Web and Tech

Memory Lane – The First AK-47’s, Part 1

Michael Cessna March 26, 2023

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with modern firearms knows about the AK-47. In fact, we discussed it here, as part of another series. The AK-47 is so well known because it is so widespread, having been handed out at no- or low-cost to so many rifles, that they now appear on national flags and crests.

*Flag of Mozambique, showing an AK-47 in the canton. Public Domain.*

But the AK-47 was not the first weapon to have this kind of impact. This article is the first part of a two-part series on the rifles that had a similar impact to the AK-47. One of those is still all over the world. This one, however, is nowhere near as well known today.

Today, we’re going to talk about the Remington Rolling Block.

*Gevär m/1867, from the Armémuseum (The Swedish Army Museum) collection. CCA-4.0*

As the American Civil War raged, weapons using metallic cartridges began to appear, both in the hands of civilians and on the battlefield. While flashy weapons like the Henry and its descendant from Winchester Repeating Arms are better known, those weapons’ use in the military sphere was very limited. Early cartridge revolvers because popular with cavalry, but the Winchester remained almost solely a civilian weapon.

Armies are conservative by nature. The reason for this is understandable, given the stakes – when a business gambles on new technology, and the new tech fails, that is a very inconvenient; it might even be sad, if it causes the company to fail and costs workers their jobs. In contrast, if an army gambles on new tech and it fails, the consequences can be catastrophic out of all proportion to the technology. Case in point, the mitrailleuse.

*Muzzle view of a Mitrailleuse, Les Invalides, Paris. CCA/3.0*

The mitrailleuse was supposed to be France’s ultimate war-winning weapons system, able to sweep the Republic’s enemies from the battlefield like wheat before the scythe…The problem? It was kept so secret, no one ever trained the French artillery to handle it, and thus no one ever realized what it really was: a simple volley gun that could be loaded moderately quickly, and didn’t have much better range than the regular French rifles.

Result? The Prussians completely demolished the French in 1870-71, and the destruction wrought upon France was immense.

When it came to rifles in the post-American Civil War era, militaries around the world weren’t stupid – they knew that breech loading, metal-case cartridge rifles were the wave of the future…but which one was the best to use? Many countries tried various designs from their arsenals. Many other nations, unable to afford the infrastructure to mass-produce their own internal design, did what states have always done:

They went shopping.

The Remington Company of Ilion, New York, had been making firearms and ammunition since 1816. While it was legendary for its staggering levels of management incompetence (it finally folded permanently in 2020, broken into several pieces), it managed to produce a long and majestic line of firearms. And its first real “smash hit” was the Rolling Block.

The single-shot Remington Rolling Block began in 1863 as a slightly different design. Modified to strengthen the breech mechanism, by 1867, the rifle had matured into a solid weapon. It was rugged, reliable, and – most importantly for armies – was the last word in “soldier-proof”: it literally cannot misfire during loading, and cannot fire unless the breech is fully closed. The action was so strong, it needed virtually no modification when smokeless powder was developed in 1884. The only real danger was the chance of a misfired cartridge “cooking off” while it was being removed from the breech.

*Remington Rolling Block breech mechanism. CCA/3.0*

Remington’s rifle was made in a vast array of calibers and chambering’s. Remington would happily cut barrels for any cartridge provided by the customer. Mechanically much more simple than some thing like a British Martini-Henry and vastly more reliable than the Prussian needle-fired Dreyse rifle, the Rolling Block quickly took the military world by storm.

Although the Rolling Block was never adopted in any great numbers by the United States (due to a very parsimonious Congress), it was adopted by at least forty-seven nations over its lifespan, a staggering achievement for a time (~1880) when there were only about fifty-five “nations” in the world recognized as such.

From the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, to Peru, Qajar Persia and the Papal States (YouTube link), the Rolling Block fought wars, guarded walls and stood in parades for nearly fifty years. It was party to one of the oddities of the Spanish-American War (YouTube link), in 1898. Its last major war was actually World War One (YouTube link), where it served as a second-line rifle for rear area troops. It served countless hunters as far afield as Canada and the heart of Africa, and was “the other buffalo rifle,” next to the Sharps. The last version of the Rolling Block produced by Remington was the elegant “Number 7” target rifle (YouTube link), introduced in 1907.

But, as we will see next week, the Remington Rolling Block was buried in the public mind by a newly arrived competitor in the military rifle market, a rifle what would continue to serve for nearly a century in active military forces, a rifle so iconic, it will likely still be shooting when all the readers of this article will have passed beyond the Pale.

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

Steampunk Tech…What?

Michael Cessna March 10, 2023

The dawn of the 19^th Century heralded perhaps the greatest explosion of technological development in human history. While technologies in most areas had been advancing slowly for centuries, a little-understood combination of factors combined to radically reshape human societies, developing – for better or worse – faster in one hundred years, than at any other point in human history. Steam engines radically reshaped transport on land and sea, opening broad new ranges of products, both agricultural and manufactured; the telegraph radically altered patterns of human communication; medicine suddenly evolved from speculation and bloodletting to observable and testable practices, radically reshaping human mortality rates. The maturing of electrical power generation, transmission and use resulted not only in the telegraph and the light bulb, but of an early form of fax machine.

*Caselli’s pantelegraph tinfoil mechanism, 1866. Public Domain.*

In firearms technology, the developments were just as radical. In 1800, the only personal firearms out there were flintlock muskets (aside from some pretty radical one-offs). Less than thirty years later, the percussion cap significantly changed the calculus, by making the musket vastly more reliable. By the end of the 1860’s, self-contained rimfire and centerfire cartridges had begun to dominate the battlefield. Well before the end of the century, smokeless powder and functional machine guns had begun to fundamentally alter infantry warfare.

This steamroller of technological advancement held true in the world of artillery technology, as well. The muzzle-loading cannons of 1800 gave way to breech-loading guns by 1870…Which is where our story actually begins, when artillery met steam power, but off the railroad or warship.

Edmund Louis Gray Zalinski, (1849 – 1909) was a Polish-born American soldier, military engineer and inventor. Born to a Jewish family in Kórnik, Prussian Poland in 1849, he immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1853. Lying about his age to enlist, he joined the US Army and served during the Civil War. Commissioned a 2^nd LT in an artillery regiment from the state of New York, Zalinski served on the staff of General Nelson Miles. While not much is known of the details of his exact service, it was apparently enough to see him offered a commission in the Regular Army after the war, which is a notable thing, given the drastic post-war cuts in manpower and budgets. During his career, he served as an artillery officer at the Fort Jefferson military prison in Florida (where he authored an appeal to President Andrew Johnson to pardon Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had been convicted as a conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, for the doctor’s service during an outbreak of Yellow Fever at the prison), and as a professor of military science at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). During this time, he patented a number of inventions, including an artillery sight.

In 1883, Zalinski witnessed a demonstration of a pneumatic artillery weapon, designed by D. M. Medford of Chicago, Illinois. Zalinski began working on the idea, and eventually designed his own pneumatic gun. While the Army was not initially interested, the US Navy was intrigued. As chemistry had advanced, it had started to create high explosives, that were far more powerful than the older black powder; however, these new explosives were very unstable, and were liable to detonate when fired in a conventional gun. The Navy, wanting to find a way to use the new tool, thought that Zalinski’s new system might be the answer.

*USS VESUVIUS Dynamite Cruiser, 1888-1922. Photo: H.C. Peabody. Public Domain.*

In late 1887, the USS Vesuvius was laid down at the William Cramp & Sons yard in Philadelphia, PA; she would be commissioned some six months later. As fitted out, the Vesuvius (named for the Italian volcano) carried three 15-inch “dynamite guns” (a term coined by the press), that could each throw a 500-lbs shell (called a “torpedo”, because – Navy) out to about one-and-a-half miles, adjusting the range by varying the air pressure. Without a war to fight, however, the ship was mostly relegated to the dreaded “dog & pony” circuit, visiting port towns to help them celebrate various holidays. In South America, the Brazilian Navy also fitted a 15-inch model to an auxiliary cruiser named the Nichteroy, which was later sold to the US Navy, which named that ship the USS Buffalo.

*15inch ‘Dynamite Gun’, mounted on the Brazilian Navy ship Nitheroy, 1892. Photo by Marc Ferrez, 1982. Public Domain.*

Wanting to stay as far ahead of the game as possible, the Navy also commissioned the USS Holland in 1900, to see if an 8-inch version of Zalinski’s gun could be used on a submarine.

*USS Holland (SS-1), the first submarine of the U.S. Navy, showing the 8-inch dynamite gun muzzle open at the bow. Taken in 1898. US Navy Photo.*

Following a two-year stint in the yards for repairs, Vesuvius returned to the fleet in 1897, as relations with Spain worsened. These tensions would soon lead to the Spanish-American War, in 1898. While the Vesuvius performed well in nighttime raids on the Cuban city of Santiago, the ship was saddled with a number of flaws, not least of which was the fact that it was very difficult to aim her main guns, as they were set deep into her hull, instead of being mounted in more conventional turrets. This led the Navy to convert the Vesuvius into a torpedo test vessel in 1904, stripping her of her ”dynamite guns” and replacing them with a variety of torpedo tubes.

*U.S.S. Vesuvius, c. 1890-1901, showing its main gun barrels protruding from its deck. Library of Congress. Public Domain.*

As well, the US Army would abandon their experiments with Zalinski’s guns. The Army, which was responsible for coast artillery defense, had installed a number of 8- and 15-inch guns at various forts around the country. But, by 1900, the “dynamite guns” had all been dismounted and sold for scrap.

*“Battery Dynamite” at Fort Winfield Scott, San Francisco, CA. Photo c.1900. Public Domain.*

The reasons for the abandonment of Zalinski’s design are simple: the development of stable high explosives and the limited range of the guns made the “soft-launch” of the pneumatic guns irrelevant, as both issues were easily overcome by conventional artillery. As well, the low velocity of the shells forced them to fire at a high angle, limiting both their accuracy and impact force against armored targets.

While it is neat to speculate on “what if,” the fact remains that pneumatic artillery, although playing an interesting and important role in late-19^th Century artillery, has had its day: the support infrastructure to operate pneumatic guns, even using modern technology, is not sufficient for use in combat, even using rocket assist to increase their range.

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.

BREAKTHROUGH MAKES MICROBATTERIES AS EFFICIENT AS REGULAR BATTERIES

Freedomist Editor March 1, 2023

A team of scientists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign published a paper in Cell Reports Physical Science that claims they have figured out a way to create micro-scaled batteries without losing energy and power that is typical of current micro-batteries and designs. The team developed a new packaging design that eliminates much of the loss of power and energy of other designs, and they improved the overall performance of the battery by using much more dense electrodes than in previous designs.

Spy Tech – Numbers Stations: The Immortal Dinosaur

Michael Cessna February 21, 2023

In the intelligence world, one of the key disciplines is communicating information securely. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is, albeit for different reasons. Since the invention of radio communication – or “wireless telegraphy,” if you prefer – has been the Numbers Station.

To understand what a numbers station (One-Way Voice Link, or OWVL), is the technical term) is, we briefly have to discuss cryptography.

In its simplest form, cryptography is the art of making and breaking codes. Over the course of human history, many states and leaders have come up with various, often ingenious, codes and ciphers, as well as the means to both break them and manipulate them. Sir Francis Walsingham, official spymaster for the first Queen Elizabeth, was responsible (among many other things) for the interception and breaking of the ciphers used by Mary, Queen of Scots – an intelligence operation that resulted in that monarch’s execution. Likewise, the “polyalphabetic substitution cipher”, invented by an Italian cryptographer named Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553 (better known as the Vigenère cipher), was so strong, it remained unbroken until 1863. There are many other systems – ancient, new and unique – but all share the same fundamental flaw: Key Distribution.

*Front matter of Cifra (1553), Bellaso. Public Domain.*

In cryptography, encipherment and decipherment are relatively easy, but only if both sender and receiver share the code – and written codes, as proved by Walsingham – can be intercepted, opening messages’ secrets that could and did lead to war, death and betrayal.

Heavy stuff.

The goal of key distribution was only solved – for a time, at least – by the invention of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in the 1990’s…but that’s for another time.

But the problem, ‘back in the day’, seemed insurmountable: in order to decipher a message, the receiver required a copy of the code, a serious problem if a considerable distance separated sender and receiver. The Vigenère cipher, however, significantly reduced that problem through what we would now call “keywords”. Still, as was proven in 1854 by English mathematician and scientist Charles Babbage, Prussian army Major Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski in 1863, and by American engineer William F. Friedman in the 1920’s, the Vigenère cipher model could, and was, breakable, via frequency analysis.

As early as World War 1, strange radio transmissions in the short-wave band began to be heard over the public airwaves. These stations transmitted signals in Morse Code, but the transmissions were not encoded. Instead, they were just strings of letters, numbers, and occasionally both. It quickly became apparent that these signals were almost certainly in a code of some kind, but no one – in public, at least – was able to decode the signals. They were resistant to frequency attacks, and seemed to be immune to proven forms of cryptanalytic attack.

This was the births of the One-Time Pad (OTP) and the Numbers Station.

*An example of a one-time pad. Mysid, 2007. Public Domain.*

First outlined in 1882 by the American banker Frank Miller, the OTP was reinvented in 1917, patented in the United States by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne (pdf link). In this coding system, random strings of letters or numbers (and sometimes both) were added or subtracted against a list of random numbers, to produce an enciphered message. The receiver – who would have a copy of the list of numbers – would, using their copy of the list – work in reverse, to reveal the message. Once received and decrypted, both sender and receiver would cross out the section of the numbers list they had used…and never use those exact sequences again.

And, up to this day, as long as the strict requirements of the system are followed, the messages are indecipherable, unless a decrypter has access to the key. (For a full discussion of the practical use of OTP’s, visit this PDF file).

What someone had realized was that an encoded signal did not have to go via telephone, telegraph or mail, all of which were open to interception. Instead, all a secret agent in the field needed, was a radio capable of picking up the Morse signals on the proper frequency, to receive a message. And, with the OTP, the agent’s “codebook” was shrunken to the size of a roll of postage stamps.

As time went on, wireless radio moved from Morse to verbal speech, helping to eliminate errors in transmission. National intelligence services constructed powerful shortwave transmission towers in areas they controlled around the world, and – in addition to the normal propaganda broadcasts and music they would play – would periodically pause, and transmit strings of letters and/or numbers at specific times of the day.

*Three portable shortwave receivers. CCA/3.0*

Counterintelligence officers found this highly frustrating, because there was no way to monitor who had a simple radio receiver. Capturing agents was usually through those agent’s mistakes, not through any kind of cunning technology.

And that is where things stand, to this day. Numbers stations transmit messages “in the clear,” and unless someone makes a mistake, there is no way to decipher the messages. No nation, incidentally, will openly admit to operating a numbers station, and will only rarely acknowledge their existence, as happened in the “Atención spy case”, where the bumbling of a group of agents from Fidel Castro’s Cuba rolled up a network of some twenty-seven agents, among many other operations.

There are civilian monitoring groups out on the internet for the interested sleuth, such as the Numbers Stations Research & Information Center, and PRIYOM.

…Just…please don’t get caught doing dumb things. If certain parties in government think you are up to no good, you won’t be able to catch our articles on time.

Priorities, you know.

Will Humans Be Batteries and Antennas for 6G?

Freedomist Editor January 12, 2023

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have conducted a study that claims the human body has enough electro-magnetic power within it to power small IoT (Internet of Things) devices, including powering and becoming antennas for the next evolution of the internet, 6G. This new internet promises to be 1000 times quicker than 5G, which is still being rolled out even as we speak.

6G promises to make even more of our world interconnected to everything else, creating a total “internet’ that includes everything from your t-shirt to your pen, from the table in your house to the house itself. Humans becoming part of the 6G network could be viewed as a positive development for humans or a further de-humanization of them.

As 6G emerges, the ethical, philosophical, and theological implications of an all-consuming network will come to the fore, challenging humans to potentially question the wisdom of creating a system that reduces humans to batteries.

Musk Announces Trump Reinstatement Under Consideration

Freedomist Editor November 18, 2022

Elon Musk made two major announcements on Twitter today, one announcing certain accounts had beem reinstated, and one still being considered, and a new policy regarding “free speech,”

He said in the first tweeet:
New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.

He added this in the second tweet:

Kathie Griffin, Jorden Peterson & Babylon Bee have been reinstated. Trump decision has not yet been made.

He followed up with this:

Note, this applies just to the individual tweet, not the whole account

The newly restored Jordan Peterson replied:

Thanks Elen 🙂

@elonmusk

Really. Thank you sir. Probably best to reinstate Trump too. Let him do what he needs to do, and let the people decide. Right out in the open. Where such things should be decided.

New Study Could Lead to Micro-Robots Killing Cancer Without Harming Patients

Freedomist Editor November 14, 2022

CANCER ASSASSINS COULD PURGE THE BODY OF THE DEADLY DISEASE – Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich have released a study that shows the potential to engineer and grow micro-robots that can target cancer cells in the body for pinpoint delivery of cell-killing drugs that won’t harm any other cells other than the ones targeted. The robots were tested on cancerous mice, whose cancers were targeted 3 times more efficiently than traditional treatments did, with none of the additional harm to the body the other methods produce.

NEWSWATCH BLURB:

Scientists use magnets to deliver cancer-killing ‘micro-robots’ into the body – interestingengineering.com

Excerpt:

The invention, although exciting, is not entirely new. In November of 2021, researchers created a new way of moving chemotherapy drugs to the site of cancer cells with microbots.

The innovation was said to substantially enhance cancer treatment because it enabled the direct injection of chemo drugs into the cancerous cells.

The tiny microbots developed were guided to their goal (in this case, cancer cells) via magnets. Once there, they released the drug payload.

Composed of 3D-printed hydrogel in the shape of various animals (including a butterfly, crab, and fish), the little robotic critters exhibited gaps on the inside where engineers could stuff particles.

In April of 2022, researchers engineered a slimy turd-like robot powered by magnets that they said could one day be used to grab things from inside the body.

It consisted of a mixture of a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol, borax, and particles of neodymium magnets responsible for the magnetic attraction that leads to the slime’s movements.

The new study was published in the journal Science.

Study abstract:

Biohybrid bacteria–based microrobots are increasingly recognized as promising externally controllable vehicles for targeted cancer therapy. Magnetic fields in particular have been used as a safe means to transfer energy and direct their motion. Thus far, the magnetic control strategies used in this context rely on poorly scalable magnetic field gradients, require active position feedback, or are ill-suited to diffuse distributions within the body. Here, we present a magnetic torque–driven control scheme for enhanced transport through biological barriers that complements the innate taxis toward tumor cores exhibited by a range of bacteria, shown for Magnetospirillum magneticum as a magnetically responsive model organism. This hybrid control strategy is readily scalable, independent of position feedback, and applicable to bacterial microrobots dispersed by the circulatory system.

Read Full Article

Operation Bronze Griffin Assures Facebook Keeps DNC Enemies at Bay

Freedomist Editor November 7, 2022

FACEBOOK EXPOSED AS DNC SOCIAL MEDIA TOOL – The U.S. House GOP has released a 1,050 page report that exposes the DNC-FBI working in direct collusion with Facebook to assure the DNC narrative is protected and its opponents are throttled or eliminated altogether. The report exposes “Operation Bronze Griffin,” which worked as a liaison between DNC-Facebook and DNC-FBI to control American politician discourse for the good of the party.

NEWSWATCH BLURB:

House GOP report says Facebook giving FBI ‘partisan’ tips – news.google.com
Excerpt:

The FBI has a politically one-sided surveillance partnership with Facebook under the apparent name Operation Bronze Griffin, according to a bombshell report released Friday by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.

The 1,050-page report broadly outlines the FBI’s alleged pro-Democrat political bias — just days after revelations of a secret Facebook portal through which authorities can request the deletion of alleged “misinformation” from the world’s top social media platform.

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CCP Welcomes Former Biden Official to his New TikTok Executive Position

Freedomist Editor November 7, 2022

FORMER BIDEN OFFICIAL NOW WORKING FOR CCP’S TIKTOK – Jamal Brown, the former Pentagon official and campaign spokesperson for Joe Biden during the 2020 Mass-Mailer Presidential Campaign, is now taking a top position with the CCP’s owned and controlled social media app TikTok. President Donald Trump was trying to ban TikTok before the mass mailer President reversed the decision. Now it appears he’s also lending his best minds to help the Communist Party do better harvesting hearts and minds from American teens, for the good of the whole.

NEWSWATCH BLURB:

TikTok hires former Biden campaign press secretary, Pentagon spokesman for top gig at Chinese-owned video app – news.google.com
Excerpt:

Senior Republican and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr discusses the Chinese Communist Party’s data harvesting practices for its ‘malign goals.’

A former campaign spokesman for President Biden and top Pentagon official has taken a job at TikTok.

It was first revealed in Politico newsletter on Tuesday that Jamal Brown is “joining TikTok to manage policy communications for the Americas, primarily focusing on the United States.”

TikTok has not appeared to put out an official statement regarding the hiring decision, but Brown’s Twitter bio has already been updated to show his employment for the Chinese-owned social media app.

From February 2021 until February 2022, Brown served as the deputy Pentagon press secretary at the U.S. Department of Defense. He previously worked as one of three national press secretaries for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

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Outside The Box Thinking: Are We At The Dawn Of The DIY Air Force…?

Michael Cessna November 4, 2022

Previously, we have talked about ersatz combat vehicles at length. While 300 angry people, armed with 200 machetes, 100 rifles and 50 rounds of ammunition made a respectable revolution as late as the mid-1990’s, the proliferation cheap, reliable and effect modern combat rifles around the world have shifted insurgent capabilities and tactics, there has been little movement in the other realms of physical combat, outside of the land environment.

Where any group armed with modern automatic weapons can turn themselves into “motorized cavalry” by seizing a used car and truck dealership and a tanker truck of fuel, there have been few examples of groups organizing actual combat ships on water, using what are essentially armed civilian pleasure craft – it happens, but infrequently.

Likewise, the use of equally ersatz militarized drones has been on the rise, for surveillance, assassination and combat. This theater of use has been accelerated in recent years, as many drones with significant capabilities, from a military perspective, are available “off the shelf” for well under US$200, with many retailing at under US$100. Expanding the capabilities of such devices requires little investment for a group able to recruit young and tech-savvy teens and early-20’s with an interest in gaming and computer mods.

Far more rare, are instances of “guerrilla air forces.” Appearing in significant numbers only twice since WW2, civilian aircraft being used as “armed combatant craft” usually appear in one’s and two’s, used by small states and groups who can only afford (or receive through donations) the kind of small, single-engine aircraft that are normally used for leisure flying or primary flight instruction for trainee pilots.

The question at hand, then, is this: Can an insurgent force create their own air force? That is what we will examine in this article.

The first questions to answer are, Where is the insurgent force getting its aircraft?, and What kind of aircraft can they easily acquire?

The first thing to understand, is that our hypothetical guerrilla force is not (probably) going to be buying craft like the AT-6B Wolverine, A-29 Super Tucano, AT-802L Longsword. These aircraft are being developed by defense contractors for established governments; for an insurgent group to obtain dedicated craft like this would require major-nation support. What we are discussing here, is the insurgent force acquiring specifically civilian craft, and using them as an “air force.”

*An Afghan Air Force A-29 Super Tucano soars over Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 14, 2015. USAF Photo. Public Domain.*

The insurgent force will be limited, first, by its financial levels – aircraft, even small craft like a Piper or an immortal Cessna 172 (go ahead – reflect on the irony…Moving on…) or 208 Caravan are expensive, for a small group, with a Cessna 172 coming in at around US$40-50,000 for a used model, each. Obviously, this is a major impediment, unless a group is very well funded.

On the other hand, these small aircraft can be effectively armed; can land on almost any flat patch of ground or blacktop road long enough; require no overly complicated tools or equipment to maintain, and have cheap and readily available spare parts and maintenance manuals available on the open market. These aircraft can – and are – be hidden in rural barns and warehouses very effectively, only requiring a door large enough for their wings.

Given the above, then, the next question is, Where can the prospective insurgent air force get its pilot?

The one major downside to an insurgent force using aircraft is the need for competent training. While learning to fly a basic aircraft such as a Piper or a Cessna is not actually difficult for most people with a decent high school education to learn, teaching one to fly requires a pilot with at least 250 flight hours to begin training for such a rating as an Instructor Pilot (IP). However, there are plenty of IP’s out there who could be recruited to train pilots for an insurgent force.

Ground maintenance on these common civilian airframes, as previously stated, is not difficult, and spares are common enough to not present major issues. That brings us to weapons: what can you arm these airplanes with?

Simply placing one or two people armed with rifles in the back seats of these kinds of aircraft, and having them shoot at enemies on the ground is not complicated. Likewise, hanging machine guns out of a side door is also relatively uncomplicated to set up.

*Afghan Air Force Sgt. Razeg, a Gunner, fires an M-240 weapon from an Mi-17 Helicopter during a mission from Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov., 2012. USAF Photo. Public Domain.*

Salvage and theft of opposition government aircraft – as well as weapons bought on the black market – is another important source of ground-to-air capability. In like manner to recovered helicopter rocket pods being used as ground-to-ground multiple rocket launchers since the civil wars in Libya, the same pods could be mounted to civilian airframes.

This is especially true for smaller pods, such as the venerable Hydra-70 rocket pods. In fact, the prevalence of mounting the ex-Soviet SA-5 rocket system, fired by UB-16 and UB-32 launchers to “technical vehicles” in both Libya and Syria have begun to inspire Western firms to begin cashing on the market, with such “drop-in kits” as the new V.A.M.P.I.R.E. system, which is a drop-in kit for a conventional civilian pickup truck, giving it the ability to fire four Hydra-70 rockets at a time in the ground-to-ground role.

*Hydra 70 rockets in two M261 launch pods, mounted to an AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter, unknown date. US Army Photo. Public Domain.*

As well, should the guerrilla force come into possession of anti-aircraft weapons such as the Stinger missile, that force could conceivably mount such weapons to a civilian airframe, which would be a very nasty surprise to any opposing aircraft that did not know about them.

Note that the foregoing applies to helicopters, as well, although rotary-wing craft are generally more expensive than their comparable brethren.

So…Is it possible for a guerrilla/insurgent force to create and operate an actual “air force” on the cheap? The answer, clearly, is a solid Yes, albeit with caveats concerning the perennial problem of money. Such a force would clearly be no match against a First World air force, but it likely won’t need to, at least initially.

Never become complacent inside your box…because someone is always outside, thinking about how to get in.