Front – The Freedomist

God’s Battalions Revisited and the Potential “Church Militant”

Michael Cessna July 10, 2026

Possibilities are everything.

In August 2023, this column examined a question that most analysts had not thought to ask: what would it mean, in practical terms, if the Holy See decided to field an operational military force? The piece was speculative — a thought exercise grounded in the Vatican’s sovereign status under the Lateran Pacts of 1929, its financial depth, its 1.3 billion strong population of potential sympathizers, and its diplomatic relations with some 180 nations. The conclusion was cautious: the pieces existed, but there was no indication anyone was moving to assemble them.

On July 1, 2026, something happened that makes that question considerably less theoretical.

On that date, the Society of St. Pius X consecrated four new bishops at its seminary in Écône, Switzerland, in direct defiance of an explicit personal appeal from Pope Leo XIV not to proceed. The ceremony was attended by an estimated 15,000 to 16,500 faithful. Within twenty-four hours, the Vatican’s doctrinal office issued a decree declaring automatic excommunication — latae sententiae — for the six bishops involved, extending the penalty to all SSPX priests, and warning that lay faithful who formally adhere to the schism face the same consequence. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, stated plainly: the SSPX is in schism, and its sacraments are now illicit. Confessions invalid. Marriages invalid.

The Church has not moved this hard against a traditionalist body since 1988.

The 1988 Echo and What Is Different Now

The parallel to 1988 is real and the SSPX knows it — Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, who presided over the July 1 consecrations, was himself one of the four bishops excommunicated by John Paul II thirty-eight years ago to the day. The symmetry was deliberate. The SSPX issued a statement at the outset of the ceremony declaring that any Vatican sanctions against them “will have no validity.” That is not the language of an organization expecting reconciliation. That is the language of a body that has decided the break is permanent and is acting accordingly.

What is different from 1988 is the Vatican’s response. When Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated bishops without papal mandate that year, the excommunications fell on the bishops and Lefebvre himself, only — not on priests and laity. Pope Benedict XVI lifted those excommunications in 2009 as a gesture of reconciliation, and Pope Francis extended further concessions, allowing SSPX priests to hear valid confessions in 2015 and to officiate recognized marriages in 2017. The pattern across four pontificates was consistent: Rome extended olive branches, and the SSPX accepted the practical benefits while refusing to sign any doctrinal preamble acknowledging Vatican II as legitimate.

Leo XIV has ended that pattern. The July 2 decree explicitly rolled back the sacramental privileges granted under Francis and extended the excommunication beyond the episcopal level for the first time. America Magazine’s Vatican correspondent noted that this goes further than any previous Vatican action against the SSPX — and Leo XIV is the first pope to have undergone all of his seminary formation in the post-Vatican II era, which makes his position on the Council’s legitimacy non-negotiable in a way it perhaps was not for his predecessors. The olive branch strategy has been formally retired.

Coat of arms of the Holy See. From Donald Lindsay Galbreath’s, “A Treatise on Ecclesiastical Heraldry” (W. Heffer and Sons, 1930). Credit: WikimediaCommons User: F l a n k e r,. 2007. Public Domain.

What the SSPX Actually Represents

Before assessing what comes next, it is worth being precise about what the SSPX is, because popular coverage tends to flatten the reality. With an estimated 600,000 adherents across 77 countries, 751 priests, 1,500 total members including seminarians and religious, and a network of seminaries, schools, and chapels operating across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the SSPX is not a fringe sect. It is a functioning parallel ecclesiastical structure with its own episcopal succession — now reinforced by four new bishops — its own formation pipeline, its own institutional infrastructure, and a lay following that skews educated, committed, and transgenerationally stable. The new Bishop Michael Goldade, one of the four consecrated, is American, from St. Marys, Kansas, where the SSPX maintains one of its most established North American communities.

The SSPX’s theological objection is not primarily over the Latin Mass, though that is the most visible symbol. It is to the ecclesiology and anthropology of Vatican II itself — specifically, the Council’s teachings on religious liberty, interdenominational relations, and the collegial authority of bishops. These are not peripheral disputes. They go to the fundamental question of what the Catholic Church understands itself to be, and what authority it claims over the temporal order. That is the ground the SSPX has refused to concede across six decades, and the grounds Leo XIV has now formally declared them expelled for refusing to concede.

The Wildcard — The Church Militant Variable

It is here that our previous 2023 analysis becomes relevant in a new way — and where precision matters more than ever.

The 2023 piece asked what a Vatican military capability would look like if the institutional will existed to build one. The answer then, as now, is that the raw material is available: financial depth, diplomatic reach, a global population of potential volunteers including many with military experience, and sovereign status under international law. What was missing was a driver — a circumstance acute enough to generate the institutional will.

The SSPX schism does not provide that driver for the Holy See itself. Leo XIV’s papacy is built around unity, not militancy, and the excommunication of the SSPX is a disciplinary action, not a mobilization signal. Rome is not arming up.

Yet.

But the schism does something analytically significant on the other side of the equation. It creates, for the first time in the modern era, a fully excommunicated traditionalist Catholic body with its own episcopal succession, its own institutional infrastructure, its own global network, and a leadership that has explicitly declared Vatican authority over them to be null. The SSPX has, in the vocabulary of canon law, stepped entirely outside the visible Church. It has done so with its bishops intact, its seminaries operational, its schools and chapels functioning, and its lay faithful — at least some of them — prepared to follow.

What makes this analytically significant beyond the canonical mechanics is something visible to anyone with an internet connection and five minutes on a mainstream retail platform. A substantial cultural ecosystem has grown up around the phrase Deus Vult — “God wills it,” the battle cry of the First Crusade.

Expressed in tactical morale patches, embroidered caps, hoodies, and apparel available on Amazon and Etsy and more carrying imagery of Crusader crosses, numerous military religious orders, and what the listings describe without irony as “biblical knight” and “Catholic warrior” iconography, is ready and in place for any group with even minimal funds to activate and leverage, much like the “Kek/Pepe the Frog” symbology of c.2015. This is not a fringe underground. It is mainstream commercial/retail, accessible to and purchased by a broad population of traditionally-minded Christians well beyond the SSPX faithful — Protestant as well as Catholic, American as much as European. The cultural identity infrastructure is already in place, already widely distributed, and currently unaffiliated with any institutional structure. The SSPX schism is the first event in the modern era capable of providing that infrastructure with a canonical anchor. More to the point, coherent and uniform iconography, taken seriously by those using it, is a core identity formation tool for military and military-adjacent units.

Sit with that for a moment.

An excommunicated body with episcopal succession, an existing organizational structure spanning 77 countries, a committed and relatively affluent lay base, and a theology that frames the current Roman hierarchy as having abandoned authentic Catholicism is not the same thing as a “splinter group“. It is, in structural terms, a parallel institution. Whether that parallel institution remains purely ecclesiastical, or whether it develops harder edges under the pressure of persecution and the psychology of a movement that now has nothing left to lose from Rome’s perspective, is the question analysts should be asking.

The historical record of excommunicated movements developing temporal as well as spiritual ambitions is long and instructive. The SSPX leadership has given no indication of moving in that direction. But the SSPX leadership also gave no indication, as recently as six months ago, that it would consecrate bishops in open defiance of a sitting pope’s personal written appeal. The July 1 ceremony at Écône was not an act of an organization that expects to be welcomed back. It was an act of an organization that has decided it is the Church, and that Rome is the schismatic party.

Possibilities, as was observed here in 2023, offer options. The landscape has changed, and dramatically so. Whether anyone, whether SSPX or the Vatican itself, moves to act on activating that landscape is a different question — and not one this column can answer at the moment.

But…the military potential is very real.

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

The Mighty D-30 – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna June 26, 2026

Artillery is the King of the battlefield, and has been for nearly three hundred years.

Set up a D-30 howitzer and watch the crew work. The gun arrives towed muzzle-first behind a truck, trails folded flat. The crew unhitches it, lowers the central hydraulic jack — lifting the wheels clear of the ground — and swings the two outer trail legs outward, each through 120 degrees, until all three rest on the earth and are staked in place. The whole evolution takes under two minutes. The gun can now traverse through a full 360 degrees and engage a target in any direction without being repositioned. That is not a feature common to artillery; it is a feature specifically engineered into the D-30 by its designer, F.F. Petrov working at Plant No. 9 in Sverdlovsk, in the 1950s, and it remains one of the most practical innovations in postwar artillery design. Sixty-five years after the D-30 entered Soviet service, its three-legged silhouette is still appearing in drone footage from Ukraine, on both sides of the front line.

*Afghan National Army instructors fire the 122 milimeter D-30 howitzer, Oct. 4, 2010. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Zachary Wolf. Public Domain.*

A Caliber With a Long History

If nothing else, Russians love stability. They adopted the 7.62x54R rifle cartridge in the 1890’s…and still use it today. The D-30’s 122mm calibre did not arrive with the Cold War. Russia adopted that bore in the early twentieth century, and it became central to Soviet artillery doctrine through the Second World War, when the M-30 howitzer — also a Petrov design, also from Plant No. 9 in Sverdlovsk — served as the backbone of divisional artillery across every front from Barbarossa to Berlin. By the mid-1950’s the M-30 was aging and its limitations were apparent: a split-trail carriage that restricted traverse to just 49 degrees, a barrel too short for the ranges modern warfare demanded, and a weight that strained the logistics of rapid mechanized advance. Petrov’s bureau was tasked with replacing it, and the design that emerged kept the calibre and the ammunition commonality while discarding everything else about the M-30’s architecture.

The result was the 2A18, designated the D-30 in service. Where the M-30 had a conventional split-trail carriage limiting it to a narrow arc, the D-30 used a three-legged tripod arrangement that permitted the full-circle traverse. Where the M-30’s barrel was a stubby 22.7 calibres long, the D-30’s ran to 38 calibres, driving muzzle velocity and range substantially higher. The effective range with standard HE ammunition reached 15.4 kilometers; with modern rocket-assisted projectiles, 21.9 kilometers. Rate of fire peaked at ten to twelve rounds per minute, sustained at five to six. The crew required — commander plus seven, or in some configurations six — was manageable for a divisional artillery unit. The Soviet Army adopted it in 1960 and began exporting it to Warsaw Pact allies and client states shortly afterward.

*D-30 (2A-18) 122mm howitzer. 2007 photo by George Shuklin. CCA/1.0 Generic.*

The Three-Leg Trick and What it Means

The 360-degree traverse deserves more analytical attention than it usually receives, because it was not simply a convenience feature. Soviet doctrine for motorized rifle divisions expected artillery to operate in fast-moving, fluid engagements where the threat direction could change rapidly — including from armored vehicles breaking through to artillery positions. A conventional split-trail howitzer caught by an unexpected flanking attack has no practical recourse; the crew cannot swing it to bear in time. The D-30’s crew can. With its HEAT round, the D-30 can penetrate over 450mm of rolled homogeneous armor — sufficient to defeat any IFV and most tank side armor — and the all-round traverse means the gun is in effect a self-defending anti-tank weapon of last resort, capable of engaging targets in any direction without emplacement changes. The US Army’s own assessment noted that the D-30 was “fully suitable for antitank defense” and could be equipped with infrared or passive night sights for direct-fire engagements after dark.

*Drawing of BK 13 HEAT projectile used in D-30 gun-howitzers. 1997 drawing by J.H. Morgan and J. Pittman, United States Government. Public Domain.*

This dual-role capability — indirect fire howitzer and emergency anti-tank gun — was a deliberate Soviet design choice rooted in the expectation that artillery positions in a fast-moving European war might need to defend themselves. It added no meaningful weight or complexity. It cost nothing beyond the carriage design itself. It is, in retrospect, one of the more elegant solutions in Cold War artillery engineering.

The same barrel assembly went into the 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer, which entered service in 1972 and gave motorized rifle regiments equipped with BMP infantry fighting vehicles a tracked, armored platform using the same ammunition as the towed D-30 batteries in the division behind them. The logistical coherence was intentional. Over 12,000 D-30s were produced across the Soviet period, with licensed or derivative manufacture in China, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Iran, and Iraq. It remains in production internationally and in service with more than 60 nations.

A Combat Record Spanning Decades

The D-30’s operational history reads like an atlas of post-1960 conflict. It fired in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Lebanese Civil War, the Soviet-Afghan War, the Iran-Iraq War — where both sides used it in the kind of grinding, WWI-adjacent attrition that consumed ammunition by the trainload — the Gulf War, the Yugoslav Wars, the Syrian Civil War, the recent Tigray War, and the ongoing conflict in Myanmar. No other postwar artillery piece has fired in as many distinct conflicts across as many continents. Its appearance in a conflict zone is almost a predictor of that zone’s geopolitical history: wherever the Soviet Union sold weapons and influence, the D-30 eventually followed.

Afghanistan was a particular proving ground. Soviet D-30 batteries engaged Mujahideen positions across mountain terrain that challenged every other piece in the divisional inventory. After the Soviet withdrawal, the gun remained with Afghan forces — and then with both the Afghan National Army and Taliban-adjacent formations — requiring US Army trainers to become proficient on it themselves in order to build Afghan artillery capacity. The JPEO Ammunition command was still procuring spare cannons, breeches, and fire control conversion kits for Afghan D-30s as recently as 2016.

Ukraine and the Drone Problem

The D-30’s presence in Ukraine is as a weapon on both sides of the line, which is itself a commentary on how thoroughly Soviet materiel saturated the world across the Cold War decades. Ukrainian forces inherited substantial D-30 stocks from the former Soviet military, and have supplemented them with captured Russian pieces. Russian forces continue to field them in motorized rifle formations alongside more modern systems, pulling them from storage reserves as attrition has consumed more capable equipment.

The drone age has been unkind to the D-30 in ways that go beyond mere vulnerability. A towed howitzer is by definition a slow-moving, visually distinctive platform that requires time to emplace and displace. On a battlefield where reconnaissance UAVs can locate a firing position within minutes of the first shot and direct a Lancet loitering munition or FPV drone onto it before the crew can limber up and move, the D-30’s greatest operational asset — its two-minute setup time — becomes a liability rather than an advantage. Ukrainian drone operators have documented and filmed the destruction of Russian D-30s throughout 2024 and into 2025, with Defense Express reporting confirmed drone strikes against the type in the Northern Slobozhanske direction as recently as late 2025.

The artillery doctrine Ukraine has developed in response to this environment emphasizes what analysts have called “shoot and scoot” discipline: fire a short mission, displace immediately, move before the counter-battery or drone response arrives. That discipline demands mobility. A D-30 towed by a Ural-4320 truck can reach 60 kilometers per hour on road and reposition within a few minutes of unlimbering — fast enough, if the crew is well-trained and the intelligence picture is managed carefully. Not fast enough, if it isn’t.

*Shot from the D-30 howitzer. Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, via mil.ru, 2021. CCA/4.0 Int’l.*

The D-30’s longevity is ultimately a product of the same qualities that have sustained every other piece of Soviet-era equipment in this series: rugged simplicity, ammunition commonality with a vast global stockpile, and a design architecture that asked nothing exotic of the armies operating it. The gun that Petrov’s bureau produced in Sverdlovsk in the 1950’s did not promise sophistication. It promised reliability, range, and the ability to swing in any direction and kill whatever came at it. In sixty-five years of continuous combat across six continents, it has largely delivered on that promise — and it is still being asked to do so.

The Immortal BMP

Michael Cessna June 19, 2026

On the morning of November 7, 1967, Western military attachés watching the annual Revolution Day parade roll across Red Square got their first look at something that had no equivalent in any NATO inventory. It was low, fast, amphibious, and bristling with weapons that no armored personnel carrier had any business carrying — a 73mm main gun and a rail-mounted anti-tank guided missile capable of killing a main battle tank at 3,000 meters. NATO scrambled to assign it a reporting name, settling on M-1967, because no one yet knew what the Soviets called it. What they called it was the BMP-1 — Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, or “fighting vehicle of the infantry”, in English — and its appearance in that parade triggered a reappraisal of mechanized warfare doctrine across the entire Western alliance that is still unfolding today.

A New Category Of Weapon

To understand why the BMP-1 caused the reaction it did, it is necessary to understand what came before it. The armored personnel carrier of the mid-1960s — the American M113, the Soviet BTR-60, and the British FV432 — was essentially a “battlefield taxi”. Its job was to move infantry to the edge of a fight, at which point the soldiers dismounted and the vehicle pulled back. The APC carried a machine gun for self-defense. It was armored against small arms and shell fragments. It was not expected to fight alongside tanks; it was expected to survive long enough to deliver its cargo and withdraw.

*BMP-1 vehicles belonging to the 152nd Mechanised Brigade, May 2024. Photo by 152 окрема єгерська бригада, Ukrainian Army. CCA/4.0*

The BMP-1 discarded that entire concept. It was designed from the outset as a fighting vehicle in its own right — a platform from which infantry could engage the enemy without dismounting, and which could itself engage tanks, bunkers, aircraft, and infantry through its own organic weapons. Every infantryman in the troop compartment had a firing port and a vision block. The vehicle carried an NBC over-pressure system allowing it to operate in a contaminated environment — a direct product of Soviet doctrine that treated tactical nuclear weapons as a normal feature of any future European war. The BMP-1 was not designed for the wars the West had been fighting. It was designed for the war Soviet planners expected to fight: a high-speed armored offensive across a nuclear-contaminated Central Europe, with infantry and tanks advancing together under the same protective shell.

*The firing arcs of the firing ports on the BMP-1 MICV. Image from a US Army TRADOC (“Training And Doctrine Command”) technical briefing, dated 30 June 1977. US Army image, 1977. Public Domain.*

In theory.

When Western analysts instantly grasped what they were looking at, the reaction was acute. There was no NATO equivalent. Only West Germany had been moving in a remotely similar direction with early development work that would eventually become the Marder, and even that was years from fielding. The consensus in 1967 was that the Soviet Union had stolen a significant doctrinal zone, and the Western responses — the M2 Bradley, the Marder, the British Warrior — would take fifteen years to reach the field. Overnight, the BMP-1 had created an entirely new category of weapon: the Infantry Fighting Vehicle, and it had created it alone.

The Gap Between Theory And Practice

The BMP-1’s combat debut came in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, where Egyptian and Syrian forces used it against Israeli armor. The results were sobering for Soviet doctrine. The 73mm 2A28 Grom gun proved inaccurate beyond 500 meters — less than a third of its theoretical effective range. The AT-3 Sagger anti-tank missile, mounted on a launch rail above the gun, could not be effectively guided from inside the cramped turret, requiring the operator to expose himself to do so. The vehicle’s aluminum-reinforced steel armor proved vulnerable to .50 caliber machine gun fire in the sides and rear, and to 106mm recoilless rifle rounds all around. In the heat of the Sinai, crews kept roof hatches open for ventilation, exposing them to fire from elevated positions. Soviet technical teams deployed to Syria in the war’s aftermath to gather data, and what they gathered was not encouraging.

*Four BMP-1s in Afghanistan. 2005 photo be “davric”. Public Domain.*

Afghanistan confirmed and extended those findings. Soviet BMP-1s operating in the mountainous terrain of the Hindu Kush encountered an enemy that understood their vulnerabilities precisely. Mujahideen fighters armed with RPG-7’s penetrated BMP-1 armor in approximately 95% of hits, frequently igniting the ammunition stored within the fighting compartment. Soviet soldiers — the people the vehicle was designed to protect — responded by riding on the outside of the hull rather than inside it, a damning commentary on the gap between the vehicle’s theoretical protection and its actual survivability. The BMP-1’s front-left seating arrangement, which placed the driver and commander in tandem alongside the engine, meant that a single mine blast or RPG hit could kill both simultaneously.

BMP-2 AND BMP-3: The Lessons Applied

Soviet engineers had begun drawing conclusions from the Yom Kippur data before Afghanistan confirmed them. Work on a successor vehicle began in 1974, and the BMP-2 entered service in 1980, reaching Afghanistan in time to serve alongside its predecessor. The changes were pointed. The Grom’s 73mm low-pressure gun was replaced by a 30mm 2A42 autocannon capable of engaging both infantry and light armor with high accuracy at ranges the original gun could never reliably achieve. The Sagger missile was replaced by the AT-4 Spigot and later the AT-5 Spandrel, with the launcher repositioned for better usability. The turret was redesigned to improve commander visibility. The gun’s elevation arc was extended sharply upward — a direct response to Afghan mountain fighting — allowing it to engage targets on high ground that the BMP-1 could not reach. The BMP-2 became and remains the most widely produced variant of the family, the backbone of Soviet and then Russian motorized rifle formations through the Cold War’s end and beyond.

*Slovak Republic BMP-2, during a live-fire exercise with US Army forces, 2015. US Army photo. Public Domain.*

The BMP-3, which entered limited Soviet service in 1987, represented a more radical departure. Rather than the graduated improvements of the BMP-2, the BMP-3 introduced an entirely new weapon package: a 100mm 2A70 gun capable of firing both conventional ammunition and laser-guided anti-tank missiles, combined with a coaxial 30mm 2A72 autocannon and three 7.62mm machine guns. The combination made it one of the most heavily armed infantry fighting vehicles in the world by firepower, though at a cost in complexity and production expense that limited its numbers. Russia entered the 2022 invasion of Ukraine with an estimated 400 to 750 active BMP-3s — a fraction of its BMP-2 holdings — supplemented by vehicles drawn from storage.

The Ukraine Reckoning

The BMP series has paid a severe price in Ukraine. By mid-2024, open-source tracking by Oryx had documented over 500 visually confirmed BMP-3 losses alone — a figure representing the destruction or capture of potentially the entire pre-war active fleet, with losses continuing to mount through 2025. BMP-1s and BMP-2s, operated by both sides, have been destroyed in numbers too large to track precisely. The vulnerability pattern is familiar: thin side and roof armor, ammunition in the fighting compartment, and no meaningful protection against the FPV drones that have become the dominant anti-vehicle weapon in the theater.

*Destroyed Russian BMP, near Kiev, Ukraine. 2022 photo by “Flamberge-Flamberge”. CCA/4.0 International.*

Russia’s response has been production and adaptation rather than replacement. Rostec confirmed a shipment of upgraded BMP-3s to the Russian Ministry of Defense in January 2026, claiming production running 40% above plan at 463 vehicles per year, with new builds incorporating ERA, improved belly protection against mines, electronic warfare systems, and upper-hemisphere armor responding directly to drone threats. A further development, the BMP-3M ‘Manul’, has been explicitly framed as a response to the US-supplied M2A2 Bradley and German Marder 1A3 IFVs fielded by Ukrainian forces — the same Western vehicles the BMP-1’s 1967 appearance first drove NATO to develop.

The wheel has come full circle in an ironic way. The vehicle that shocked NATO into creating the infantry fighting vehicle concept is now being redesigned to compete with the vehicles that NATO built in response to it. The BMP’s core idea — that infantry and armor should fight together rather than separately, that the carrier should itself be a weapons platform rather than a taxi — has proven more durable than any specific iteration of the vehicle embodying it. What changes with each generation is the answer to the same question the Soviet designers at the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant were wrestling with in the early 1960s: how much protection is enough, and against what?

The T-72: The Cookie-Cutter Tank

Michael Cessna June 5, 2026

The turret flies off cleanly — a forty-ton steel cap launched ten or fifteen feet into the air by the pressure wave of its own ammunition cooking off inside. It became the signature image of Russia’s war in Ukraine: T-72’s reduced to a burning hull and a displaced turret, the phenomenon so predictable it acquired a name. NATO analysts called it the “jack-in-the-box.” The Ukrainians called it a gift. That a tank designed in the late 1960s as an affordable alternative to a more advanced Soviet design is still absorbing those lessons in 2025 says something unflattering about Russian procurement — and something complicated about the T-72 itself.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Soviet tank development.

Origins Of The Economy Tank

The T-72 began not as a primary Soviet tank project, but as a parallel design for rapid mobilization, developed at the Uralvagonzavod factory in Nizhny Tagil, while the more sophisticated T-64 remained the prestige program. Designer Leonid Kartsev, joined by Valeri Venediktov, drew on the best features of the T-64 and the older, simpler T-62 to produce in the T-72 what was essentially a throwback to 1960s design logic, fitted with an improved autoloader and a two-component main armament stored in a less cumbersome configuration than the original T-64’s. The result was intentionally unglamorous: cheaper and faster to build, easier to maintain, and suitable for export to Warsaw Pact allies and client states who would never receive the classified T-64. Field trials ran from 1971 to 1973, and upon acceptance the Chelyabinsk Tank Factory immediately ceased T-55 and T-62 production to retool for the new design.

*T-72B’s at the Chebarkul training ground, 2017. Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. CCA/4.0 Int’l.*

Approximately 25,000 T-72s of all variants were produced throughout the Soviet era and beyond, making it one of the most numerous main battle tanks in history. The autoloader — the feature that most defined it — reduced the crew from four to three by eliminating the human loader, allowing a lower, more compact hull profile. The carousel mechanism fires at a quoted average rate of eight rounds per minute, cranking the gun up three degrees above horizontal to align the breech with each shell. It was an elegant solution to the problem of crew size and vehicle volume. It was also the design decision that would eventually turn T-72s into the most photogenic casualties in modern warfare.

The Carousel Problem

The autoloader stores its propellant charges and projectiles in a ring around the base of the turret — a “carousel” sitting at precisely the point where incoming fire is most likely to penetrate. Unlike modern, post-1970 Western tanks, which stow ammunition behind blow-out panels designed to vent explosive forces upward in the event of a catastrophic penetration, the T-72’s carousel offers no such protection. A penetration of that zone triggers rapid cook-off, blowing the turret clear of the hull and eliminating the crew. The effect is spectacular and lethal in equal measure.

*Russian T-72B3 “cooking off”, after being struck by Ukraininan forces, 2022. Uknrainian Ministry of Defense. Public Domain.*

The T-72’s ammo-in-turret design magnified kills throughout the Ukraine war, though artillery accounted for much of the actual stopping power. What Ukraine demonstrated — and what analysts had long suspected — was that the vulnerability becomes catastrophic when combined with the proliferation of top-attack weapons. Javelins, NLAWs, and FPV drones all strike from above or at steep angles, hitting precisely the turret ring and upper hull where the carousel sits. The tank was not designed against this threat class. Nothing in its upgrade lineage fully addresses it.

Positions of crewmembers in a Soviet T-72 tank. The driver (1) is seated in the vehicles front, commander (2) and gunner (3) are positioned in the turret, directly above the carousel (4), which contains the ammunition for the autoloading mechanism. 2010 image by Alexpl. CCA/3.0 Unported.

Fifty Years Of Variants – All With One Fundamental Flaw

The T-72 has proven remarkably adaptable within the constraints of its basic architecture. As of 2025, operators range from Algeria and Armenia to India, Belarus, and Azerbaijan, with around 40 nations fielding some variant of the platform. India operates over a thousand under the designation Ajeya. The Czech Republic developed the T-72M4CZ with a Western Perkins engine and composite armor reaching 570mm equivalent at the turret face. Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania all produced licensed or derivative variants. Russia’s own T-72B3M, the current frontline upgrade, added Relikt explosive reactive armor, the Sosna-U thermal sight, and more recently hard-kill active protection systems — the first of which began appearing on frontline units in late 2024.

None of it solved the autoloader problem. In early 2024, a T-72B3 became the first tank in the world to frontally penetrate a US-supplied M1 Abrams in a tank-on-tank engagement in Ukraine — a data point Russia promoted heavily. The Abrams loss was real. So were the roughly 1,700 T-72s Russia has lost in the same theater. At the outset of the invasion in February 2022, Russia deployed approximately 2,100 late-model T-72s; estimated losses across the war now stand at around 1,700 vehicles, according to various sources.

The Lessons Ukraine Teaches

Ukraine became a real-time laboratory for what happens when a 1970s tank design meets cheap, proliferating drone technology. FPV drones carrying small explosive payloads proved capable of defeating T-72s consistently, detonating ammunition in the carousel even through improvised cage armor welded on to deflect the strikes. Russian crews responded with the so-called “turtle tank” configuration — welding metal roofing over the hull and turret — which reduced the drone threat while simultaneously eliminating visibility, ventilation, and the tank’s already marginal speed advantage. As Russia’s modern armor was depleted or withdrawn, Moscow fell back on T-62s from the 1960s and eventually T-55s, pulling vehicles from storage bases in the Russian Far East to back-fill frontline losses.

T-72 at the Drawsko Pomorskie training ground, *2008. Polish Ministry of National Defense. Public Domain.*

The question every other T-72 operator is now asking is how much of this transfers to their own strategic situation. The answer depends on adversary, terrain, and the quality of combined-arms integration the tank operates within. Ukraine showed that the T-72 fails catastrophically when used without adequate additions of mass, infantry, air cover, or electronic countermeasures against drone threats. It showed rather less about what a competently integrated T-72 force might accomplish — because Russia rarely provided one. For the forty-odd nations still fielding the platform, that distinction matters decisively. The tank’s flaws are structural and unresolvable without a fundamental redesign. Whether those flaws are decisive depends on what they are being asked to do, and against whom.

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.

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.