After the U.S. Energy Department declared the Covid-19 virus came from a Wuhan Lab leak, now the FBI Director, Christopher Wray is ready to join in that assertion. This follows years of blacklisting of Americans who shared the same belief, and censorship of this assumption on DNC-CCP-run social media platforms and in DNC-CCP allied newsrooms.
As thoughtful Americans investigated the Covid-19 virus, they discovered evidence the virus was a man-made virus leaked from China’s Wuhan Lab. Corporate America decided to use its culture-making power to destroy the lives of those who made such a claim, cancelling them from their jobs, cancelling them from social media, and assuring the corporate-owned DNC-CCP media continued to demonize dissent from the party narrative. Now, as China rises in power and the DNC-CCP contemplates its relationship with the CCP, Team Biden is ready to embrace the truth that the virus WAS a man-made virus released from China’s Wuhan Lab.
It is the nature of a frenemy relationship in which both sides depend on the other for some of their tyrant-making powers at home against their own people, that each gives the other assistance even as it seeks to undermine what power could be used to tip the advantage in their frenemy’s favor. Even as Team Biden continues to support China’s spy apps like TikTok to permeate our homes and influence our children, they are also hoping leaning into convenient truth could check some of China’s credibility overseas, especially in Africa, where the U.S. and the West is falling behind China’s grifting of her new African colonies.
Near the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union was searching for a new rifle. While the country was very happy with the venerable 7.62x54mmR (Rimmed)cartridge (dating from the 1880’s), its primary service rifle – the Mosin-Nagant – was long past its due date. The Mosin was, and is, a terrible rifle. Its one major positive, was that the Soviet state arms factories had been producing it for so long, they could (figuratively) make the rifles in their sleep. The 7.62x54R was, and remains, a fantastic cartridge for machineguns, as well as for sniper weapons, but as a general-issue cartridge for infantry weapons, there are serious issues that run against the cartridge, as the Soviets discovered to their regret.
SVT-40 Russian semi-automatic rifle (1940), without magazine. Caliber 7.62x54mmR. From the collections of Armémuseum (Swedish Army Museum), Stockholm, Sweden. CCA/4.0
The solution presented itself in the form of the M43 cartridge. The M43 – developed in 1943 – was formally adopted in 1945, for use in the SKS rifle. But the SKS, although a perfectly fine weapon, was on the tail end of technical developments, much like the Western FN-49 rifle. The Soviets had found that as war had changed, so too did tactics need to evolve as well. We touched on these tactical concerns recently, but a short review is warranted.
In their fight-back against Nazi Germany, the Soviets had learned that massed, fully automatic firepower from the infantry, assaulting alongside tanks, was one of the main keys to victory. This was especially true in assaulting into urban areas, where suppressive fire, delivered in close concert with the infantry, was vital to success. In these tight, fast-moving combat environments, long, cumbersome and slow-firing weapons like the Mosin (even in its shorter cavalry carbine version) were simply incapable of getting the tasks done.
The Soviet solution was deploying massive numbers (YouTube link) of submachine guns. This, however, was only a stopgap solution, as almost all SMG’s fire pistol caliber only. Even when using a longer barrel than a handgun, this significantly restricted the range of the weapons, forcing Soviet infantry to not fire until almost at point-blank range. And after that, if ranges suddenly opened back up, SMG-armed troops were immediately thrust back into a severe range disadvantage.
The solution to this problem was not a smaller weapon, but a carbine-class cartridge – and hence, the M43 was born. Fired from a 14- to 16-inch barrel, the M43 is accurate to 300-400 meters.
Home studio shot of the most common pistol and rifle cartridges. From left to right: 5.45×39mm, 5.56×45mm NATO, 7.62×39mm (the M43 cartridge), 7.62×51mm NATO and 7.62×54mmR. CC0/1.0
As noted above, although the SKS was – and is – an excellent carbine, it is severely limited by its fixed, 10-round magazine. A different weapon was required, a weapon that could feed its ammunition through a detachable magazine, similarly to an SMG, and with a similar ammunition capacity, of preferably in the range of thirty rounds. It needed to be selective-fire (capable of firing either single shots, for accurate fire, or emptying its contents in bursts, in the assault), and it needed to be compact, to fit in tight confines in vehicles, and when maneuvering through trenches and urban areas.
SKS Carabine, with charger strip of M43 ammunition inserted. CCA/4.0
The Soviets had faced the German StG-44 – the first true “assault rifle” – on the Eastern Front, and it fit the requirements for their new weapon. Although certain quarters still try to insist that what became the AK47 is a copy of the StG-44, nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from a superficial resemblance on the outside, the AK47 and the StG-44 are completely different weapons under the skin.
Although the story has almost certainly been embellished over the decades, Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919-2013) had grown up tinkering, as so many inventors do, with anything mechanical. But his “grease monkey” side was balanced with his love of poetry; he would go on to publish six books of poems over the years. In 1938, Kalashnikov was conscripted into the Red Army, where his engineering skills had him first assigned as a tank mechanic, and then a tank commander. When Nazi Germany turned on Stalinist Russia, Kalashnikov commanded his T-34 tank in several battles, before being seriously wounded at the Battle of Bryansk in October of 1941.
While recuperating in the hospital, Kalashnikov began designing small arms in earnest. His design for a submachine gun was rejected in 1942, but was seen as good enough to warrant assigning him to the Central Scientific-developmental Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate of the Red Army.
The original prototype of the Kalashnikov rifle. CCA/2.0
Over time, his design would evolve, eventually being adopted as the AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova, model 1947).
English: AK-47 copies confiscated from Somali pirates by Finnish minelayer Pohjanmaa, during Operation Atalanta, c.2012. Public Domain.
Comparatively light in weight and relatively cheap (especially after a stamping process was developed for the receivers), the AK47 was also more reliable than most of its Western competitors, and was a very easy weapon to learn. If the stock version of the AK47 has a major fault, it is the rifle’s “iron” (or, “manual”) sights, which – while usable – need real improvement. In this regard, however, it is no worse than most of the rifles and carbines that preceded it.
Once the design was perfected, the Soviet Union began producing them on a gargantuan scale. Factoring in licensing to non-Soviet manufacturers, a 2007 study (pdf link) estimated that, of the c.500million firearms in circulation in the world, approximately 100million are AK-variant weapons, with some ~75million being AK47’s.
AK47s are, quite literally, everywhere: in every conflict zone in the world – actual or potential – a person is guaranteed to run across an AK-variant rifle. The weapon is so ubiquitous, it is a central feature on national flags and emblems from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to East Timor, in the Pacific Ocean.
The only significant version to see widespread service to date is the AK74. Entering service in 1974, the AK74 is chambered for the 5.45x39mm cartridge. This caliber was chosen as a result of studies of infantry combat during the Vietnam War (1946-1975), where the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerillas battled with French and US forces, the latter of whom deployed the M-16, in 5.56x54mm. While sharing the simplicity and reliability of its older sibling, the –74 is merely different – “good different,” to be sure, but only that. The later Kalashnikov variants have never surpassed the older rifle in popularity, reinforcing the rubric, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
For good or for ill, Kalashnikov rifles have battled across the globe for over 75 years, and are not likely to disappear within the lifetimes of the readers of this article. Anyone who thinks that they may encounter a Kalashnikov model at some point, would do well to find a manual – if not an actual weapon – and learn how to employ it.
One never knows when that kind of information might come in handy.
AK47 Manual, 2009. USMC. Public Domain.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
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.
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.
…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.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
There are growing cases mounting against the Chinese Communist Party Owned Social Media TikTok accusing the company of illegally spying on its users and giving private user date to third parties. Currently there are multiple cases across five states, with over twenty (and counting) states banning TikTok on government-owned devices.
The Biden administration continues to allow the dissemination of Chinese Communist Party software into the homes of millions of American children and adults, with little to no accountability and consideration of the basic duties of the Federal government, to defend the people from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
According to an exhaustive report by noted U.S. journalist Sydney Hersh, the Biden administration planned for the demolition of the Nordstream pipeline, through which Russian gas was reaching Europe. The report was released in a substack article.
Following the report, the Russians are now calling for an International Probe into the incident, a call that is sure to gain momentum among Russian and China adjacent nations, which is an increasing number, especially in Africa.
“Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal,” Hersh wrote, in part, in his report.
The sabotage effectively ended Russia’s natural gas leverage over Europe. It forced Russian-gas-dependent nations to develop new solutions for energy, through different partnerships and inhouse shifts in energy tech. For instance, the Germans eased restrictions on coal to meet the new post-Nordstream reality.
Hersh’s report follows a German report that exonerated the Russians from being self-saboteurs.
If the President of the United States ordered such an overt action that can only be interpreted by Russia as an act of war, then he seriously violated the Constitution by taking an action of war without congressional approval. More than that, he pushed Russia into an existential corner, a nation with thousands of nuclear warheads, an impeachable act on its own if ever any of Donald Trump’s showpeachments merited actual impeachment.
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution. A few months later, when it emerged that Russian authorities had been quietly getting estimates for the cost to repair the pipelines, the New York Times described the news as “complicating theories about who was behind” the attack. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
While it was never clear why Russia would seek to destroy its own lucrative pipeline, a more telling rationale for the President’s action came from Secretary of State Blinken.
Asked at a press conference last September about the consequences of the worsening energy crisis in Western Europe, Blinken described the moment as a potentially good one:
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”
Real Europeans suffer as a result of this action, for, while Europe has been able to meet much of the burden of replacing the lost energy resource, that hasn’t been entirely the case for all households. The extended cost is felt in the price of food across Europe, which further burdens the least with the most needs.
Blinken talks about weaponizing energy while he lauds what seems to be DNC-America’s weaponization of energy directly, by bombing a critical pipeline that triggered a man-made environmental disaster. The DNC chose power over the planet. Let that sink in “environmentalists.”
The Swedes are feeling the heat of Russia’s expansionist actions. They’ve already begun the process of joining NATO and now the Swedes are considering expand the draft to assure they have enough troops to meet the threat Russia right now presents to them.
The Swedes reinstated the draft in 2017 but so far have not fully acted on it. They only have 5,000 conscripts. They plan on doubling that by the end of the year to 10,000, with more expansions expected. The move sends a message to the Russians that the Swedes are resolved to resist any efforts by the Russians to expand their borders into Sweden.
How the Media lies to the American People – and why that is more dangerous than you think…
As of mid-November of 2022, the American Electorate remains as divided as ever, if not more than at any time since the Civil War. The “mainstream media” continually highlights the chaos of the recent mid-term elections, appearing to inadvertently present the truth of a lie, while trying to ‘spin’ those facts to represent their diametric opposite. Simultaneously, the same body ‘amps up’ hysteria over social media giant Twitter’s impending demise, despite its record growth since being bought out by billionaire businessman Elon Musk, while partisan senators threaten a private business if Musk refuses to bow to their will, regardless of the legality of their claims and threats.
Along with these “amplifications,” the mainstream media leaves unspoken the greater fear: the silence of the armed American public. In a word, America is “too” quiet: in many other countries, actual armed rebellion would have already broken out…but not within the United States. And yet…a quiet, yet palpable tension is building; whispers of a call to arms from a once quiet “American Street” are slowly beginning to grow louder. This is not a potential that should be ignored – unlike most countries in the world, the population of the United States is among the most well-armed in history; the closest analogies in recent times are Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Let that sink in.
What the media is not talking about, what it is diligently avoiding talking about at all costs, are the massive protests around the world, protests rivaled only by the Russo-Ukrainian War in their potential to destabilize – if not potentially overthrow – the current world order.
In Brazil, the United States’ closest analog in the Western Hemisphere, tens of thousands of protesters have been marching across the country in protest for nearly two weeks over the razor-thin defeat – well within the margins of error – of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro by disgraced left-wing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Many of these protesters are calling on the Brazilian Armed Forces to intervene to keep Bolsonaro – who has not conceded defeat – in office, claiming that the elections were rigged. The calls for the military to intervene in the country’s political process are not to be taken lightly – the Brazilian military has done so in the past – four times, in fact – sometimes lasting decades. Such an economic destabilization would threaten a US$280billion export market, at a time when global supply chains have not recovered from the jackhammer blows of Covid-19 and the logjams caused by the grounding of the massive container ship MV Ever Given.
But, if Brazil and the Russo-Ukrainian War (as well as the many ongoing terrorist campaigns and guerrilla wars around the world) were the only issues at hand, those would present only minor disruptions to the world. However, this is very much not the case.
The populations of the “Western World” are extremely unhappy as many, if not most, nations identified as “Western” are seemingly making insanely self-destructive policy decisions, attempting to conform to the pronouncements of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF, founded by German engineer and economist Professor Klaus Schwab, is a self-appointed, international organization of lobbyists who promote the concept of “The Great Reset” and a reformation of the social contract, concepts that are wholly and completely embraced by the administration of Joe Biden. Schwab has alluded to promoting ideas of forcing people to accept controversial Covid-19 vaccines (YouTube link), despite their highly questionable efficacy versus side effects. Criticisms of the WEF are rampant, not least because it is, colloquially speaking, about as transparent as a granite block. One of its main criticisms is the formation of a detached elite, believing themselves to have no national loyalty whatsoever, with some observers going so far as to describe them as a “mafiocracy” of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats and politicians.
As a result, it should not be surprising that such detached views lead to the promotion of insane policies by adherent of this hydra that are embedded in national governments to whom they hold to no loyalty. As a result, tens of thousands of Germans are protesting over being forced to turn to firewood as a frigid winter begins to take shape; Frenchmen and Italians march in the tens of thousands against the skyrocketing cost of living in those nations; and many worry that increasing tensions between Greece and Turkey could erupt into an actual shooting war.
Likewise, these economic woes are being exacerbated by government’s toadying to the shrill demands of the globalist “climate change” movement, demanding that draconian climate controls be enforced, regardless of the fact that not a single proposal for alternative energy production such groups have advanced has proven to be in any way viable.
A quick perusal of the sources of the above sources show that the latest substantive results do not come from “first reference” news sources. There are plenty of international news agencies around the world that are outside the mainstream, yet that present quality reporting…Not that you, the Reader, are going to see their stories carried by mainstream outlets. You have to go looking for them.
And that is the point.
There is a war going on, a war – if a certain dramatic license can be allowed – over your minds and bodies. You, personally, as well as your families, are the product and the goal of bodies like the WEF.
But, it is not simply the West that is being battered by the whims of detached billionaires thinking that they can play at being God. In fact, the ongoing low-key holocaust in Africa is also playing its part. The endemic interference – both by First World states and corporations – which keeps generational quarrels oozing blood is contributing to a building tension across the continent, a tension that if it snaps on its own will rival the consequences of the United States “cutting loose.”
The danger lies not in the “Snap” itself. Tensions happen in societies all throughout history. The problem lies in the deliberate nature of forcing ever-increasing tension on a structure that was already stretched to its limits. “Just in time delivery” and “offshore outsourcing” proved economically profitable for the globalist ideal – if catastrophic to local economies – but its cultic devotion to economic efficiency and profitability left the world’s economy unusually vulnerable to supply chain disruption, as was amply demonstrated in 2020-2021. The response of the WEF-elite, however, was not to pause and rethink their strategy. Instead, the WEF and its adherents in various governments have continued to push their agendas forward, despite the wider dangers that are being revealed.
Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists have wondered for decades about a period known as the “Late Bronze Age Collapse”, a period of about 300 years, beginning in c.1100BC, where the advanced civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean seemed to implode and collapse. Dr. Eric Cline, PhD has described this event as a “systems collapse”, where a highly interconnected system vulnerable to a combination of threats – each individually insignificant, but collectively devastating – collapsed completely (YouTube link), not in a period of centuries, but in a period of one or two decades, at most…in a time when it could take weeks to cross the Mediterranean.
It is a truism, that the speed of communications – via faster ships, aircraft and the internet – have made the world smaller and faster. This being so, when detached, elitist billionaires play with a house of cards that they do not understand, they will not be the only ones who pay the price.
You will.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
PUTIN WANTS OPPOSITION TO UKRAINE WAR STRIPPED OF CITIZENSHIP – In a move reminiscent of the desires of the DNC in America, Vladimir Putin is pushing a bill that will cancel your Russian citizenship if you oppose the party’s policies, specifically its policy regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Without a bill of rights, the bane of DNC existence, the DNC-wannabe is sure to get the bill passed and codified into law, thus outdoing the possible source of Putin’s inspiration, the DNC’s method for dealing with dissent in America (by declaring the opposition seditionists while supporting the death of the republic themselves).
President Vladimir Putin has put forward legislation that would allow authorities to revoke the passports of naturalized Russian citizens who oppose the invasion of Ukraine, state media reported Sunday.
Putin proposed amendments to Russia’s law on citizenship that would make “discrediting” and spreading “fake news” about the Russian military grounds for denaturalization, according to the RIA Novosti news agency.
Russia passed laws against “discrediting” and spreading “fake news” about the army shortly after it sent troops into Ukraine in late February, a move Kremlin critics say has been used to silence most anti-war voices.
DESPITE US INTERVENTION, HAITI’S GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO COLLAPSE – The current prime Minister of Haiti, Ariel Henry, has dismissed Justice Minister Dorcé days after he had the Minister fire Government Commissioner Jacques Lafontant. Interior Minister Liszt Quitel was also fired by the embattled PM, who promptly appointed himself to be both Prime Minister and Interior Minister of Haiti.
Prime Minister Ariel Henry has dismissed Haiti’s justice minister, interior minister and its government commissioner in a fresh round of political upheaval.
Former Justice Minister Berto Dorcé first fired Government Commissioner Jacques Lafontant on Henry’s orders before being ousted himself days later along with Interior Minister Liszt Quitel, according to documents that The Associated Press obtained on Monday.
In previous articles, we have touched on the ideas for building “DIY” ground- and air-combat forces. Today, we will take a look at the naval aspect of this idea.
Water-based travel is not new. In fact, for the majority of human history, travel further than 100 miles in any direction was usually faster, cheaper and safer than overland travel, even if wide detours were necessary. Without getting into the physics of fluid dynamics, movement is a lot easier when nature is helping you along, especially when friction resistance is determined more by shape than by weight. It was not until the advent of railroads in the early 19th Century that land travel became faster and comparatively safer than travel by water.
River Landscape with Man in Rowing Boat and Tree-Lined Shore. Johannes Hermanus Koekkoek (1778–1851). 1800-1850. Public Domain.
However, when looking at the military dimensions of water travel, while there were early examples of purpose-built warships, such as the Greek and Roman “triremes”, the vast majority of ships were perfectly suitable for both military and commercial use. Mostly, this consisted for transporting troops, animals, equipment and other supplies. Because of the ships’ designs of these eras, most vessels were also capable of going fairly far upriver; this was the main tactic of Viking raiders, from the 8th-11th Centuries, whose “Karvis”, “Snekkjas” and “Drakkars” drew as little as 30in/762mm in draft.
Gokstad Ship, late 9th Century, Viking Ship Museum, Oslo. CCA/2.0 Generic.
As previously noted, however, after about 1860, a dramatic divergence began to open between purely military and purely civilian merchant vessels. Without restating those points here, by the end of World War 2, it seemed that the divide was complete and unbridgeable: “Warships” fought in wars, and civilian vessels supported the warships, while remaining mostly unarmed.
But, there lurked an exception: the PT Boat.
Patrol Torpedo Boat (PT) 658 transits past U.S. Navy ships at the Portland Rose Festival. US Navy photo. Public Domain.
Developed just as WW2 was starting, the “Patrol Torpedo Boat” quickly became famous as the heavily armed war vessel of WW2, on a weapon-to-tonnage basis. Not much larger than most commercial yachts, the PT’s were fully capable of sinking full-size warships – as long as their torpedoes worked. If there weren’t enough enemy warships around to sink, the PT’s could easily remove their torpedoes, and bolt on heavier cannons to destroy lightly armored barges and lighters, as well as extra machine guns, turning them into floating anti-aircraft batteries.
While the US Navy seemed to have forgotten the lessons of PT Boat warfare after the end of the war, that turned out to not be the case. While light-armed craft more or less vanished from the Navy’s inventory after WW2, that was due to the savage budget cuts and vicious organizational fights of the post-war years, more than because the Navy didn’t want the boats. Indeed, the Navy had to burn significant political clout just to help prevent the Marine Corps from being disbanded by an Army and Air Force that were battling for scarce funding.
As soon as the Vietnam War began to heat up, it was discovered that North Vietnam was supplying the Viet Cong and its own troops in the South by smuggling arms and supplies down the coast in civilian sampans. The solution to this were the “Swift Boats” – small, high-speed, aluminum-hulled boats, heavily armed with machine guns. With very shallow drafts, these fast craft were able to chase down almost any watercraft, and usually outgunned whatever they could catch. As well, they could land small parties of US and Vietnamese Marines or SEALs deep in enemy territory, doing great damage to areas the enemy had thought to be relatively safe.
Fast Patrol Craft (PCF, Swift boat) during riverine operation in Vietnam. US Navy photo. Public Domian.
After the war in Vietnam ended, the US Navy once again had to struggle for funding, and small combat craft went onto the back burner. But not completely. As funding improved in the 1980’s small combat craft came back to prominence, leading to the expansion of the Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen (SWCC) career field in the Navy, and the development of the SOC-R. NATO partners took note, at least to some extent.
Like naval warfare and transport in general, small craft-based warfare is not new. In the modern era, say from 1800 to today, military raids against pirates operating from swampland bases with open canoes and boats was far more common than fighting large ships, à la Hollywood pirate films. Indeed, in World War 1, the “Battle for Lake Tanganyika” was fought and decided by a handful of small boats that barely qualified as life rafts; the largest vessel, the SMS Graf von Goetzen, was barely 235ft long; that’s short for a warship.
German steamship Goetzen before its warship conversion in 1915. Public Domain.
Likewise, Filipino guerrillas fighting the Japanese in their archipelago after Japan’s conquest of the island group in early-1942 made good use of small-boat smuggling tactics to make amphibious raids throughout the islands for three years, until the war ended. The Philippine government continued this successful strategy in the Huk Rebellion that followed the war, and both government and anti-government forces continue to use boats for the same purposes to this day.
Starting from essentially scratch in 1976, the LTTE quickly showed – much as the Islamic State would do, decades later – that all that was required for an insurgency to grow exponentially, was intelligent, cunning and quick-witted leadership…Even if they end up using straight-out terror tactics.
In its 25-year history, the LTTE’s “Sea Tigers”, with no more than 3,000 personnel at any given time, not only fought the Sri Lankan Navy to a standstill, sinking nearly 30 vessels, while also conducting amphibious raids, it conducted widespread “strategic support operations”, until the Sri Lankan military got serious, got its collective act together, and ground the LTTE down by mid-2009.
Slovenian fast patrol boat HPL-21 Ankaran (Super Dvora MK II class), 2009, of a type used by the Sri Lankan Navy. CCA-3.0
But – what about other groups?
While the LTTE managed to create a ferociously effective “commando navy,” the “Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps”, has taken the direction of using masses of small “Boghammer”-type speedboats. Based on a design from the Swedish company Boghammar Marin AB developed in the 1980’s, the modern “Boghammer” has taken on the moniker to describe any improvised naval fighting vessel.
A speed boat (used in a terror attack attempt on 5 May 1990) in the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum, Haifa, Israel. CCA/3.0
As used by the IRGC-N, the Boghammer is armed with a variety of weapons, including RPG-7 type rocket launchers, as many as three 12.7mm heavy machine guns, recoilless rifles and 107mm multiple rocket launchers based on the Type 63 MRL. And these craft do pose a threat to major-nation warships, when used in swarms. After nearly ten years of study, it remains a problem that major-state navies – including those of the United States and Great Britain – don’t talk about in public.
That’s all well and good…but, what about “modern guerrillas”? The above examples, including the LTTE, were all either formally organized navies, or were at least funded on a regular basis. What about a small guerrilla force? What can they do on the water?
Quite a bit, actually.
While large, ocean going vessels are going to be mostly out of a small group’s reach, at least initially, acquiring civilian pleasure craft (through theft or “under the table” deals) that can be modified to carry weapons is not at all difficult. While craft as large as Boghammers are uncommon, they are not so unusual that they would be noticed.
There is, however, another class of vessel normally associated with major states that most people would not associated with guerrilla warfare: long-range submersibles – i.e., submarines…Specifically, drug-running “narco-subs”.
Narco-submarine captured by the Peruvian Navy in December 2019. Ministerio de Defensa del Perú. CCA/2.0.
While “combat submersibles” in the modern era begin with David Bushnell’s Turtle in 1775-1776, submarines have only played a pivotal role in naval warfare since WW1, and the first “Battle of the Atlantic”. Submarines have always been complicated and dangerous craft – there is always a solid chance that something will go catastrophically wrong while submerged. Survival rates when things like that happen at sea are never good.
Submarines are also expensive, in the extreme. As a result, few people imagine a threadbare guerrilla army being able to operate something as technically complex and ridiculously expensive as a submarine. Sure, there are “vanity” submarines out there, used to excursions by cash-rich vacationers, but surely no one is actually building submarines intended for combat.
Established navies, however, beg to differ – which is why they are spending significant amounts of money designing advanced harbor-protection systems…specifically to counter small combat submarines.
But, for our purposes, narco-subs are not that. Narco-subs are generally thought of as “semi-submersible”, in that they cannot “deep dive,” like a conventional submarine. Instead, they are designed to run at or just below the surface. And these craft are not small – narco-subs with cargo capacities of up to 17,000lbs have been captured. That’s a significant capacity for a “guerrilla shipyard”.
And, as hard as the militaries of North and South America try, they cannot catch them all; at best, one in ten are estimated to be intercepted. Worse, the drug subs are being much more sophisticated, diving deeper, becoming less detectable, carrying more, and extending their range, with some now being able to cross the Atlantic, to bring drugs into the waters of Spain and Portugal.
This is a serious concern, and not from the narcotics angle. While infiltrating “operators” into a nation (even the United States) is relatively easy, importing weapons and explosives is not. And 10-17,000lbs of weapons, ammunition and explosives at a time provides significant capacity for an attacker.
Indeed, since 2000, abandoned narco-subs – true deep-diving models – have been discovered in South America that have cargo capacities in the range of 20,000lbs or more, and with ranges of c.3,700km, more than enough to reach New Orleans from most of the South American Caribbean coast.
A fully-operational submarine built for the primary purpose of transporting multi-ton quantities of cocaine located near a tributary close to the Ecuador/Colombia border that was seized by the Ecuador Anti-Narcotics Police Forces and Ecuador Military authorities with the assistance of the DEA in 2010. Public Domain.
Making matters much worse, these craft are very difficult to detect at sea, because their hulls are made mostly of fiberglass and Kevlar; are painted sea-blue; and vent their engine exhaust along the bottom of their hulls before releasing it to the atmosphere, cooling it to the point of being indistinguishable from the surrounding water. Coupled to them running just below – or well under – the surface, this makes them virtually invisible to radar and sonar. In fact, the vast majority of the narco-subs captured were spotted by aircraft, running on the surface.
So – why is this important? It’s “just” drugs, right?
Well, “cargo” covers a very broad scope. Narco-subs don’t have to carry drugs, after all. Coupled to this, is the fact the fact that the South American and Mexican cartels operate these subs in alliance with guerrilla groups such as the FARC, among others. It requires no great leap of imagination to picture a scenario of a group like Revolutionary Iran or the I.S. infiltrating two- to four-hundred trigger-pullers into the US, hidden among the masses of illegal immigrants being allowed into the country by a criminally – if not deliberately – incompetent political establishment so arrogant, that they believe that the Rules of War do not apply to them.
Why is the author so vehement about this?
In 1974, R&D Associates – a think tank in Santa Monica, California – working under contract for the Department of Defense, produced a document titled A Soviet Paramilitary Attack on U.S. Nuclear Forces – A Concept (PDF link). The paper sketched out a threat concept to US strategic nuclear forces, wherein Soviet Spetznatz special forces could potentially infiltrate sabotage teams into the US to attack ICBM, bomber and nuclear submarine bases, simply by walking in over the borders from Mexico and/or Canada. It goes into detail of then-current estimated numbers of illegal aliens crossing the US border, who were not intercepted by the Border Patrol, and pointed out that enough four- to six-man teams could be infiltrated and housed by ‘illegal’ KGB agents just long enough to sabotage US nuclear forces in preparation for a Soviet first strike.
Very James Bond, yes?
This paper remained classified until 1995.
ISIS fighters execute Taliban fighter In the city of Jalalabad, December 2021. CCA/4.0
A threat – a clear and present one – exists against the United States, and its citizens. While some would argue that this author is “letting the cat out of the bag” by speculating on this in public, none of the information in this article is classified; there is no “whistle-blower” information here. If this author can find it, anyone can. You, the Reader, simply aren’t being told any of this. I will let you speculate as to why that is the case. The author, here alone, is unable to take corrective measures against this threat – it is the job of the Reader to do so.
All I can do, is warn you.
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