrusized. CC0/1.0*

More intriguingly, international recognition of a southern Yemeni state could establish precedent for other de facto separations. Somaliland, which declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and has maintained stable governance for over three decades, has long sought international recognition. If the international community accepts Yemeni partition based on historical precedent (the pre-1990 states) and effective governance, Somaliland’s case becomes significantly stronger, creating a range of possible fallout scenarios. Both represent functional states with historical legitimacy denied recognition due to international community inertia and fear of encouraging separatism.

The Path Forward

The question facing policymakers isn’t whether Yemen should split — it already has. The question is whether maintaining the fiction of Yemeni “national unity” serves any useful purpose, or whether acknowledging reality might actually enable better governance, clearer accountability, and more effective international engagement with whoever actually controls Yemeni territory.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE already deal with separate Yemeni entities. The Houthis negotiate independently with international actors. The Southern Transitional Council administers its territory with minimal reference to the “official” government. At what point does pretending these are temporary arrangements become more destabilizing than simply accepting the divorce?

Yemen’s reunification was an experiment that failed. Acknowledging that failure might be the first step toward actually addressing Yemen’s crises rather than pretending a unified government will somehow reassert control over territories it never effectively governed.

Venezuela: On the Brink, or Just for Show?

Michael Cessna December 5, 2025

President Trump’s recent comments about potential military action against Venezuela have sent ripples through diplomatic channels and defense planning offices alike, including Congress hysterically trying to invoke the “War Powers Act“. The question isn’t whether the United States could conduct military operations against the Maduro regime — the answer to that is obviously yes. The real questions are whether we should, what it would actually cost, and whether anyone in Washington has seriously thought through what happens on Day Two.

Venezuela presents a deceptively complex military problem wrapped in what looks like a simple regime-change operation. On paper, the Venezuelan military is a sad joke. The Bolivarian National Armed Force fields Soviet-era equipment in various states of disrepair, struggles with spare parts due to sanctions, and has been hollowed out by corruption and political purges. Their Russian Su-30 fighters are mostly grounded. Their navy is a coastal defense force at best. The country’s air defense systems are…”dated”…is a charitable term. In a conventional fight, U.S. forces would achieve air superiority within hours and could strike any target in the country with impunity.

But that’s where the easy part ends.

Venezuela isn’t Iraq in 2003. It’s a country of 28 million people with a long history of guerrilla warfare, sitting on top of the world’s largest proven oil reserves — an estimated 303 billion barrels, more than Saudi Arabia. The terrain ranges from Caribbean coastline to Amazonian jungle to urban sprawl. Caracas alone has a metropolitan population of 5 million packed into a valley surrounded by mountains and barrios — sprawling hillside slums that would make Sadr City look manageable especially compared to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

The military operation itself would be straightforward enough: establish air superiority, conduct precision strikes on regime leadership and military infrastructure, land forces to secure key facilities. The U.S. Southern Command has surely war-gamed this scenario dozens of times. We could decapitate the Maduro regime in a matter of days, possibly hours if we caught them by surprise.

But then what?

Venezuela’s economy has been in free-fall for a decade. Hyperinflation reached 130,000 percent in 2018. Basic services are collapsing. Over 7 million Venezuelans have already fled the country — the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history. The infrastructure is crumbling, the healthcare system barely functions, and the electrical grid fails regularly. This isn’t a country where you can remove the dictator, install a friendly government, and expect things to stabilize.

More problematically, Maduro isn’t universally despised. He’s incompetent and brutal, but he’s also built a patronage network through Colombian guerrilla groups, narco-trafficking operations, and the military officer corps. The colectivos — pro-government paramilitary groups — number in the tens of thousands and are heavily armed. Unlike Iraq’s Republican Guard, which evaporated when confronted with U.S. armor, these groups would likely melt into the population and wage an extended insurgency. They know the terrain, they have local support in certain areas, and they’ve got nothing to lose.

The logistics alone should give Pentagon planners nightmares. Venezuela shares borders with Colombia, Brazil, and Guyana. Securing those borders to prevent weapons flow and insurgent safe havens would require tens of thousands of troops and cooperation from neighbors who have no interest in hosting a U.S. occupation next door. Brazil, in particular, would likely oppose military intervention strongly — they’ve got their own political complexities and don’t want American forces operating on their northern border.

Then there’s the oil question. Venezuela’s petroleum infrastructure is a disaster after years of mismanagement and underinvestment. The heavy crude requires specialized refining. Simply occupying the oil fields doesn’t mean production magically resumes. You’d need to secure the various facilities, bring in real expertise, negotiate contracts, establish security for workers — all while dealing with potential sabotage and insurgent attacks. Iraq’s oil infrastructure, which was in far better shape, took years to fully restore after 2003.

The regional implications are equally messy. Every Latin American country remembers the history of U.S. military interventions — Guatemala (1954), Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989). Even governments that despise Maduro would face domestic political pressure to condemn American military action. The Organization of American States would fracture. China and Russia, both of which have significant investments in Venezuela, would use the intervention as proof of American imperialism and work to undermine any post-conflict stabilization.

And here’s the fundamental question nobody seems to want to answer: what’s the actual U.S. national security interest that justifies the cost? Yes, Maduro is a thug. Yes, Venezuelan refugees are destabilizing neighboring countries. Yes, the humanitarian crisis is real. But none of that constitutes a direct threat to American security that requires military intervention. The oil? We don’t need it — the U.S. is now a net energy exporter.

Trump’s “Crazy Gaijin” act on the world stage has genuine strategic value—keeping adversaries uncertain about American responses can deter aggression. But there’s a difference between strategic unpredictability and backing yourself into a corner where you either have to act or lose credibility. If the rhetoric about Venezuela escalates much further, Trump may find himself facing exactly that choice.

And if Trump is anything, “unpredictable” fits the descriptive bill.

The question then becomes: is this administration prepared for what an actual shooting war with Venezuela would require? Not the easy part — the invasion. The hard part — the occupation, stabilization, and reconstruction that would consume American resources and attention for a decade or more.

Based on our track record in Iraq and Afghanistan, foolish optimism about anyone’s ability to honestly answer that question before the first shots are fired is not something that we should trust in.

The Arsenal of Democracy’s Empty Shelves

Michael Cessna October 24, 2025

By and large, your humble author has largely avoided talking about the war between Russia and Ukraine that entered its “hot” phase in late-February of 2022, even though it actually began in 2014 – but don’t expect the mainstream media to talk about that too much.

Breaking the “Fourth Wall” a bit, I hate politics, in general. I have strong and rigid opinions, and I am not going to beat dead horses here. So, don’t expect political moralizing. I write about the technical aspects of defense and security – which are completely agnostic, until some idiot decides that their juice is better than that of the other guy across the river.

Moving on.

There has been a toxic fantasy in the West – especially in the United States – that has arisen in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Caused by a putrid mix of slavish devotion among politicians desperately wanting to look good to voters, greedy and craven defense contractors, and military officers looking to pad their retirement portfolios, all of whom adopted the idiotic ideas of Alvin Toffler – a subject we recently touched on – have combined to weaken the military capacity of the West to levels of incapacity not seen in nearly a century.

After the Cold War ended, there was a frenetic rush to make the “butter not guns” dream a reality. The problem? Like all utopian concepts – especially when backed up with “sciency”-looking graphs and densely written tomes filled chock-full of techy-sounding wording – that paradigm drove Western defense infrastructure over a cliff.

What all of those lofty hopes-n-dreams deliberately ignored, was that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the only enemies left – so it seemed – were minor states, like Serbia and Iraq, and later, against various terrorist groups like al-Qaeda as part of the grandiosely-named “Global War On Terror” (GWOT).

The idea of a massive conventional war in Europe was completely dismissed as a thing of the past. In this, to be both as blunt and honest as possible, was a level of “genteel racism” that has run as an undercurrent (and occasionally not so “under”) through the psyches of the Western establishment, as massive conventional wars happened throughout those parts of the world the mainstream media chooses to ignore since the Cold War’s end.

As a result, modern (i.e., 21st Century) Western militaries are barely-hollow shadows of their former selves.

This particular Emperor’s lack of clothing became starkly apparently in 2022, as the war goaded into being by the “globalists”, led by Joe Biden’s autopen, revealed that there were no functional reserves of war material in the West, including within the United States…while Russia – with only minimal support from its allies – was able to easily maintain operations throughout the war, hysterical screaming from the Western/globalists.

*Destroyed military vehicles on a street in Bucha, Ukraine, near Kiev, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, March 1, 2022. Picture by REUTERS/Serhii Nuzhnenko. CCA/2.0 Generic.*

In a word – the “Arsenal of Democracy” is empty. And deliberately so, in the interests of greed.

Coming Clean

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered a sobering assessment to London audiences in the summer of 2025: “Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year” when it comes to ammunition. The statistic encapsulates one of the most profound strategic failures of the post-Cold War era – the systematic dismantling of the Western defense industrial base just as the world was returning to the high-intensity conflicts it was designed to support.

Three years after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine remains critically short of the basic ammunition needed to defend itself, despite receiving unprecedented Western military aid. The shortage isn’t due to lack of political will or financial resources, but something far more fundamental: the West simply cannot produce enough ammunition to meet the demands of modern warfare. What was once called the “Arsenal of Democracy” now struggles to keep a single medium-sized conflict adequately supplied.

The Arithmetic of Industrial Failure

The numbers tell a stark story. Before the war, [the United States produced approximately 14,400 artillery shells per month – roughly 180,000 annually. Europe’s combined capacity for 155mm shells ranged between 240,000 and 300,000 pieces per year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces were using 2,000 to 9,000 shells daily in active combat – potentially consuming the entire annual Western production in a few weeks.

Russia, by contrast, ramped up to producing an estimated 4.5 million shells annually by 2024, supplemented by millions more from North Korean stockpiles. This allowed Russian forces to fire 10,000 to 80,000 shells daily at their peak – a volume that Western production couldn’t match even if every shell manufactured went directly to Ukraine.

The disparity became operationally decisive. The fall of Avdiivka in early 2024 occurred not because Ukrainian defenders lacked courage or competence, but because they lacked ammunition. Soldiers withdrew from a town successfully defended since 2014 simply because they couldn’t shoot back.

How We Got Here

The post-Cold War “peace dividend” seemed reasonable at the time. With the Soviet threat vanished and conflicts shifting to counterinsurgency operations requiring precision strikes rather than mass artillery barrages, Western militaries optimized for quality over quantity. Production lines closed, skilled workers retired, and long-standing supply chains atrophied. The assumption was simple: modern warfare would be short, decisive, and technology-intensive. Artillery-intensive wars of attrition belonged to history.

A recent academic analysis suggests deeper psychological factors at work. Western militaries over-invested in visible weapon systems – aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, advanced tanks – that could be showcased to signal military strength while neglecting unglamorous stockpiles of shells and propellant. Like luxury goods in consumer markets, these prestige platforms satisfied political and institutional desires for status while the mundane logistics of sustained warfare received inadequate investment.

The result: warehouses that looked full but weren’t. NATO’s own ammunition stockpile targets, set in 2014 to sustain a 30-day high-intensity conflict, were never met. When Ukraine needed support, European nations were drawing from “half full or lower warehouses,” as Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, acknowledged in 2023.

The Response: Too Little, Too Slow

Western nations recognized the crisis early but struggled to respond effectively. The U.S. has invested billions to increase 155mm production from 14,400 monthly shells to 40,000, with targets of 100,000 by late 2025. Europe set goals of 2 million rounds annually by 2025. These are impressive percentage increases but remain inadequate to both supply Ukraine and replenish depleted Western stocks.

The problem isn’t just production capacity – it’s the entire industrial ecosystem. Explosive production, particularly TNT, relies on a single Polish factory. Specialized steel alloys, propellants, and precision components all face similar bottlenecks. It takes two to four years to establish new production lines for high-intensity military equipment, meaning decisions made today affect battlefield realities years hence.

European efforts face additional complications. The EU produces around 170 different weapon systems, with 16 different types of 155mm shells alone. Ukrainian soldiers call this diversity a “zoo,” forced to constantly recalibrate equipment as they receive incompatible ammunition batches. National defense industries resist standardization to protect domestic jobs and capabilities, creating inefficiency precisely when efficiency matters most.

*President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy visiting the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, where components for artillery and mortar shells are produced. Public Domain.*

Strategic Implications

The ammunition shortage reveals uncomfortable truths about Western military power. The United States and its allies possess overwhelming technological superiority in sensors, precision weapons, and command systems. They can see the battlefield better, strike more accurately, and coordinate more effectively than any adversary. But modern wars – particularly wars of territorial conquest – still require mass. You cannot hold ground with satellites nor break fortified lines with precision alone, when the enemy can absorb losses and continue fighting.

Russia’s production advantage doesn’t reflect superior technology or efficiency – Russian shells are cruder and less accurate than Western equivalents. It reflects strategic focus and industrial mobilization. Russia maintained cold-war-era production capacity, kept supply chains intact, and prioritized ammunition stockpiling even when it seemed unnecessary. When war came, this unglamorous preparation proved decisive.

The West now races to rebuild what it spent thirty years dismantling. New contracts are signed, facilities are being constructed, and production targets are set. But wars don’t wait for industrial mobilization. Ukraine needs ammunition today, not in 2026 or 2027. Every month of shortfall translates to lost territory, casualties that might have been prevented, and strategic opportunities foreclosed.

The hollowed-out “Arsenal of Democracy” stands as testament to what happens when military planning assumes future wars will resemble preferred scenarios rather than probable realities. Preparing for the wars we want to fight while ignoring the wars we might have to fight is a luxury no serious power can afford – a lesson being relearned at terrible cost on Ukrainian soil.

Russia bet long, and is succeeding. The West bet short, and is failing….It’s as simple as that. The only good thing is that we are not in direct combat with Russia.

Yet.

I can’t tell you how we’re going to fix this, because there are entrenched actors in the West – in government, industry and military departments – absolutely unwilling to bend the knee to take the actions needed to fix the problems outlined above.

Not least, when the United States Army can only seem to feed its troops lima beans and toast on Thanksgiving.

Take note.

American Activist Charlie Kirk Slain on College Campus by Sniper

Paul Collier September 10, 2025

Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative American activist, was murdered by a sniper’s bullet at a Utah event on the Utah Valley University campus on Wednesday, September 10, 2025. At this time, no motive for the shooting has been announced. The shooter has been arrested. Charlie Kirk was only 31 years old. The shooter has been identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He was turned in by his family, with his father detaining him until the police arrived.

President Trump said of the news of the shooter being captured, “I hope he was going to be found guilty, I would imagine, and I hope he gets the death penalty. What he did. Charlie Kirk was the finest person that he didn’t deserve this. He worked so hard and so well. Everybody liked him.”

Charlie Kirk Shot at Utah College Event: Report– people.com
Source Link
Excerpt:

NEED TO KNOW

Shots were fired at a Charlie Kirk event in Utah on Wednesday, Sept. 10

The right-wing political commentator was manning his well-known “Prove Me Wrong” table when gunfire broke out

Kirk shared photos and video from the event on X just moments before the shooting began.

Charlie Kirk was shot during a campus event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, Sept. 10.

The 31-year-old right-wing political commentator was manning his signature “Prove Me Wrong” table as part of his American Comeback Tour on the Orem, Utah, campus, when shots were fired.

Video posted from the event appeared to show Kirk being shot in the side of the head or neck as he spoke to the crowd from under a white pop-up tent.

After the shot rang out, the crowd dispersed in a panic, with onlookers shouting “Run, run, run!”

Utah Senator Mike Lee posted to X shortly after news of the shooting broke, writing, “I am tracking the situation at Utah Valley University closely. Please join me in praying for Charlie Kirk and the students gathered there.”

Kirk shared photos and video from the event on X just moments before the shooting began.

“WE. ARE. SO. BACK. 🔥🔥🔥. Utah Valley University is FIRED UP and READY for the first stop back on the American Comeback Tour,” he wrote.

PEOPLE reached out to the Utah Valley University Police Department who confirmed “there were shots fired, yes.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

The Aluminium Taxi – The M113

Michael Cessna September 5, 2025

Military vehicles develop slowly, and not in very predictable ways. Most of the time, the requirements for a military vehicle are largely divorced from what manufacturers actually come up with. However, sometimes, the stars align, and magic actually happens.

Case in point: the M113.

*M113 crew firing their .50-caliber machine gun during South Vietnamese training exercise. US Army photo by PFC J.C. Rivera. Public Domain.*

As World War 2 developed, the United States developed the M3 Half-Track, an odd – but highly effective – hybrid, with a wheeled front axel much like a truck, in front, with a “tracked” rear drive system that used what amounted to a very large rubber tire, stretched over a huge span.

While very strange, the M3 proved highly effective at everything from delivering infantry right behind the tanks, to light artillery, anti-aircraft and logistics, doubtless why some 38,000 ended up being produced. But, the half-track wasn’t perfect, and by the beginning of the 1950’s, the Army needed a replacement.

The M113 Armored Personnel Carrier stands as one of the most widely produced and utilized armored vehicles in military history, with its operational footprint spanning over six decades and more than 80 countries worldwide. The M113 is the unlikely gold standard for “battle taxis” arounf the world.

Since its introduction by Food Machinery Corporation (later United Defense) in 1960, the M113 has become synonymous with versatility, reliability, and adaptability in military operations across diverse theaters and conflict zones. While it can technically carry 11 troops, plus its 2-man crew, most current operators use an 8- or 9-man squad.

Originally developed to meet the U.S. Army’s requirement for a lightweight, amphibious armored personnel carrier, one light enough to be air dropped, the M113 quickly demonstrated its value well beyond its initial design parameters. Two prototypes were initially produced, the aluminium-hulled T113 and the steel-hulled T114. The aluminum hull construction provided substantial weight savings compared to steel alternatives while maintaining adequate protection against small arms fire and artillery fragments. In contrast, the steel hulled design, owing to the severe weight restrictions set by the design targets, offered no greater protection than the aluminum hull. This lightweight design enabled the vehicle to achieve speeds of up to 42 mph on roads and maintain mobility across various terrains, from jungle environments to desert conditions.

*US Army infantrymen armed with M16A1 rifles unload from an M113 armored personnel carrier during a training exercise, 1985. US Army photo. Public Domain.*

The Vietnam War marked the M113’s combat debut and established its reputation for durability under harsh conditions. American forces employed thousands of M113s in Southeast Asia, where the vehicle’s amphibious capabilities proved invaluable in the Mekong Delta‘s waterlogged terrain. The “Green Dragon,” as it became known, served not only as a troop transport but also as a command post, ambulance, and fire support platform. Its aluminum armor, while initially questioned, demonstrated remarkable resistance to mines and improvised explosive devices, contributing to crew survivability rates that exceeded expectations.

International adoption of the M113 family has been unprecedented in armored vehicle history. Countries ranging from NATO allies to Middle Eastern nations, Asian powers, and African states have incorporated various M113 variants into their military arsenals. Australia, for instance, has operated M113s since the 1960’s and continues upgrading these platforms for modern operations. Similarly, nations like Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands have maintained M113 fleets for decades, a testament to the platform’s capabilities in severe environments showing its enduring utility and cost-effectiveness.

The M113’s modular design has facilitated extensive variant development, with over 40 different “official” configurations currently documented. These include the M106 mortar carrier, M577 command post vehicle, M901 Improved TOW Vehicle, and M163 Vulcan Air Defense System; one variant, the M752, was built to launch the MGM-52 Lance tactical missile, which could launch nuclear warheads. This adaptability has allowed military forces to maximize their investment by utilizing a common chassis for multiple mission requirements, simplifying logistics, maintenance, and training procedures.

Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment drive an M-163 20mm Vulcan self-propelled anti-aircraft gun system to a refueling area during Operation Desert Shield, c.1990-1991. US Army photo by SPC. Samuel Henry. Public Domain.

Production numbers underscore the M113’s global impact, with over 80,000 units manufactured across multiple production lines in the United States and licensed manufacturing facilities internationally. Countries including Italy, Turkey, and South Korea have produced their own variants, often incorporating indigenous modifications to meet specific operational requirements. This distributed production model has enhanced the platform’s accessibility and sustainability for allied nations.

Contemporary operations continue to validate the M113’s relevance in modern warfare. During conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, various nations deployed upgraded M113 variants equipped with enhanced armor packages, digital communication systems, and improved weapon stations. The platform’s relatively low signature and proven mechanical reliability have made it suitable for peacekeeping missions, border patrol duties, and domestic security operations.

The M113’s influence extends beyond traditional military applications. Law enforcement agencies, particularly SWAT teams and tactical units, have adopted surplus M113s for high-risk operations. Emergency services have converted these vehicles for disaster response, leveraging their mobility and protection in hazardous environments. This civilian adaptation demonstrates the platform’s fundamental design soundness and operational flexibility.

Modernization programs worldwide continue extending the M113’s service life well into the 21st century. Upgrade packages typically include improved armor protection, digital battlefield management systems, enhanced powertrains, and modernized weapon systems. Countries like Australia have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in comprehensive M113 upgrade programs, indicating long-term confidence in the platform’s viability.

*Canadian Air-Defense, Anti-Tank System (ADATS), built on an M113 chassis, on display during the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo, 2008. Photo by Jonathon A.H., 2008. CCA/3.0*

The M113’s legacy encompasses not only its direct military impact but also its influence on subsequent armored vehicle development. Design principles established with the M113 – including aluminum construction, amphibious capability, and modular architecture – have informed modern infantry fighting vehicle development programs worldwide.

Today, despite being supplemented or replaced by newer platforms in some applications, the M113 remains actively deployed across numerous conflict zones and operational theaters. Its combination of proven reliability, operational versatility, and cost-effectiveness ensures continued relevance in military inventories globally.

The M113’s near-seven decades of service represents an exceptional achievement in military vehicle design, establishing standards for durability and adaptability that continue influencing contemporary armored vehicle development. This enduring success reflects not merely engineering excellence but also a fundamental understanding of operational requirements that transcend technological generations.

Try as it has, the US Army has not been able to completely retire the M113, although it has, yet again, announced its imminent demise. Why is this the case? After all, the M113 was designed in the 1950’s, right? well, so was the AR-15, from which we got both the M16 and the M4, neither of which have been fully replaced, either.

The answer, then, is:

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.