Middle East – The Freedomist

Proto-APC’s: From Lend-Lease To The Cold War – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna August 14, 2026

Armored combat vehicles are relatively new things. Like most complicated technology, they had rough starts. Few people, be they the engineers who designed and built them, or the soldiers using them, had any real idea of how they should be used, nor what requirements were necessary to make them function.

There is a particular irony embedded in the early history of Soviet mechanized infantry that most Cold War histories skip past without pausing on it. When the Soviet military’s engineers sat down in November 1946 to design the Red Army’s first purpose-built armored personnel carrier, the vehicles they studied most carefully were American. Thousands of M3 half-tracks had arrived in the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program during the Second World War, alongside captured German Sd.Kfz. 251 half-tracks that Soviet troops had taken off the battlefield. Soviet infantrymen had ridden both into combat. Soviet engineers had pulled both apart to understand how they worked. When designer B.M. Fitterman’s team at the ZiS plant began drawing the vehicle that would become the BTR-152, they were not starting from scratch. They were starting from an M3.

That lineage makes the M3/BTR-152 comparison something more interesting than a simple East-West parallel. It is a study in what happens when one nation takes another’s design concept, rebuilds it from different industrial and doctrinal assumptions, and produces a vehicle that resembles its ancestor in outline while differing from it in almost every meaningful detail. The differences tell you more about the two armies’ understanding of mechanized warfare than the similarities do.

The M3: A Commercial Vehicle Goes to War

The M3 half-track emerged from a straightforward American procurement logic: build a vehicle that can carry a rifle squad across broken terrain, protect it from shell splinters and small arms fire over the front arc, and do so using as many commercially available components as possible to speed production and simplify maintenance. The White Motor Company produced the first prototype using the body of the existing M3 Scout Car mated to a half-track running gear derived from French Citroën-Kégresse designs the US Army had evaluated in the 1930s. Accepted for service in May 1941, it could carry thirteen men — three in the cab, ten in the rear — at up to 45 miles per hour on road, with cross-country performance the wheeled vehicles of the era could not match.

*M3 Halftrack armored cars Fort Knox, June 1942. US Office of War Information photo by Alfred T. Palmer. Public Domain.*

Its armor ran to 12mm at the front and 6mm on the sides — enough to stop rifle-caliber fire and most shell fragments, not enough to stop a machine gun at close range. The open top, which saved weight and allowed the crew to fire their weapons in any direction, was also the M3’s most consistent complaint: American troops, who nicknamed it the “Purple Heart Box” in grimly humorous reference to the decoration for combat wounds, objected that artillery airbursts and grenades dropped from above found the interior entirely unprotected. In the close terrain of the Italian campaign and the Hürtgen Forest, that limitation was lethal.

The M3 was produced in numbers that reflected American industrial capacity at full war mobilization: approximately 41,000 vehicles of all variants across the production run from 1941 to 1945, built by White, Diamond T, and Autocar and delivered to American, British Commonwealth, Soviet, and Free French forces across every major theater. Its variants numbered in the dozens — self-propelled artillery mounts, anti-aircraft platforms, mortar carriers, ambulances, command vehicles — which testified both to the design’s adaptability and to the American tendency to derive entire vehicle families from a proven platform rather than develop specialized vehicles from scratch.

Partly finished halftrack scout cars travel along a moving assembly line in a plant converted from the manufacture of safes and locks. Diebold Safe and Lock Company, Canton, OH. December, 1914. US Office of War Information photo by Alfred T. Palmer. Public Domain.

The M16 Multiple Gun Motor Carriage variant, mounting four .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns in a powered turret, became the standard American light anti-aircraft vehicle of the war and one of the most effective ground support weapons of the Italian campaign. The M3 Gun Motor Carriage mounted a 75mm gun and served as a tank destroyer in North Africa before being replaced by purpose-built vehicles. The platform proved more versatile than its designers had intended, in the way that genuinely sound engineering often does.

The BTR-152: The Same Idea, Built Differently

The specification that produced the BTR-152 was issued in 1946, and work began at ZiS — the Zavod imeni Stalina, later renamed ZiL [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIL] — under Fitterman that November. The design brief called for an all-terrain armored personnel carrier capable of operating with tank formations across the terrain of a future European war. The Soviet engineers’ answer was conceptually similar to the M3 but mechanically quite different: rather than a dedicated half-track running gear, Fitterman’s team took the chassis and drivetrain of the ZIS-151 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIS-151] six-by-six military truck — a vehicle already in Soviet service — and wrapped it in sloped armor. The result was a fully wheeled vehicle, not a half-track at all, carrying up to eighteen passengers at a maximum road speed of 75 kilometers per hour.

*BTR-152 APC in Yad la-Shiryon Museum, Israel. 2005. Photo by Bukvoed. CCA/3.0.*

The BTR-152 entered Red Army service on March 24, 1950, was first shown publicly in a Moscow parade in 1951, and was produced in approximately 8,600 units through 1959 — a much smaller run than the M3, reflecting both the Soviet Union’s more constrained postwar industrial capacity and the shorter window before the BTR-60 rendered it obsolete. It carried a 7.62mm SGMB machine gun on a pintle mount, with provision for a 12.7mm DShK heavy machine gun on some variants. Its armor ran to 15mm at the front and 9mm on the sides — marginally thicker than the M3, though the same fundamental vulnerability to heavy machine gun fire and direct anti-tank weapons applied.

The BTR-152’s combat debut came not in a major war but in a city. In November 1956, Soviet forces used BTR-152s in Budapest during the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising. The results were instructive and unflattering. Hungarian insurgents threw Molotov cocktails and grenades into the open-topped troop compartments. Bullets and improvised weapons punctured the tires, immobilizing vehicles that could not move on rims as a tracked vehicle might. The armor that had seemed adequate on a proving ground was penetrated by heavy machine gun fire at close range in the narrow streets. The BTR-152 V1 and V2 variants that followed added a central tire pressure regulation system allowing the crew to adjust tire pressure while moving — a direct response to the Budapest lesson — but the open top remained until the BTR-152K, which added an armored roof at the cost of the firing ports’ usefulness.

*BTR-152 armored personnel carrier. Poland, 1957. Photo by Zbyszko Siemaszko. Public Domain.*

The pattern was identical to the M3’s experience in the Hürtgen and Italy: a vehicle designed for open mechanized warfare proving costly when urban terrain inverted its advantages. The open top that allowed observation and flexible fire in the open became a liability the moment walls and rooftops provided the enemy with elevation.

Two Vehicles, One Lesson

The M3 and the BTR-152 belong to the same moment in military history — the point at which armies that had learned the hard way that infantry could not keep pace with tanks on foot began building the infrastructure to change that, without yet having developed a coherent theory of what a truly integrated mechanized infantry vehicle should look like. Both vehicles were, in the vocabulary of their era, “battlefield taxis”: their job was to deliver infantry to the edge of the fight in something better than a truck, with enough protection to survive the journey under fire and enough firepower to suppress opposition during the dismount. Neither was expected to fight through the objective with the infantry aboard. Neither had the armor or the weapons to do so.

It took the 1967 appearance of the BMP-1 — which we examined in an earlier piece in this series — to demonstrate what a vehicle built on a genuinely different concept could accomplish: infantry that fought from the vehicle rather than dismounting before the fight, organic anti-tank capability, protection against the NBC environment of a nuclear battlefield. The BMP made both the M3 and the BTR-152 look like what they were: first attempts at solving a problem that would take another generation of engineering to solve properly.

The M3 was declared obsolete by the US military around 1955, though it continued in Israeli service through the 1973 Yom Kippur War and with various other operators well into the 1980s. The BTR-152 was similarly retained by export customers long after Soviet motor rifle units had moved on to the BTR-60 and eventually the BMP. Both vehicles appeared in the Lebanese Civil War. The M3 appeared in the hands of the IDF as recently as the 1982 Lebanon War.

The deeper irony is that the vehicle the Soviet engineers built by studying their American ally’s design ended up serving as long, in the same breadth of conflicts, in as many hands as the original — not because it was worse, but because it was cheaper, simpler, and distributed to clients who could not afford to upgrade when something genuinely better arrived. Which is, when you examine it carefully, a reasonable description of the M3’s own staying power. The Lend-Lease intellectual debt ran in one direction. The lesson about simplicity and durability ran in both.

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

The M101 And M102 – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna August 7, 2026

In a previous piece in this series, we examined the D-30 — the Soviet 122mm howitzer that entered service in 1960, whose three-legged carriage gave it full 360-degree traverse and whose rugged simplicity has kept it relevant across six decades of continuous combat. The D-30 was designed to solve a specific problem: how do you give a divisional artillery piece the ability to defend itself against armor coming from any direction, while keeping it light enough to move with a mechanized force? The answer Petrov’s bureau reached in Sverdlovsk was the tripod carriage.

In the same years that Soviet engineers were developing that solution, American engineers at Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois were wrestling with a version of the same problem — and arriving at a remarkably similar answer, albeit by a different route. The result was the M102, a lightweight 105mm howitzer that also achieved full 360-degree traverse, also prioritized air mobility over raw firepower, and also remained in service decades beyond its expected replacement date. The parallel is instructive, and the differences are at least as revealing as the similarities.

The M101: The Gun That Wouldn’t Retire

To understand the M102, you have to start with what it replaced. The M101 — originally designated the M2A1, redesignated in 1962 — was itself a development of a 1920s design, standardized as the M1 howitzer in December 1927 after the US Army Ordnance Department spent the immediate post-World War One years studying captured German 105mm artillery pieces. Entering full production in 1941, it became the standard American light field howitzer of the Second World War, serving in both the European and Pacific theaters in quantities that dwarfed any comparable weapon: a typical US infantry division’s artillery complement included three battalions of twelve M101s each, alongside a single 155mm battalion, giving each division thirty-six 105mm “tubes”. The gun fired its HE round to approximately 11,270 meters — about seven miles — with a probable range error of 41 meters at 9,000 meters, a figure that reflected genuine accuracy for a mass-produced field piece of that era.

*105mm Howizter, USMC Base MCAS, Cherry Point, North Carolina. 1979 photo by Sgt R. Dorsey, USMC. Public Domain.*

The M101 was accurate, reliable, and thoroughly understood by the armies that operated it. It was also, by the mid-1950s, showing its age. Its split-trail carriage limited traverse to 46 degrees — adequate for a fixed defensive position, problematic for a fast-moving mechanized advance where the threat direction could change without warning. At 2,260 kilograms (4,980 pounds), it was heavier than the Army wanted for the airmobile doctrine that was beginning to take shape around the capabilities of rotary-wing aircraft. And its 22 caliber barrel — stubby by contemporary standards — capped its range at figures the evolving battlefield was beginning to render inadequate. The US Army issued a requirement for a replacement in 1955. Work began in earnest in 1962.

The M101 nevertheless outlasted its intended replacement in front-line service, remaining alongside the M102 throughout Vietnam and retiring from US Army active use only when the M119 — a licensed American version of the British L118 Light Gun — entered service in 1989. By that point, the M101 had accumulated a combat record spanning World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War, and multiple smaller conflicts across four continents.

Approximately 10,200 were built. They remain in service today with the Philippines, several Latin American armies, and various other operators — appearing as recently as the 2022-present Russo-Ukrainian War in Ukrainian hands…and the United State Marine Corps, which still operates over three hundren guns in 2026.

The M102: Lighter, Lower, and Capable of Looking in Any Direction

The prototype “XM102”, completed at Rock Island Arsenal in 1962 and type-classified as Standard A in December 1963, addressed the M101’s limitations through a fundamentally different carriage architecture. Where the M101 used a conventional split-trail design that anchored the gun to a fixed arc, the M102’s single-leg box trail ended in a roller assembly that allowed the entire weapon to pivot around a central firing platform — achieving the same 360-degree traverse the D-30’s tripod provided, by a different mechanical path. The parallel with the Soviet gun is not coincidental: both design teams were solving the same doctrinal problem in the same decade, and both reached the full-traverse solution as the correct answer.

*Artillery Marines of the 3rd Marine Division operating an M-101 105mm howitzer at a mountain-top fire support base, Republic of Vietnam. USMC photo via NARA/DVIDS. Public Domain.*

The M102’s aluminum alloy carriage reduced its weight to approximately 1,496 kilograms (3,298 pounds) — nearly 800 kilograms lighter than the M101 it replaced — making it slingable under the UH-1 Huey and later the CH-47 Chinook, and parachute-droppable with airborne units. Its barrel ran to 32 calibers in length, rather than the M101’s 22, extending effective range to 11.5 kilometers (7.1 miles) with standard ammunition and 15.1 kilometers (9.4 miles) with rocket-assisted projectiles — broadly comparable to the D-30’s figures. Maximum rate of fire reached ten rounds per minute for the first three minutes, sustained at three rounds per minute — again, a figure that tracks almost precisely against the Soviet gun’s quoted performance.

The M102 reached South Vietnam in June 1964, equipping the airmobile formations then being developed around the 1st Cavalry Division. Fire bases across the country were built around it, and its combination of light weight, high rate of fire, and full traverse made it the defining artillery piece of that war’s particular tactical geometry — a geometry built around helicopter mobility, rapidly shifting threat axes, and positions that needed to cover 360 degrees by necessity rather than by design choice. The gun’s low silhouette when firing — a deliberate design feature — reduced its vulnerability to counter-battery fire in a way that its taller predecessor could not match.

From Grenada to Iraq and the AC-130

After Vietnam, the M102 accompanied American forces through Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada in 1983, Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989, and the Persian Gulf War in 1991, consistently in the hands of airborne and air assault units for whom its slingload capability remained the critical attribute. Its last confirmed combat deployment came in 2004 in Iraq, when the 1st Battalion, 206th Field Artillery of the Arkansas Army National Guard deployed seventeen M102s to Camp Taji — and, in a detail worth filing, scavenged spare parts from M102s in the Camp Taji boneyard that had been captured from Iran by the Iraqi Army during the Iran-Iraq War and left behind. The gun’s global proliferation had created its own improvised logistics chain.

82nd Airborne Division artillerymen prepare to load a round into their M102 105 mm howitzer during a fire mission in support of Operation URGENT FURY, 1983. Photo by SPC Douglas Ide, US Army. Public Domain.

The M102 also found an afterlife that its designers could not have anticipated. The gun’s cannon assembly — the M137 barrel and M37 recoil mechanism — was adapted for use in the AC-130 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_AC-130] gunship, firing from the aircraft’s left-rear side door in the ground attack [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_air_support] role. That application remains in service today, making the M102’s mechanism one of the longest-lived in the American arsenal in any form.

A 105 mm Howitzer and a 40 mm cannon protrude from the side of a 16th Special Operation Squadron AC-130H Hercules gunship aircraft. Unknown date. Hurlburt Field, Florida. USAF photo by SSGT Susan Foreman USAF. Public Domain.

The US Army began replacing the M102 with the M119 in Regular Army units from 1989 onward, while National Guard battalions retained their M102s through the 2004 Iraq deployment. The M119 itself is now being supplemented in some roles by the M777 155mm lightweight howitzer, which Ukraine has operated to good effect — and which has absorbed the same drone-vulnerability lessons that have reshaped every other artillery platform on that battlfield.

Two Guns, One Problem, Different Philosophies

Set the M102 against the D-30 and the comparison rewards attention. Both entered service in 1960-64. Both achieved 360-degree traverse as a deliberate design priority. Both weighed approximately 1,500 kilograms (3300 pounds) in firing configuration. Both fired to comparable ranges with comparable rates of fire. Both were designed for fast-moving combined-arms warfare in which the threat direction could not be guaranteed. Both outlasted their planned service lives by decades.

The differences are equally instructive. The D-30 was designed to be cheap, simple, and producible in the tens of thousands — a gun for a mass army expecting to absorb enormous losses and keep fighting. The M102 was designed to be light enough for helicopter sling loads, reflecting an American doctrine that substituted mobility and firepower concentration for mass. The D-30 used steel construction throughout; the M102’s aluminum carriage saved weight at the cost of field repairability in austere conditions. The D-30 has been exported to over sixty nations and manufactured on multiple continents; the M102 saw limited export, reflecting American caution about transferring military technology to all but close allies.

What both guns share, beyond their technical specifications, is the quality that defines every piece in this series: they outlasted the strategic assumptions that produced them, adapted to conflicts their designers never anticipated, and remained useful long after theoretically superior replacements had arrived. The M102’s cannon still fires from AC-130 gunships. The M101 still fires in Ukraine. Petrov’s three-legged gun still fires in more conflict zones than this column has space to cataloge.

There is a lesson in that persistence, and it is not primarily about the guns.

The AES: Three Coups, One Alliance, And A War That Defies Simplicity

Michael Cessna July 31, 2026

The headline writes itself and is almost entirely misleading: three countries in West Africa’s Sahel have been seized by military coups, expelled French and American forces, turned to Russia for security partnerships, and formed a new political confederation outside the framework of the region’s established institutions. Read that sentence in isolation and the conclusion seems obvious — failed states, Russian proxies, chaos compounding chaos.

France staged a masterful rapid intervention to rescue the nation of Mali in 2013…but seven years later, the honeymoon ended in a very nasty – and very public – divorce.

The analytical picture on the ground is considerably more complicated, and understanding it matters, because the Alliance of Sahel States — the AES, comprising Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — is not what most Western coverage has made it out to be.

*African countries in the Coup Belt. 2023 image by “**Discombobulates**“. **CCA/4.0 International**.*

The Coups in Context

The wave of military takeovers that produced the AES did not emerge from a vacuum. Mali experienced coups in August 2020 and again in May 2021. Burkina Faso experienced two in 2022 alone, with Army Captain Ibrahim Traoré consolidating power in September of that year. Niger’s military removed President Mohamed Bazoum in July 2023. In each case, the military’s public justification was the same: the civilian government had failed to contain the jihadist insurgencies consuming the country’s territory, and French forces — present under Operation Barkhane and its predecessor missions since 2013 — had failed alongside them.

Burkina Faso President Captain Ibrahim Traoré, 2025. Image from **RIA Novosti** archive, image # / **CC-BY-SA 3.0**

That justification deserves scrutiny rather than dismissal. Despite the success of Operation Serval, French counterinsurgency strategy in the Sahel had produced a decade of inconclusive results despite significant resources, considerable French casualties, and the deployment of sophisticated ISR and strike assets that no Sahelian government could replicate independently. Operation Barkhane at its peak deployed approximately 5,100 French troops across five countries; JNIM and the Islamic State Sahel Province continued to expand their territorial control, increase their attack tempo, and grow their recruitment base throughout the same period. The populations of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger drew conclusions from that evidence. The coup leaders articulated those conclusions in the language of sovereignty rather than counterinsurgency doctrine, but the underlying assessment was not irrational.

What the departing French and American presence also represented, in a less discussed dimension, was a set of political constraints on how the AES governments could fight. Western counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes civilian protection, human rights compliance, and governance reform alongside kinetic operations. Those emphases were not merely theoretical for the civilian governments that preceded the juntas — they were tied to aid flows, political recognition, and the terms on which French forces operated. The juntas removed those constraints. Whether what replaced them is better or worse for the populations of the Sahel is a genuinely open question; that the constraints existed and shaped operations is not.

The Economic Factor

The AES governments’ accusations that France colluded with or tacitly enabled jihadist groups in the Sahel have been widely dismissed in Western media as Russian-amplified disinformation. A French court ruling handed down on April 13, 2026 however, makes that dismissal considerably harder to sustain.

On that date, the Paris Criminal Court found Lafarge — the French cement giant now part of Swiss conglomerate Holcim — and four former executives guilty of financing terrorism. The conviction rested on documented payments totaling approximately €5.5 million made between 2013 and 2014 through Lafarge’s Syrian subsidiary to armed groups including the Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front, in order to keep the company’s Syrian cement plant operational during the civil war. Lafarge had already pleaded guilty in the United States in 2022, paying $778 million in fines and forfeitures to the US Justice Department for conspiring to provide material support to designated terrorist organizations. The Paris court imposed the maximum available corporate fine and sentenced the former executives to prison terms ranging from three to six years. A separate charge of complicity in crimes against humanity remains under investigation.

The Lafarge case does not prove that the French government directed or approved payments to jihadist groups. What it establishes is that a major French corporate entity — operating in a conflict zone where French military and intelligence assets were also present — paid jihadist organizations to protect its commercial operations, and that French institutional and legal processes took the better part of a decade to bring the company to account. The AES governments have not made the careful distinction between corporate and state culpability. Neither, in many cases, have their populations.

The economic dimension of France’s Sahelian presence is not peripheral to this story — it is, by any honest accounting, central to it. France generates approximately 70% of its electricity from nuclear power, and Niger was, until recently, its second-largest supplier of uranium, providing roughly 20% of French uranium imports over the past decade. That uranium came primarily from the Somair mine operated by Orano — a company majority-owned by the French state. Following Niger’s 2023 coup and the expulsion of French forces, the junta in Niamey revoked Orano’s license for the Imouraren deposit — estimated to hold 200,000 tons of uranium reserves — and by December 2024 had taken operational control of Somair itself, effectively nationalizing France’s primary nuclear fuel source in West Africa.

Mali has been equally direct about the economic reordering. The Malian government placed Barrick Gold‘s Loulo-Gounkoto gold complex under state administration in a tax dispute and detained the CEO of Australia’s Resolute Mining until the company agreed to a $160 million settlement. Mali’s military government states that its renegotiated mining contracts and royalty enforcement have generated over 700 billion CFA francs — approximately $1.2 billion — in additional state revenue. Gold mining accounts for roughly a quarter of Mali’s budget; the previous arrangements, negotiated under civilian governments with French backing, returned a substantially smaller share to the Malian state.

*Essakane Mine in Burkina Faso. From iamgold.com. **CCA/3.0 Unported**.*

The picture that emerges from these facts, taken together, is not one of ideologically pure anti-jihadist governance. It is one of sovereign governments — however imperfect their democratic credentials — reasserting control over natural resources that had been structured, over decades of post-independence arrangements, to benefit external corporate and state interests more than the populations sitting on top of them. Whether the AES juntas will deploy that recovered revenue effectively against the jihadist threat is a separate and still-open question. That the revenue was being extracted at terms unfavorable to the host nations, and that French military presence served as a guarantor of those terms regardless of its stated counterinsurgency mission, is now a matter of documented record rather than junta propaganda.

The AES – An Emerging Security Architecture

The Alliance of Sahel States was formally constituted through the Liptako-Gourma Charter in September 2023, initially as a mutual defense pact — an explicit response to ECOWAS threats of military intervention to restore civilian governance in Niger. The three states withdrew from ECOWAS formally in January 2025, and signed a Confederation Treaty in July 2024 that deepened the alliance’s institutional structure. On December 20, 2025, at a ceremony at an air base in Bamako, the AES inaugurated its Unified Force — the FU-AES — an initial force of approximately 5,000 troops drawn from all three armies, placed under the command of Burkinabe General Daouda Traoré and headquartered in Niamey. The April 2026 summit expanded the planned force to 15,000.

This is the third attempt to build a joint security mechanism for the central Sahel. The Multinational Joint Task Force announced in January 2017 never effectively materialized. The G5 Sahel Joint Force, established in July 2017 with French support and including Mauritania and Chad alongside the three AES states, collapsed when Mali withdrew in 2022 and the others followed. The AES Unified Force differs from both predecessors in one critical respect: it is explicitly designed to operate without Western donor funding, without French logistical support, and without the political conditionalities that accompanied both. Whether it can be sustained at scale on that basis is the central unresolved question.

Russian engagement has partly filled the gap. Africa Corps — the restructured successor to Wagner Group following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in August 2023 — has deployed personnel to Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, providing presidential guard services, counterinsurgency support, training, and hardware including helicopters, drones, and armored vehicles. Mali and Niger have also signed agreements with Roscosmos for telecommunications and surveillance satellites. The AES-Russia relationship is not an alliance of equals — Russia brings assets the AES cannot generate domestically, and the AES provides basing, political cover, and African legitimacy for Russian influence projection — but it is a functioning working arrangement, a meaningful difference from France’s openly neo-colonialist operations.

The Honest Accounting

Western analytical assessments of the AES have tended toward pessimism, and not without foundation. The ISS Africa analysis published in March 2026 noted plainly that by mid-2026, the core justification for the coups — that the juntas could succeed where civilian governments had failed — has not been settled. Jihadist territorial control in Burkina Faso is estimated at approximately 60% of the country’s land area; this should not, however, be assumed to equal the country’s population under jihadist control, given the nation’s population density of 90 per square kilometer (233 per square mile). JNIM’s attack lethality has increased year-on-year throughout the junta period. The April 25, 2026 assault on Kidal and the simultaneous car bombing at Kati that killed Mali’s Defense Minister represented a significant jihadist operational success against the AES and its Russian partners, occurring after the FU-AES had been formally activated.

*Malian soldiers conduct close quarter battle drills in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso on Feb. 26, 2019, as part of Flintlock 2019 exercise scenarios. U.S Army photo by Spc. Peter Seidler. Public Domain.*

The counterargument — and it is a real one — is that the comparison baseline matters enormously. The AES governments inherited security situations that French-backed civilian governments had failed to stabilize over a decade, with deteriorating trajectories already established before the coups occurred. The relevant question is not whether the AES is winning, but whether it is performing better or worse than its predecessors given the same underlying conditions. That counterfactual is difficult to construct cleanly, and Western analysis has been slow to attempt it seriously, in part because the political incentives run toward emphasizing junta failure.

What is observable rather than inferential is this: the AES has demonstrated genuine political cohesion that neither the G5 Sahel nor any previous regional framework managed. When JNIM and the FLA struck on April 25, all three AES governments responded within hours with joint airstrikes in Malian territory — the Niger government explicitly welcoming “the prompt and vigorous response of the units of the unified force.” The FU-AES commander is Burkinabe, the headquarters is in Niger, and the force draws from all three armies. The institutional solidarity, at least, is functioning. The April summit expansion of the planned force from 5,000 to 15,000 signals that the member governments regard the Unified Force as viable enough to scale.

The AES is not winning its war, at least not quickly, and certainly not “cleanly”. But it is also not the simple story of junta incompetence and Russian exploitation implied by much of Western media coverage. It is three countries with legitimate sovereignty, genuine security problems that preceded their current governments, and a functional if fragile regional architecture, all trying to develop indigenous solutions to a problem that externally-backed approaches failed to solve. The complexity of that situation is not a reason to withhold analytical judgment. It is a reason to ground that judgment in the actual record rather than the preferred narrative.

Reading The School From Its Graduates

Michael Cessna July 24, 2026

Looks, as they say, can be deceiving.

There is no published curriculum. No training manual has been captured and released. No defector has provided a detailed account of what happens inside a JNIM formation camp in the Sahel’s interior. What exists instead is a body of observable output — attacks of increasing precision, lethality, and tactical sophistication — from which the training architecture can be inferred with reasonable confidence. Military forensics works this way: you read the wound to understand the weapon. You read the tactics to understand the school that produced them. In the case of JNIM, what that school is producing in 2026 is considerably more dangerous than what it was producing five years ago, and the rate of improvement is itself analytically significant.

*Sahel region of Africa. 2012 image by Tom Patterson, US National Park Service. Public Domain.*

JNIM was formally constituted in March 2017 as a coalition of four Mali-based extremist groups — Ansar al-Din, al-Murabitoun, the Macina Liberation Front, and the “Sahara Emirate” subgroup of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Its leader, Iyad ag Ghali, pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda’s leadership and to the Taliban, establishing the ideological lineage and the external mentorship relationships that have shaped the group’s development. The Institute for Economics and Peace’s 2025 Global Terrorism Index identified JNIM as the world’s second deadliest terrorist organization, responsible for more than 1,200 deaths across four countries in 2025 alone, following its 1,454 deaths and 46% year-on-year lethality increase in 2024. An average of ten deaths per attack is not the product of enthusiasm. It is the product of training.

The Recruitment Pipeline as a Training System

Before asking how JNIM trains its fighters, it is worth asking how it selects them — because the selection process is itself a form of pre-training that shapes what formal instruction needs to accomplish. The June 2026 Strategic Threat Outlook on JNIM, one of the most current analytical assessments available, is direct on this point: recruitment is less a function of large-scale ideological adherence than of the ability to convert local grievance systems into mechanisms of compliance, protection, and mobilization. Where the state is absent, predatory, or inconsistent, JNIM offers order, dispute resolution, and livelihood — and the fighters it recruits from that population arrive already embedded in the group’s social logic, already owing it something, already understanding what it is protecting them from.

*Telly Village, Bandiagara, Mali. 2008 image by **Ferdinand Reus**. **CCA/2.0 Generic**.*

This matters for training because it means JNIM is not starting from zero with its recruits in the way a conventional military does. A Fulani community member who joins JNIM after his village was burned by a government-backed militia arrives with motivation, local knowledge, and an understanding of the terrain that no classroom can replicate. The formal training layer is built on top of a foundation of grievance, familiarity, and social obligation that state armies spend years trying to manufacture through basic training and unit cohesion exercises. JNIM gets it for free from the conditions its adversaries have created.

The US State Department’s National Counterterrorism Center notes that JNIM explicitly trains militants to fight against the group’s enemies while simultaneously appeasing local communities through material resources — a dual-track approach that mirrors the classic Maoist model of winning the population while fighting the state. The fighting and the governance are not separate activities. They are taught together, because the group understands that a fighter who cannot govern cannot hold ground, and ground is what JNIM is increasingly interested in holding.

What the Attack Record Reveals

The tactical sophistication visible in JNIM’s recent operations implies a training system with several distinct components, none of which require a fixed training establishment to deliver.

The first is small-unit fire and movement. JNIM’s standard assault package — documented across multiple engagements — involves rapid concentration of motorbike-mounted fighters, multi-directional assault in early morning hours, and equally rapid dispersal before air assets can respond. That is not improvised. The dispersal discipline in particular — fifty motorbikes scattering in fifty directions on a pre-planned schedule — requires rehearsal, communications discipline, and an understanding of the enemy’s response timeline that comes from deliberate instruction and repeated practice. The JNIM fighters who executed the April 2026 assault on Kidal had practiced what they did.

*Chadian technical combat truck during EUFOR operations in Chad. 2008 photo courtesy of the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces of the Czech Republic.*

The second is HUMINT collection and target development. The April 25 car bomb at Kati that killed Mali’s Defense Minister required precise knowledge of checkpoint locations, shift patterns, internal base layout, and the physical location of a senior government figure within a secured compound. That intelligence was not collected remotely. Someone with access collected it, which means JNIM trains — or at minimum briefs — its operatives on the systematic collection of human intelligence from inside adversary institutions. The tradecraft is real, if informal by Western standards.

Probably.

The third and most analytically significant component is drone integration. JNIM’s first documented drone activity occurred in September 2023. By mid-2025, the Policy Center for the New South documented over two dozen confirmed drone incidents, with 82% occurring since March 2025. By 2026, the group’s drone operations had expanded across three countries — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Togo — and the Policy Center’s analysis describes the shift explicitly: JNIM has moved from experimentation to operational doctrine. That transition happened in under thirty months.

Sit with that for a minute.

The speed of that transition implies a train-the-trainer structure. When Colonel Hussein Ghulam, previously with the Tuareg-Azawad FLA rebel alliance, joined JNIM in mid-2024, his name subsequently appeared in connection with drone operations including the Dioura strike of May 2025. The pattern — an expert joins, capability accelerates, geographic scope expands — suggests that JNIM absorbs technical expertise through personnel transfers and then systematically replicates it through internal instruction. The group is not re-inventing the wheel with each new drone operator. It is teaching the wheel.

The Technology Floor Has Collapsed

The practical significance of JNIM’s drone training pipeline extends well beyond the Sahel, because the technology it is training on is available to anyone with a retail account and a few hundred dollars. Commercial drones paired with offline artificial intelligence tools — used to bypass geofencing, optimize payload delivery, and plan flight paths without emitting trackable signals — represent a technical capability that requires weeks of instruction to master, not years. The March 2025 CTC Sentinel documented the expanding transmission ranges and payload capacities of commercially available platforms; the 2026 Eurasian Review analysis described the resulting economic inversion in stark terms: a $500 drone can destroy a vehicle worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and force a state military to respond with multimillion-dollar intercept systems.

*Ukrainian loitering munitions made from FPV drones. 2023 image courtesy of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, armyinform.com.ua, per **CCA/4.0 International**.*

What this means in training terms is that the barrier to producing a competent drone operator has collapsed to the point where a motivated group with basic organizational discipline can build that capability in a matter of months. JNIM demonstrated this. The implication for other non-state actors — in the Sahel, in coastal West Africa where JNIM’s operational reach is visibly expanding, and beyond — is that the playbook is now open-source. The tactics, the technology, and the organizational logic are all observable from public reporting. The only remaining variable is the will and the organizational coherence to implement them.

The foregoing is fairly straightforward, but – as the example of Ghulam shows – the door is wide open to major-state interference being a factor. Russia, Communist China, and even France (still smarting from its ejection from most of the Sahel region), are all possible sources for supplying training officers to JNIM. To be clear, there is no hard evidence of this as of writing, although the French cement company LaFarge is facing financing allegations. But – more direct foreign support to JNIM remains a potential factor.

JNIM currently controls or contests territory across Mali and Burkina Faso, with early indicators of an operational presence extending toward coastal West Africa — Ghana, Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire. In each new operational area, the pattern repeats: grievance exploitation, governance provision, recruitment, instruction, attack. The school follows the army, because the school is the army. Understanding what it teaches is not an academic exercise. It is the precondition for countering it.

World War 3 isn’t being fought with nuclear weapons. It is being fought with simple tools, in regions of the world few people actually care about…unless they live there.

The Lion Roars To Life

Michael Cessna July 17, 2026

There is an old saying in the military sphere:

Beware the old man, in a profession where men die young.

On January 2, 2025, India’s Ministry of Defense quietly issued a Request for Information to domestic defense companies, asking for proposals on a very specific problem: 23mm proximity-fused ammunition capable of detonating near an enemy drone rather than requiring a direct hit. The weapon they wanted to upgrade was the ZU-23-2 — a Soviet twin-barreled anti-aircraft cannon that entered service in 1960, the same year John F. Kennedy was elected president. That a weapon designed to engage Korean War-era low-flying aircraft is now being fitted with twenty-first-century smart fuzes to hunt quadcopters over the India-Pakistan border is, depending on your perspective, either a testament to the original design’s enduring utility or a commentary on how thoroughly the drone threat has outrun the world’s ability to respond to it.

The reality is likely somewhere in between.

From Vietnam to the Technical

The ZU-23-2’s formal designation decodes itself: ZU for Zenitnaya Ustanovka — “anti-aircraft mount” — “23” for its caliber in millimeters, and “2” for the number of barrels. The KBP design bureau presented the prototype in 1955, refined it through the late 1950s, and the Soviet Army adopted it in 1960 as the standard towed light anti-aircraft weapon for Warsaw Pact forces. Its immediate predecessor in that role was the ZPU-2, which mounted twin 14.5mm KPV heavy machine guns — effective against very low and slow targets but outpaced by the jets that were becoming the dominant low-altitude threat by the late 1950s. The ZU-23-2’s twin 2A14 autocannons firing 23x152mm ammunition at a combined cyclic rate of up to 2,000 rounds per minute gave Soviet air defense batteries something capable of reaching targets at ranges out to 2,500 meters and altitudes up to 1,500 meters, with enough hitting power to be lethal rather than merely disruptive.

The Vietnam War gave the weapon its first major combat trial. From 1965 onward, the Soviet Union shipped ZU-23-2s to North Vietnam in quantity, and the gun became, alongside the 37mm M1939, the most commonly encountered anti-aircraft weapon in the theater. Given that approximately 83% of US Air Force losses over Vietnam came from ground fire rather than surface-to-air missiles or MiGs, the ZU-23-2 is conservatively credited with shooting down hundreds of aircraft — a combat record that no other weapon in this series can claim against modern fast jets in their first decade of service.

*ZU-23-2 firing. Vitebsk, Belarus. 2010 photo by Serge Serebro. **CCA/3.0 Unported**.*

What the Vietnam experience also revealed was a capability the Soviet designers had built in but perhaps underemphasized: the gun’s effectiveness against ground targets. At 2,000 meters, its armor-piercing incendiary rounds could defeat light armored vehicles. Against infantry and unprotected positions, it was devastating. Soviet forces in Afghanistan confirmed and extended this lesson, mounting ZU-23-2s in the beds of ZIL-135 trucks to provide convoy protection against ambushes in mountain terrain — using the gun’s high elevation arc to engage Mujahideen fighters on ridgelines that tank guns and BMP autocannons could not reach. After the Soviet withdrawal, both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance operated the weapons left behind. The pattern was establishing itself: wherever the ZU-23-2 went, it tended to stay, and whoever inherited it found new uses for it.

The technical — the improvised fighting vehicle built by mounting a weapon on a civilian truck — became the ZU-23-2’s most consequential platform adaptation. Lebanese militias in the civil war, Iraqi forces in 1991, Libyan factions in both of their civil wars, Sahelian insurgent groups including JNIM and its affiliates: all have mounted the gun on whatever truck was available and achieved a mobile fire support capability that costs a fraction of any purpose-built system. The weapon’s light weight — just over a ton in firing configuration — makes this straightforward. It can be set up for firing from the travel position in 30 seconds. It does not require specialized maintenance infrastructure. It fires ammunition that exists in virtually every post-Soviet conflict zone in quantities that border on inexhaustible. These are not small advantages.

*ZU-23-2 mounted on ZIL-157 truck at Muzeyon Heyl ha-Avir, Hatzerim airbase, Israel, 2006. Photo by Bukvoed. CCA/3.0 Unported.*

The Drone Problem and the Proximity Fuse Answer

For all of that, the ZU-23-2 spent the better part of its service life being quietly written off as obsolete for its nominal primary role. By the 1980s, jet aircraft were flying faster, higher, and with better electronic countermeasures than any optically-aimed 23mm gun could reliably engage. The ZSU-23-4 Shilka — the self-propelled, radar-guided development of the same 23mm caliber — had partially supplanted it in that role for Soviet forces, though even the Shilka was acknowledged as limited against fast-moving aircraft. The ZU-23-2 survived primarily because it was cheap, reliable, and effective against helicopters and slow aircraft — and because some 140,000 of them had been produced and distributed to something over fifty countries, which gives any weapons system remarkable institutional staying power regardless of its theoretical limitations.

The drone revolution has inverted that obsolescence logic almost completely. The primary aerial threat facing armies, militias, and non-state actors across Ukraine, the Sahel, Yemen, and the India-Pakistan border is no longer a fast jet flying at 600 knots. It is a commercial quadcopter or a fixed-wing FPV drone flying at 60 to 100 knots at low altitude, often in swarms, and costing between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. Against that target class, the ZU-23-2’s engagement envelope — 2,500 meter range, 1,500 meter altitude ceiling, 2,000 rounds per minute combined — is not obsolete. It is, if anything, oversized for the job.

*ZU-23 mounted on a Ural-4320 cargo truck. 2019 photo by the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, via Mil.ru. CCA/4.0 International.*

The remaining problem is probability of hit. A 23mm round fired at an FPV drone requires a near-direct hit to kill it. The drone is small, fast for its size, and maneuverable. Tracer-based manual aiming against such targets is demanding even for a well-trained crew. This is precisely the gap India’s January 2025 RFI was designed to close: proximity-fused 23mm ammunition that detonates within lethal radius of the target rather than requiring physical contact. The same concept drove the development of the original anti-aircraft proximity fuse in World War II — the VT fuze that transformed naval anti-aircraft gunnery against kamikazes — and its application to 23mm autocannon ammunition is technically straightforward given modern microelectronics. The payload is small; the fuze logic is well understood; the manufacturing challenge is miniaturization and cost, not physics.

India is not alone in recognizing this. Russia has deployed truck-mounted ZU-23-2 batteries in dedicated anti-drone mobile units in Ukraine since early 2024, pairing the guns with electronic warfare systems and smoke generators in combined teams designed to defeat FPV drone attacks. Russia has also developed and demonstrated a remotely operated variant, the ZU-23/30M1-3, with integrated electro-optical sighting — a concept first shown in 2013 that finally reached serious development attention under the pressure of the Ukraine war. Poland’s WB Group presented its ARM-28 electromechanical upgrade kit at the DEFEA 2025 defense exhibition in Athens, converting the ZU-23-2 into a semi-automated or remotely operated platform with digital drive motors, joystick control, and compatibility with external fire control systems. In May 2025, India’s own army air defense reported that ZU-23-2s alongside Bofors L/70 guns had been effective in shooting down multiple Pakistani drones during the India-Pakistan conflict — a real-world validation that arrived barely four months after the proximity fuse RFI was issued.

A Platform That Keeps Earning Its Place

The ZU-23-2’s spread across more than fifty national inventories and a substantial number of non-state arsenals means it occupies a peculiar position in the current global defense environment: it is simultaneously a museum piece and a front-line system, often in the same conflict zone. In Ukraine, Russian forces operate it as an improvised anti-drone gun. Ukrainian border guards have received new ZU-23-2 deliveries as recently as 2025. In the Sahel, JNIM-affiliated groups have truck-mounted examples that serve as the air defense component of a force that otherwise operates on motorbikes. In Yemen, Houthi forces have used them against Saudi coalition aircraft and, more recently, against drone threats.

What the proximity fuse development — in India, and likely elsewhere — signals is that the global community of ZU-23-2 operators has collectively decided the platform has a generation of useful life remaining, provided the ammunition catches up with the threat. The gun itself does not need to change. The carriage is sound, the barrels are replaceable, and the rate of fire is already more than adequate. What changes is the fuze in the nose of the round, and with it the probability that any given burst finds its target. A sixty-five-year-old Soviet anti-aircraft gun, fitted with a smart fuse developed for a threat that didn’t exist when the gun was designed, hunting Chinese-manufactured quadcopters over an Indian border post. The ZU-23-2’s designers at KBP in 1955 could not have anticipated any of that. The gun they built was flexible enough not to care.

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

Michael Cessna June 26, 2026

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

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

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

A Caliber With a Long History

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

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

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

The Three-Leg Trick and What it Means

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

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

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

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

A Combat Record Spanning Decades

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

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

Ukraine and the Drone Problem

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

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

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

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

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

The Immortal BMP

Michael Cessna June 19, 2026

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

A New Category Of Weapon

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

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

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

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

In theory.

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

The Gap Between Theory And Practice

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

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

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

BMP-2 AND BMP-3: The Lessons Applied

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

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

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

The Ukraine Reckoning

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

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

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

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

The 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.