Middle East – The Freedomist

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

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 BGM-71 TOW: A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna June 12, 2026

On the morning of May 2, 1972, Chief Warrant Officer Carroll Lain made history without fully realizing it. Flying a UH-1B Huey over the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, he fired an experimental anti-tank missile at a North Vietnamese tank during the Easter Offensive and hit it. The weapon was the BGM-71 TOW — Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided — pulled from storage barely three weeks earlier and rushed to the battlefield by a three-plane airlift. That first shot destroyed a captured American-built M41 tank. By the end of the day, four tanks, a truck, and an artillery piece were wrecked. The TOW had arrived. It has not left since.

TOW-armed AH-1S Cobra attack helpicopter of the US Army on the flight line, during Operation BRIGHT STAR ’85 (1985). Photo by US Army camerman SSGT David Nolan via US National Archives. Public Domain.

More than 700,000 BGM-71s have been produced in the fifty-five years since that morning, making it one of the most proliferated anti-tank guided missiles in history. It has been fired in anger from Vietnam to the Bekaa Valley, from the deserts of Iraq to the rubble of Syrian cities, and most recently across the steppes of Ukraine. No American anti-tank weapon has a longer unbroken combat record. That longevity is not accidental — it reflects a design architecture flexible enough to absorb five decades of warhead, guidance, and platform upgrades without requiring a fundamentally new missile — and it raises an uncomfortable question about whether a system conceived to kill Soviet armor in the Fulda Gap remains adequate for the battlefield that has emerged in the 2020s.

The Design Logic To Kill Tanks

Hughes Aircraft began development in 1963 in response to a US Army requirement for a heavy anti-tank guided weapon capable of defeating the Soviet armor then entering service. The design brief was demanding: the missile had to be effective from both ground mounts and helicopters, had to defeat contemporary Soviet tank armor at ranges out to 3,000 meters, and had to be accurate enough that a single gunner with a sight could guide it without specialized training in manual joystick control. The answer was SACLOS — semi-automatic command to line of sight — guidance. The gunner keeps the crosshairs on the target; the missile’s flight computer does the rest, reading the position of an infrared flare on the missile’s tail and transmitting corrections down the wire that spools out behind it in flight. Full-scale production began in 1968; the US Army fielded the system in 1970.

The wire itself is both the system’s defining characteristic and its principal tactical limitation. At its quoted maximum range of 3,750 meters, a TOW is in flight for roughly twelve seconds — twelve seconds during which the gunner must remain stationary, eye to sight, tracking the target while the missile guides itself toward it. In a suppressed or obscured environment, those twelve seconds are an eternity. The wire can be cut by terrain obstacles. The guidance link can be disrupted by smoke, dust, or electronic countermeasures. The launcher is a crew-served weapon weighing over 90 kilograms fully assembled, not something a single soldier moves quickly. These were known constraints from the beginning. The Army accepted them in exchange for a system that could reliably kill tanks at ranges beyond the effective reach of most direct-fire weapons available to infantry.

*A Stryker vehicle crew belonging to the 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, fires a TOW missile. Note the wires playing out of the missile in flight. 2009 photo by Victor J. Ayala. CCA/2.0 Generic.*

For the Marine Corps, the problem of the wire-guidance carries special problems. A TOW missile being fired over salt water – or even plain water – can cause a serious loss of control, potentially shorting out the guidance wires completely. Modern versions of the TOW have tried to correct this by ditching wire-guidance entirely in favor of wireless systems, but with only limited success to date.

Variants And The Arms Race With Soviet Armor

What distinguishes the TOW’s half-century run is the relentless pace at which its warhead evolved in direct response to Soviet armor improvements. The original BGM-71A delivered a simple shaped-charge warhead capable of penetrating around 430mm of rolled homogeneous armor (RHA) — sufficient for defeating the T-54 and early T-62. By 1981, the BGM-71C Improved TOW introduced a telescoping nose probe that detonated the warhead at standoff distance for optimum shaped-charge performance, pushing penetration toward 700mm of rolled homogenous armor. When the Soviet Union fielded explosive reactive armor on its tanks in the mid-1980s, the response was the BGM-71E TOW-2A in 1987, which added a small precursor charge in the nose probe to detonate the ERA block before the main warhead arrived.

The most conceptually significant variant came in 1992 with the BGM-71F TOW-2B. Rather than attacking a tank frontally — where armor is thickest — the 2B flies over the target at a preset height above the gunner’s line of sight, then fires two downward-aimed explosively formed penetrators through the thinner top armor of the turret when sensors detect the tank beneath it. The dual-mode fuze uses both a laser altimeter and a magnetic sensor to confirm the target. It is, in effect, a solution to the T-72’s carousel problem arrived at from a different angle than the Javelin‘s: instead of a steep plunging attack, the 2B attacks horizontally but shoots downward. The TOW-2B Aero extended the system’s range to 4,500 meters. A wireless radio-guided variant eliminated some of the wire constraint for platforms where wire deployment is impractical, but not in all cases.

The Modern Combat Record: From Desert Storm To Syria

Operation Desert Storm in 1991 was the TOW’s largest conventional combat deployment. Thousands of missiles and hundreds of launchers were fielded across the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, and 24th Mechanized Division, mounted on HMMWV’s, M113 APC’s, LAV-TUA (TOW Under Armor), Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters. Against Iraqi armor — largely T-55s and T-72s caught in the open desert without combined-arms support — the TOW performed precisely as designed.

Marines from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force show their LAV-AT light armored anti-tank vehicle to a group of coalition soldiers during the ground phase of Operation Desert Storm. USMC photo by LCpl Alvarado, 1991, via US National Archives. Public Domain.

Syria provided a different kind of test. Beginning around 2013, opposition groups supplied with TOW missiles through the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program used them extensively against the Assad regime’s armor in complex urban and semi-urban terrain. The results were filmed and posted widely, providing an open-source library of TOW engagements against T-55s, T-72s, and BMP infantry fighting vehicles in conditions far more demanding than open desert. The system’s performance under those conditions — engagements through rubble, across built-up areas, in the kind of cluttered visual environment that degrades optical tracking — validated that a trained two-man crew could operate it effectively even where the geometry was unfavorable. According to analysts tracking the conflict, probable thousands of Assad’s armored vehicles and fortified positions were struck by TOW missiles over the course of the civil war.

In Ukraine, TOW missiles arrived as part of US security assistance packages in 2023 and again in December 2024, mounted primarily on Bradley IFVs already in Ukrainian service. The Bradley-TOW combination proved effective against Russian armor in the same conditions that have degraded every other armored system in the theater: FPV drone surveillance, mined terrain, and the absence of reliable air cover. The wire-guidance limitation becomes less significant when the system is vehicle-mounted with a stabilized sight and the engagement range is dictated by available cover rather than the missile’s maximum reach.

The Wire’s Limits In The Drone Age

The twelve-second exposure problem that was a known constraint in 1970 looks different in 2026. On a battlefield saturated with FPV drones capable of striking a static position within seconds of detection, a crew operating a tripod-mounted TOW launcher is vulnerable in ways that the original design brief never contemplated. The system’s requirement for the gunner to remain stationary and exposed throughout the flight time is a survival liability that vehicle mounting partially mitigates, but does not eliminate. Wire-cutting by terrain obstacles remains a failure mode, though it is manageable in trained hands.

Raytheon, which acquired Hughes in 1997 and has manufactured TOW missiles ever since, has stated its production line can produce up to 10,000 missiles annually and has active contracts with the US Army for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. The US military has designated the TOW as remaining in service through at least the mid-2030s. Over 40 allied nations operate it. That institutional momentum is substantial — the logistics chain, the training base, the platform integration across dozens of vehicle types — and it represents a form of staying power that purely technical analysis tends to underweight.

A wire guided Tube Launched Optically (TOW) sighted Missile ejects a plume of flame as it is fired from its High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), by Marines from the TOW Platoon, Weapons Company, Third Battalion, Second Marine Regiment, during Combined Arms Exercise (CAX) 5-97, Twentynine Palms, CA. 1997 photo by LCPL E. J. Young, USMC. Public Domain.

The TOW is not the most capable anti-tank missile available in 2026. The Javelin’s fire-and-forget capability and top-attack profile represent a genuine generational advance, and the proliferation of loitering munitions has created new options for armor defeat that do not require a gunner to hold a sight on a target for twelve seconds. What the TOW retains is exactly what it has always offered: good range, a proven warhead capable of defeating any tank currently in service in its TOW-2B configuration, a platform-agnostic launcher compatible with vehicles and helicopters from three dozen countries, and a production base that can be scaled up. Carroll Lain’s first shot in 1972 was a proof of concept. Half a century of continuous upgrades turned that proof of concept into one of the most durable weapons systems the United States has ever fielded.

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.

The SMAW – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna April 17, 2026

The Bunker Buster

For the last few weeks, we have walked through the M72 LAW, the RPG-7, and the Carl Gustaf – three weapons that between them define the spectrum of man-portable anti-armor and assault systems that have shaped infantry combat since the 1960s. Each represented a coherent, and unique, design philosophy: the M72 disposable and simple; the RPG-7 cheap and reloadable; the Gustaf precise and multi-role. Today we look at the outlier – the weapon that does not fit neatly into any of those categories, was adopted by exactly one branch of the U.S. military, and spent its entire service life being replaced by systems that never quite replaced it: the Mk 153 Shoulder-Launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon, universally known as the SMAW.

Marines with 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, fire Shoulder-Launched Multipurpose Assault Weapons during Exercise Koolendong at Bradshaw Training Area, Aug 23, 2014. USMC photo by Sgt. James Gulliver. Public Domain.

The SMAW is a Marine Corps weapon, through and through. It was fielded in 1984 as a Marine Corps-unique system; the Army borrowed 150 launchers and 5,000 rockets for Desert Storm, then gave them back (as the FGM-148 Javelin was coming online in the mid-90’s, along with the increasing intent to adopt the Carl Gustaf to replace both the M67 Recoilless Rifle, and the positively awful M47 Dragon), and for four decades it has been the Corps’ primary tool for the mission the name describes: assaulting fortified positions. Not primarily killing tanks – though it can, to a point – but destroying bunkers, breaching walls, collapsing buildings, and suppressing crew-served weapons dug into hardened positions. That is a different set of mission requirements than any of the weapons we have previously covered in this series, and it produced a different weapon.

Where It Came From

The SMAW’s lineage runs through Israel, which is fitting – the Israelis have spent decades solving exactly the kind of close-quarters urban assault problems the SMAW was designed for. In the late 1970s, Israel Military Industries developed the B-300, an 83mm reloadable rocket launcher optimized for infantry assault operations. The Marine Corps, looking for a replacement capability after the collapse of the FGR-17 Viper program – the same procurement disaster that sent the Army to the AT4 – found the B-300 and adapted it for American service.

*Marines test SMAW at Camp Lejuene, 1982. USMC/Infantry Magazine. Public Domain.*

The American version added one distinctive and genuinely unusual feature: a spotting rifle. Mounted on the right side of the launch tube, this 9mm device fires ballistically matched tracer rounds at the target before the main rocket is launched. The idea was sound – use cheap tracer rounds to confirm the firing solution before committing an expensive rocket to the shot. In practice, it added weight, complexity, and required the operator to expose himself repeatedly to enemy observation while working through the spotting process. It was a British design concept grafted onto an Israeli launcher for American Marines, which gives you some sense of the SMAW’s somewhat eclectic ancestry.

The result weighed 16 pounds unloaded, fired 83mm rockets loaded from the rear, and entered service with the Marines in 1984 – the same year the Army was fielding the AT4 and the same period the M72 was being theoretically retired. In practice, all three ended up in service simultaneously, which tells you something about the difficulty of replacing any weapon system that actually works.

Combat Record

The SMAW’s combat record is built primarily around the Iraq War the began in 2003, and specifically around the Battle of Fallujah. In the street-by-street fighting of both the first and second offensives in 2004, the weapon found its calling. The SMAW-NE – “Novel Explosive,” which is the military’s characteristically understated designation for a thermobaric warhead – proved devastatingly effective against the fortified rooms, tunnels, and hardened positions that Iraqi insurgents had constructed throughout the city. A thermobaric warhead works by dispersing a fuel cloud and then igniting it, producing an overpressure wave capable of collapsing lightly constructed buildings and lethal to personnel in enclosed spaces. It is not a subtle tool.

A US Marine Corps (USMC) troop with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, fires an MK-153 SMAW round at an insurgent stronghold during Operation Al Fajr, Fallujah, Iraq. Marine Corps photo by LCPL J.A. Chaverri, USMC, November, 2004. Public Domain.

When the SMAW-NE lacked the penetrating power to breach certain reinforced walls directly, Marines developed a two-shot technique: first fire a High-Explosive Dual-Mode round to punch a hole through the wall, then send the thermobaric round through the opening into the room behind it. Tactically effective, if somewhat baroque. The broader point is that the weapon was being adapted in real time to meet a combat environment no one had fully anticipated – which is, as we have noted throughout this series, what separates useful weapons from expensive museum pieces.

In Afghanistan and Iraq more broadly, the SMAW gave Marine infantry squads a direct-fire breaching and suppression capability that neither the M72 nor the AT4 provided. The Army, which had returned its borrowed SMAWs after Desert Storm, later developed its own derivative – the SMAW-D, designated the M141 Bunker Defeat Munition – a disposable single-shot version using the same warhead. Even the Army eventually admitted the mission was real.

The Spotting Rifle Problem & Mod 2

The original SMAW’s spotting rifle was its perpetual liability. It was over 30 years old by the 2000s, experiencing increasing failure rates, and the process of firing multiple tracer rounds to range a target was slow and exposed the operator. In 2013, Marines at Quantico tested a modified SMAW with thermal and laser range-finding technology that replaced the spotting rifle. The results validated the concept, and in 2015 the Marine Corps contracted for the SMAW Mod 2 – a complete overhaul that replaced the spotting rifle with a Modular Ballistic Sight, incorporating a laser rangefinder, ballistic computer, and thermal capability. Weight dropped from 16 pounds to 13 pounds. Fielding to the Fleet Marine Force began in November 2017.

The Mod 2 was, by all accounts, a significant improvement. It was also, almost immediately, announced as the weapon’s final iteration before replacement.

The Gustaf Takes Over

The Marine Corps has been transitioning to the Carl Gustaf M4 as its primary infantry shoulder-fired system – and in doing so, has eliminated the 0351 occupational specialty, the Infantry Assault Marines who were trained specifically in SMAW employment. The Gustaf’s broader ammunition family, lighter weight in its M4 configuration, and compatibility with laser-guided rounds made the case for consolidation straightforward. Why maintain two separate systems, two separate MOS pipelines, and two separate logistics chains when one weapon covers the mission set of both?

The answer, for forty years, was institutional inertia, procurement complexity, and the SMAW’s genuine effectiveness in the one role it was specifically designed for. Those are not trivial reasons. But the Gustaf’s evolution has finally rendered them insufficient.

The SMAW is not gone yet – it remains in inventory and, as of 2023, Ukrainian forces of the 68th Jager Brigade were documented using it in operations against Russian forces. Old weapons, as we have noted repeatedly [https://freedomist.com/are-you-sure-you-want-to-throw-that-away/] in this series, have a way of finding new wars to fight. But its role as the Marine Corps’ primary assault weapon is drawing to a close, replaced by the Swede that finally convinced everyone it could do the job better.

This forms a fitting end to this series on man-portable anti-tank weapons. From the M72 to the RPG-7 to the Gustaf to the SMAW – four weapons, four design philosophies, and one consistent lesson: the weapon that solves a real problem, solved well, outlasts every prediction of its obsolescence.

Next time, we’ll look into a weapon that didn’t work so well – the M47 Dragon.

The Goose Is Loose – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna April 10, 2026

Previously, we have looked at the M72 LAW and the RPG-7 – two weapons born from the same fundamental problem, that solved the issue by two very different design philosophies: One is disposable, one is reloadable. One is American, one is Soviet. Both are still on the world’s battlefields today. This week, we look at the weapon that split the difference between them, outlasted both as a frontline system in the world’s most capable militaries, and is currently destroying Russian tanks in Ukraine: the Carl Gustaf 84mm recoilless rifle.

U.S. troops call it “the Goose,” or just “the Gustaf.” The British call it “Charlie G.” The Swedes, who invented it, call it the Granatgevär m/48 – “Grenade Rifle, Model 1948.” Whatever you call it, the weapon has been in continuous production and frontline service since 1948, is now operated by more than 40 countries, and in 2022 a Ukrainian crew used one to destroy a T-90M – Russia’s most advanced operational main battle tank. Not bad for a design that was old when the Korean War started.

What A Recoilless Rifle Even Is

Before going further, it is worth taking a moment to explain what a “recoilless rifle” is – because the term confuses people who are used to thinking about weapons in terms of either conventional rifles, artillery or rocket launchers.

When a conventional firearm – or cannon – fires, the propellant gases accelerate the projectile forward, and by Newton’s third law, an equal and opposite force pushes back against the shooter. That is “recoil“. In a pistol or rifle, the weapon’s mass and the shooter’s body absorb it. In a large-caliber weapon, like an artillery piece, uncontrolled recoil would be catastrophically injurious to the shooter and structurally ruinous to even a stout tube.

*Cumulative shell (H.E.A.T) diagram. 2005 image by Robert Blazek. Public Domain.*

The recoilless design solves this by venting a precisely calculated portion of the propellant gases out of the rear of the weapon through a cone-shaped Venturi nozzle at the moment of firing. The rearward thrust of those escaping gases almost exactly cancels out the forward thrust driving the projectile. The net result on the shooter is dramatically reduced recoil – not zero, but manageable even from the shoulder. The tradeoff is that the rearward ejecting blast of gases is substantial, creating a “danger zone” behind the weapon and generating a dramatic visible signature. But for a weapon that can deliver an 84mm shaped-charge round accurately at 500 meters, that is a tradeoff most militaries have been willing to make for over seven decades.

A coalition force member fires a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle system during weapons practice on a range in Helmand province, Afghanistan; Feb, 2013. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Benjamin Tuck. Public Domain.

The Gustaf fires its rounds at 290 meters per second – nearly three times the muzzle velocity of a World War II bazooka. The result is superior accuracy at range, and a rifled barrel that spins its projectiles for further stability. This is not a “point and pray” weapon – with proper training, it is a precision tool.

The Weapon & Its History

The Carl Gustaf’s origins trace to the Swedish Army’s experience in watching World War II unfold from the sidelines and drawing many correct conclusions. Sweden’s first attempt at a shoulder-fired recoilless weapon – the 20mm Pansarvärnsgevär m/42 – was already obsolete when it entered production in 1942, capable of penetrating only about 40mm of armor at a time when German and Soviet tanks were fielding considerably more. Designers Hugo Abramson and Harald Jentzen at the state-run Carl Gustafs Stads Gevärsfaktori scrapped the small-bore approach entirely, scaled their design up to 84mm in diameter, and paired the recoilless principle with a shaped-charge warhead. The resulting weapon entered Swedish service in 1948.

It first saw combat with Swedish UN peacekeepers during the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s, where it proved rugged and versatile under operational conditions. Export orders soon followed. The M2 variant, introduced in 1964, spread the weapon across NATO and allied militaries. U.S. Army Special Forces, the Rangers, and the British SAS adopted the M3 variant in the 1990’s for bunker-busting and anti-vehicle work. By 2014, the U.S. Army was ordering the Gustaf for conventional infantry units deploying to Afghanistan, specifically because enemy forces could reach American troops with RPG-7s at ranges where U.S. squads had no equivalent direct-fire response.

*Swedish rocket launcher in action at a roadblock in Katanga, during_Operation_Unokat, December, 1961. Unknown author. Public Domain*

The current production model, the M4 “MAAWS” (Multi-Role Anti-Armor Anti-Personnel Weapon System), weighs under seven kilograms – about 15 pounds – and measures less than one meter in length. It accepts a digital fire control device that communicates ballistic data directly to programmable ammunition. It can fire laser-guided rounds developed jointly by Saab and Raytheon, accurate to 2,500 meters. It can also fire the same basic HEAT rounds it was firing in 1948. That backward compatibility with legacy ammunition means nations can modernize their launchers without replacing their ammunition stockpiles – a procurement detail that matters enormously for smaller militaries.

The Ammunition Story

The Gustaf’s real competitive advantage over both the M72 and the RPG-7 is its ammunition flexibility, and this is where the “multi-tool” description earns its keep. The current round family includes:

Anti-armor HEAT rounds, including a tandem-warhead variant capable of defeating reactive armor
A High-Explosive Dual-Purpose round effective against bunkers and light armor
Anti-personnel rounds including a flechette “shotgun” load described by one veteran Ranger as “a giant shotgun where it shoots inch-long little needles at a huge spread”.
Smoke and illumination rounds for screening and marking.
A confined-spaces HEAT variant safe to fire from inside buildings.
And finally, a laser-guided multipurpose munition effective at 2,500 meters.

*A Depiction of Ammunition Variants for the MAAWS. Undated US Army graphic. Public Domain.*

No other man-portable shoulder-fired system offers this range of capability from a single re-loadable launcher. This is why, despite weighing more than the M72 and costing considerably more per launcher than an RPG-7, the Gustaf has not only survived but expanded its user base across seven decades of continuous warfare.

Poland ordered the Carl Gustaf M4 system in a deal worth over $1.2 billion in March 2024. Japan ordered 300 units in 2023. Australia, the Baltic states, and NATO as a whole have placed ongoing orders. The weapon’s procurement momentum is accelerating, not declining.

The Bottom Line

The M72, the RPG-7, and the Carl Gustaf represent three answers to the same question: how do you give infantry the ability to destroy armor, breach fortifications, and suppress defended positions without becoming dependent on vehicle-delivered fire support that may not be available? The American answer was disposable simplicity. The Soviet answer was cheap reloadability. The Swedish answer was precision versatility – and it cost more and weighed more, but it has proven more capable in more operational contexts than either alternative.

*U.S. Marine fires an M3A1 Multi-role Anti-Armor Anti-Personnel Weapon System during unknown distance engagement training, Aug. 14, 2023. USMC photo by Cpl. Aidan Hekker. Public Domain.*

In a budget environment that increasingly rewards lowest unit cost procurement, the Gustaf’s continued and expanding success is a useful reminder that the cheapest weapon per unit is not always the most economical weapon per mission accomplished.

The Goose is still flying. And judging by the order books, it will be for some time to come.

The Real Military How-To, Part 1

Michael Cessna March 21, 2026

In the past, we have frequently discussed the “democratization” of military-everything, from equipment acquisition through “higher-level” things, like “DIY” navies and air forces, but we have never really covered the actual methodology of “training” on an effectively zero-budget.

This is a sphere that I have been studiously avoiding treading into, mostly because I felt a moral responsibility to avoid adding fuel to the global fire in a “granular” way. However, that view has evolved over time: There is plenty of military talent out there at various levels – from “Tier One” military forces, to a couple of people in a Toyota Hilux with Grampa’s shotguns. In effect, no – I am not doing anything “out of bounds”.

For full disclosure, when I joined the United States Marine Corps in 1984, the very first job I had “in the Fleet”, was as a Publications Clerk”…I’m not sure if that job even exists anymore, in any way that I would recognize. As a result, my natural inclination as a bibliophile raged in full force. And, after the domination of the PDF format, I have assembled a…let’s say “overly large” collection of military manuals.

As a result, over time, I started thinking about what a personal “emergency military library” would look like: What books and manuals would I put in there? How small could I make it? And so on…

In thinking on this for several years, I came to the conclusion that such a library would be useful not only for someone actually carrying a rifle or leading troops, but to the average civilian – not someone thinking about the end of the world, but who watches the news, sees LOTS of stories about current conflicts, but has no foundation to “fact check” the media…and that is a far more dangerous situation, than publishing a list of very basic works to try and teach you the absolute basics.

The current conflict in Iran brought this into sharp focus: I cannot list the number of news reports and “expert analysis” that I have seen on the revolution in Iran that started on December 28th, that get nearly every single point wrong, at some level. It’s so bad, it’s actively dangerous to viewers, who are left with a highly skewed view of how things actually work out on “the sharp end“. It is dangerous, because otherwise well-meaning people get hysterically angry over things that anyone who has been in a Tier One military longer than a year knows – or at least, should know…and, as the US military understood almost ten years ago, the military is preparing – quietly – for extended combat operations in urban, and highly public, environments.

Students in the Basic Computer Systems Operator Course at the Army’s Computer Science School at Fort Gordon, GA. In the left foreground is a visiting student from the armed forces of Djibouti. 1988 photo from the U.S. National Archives. Public Domain.

As a start to try and remedy this situation, I have curated two lists: a short (14 videos) playlist of videos at YouTube, and a list of basic books and manuals, outlined below. There are much larger lists in each category, but the purpose here, is to at least get you, the Reader, started. Even if you have been in the military for any length of time, I think you’ll find these useful.

The thing with learning “things military” is that it takes time – this is not The Matrix, and no one is going to download a karate program into your head for you to instantly “know karate“. The YouTube link above is 14 videos…for the Short List. The full playlist is over 80 videos long. Likewise, the fourteen books below are only the “initial reading list” – and even the longer list (well over 60 individual titles) is painfully short…But, these two lists will give you the basics of how militaries work.

A pair of notes on the titles below: Many of these are older titles, some dating from the 1950’s. This was deliberate. I have found that after about 1998, many – if not most – modern military manuals are written in modern “corpo-speak”, and are nearly useless in conveying information meaningfully…That, or I’m a dinosaur. Likely the latter…OTOH – “old” does not mean “wrong” or “useless”. Take note.

*Staff meeting of the the 112th Cavalry (Texas National Guard), during the Battle pf Arawe, Papua New Guinea, 1944. US Army photo. Public Domain.*

Second, the titles below are available either as online PDF’s (marked with an ” * “) or as paper copy editions (marked with a ” + “); some are available in both formats.

Below each entry, I will provide my own review of the title, and why you need it.

+* OPNAV P 34-03 – Landing Party Manual, 1960 USN — Chapters 2-3, 5 and 12-13

This might seem like a strange manual to start with, but if I were writing this article in 1980, this manual would have eliminated about five of the other manuals here. Starting in 1920, the United States Navy began generating “Landing Party Manuals” for naval officers to study while at sea, in case they were tasked to command such parties ashore – Lieutenant Jones might be a heck of a good Engineer, but do they know how to mount a formal Interior Guard? The chapter selections are deliberate; the chosen chapters cover basics like Close Order Drill, Ceremonies, Interior Guard, physical training with rifles, and basic marksmanship – these functions change very little over time. The other chapters are interesting from a strictly historical perspective, but – this manual dates from 1960, and things like infantry tactics and first aid have radically changed since then.

+Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach; Dandridge M. Malone

A lot gets written about “leadership”, but the actual “how” has rarely been focused on in the understandable detail applied here by Malone. Note that this dates from 1983, so if you insist on being offended by your own shadow, you might want to skip this one.

*FM 16-100 – Character Guidance Manual (1961)

Sometimes, military forces are forced to settle on bringing in recruits from the literal “wrong side of the tracks”. Military forces hold dominant powers that many civilians simply do not recognize until far too late. The US Army recognized this in the 1950’s, and wrote this manual as a guide to help officers try to keep their troops from falling into criminal behaviors, in order to prevent court-martialing half of their unit for bad behaviors that unnecessarily got out of hand. Note that this manual is no longer used. Food for thought.

+Combat Leader’s Field Guide, 14th Ed.; Jeff Kirkham

Because the Landing Party Manual is so badly out of date on tactics in 2026, Kirkham’s work at least partly remedies that. While thin on the use of drones – which is constantly evolving and changing, as both Ukraine and Iran, among other conflicts, show – Kirkham sticks to the rock-bottom basics of small-unit infantry combat, the most fundamental combat task on the modern battlefield.

+*Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT); Direct link to USMC PDF link; Amazon link

The US Marine Corps developed a winning method for fighting in urban environments (when allowed to actually employ their tactics as developed). Those tactics are laid out here. When combat in built-up areas looks confusing, chaotic, and dirty, this manual can help clarify what’s going on, far more than the commentary from CNN talking-heads.

+*MCTP 3-01E Formerly MCWP 3-15.3 Sniping; Archive PDF; Amazon link

“Snipers”, in the literal sense, get a poor rap, especially from certain “subject matter experts”, who should know better, and from “influencers” more interested in making political and/or moral zingers. Snipers are actually one of the most powerful and decisive units in infantry combat. Understanding how they function, and their impact on the battlefield is critical for grasping the shape of modern combat.

+Combat Service Support Guide, 4th Ed.; John E. Edwards

Troops need a LOT of “stuff” in action. In the military, that is now termed “Combat Service Support“. It’s dull, unglamorous, hard and back-breaking work…but if someone gets it wrong, the troops do not move, do not eat and do not shoot weapons – they are, quite literally, reduced to rocks and harsh language. While there are entire bookcases devoted to the subject, this volume offers the best single-volume summary out there.

+Guide to Military Operations Other Than War; Keith Bonn and Anthony Baker

This term – “Military Operations Other Than War“, or “MOOTWA” – started out as a highly-mocked term, taken as an example of the military’s descent into morbidity. Over time, however, this sphere of operations – using military forces for non-warfighting operations like humanitarian aid and disaster relief, among others – has demonstrated how important it really is. This overview is something that cannot be ignored, if you want to understand the full scope of what well-run militaries are capable of.

*A basic framework for constructing an SOI document

Not a book or formal manual, but a website dedicated to an absolutely vital concept: how to get units to talk to each other, and talk internally, in a secure way, so that the “bad guys” don’t understand what you are doing…You need more than CB radios, and this page offers you a place to start. This is linked here, in order to show how complex even small unit communications can be.

*Map Reading and Land Navigation, FM 3-25.26 (2005)

You, the Reader, would likely be amazed at how few people know how to navigate with a map, let alone in the dark and rain, with a compass. If you read nothing else here, read this, because you can get stuck in the middle of nowhere easily and unexpectedly….Also — Browse the FAS “MAN” site, and support FAS, if you can. Their information is aging in places, but the entire “MAN” site is well worth your time.

*Field Fortifications – FM 5-15 (1968)

What combat footage from Ukraine, and you can be forgiven for thinking that you are watching colorized footage from the trenches of France in the First World War. This 1968 US Army manual explains the basics of building hasty fortifications in the dirt. If it looks dumb, but keeps you alive – it’s not dumb. Side Note: Check out BITS.de — it’s a vast archive, that I frequently use…Just watch out for their frames – highly annoying, but their only real problem.

*Military Gov’t Manual – FM 27-5 (1947)

When armies overrun – “conquer”, if you prefer – enemy territory, they then need to administer it, until some sort of civilian authority can be established. I selected this specific edition, because it was written in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, when territories all over the world had to be administered by military officers with little knowledge or training…and the farther we got from WW2, the less effective the new manuals got – “newer” is not necessarily “better”.

+*US Army First Aid Manual FM 4-25.11; 2002 online edition; 2018 print edition (my recommendation – how much is your life worth, again?)

Exactly what it says. People get hurt, sometimes seriously, and transport to a real medical facility might not arrive for a dangerously long time. A lot of times…it will come down to you.

*+Nuclear War Survival Skills; Cresson Kearney – HTML & PDF: Amazon (2022 ed.)

This might seem like an odd inclusion, but Kearney’s skill-sets apply almost 1:1 to military forces as they do to civilians. There are absolutely military-specific manuals for this sort of thing, but most of those are too military-specific for most civilians to digest. This is maintained and constantly updated, so I recommend checking the OISM site, first, before buying the hardcopy.

The fourteen titles above will not make you a general, or even a corporal. What they =will= do is give you enough foundation to watch the news coverage of any conflict — Iran, Ukraine, or whatever comes next — and understand, in basic terms, what is actually happening on the ground, rather than relying on what a studio commentator with no field experience – or a former officer who hasn’t carried a rifle in more years than you have been alive – tells you is happening. In a media environment more interested in advertising dollars than accurate reporting, where military illiteracy is the norm rather than the exception, that foundation is worth more than it might appear.

In Part 2, I will lay out the short YouTube playlist.

When Availability Beats Capability

Michael Cessna February 13, 2026

From the days of the very first aircraft carriers, like the USS Langely (CV-1), until the 2009 retirement of the USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63), virtually all of the aircraft carriers in the United States Navy ran on some flavor of marine diesel fuel. Beginning in 1961, however, with the advent of the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the Navy began transitioning all of its new aircraft carriers to nuclear power. The benefits appeared to be clear, as the nuclear powered aircraft carrier could cruise without refueling its nuclear power plant for up to 25 years.

But, just how clear was that advantage, over the conventionally engined carriers of the past? And – much more important – what were the downsides of completely shifting to nuclear power? These question came into needle-sharp focus on January 1st, 2026.

The United States Navy began 2026 with a problem that should alarm anyone paying attention to the global security of the United States: of the current fleet of eleven aircraft carriers, exactly two were deployable – the USS Gerald Ford (CVN-78), which was the center-point of the operation against Venzuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, and the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), which was patrolling the South China Sea.

By early February, facing simultaneous crises from the sudden Iranian revolution, to the increasing instability in Communist China, the Navy emergency-scrambled two more carriers (the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) and the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77)) to operational status — completing their Composite Training Unit Exercises COMPTUEX while already underway to their deployment zones.

Of the remaining carriers, only the USS Eisenhower (CVN-69) is undergoing “workups”, beginning the three or four month process to return to deployment. Every other nuclear carrier is either undergoing decommissioning (USS Nimitz (CVN-68)), or undergoing repair/overhaul/refueling. It is unclear exactly when a carrier other than the Eisenhower will be available for operations.

This isn’t a sign of extraordinary capability – it’s a symptom of a fleet in crisis.

The ten nuclear-powered Nimitz-class and the one Ford-class carriers represent remarkable engineering achievements. They can steam virtually forever without refueling. The USS Stennis, however, has been undergoing its mid-life nuclear refueling and overhaul since 2021 — a process now entering its fifth year. The USS Truman remains sidelined following collision damage, unable to deploy before its own – now-delayed, because there is only one refueling dock for nuclear carriers – refueling cycle. When you need carriers now, theoretical capabilities matter less than actual availability.

This brings up the uncomfortable question: what are we actually buying with nuclear propulsion for aircraft carriers?

The standard answer is “unlimited range” — carriers that never need to refuel their main engines. But carrier strike groups don’t operate in isolation. Their aircraft require JP-5 jet fuel continuously. Their escorts need bunker fuel. Even the carriers run backup diesel generators and require regular underway replenishment for aviation ordnance, food, and supplies. The nuclear reactor means the ship’s hull doesn’t need to refuel, but the mission absolutely does. The need for UNREP operations remain constant regardless of propulsion type.

Underway Replenishment (UNREP) operations in the Arabian Sea support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM and Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. Pictured foreground-to-background are the USN Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier USS RONALD REAGAN (CVN 76); the USN Military Sealift Command (MSC), Supply Class Fast Combat Support Ship USNS RAINIER (T-AOE 7) and the USN Arleigh Burke Class (Flight II) Guided Missile Destroyer (Aegis), USS McCAMPBELL (DDG 85). Undated US Navy phot by PH3 Aaron Burden, USN. Public Domain.

What nuclear propulsion does require is specialized infrastructure. Refueling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH) cycles take two to three years, normally, and demand nuclear-qualified facilities and workforce. The Navy has only one, single facility that can refuel nuclear aircraft carriers – which is why the USS Truman is currently riding at anchor, waiting for the Stennis to clear the dock, as the carrier fleet cannot use the same refueling docks as nuclear-powered submarines, due to size and configuration.

Budget cuts have also compounded the maintenance delays — the Obama administration’s sequestration-era budget reductions followed by COVID-related disruptions have created a cascading refueling backlog across the fleet. When institutional maintenance capacity is disrupted, nuclear carriers don’t degrade gracefully; they become tied to pier-side for years.

An aerial view of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (CVN 69), right, being assisted into port at Pier No. 12 by large harbor tugs. The aircraft carrier USS AMERICA (CV 66) is tied up at the right. 1985 US Navy photo. Public Domain.

Diesel-powered carriers offered a different trade-off. Yes, they need refueling — something which is already done constantly for the rest of the carrier’s accompanying strike group. But they also eliminate multi-year RCOH cycles. Conventional powerplants can be serviced at standard shipyards around the world without nuclear certification requirements. Battle damage to diesel systems can be more easily repaired or replaced; damage to nuclear propulsion systems requires specialized facilities and extended timelines, if they are actually repairable at all – unlike World War Two, where rapid repair of severe combat damage was routinely accomplished in a few months, at most…But, as no nuclear powered carrier had yet to be seriously damaged in combat, we really have no idea if repair of a combat-damaged nuclear carrier is even possible. Construction timelines also shrink dramatically when you remove the nuclear certification requirements from the process.

The question isn’t whether nuclear carriers are impressive pieces of engineering. They are. The question is whether that impressive engineering serves strategic needs. Consider the Essex-class carriers of World War II and beyond — diesel-powered, mass-produced, and maintained in sufficient numbers to ensure availability. Twenty-four hulls provided persistent presence through Korea and Vietnam. Our current eleven-carrier nuclear fleet just demonstrated it can field four during a global crisis.

The Reagan administration’s 600-ship Navy called for fifteen carrier battle groups — emphasizing numerical presence across global theaters. President Trump has recently advocated for returning battleships to service, arguing their firepower and durability offer capabilities modern vessels lack.

Both proposals address real problems but miss the core issue: availability. Fifteen carrier groups – or eleven – mean nothing if chronic maintenance backlogs sideline half the fleet simultaneously. The proposed battleships — essentially huge missile platforms with armor — require crews of 1,500+ versus modern a destroyer’s c.300, while offering marginal advantages over “distributed lethality” concepts using existing hulls.

The actual requirement isn’t more carriers or bigger guns — it’s operational carriers and maintainable systems. Fifteen diesel-powered carriers with conventional maintenance cycles would provide far more deployable presence than fifteen nuclear carriers cycling through extended overhauls. Similarly, additional Arleigh Burke-class destroyers deliver sustained missile capacity without the proposed battleships’ manpower and maintenance burdens.

Strategic presence requires operational availability — not just impressive-looking platforms.

Ships of the U.S. Navy Pacific fleet anchored at Ulithi Atoll, Caroline Islands, February 1945.. The aircraft carrier USS Saratoga (CV-3) is in the right middle distance. There are at least eight Essex-class carriers present. 1945 US Navy photo. Public Domain.

Form should follow function. If the function is “project American power globally during crisis,” then presence matters more than theoretical endurance. A diesel carrier that’s actually there outweighs a nuclear carrier in year five of refueling. This isn’t about going backward technologically — it’s about being operational strategically.

The Navy faces a choice: continue investing in exquisite platforms that spend years unavailable for specialized maintenance, or diversify toward simpler systems that prioritize fleet availability. The Iranian crisis and Western Pacific tensions aren’t waiting for the Stennis to complete its overhaul. Neither will the next emergency. We need carriers that can steam now, not carriers that can theoretically steam forever.

Strategic availability isn’t a compromise…And in February 2026, it’s the actual requirement.

Knees To The Breeze…?

Michael Cessna February 6, 2026

Mankind has always been fascinated by the idea of flight. The more rational thinkers realized that they had to find a way to land safely. In Europe, Leonardo Da Vinci designed a parachute – that worked – but didn’t really have a viable way to make it a “tactical system” (to borrow the modern term).

Later, in France, a balloon designed by the Montgolfier brothers was first flown successfully in 1783; luckily, the ‘aeronauts’ did not have to bail out in an emergency. In 1797, that was changed by André-Jacques Garnerin. Not exactly a “tactical” jump, but it worked.

The sight of thousands of paratroopers descending from the sky remains one of warfare’s most dramatic images. From the mass drops over Crete in 1941, and Normandy in 1944 to the 173rd Airborne’s combat jump into northern Iraq in 2003, airborne operations have captured military imagination for over eighty years. But, as anti-aircraft capabilities proliferate and modern warfare evolves, a hard question emerges: can massed parachute assaults above the battalion level still accomplish their mission in contemporary conflict, or have they become elaborate exercises in nostalgia?

A 22-aircraft “freedom launch” took place Sept. 11, 2013, at Travis Air Force Base, Calif. Seven C-17 Globemaster IIIs, 11 KC-10 Extenders and four C-5B Galaxies from the 60th Air Mobility Wing lined up in what is historically referred to as an “elephant walk,” then launched consecutively over 36 minutes to take part in Air Mobility Command missions. (U.S. Air Force photo/Ken Wright)

The last major U.S. combat jump occurred over two decades ago when the 173rd Airborne Brigade dropped onto Bashur Airfield in northern Iraq — a deliberately uncontested drop zone that faced minimal air defense threat. Since then, American paratroopers have deployed worldwide, but only as elite infantry landed by aircraft that are delivered by aircraft landing at the field, rather than jumping from aircraft in flight. This isn’t coincidence or lack of opportunity; it reflects cold calculation about what modern air defenses can do to slow-moving transport aircraft packed with paratroopers.

The tactical problem is straightforward. A C-17 or C-130 transport aircraft flying at jump altitudes — typically 800-1,250 feet — presents an ideal target for modern air defense systems. Unlike fast-moving fighters that can employ countermeasures and evasive maneuvers, transports must fly straight and level at predictable – and slow – speeds during the actual drop. Man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) like the Russian SA-24 Igla-S or American Stinger can engage targets up to 11,000 feet, well above jump altitude. More sophisticated systems like the Pantsir-S1 or Tor-M2 can simultaneously track and engage multiple aircraft, turning a mass drop into a massacre before the first paratrooper touches ground.

Historical precedent supports this concern. The 1956 Anglo-French drop on Port Said during the Suez Crisis faced minimal organized resistance and still suffered significant casualties during the drop phase. The Russian airborne assault on Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv in February 2022 — conducted by helicopter rather than parachute — was devastated by Ukrainian air defenses despite Russian air superiority claims. Transport helicopters are marginally more maneuverable than fixed-wing transports, and they still suffered catastrophic losses.

The infrastructure requirements compound the problem. A brigade-level parachute assault — roughly 3,000-4,000 personnel with equipment — requires somewhere between 40-60 transport aircraft flying in close formation. This aerial armada must be assembled, staged, and flown through potentially contested airspace to reach the drop zone. Suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) operations must precede the drop, requiring air superiority that itself demands significant resources. By the time you’ve secured the airspace sufficiently for a mass drop, you’ve likely already achieved the operational objectives that justified the drop in the first place.

The equipment limitations compound tactical vulnerabilities. Paratroopers drop with what they can carry — typically small arms, some types of crew-served weapons, and man-portable anti-tank systems. Heavy-drop platforms can deliver light vehicles like HMMWVs and 105mm howitzers, but these require separate aircraft, precise drop coordination, and recovery time before becoming operational. The U.S. M551 Sheridan light tank was specifically designed for airborne operations but proved too fragile for conventional combat and was retired in 1996. Its replacement, the Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle, won’t be air-droppable. Russia’s BMD series represents the most capable air-droppable armored vehicles globally, but even these sacrifice protection for air-transportability. This means airborne forces hit the ground significantly outgunned compared to even light mechanized forces, entirely dependent on air support and rapid linkup with heavier reinforcements. Without that linkup – or even a delayed linkup – an isolated airborne force becomes a besieged force, nearly guaranteed to be destroyed…as the British discovered at Arnhem in 1944.

Modern alternatives offer similar rapid deployment without the vulnerability. Air assault operations using helicopters provide tactical mobility with greater flexibility in landing zones and timing, the ill-planned and poorly-executed Hostomel assault notwithstanding. Air-landing operations — where aircraft actually land and offload troops — allow heavier equipment and supply delivery while reducing the time troops spend exposed during descent. Special operations forces conducting small-unit infiltrations can seize airfields for follow-on air-landing forces, the approach used successfully in Grenada and Panama.

*U.S. Army Rangers parachute into Grenada during Operation Urgent Fury. 1983 US Army photo. Public Domain.*

Yet the massed airborne capability persists. The United States maintains the 82nd Airborne Division as a ready brigade combat team capable of deploying anywhere globally within 18 hours. Russia’s Airborne Forces (VDV) number roughly 45,000 personnel organized into divisions specifically for airborne operations. France maintains the 11th Parachute Brigade, while China has expanded its own airborne corps and continues developing heavy-drop capabilities for armored vehicles.

The retention suggests these forces serve purposes beyond massed combat jumps. Airborne units provide rapid-reaction forces for contingency operations, often deploying by air-landing rather than parachute. Their light infantry organization and expeditionary culture make them ideal for quick-response scenarios. The threat of airborne operations forces adversaries to defend potential drop zones across wide areas, tying down forces and resources. And in permissive or semi-permissive environments — humanitarian operations, disaster response, non-combatant evacuation — airborne forces provide capabilities no other units match.

The answer, then, appears to be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Against peer adversaries with modern integrated air defenses, massed parachute drops above battalion level represent unacceptable risks for uncertain gains. The operational requirements to make such drops feasible — comprehensive SEAD, air superiority, electronic warfare support — require resources that could achieve the desired objectives through less vulnerable means.

But against less sophisticated opponents, in denied areas where air-landing isn’t feasible, or in time-critical scenarios where hours matter, airborne operations retain relevance. The capability also serves as strategic deterrent and rapid-response option that justify maintaining the specialized training, equipment, and doctrine even if actual combat jumps remain rare.

The parachute remains in the arsenal, but it’s increasingly a tool for specific, narrow circumstances rather than a general-purpose solution. Sometimes, the most important capability is the one you maintain but rarely use — because its mere existence shapes adversary planning and preserves options when conventional approaches fail.