November 11, 2026

Middle East

Kalashnikov’s Other Gun – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Kalashnikov’s Other Gun – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna November 6, 2026 0

 

 

 

 

In any photograph of a militia checkpoint, a jihadist position, Russian or Ukrainian units, or a poorly equipped army’s infantry line anywhere between West Africa and Central Asia, two weapons appear with the kind of regularity that intelligence analysts use to draw supply-chain conclusions: an AK-pattern assault rifle and a PKM general-purpose machine gun. While the AK-type weapons get all the cultural attention, the PKM is the more operationally significant data point — because a force carrying PKMs has sustained automatic fire to 800 meters, which the AK cannot provide, and the combination tells an analyst specific things about who built the unit and where their training came from. With more than a million produced since 1961, the PKM has become so thoroughly embedded in the world’s conflict zone inventories that its presence is less a supply-chain indicator than a baseline assumption. The question on any battlefield where it appears is no longer how it got there. The question is what variant you are looking at and what it is mounted on.

 

The Second Kalashnikov

The PK — Pulemyot Kalashnikova, or, “Kalashnikov’s Machine Gun” — was not a natural follow-on to the AK-47. It was a separate design competition, run in the 1950’s, for a general-purpose machine gun (or “GPMG”, for short) to replace several aging Soviet weapons with a single family. The Soviet Main Artillery Directorate (or “GRAU”) issued the requirement in 1955: a belt-fed weapon chambered for the standard Russian rifle cartridge of the time, capable of functioning as a bipod-mounted squad automatic weapon, a tripod-mounted company machine gun, and a vehicle coaxial gun — all from the same basic action, with maximum parts commonality. The challenge was to design a weapon reliable enough and simple enough to cover all three roles in combat conditions ranging from Arctic cold to desert sand to tropical humidity.

Tripod mounted PKM machine gun with an improvised buttstock repair at Russia-backed rebel position, eastern Ukraine, 2015. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov. CCA/4.0 International.

Kalashnikov won the competition in 1961 over a design by Grigory Nikitin and Yuri Sokolov, partly on reliability grounds and partly on the strength of a design approach that used proven elements from multiple sources. The bolt carrier and rotating bolt came from the Kalashnikov rifle action — well-tested, tolerant of fouling, straightforward to maintain. The feed mechanism was adapted from the Goryunov SG-43 medium machine gun, a mid-World War 2 wartime design that Kalashnikov had spent time analyzing. The operating mechanism was, in the characteristic Kalashnikov manner, derived from those elements and then simplified: the AK action was effectively inverted to allow belt feed from the top of the receiver rather than magazine insertion from the bottom.

The original PK was lightened and refined into the PKM (Pulemyot Kalashnikova Modernizirovannyi) in 1969. The modernization reduced weight through stamped rather than milled components and improved ergonomics. The PKM, at approximately 7.5 kilograms unloaded, became the standard. It is this version — or a licensed copy of it — that appears in virtually every Soviet-influenced military inventory on earth.

The Cartridge and its Feeding

The PKM’s caliber is the first data point any analyst notes: 7.62×54mmR], the rimmed rifle cartridge introduced with the Mosin-Nagant in 1891. At the time the PK was designed, this cartridge was already seventy years old. The Soviets chose it anyway, because the choice was not about the cartridge’s age — it was about what the cartridge was already in. The 7.62×54mmR was the standard round for the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle, for aircraft machine guns, and for the older SG-43 the PK was replacing. One cartridge across the squad, the sniper position, the vehicle coaxial mount, and the aircraft door gun is a logistics argument that overrides almost any ballistic preference.

The rimmed case created a design problem. A rimmed cartridge — one where the cartridge head is wider than the case body — cannot be pushed directly forward from a belt into the chamber the way a semi-rimless NATO round can. The PKM uses a two-stage feed mechanism, adapted from the Goryunov’s design, that first pulls the round backward out of the belt link and drops it into the feed way, before the bolt strips it forward into the chamber. This means the weapon must be cocked after the belt is placed on the feed tray — an extra step required because the first round is not yet in the feed way until the charging handle moves the mechanism.

PK machine gun non-disintegrating metal belt with 7.62×54mmR ammunition. US Army photo, 2005. Public Domain.

The belt itself is non-disintegrating: each link is a closed metal loop that retains the round, and the belt is recovered intact after firing. Western general-purpose machine guns — the American M-60, its replacement the M-240, and the Belgian FN MAG from which the M-240 derives — all use disintegrating M13 links that separate from the round as it feeds and are most often discarded with each shot. The distinction is more than mechanical. Disintegrating links are simpler to manage during firing but are one-use: each ammunition resupply requires new links loaded with new rounds. Non-disintegrating links must be managed during firing — the expended belt exits the weapon and must be managed — but they are reusable, reducing the sustained-operation logistics requirement for a force that cannot rely on regular resupply. In the kind of conflict where PKM’s appear most often, that tradeoff heavily favors the PKM.

The M-240 outweighs the PKM by approximately five kilograms/eleven pounds, fires the NATO 7.62×51mm semi-rimless cartridge through a direct feed mechanism derived from an inverted Browning Automatic Rifle action, and is the better fire-support weapon in a fully resourced Western infantry battalion. In an under-resourced force fighting a sustained irregular campaign a thousand kilometers from its nearest supply depot, the PKM’s lighter weight, simpler logistics, and reusable belt are the more relevant specifications.

 

One Family, Every Role

What distinguishes the PK series from most machine gun designs is the breadth of its role coverage from a single basic action. The PKS and PKMS are the same PKM weapon mounted on a tripod, providing a medium machine gun capability. The PKT is a modified PK with a longer, heavier barrel, a solenoid electric trigger, and no stock — designed for coaxial installation in armored vehicles, where it replaced the SGMT Goryunov as the standard tank and IFV secondary armament. The PKT became the coaxial gun in the T-54/T-55, T-62, T-64, T-72, T-80, T-90, BMP-1, BMP-2, and wheeled BTR armored vehicles — which is to say, in virtually the entire armored vehicle inventory of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Every country that received Soviet armor received, in the same shipment, the PKT as the vehicle’s secondary (or primary) weapon. There is no separate procurement decision, no separate training pipeline:

The PKT comes with the vehicle.

This is the mechanism of the PKM’s global proliferation that goes unmentioned in most discussions of the weapon. AK rifles spread through direct military aid, arms sales, and licensed manufacture. PKT’s spread through the armor itself — attached, permanently, to every T-55 sold to Egypt, every BMP-1 supplied to Syria, every BTR-60 that went to any Soviet client army from the 1960’s onward. The foot-infantry PKM follows the armor. By the time a Soviet-equipped army has equipped its infantry, its vehicle crews, and its tripod-mounted support positions, the 7.62×54mmR cartridge and the PK family’s operating system are woven through every level of the force structure.

PKT 7.62x54mmR solenoid-fired coaxial tank machine gun; AK-47 bayonet for scale. Photo by Vitaly V. Kuzmin, 2014. CCA/4.0 International.

Licensed production extended the reach further. Yugoslavia produced the Zastava M-84 and M-86 (the M-84’s coaxial version); Serbian weapons derived from that production line have since shown up in Sahel jihadist inventory, primarily acquired through looting defeated government forces. China produced the Type 80 and Type 86. Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland all manufactured variants. Post-Cold War dispersal did the rest: dissolved armies, coup-stripped armories, and battlefield capture moved the weapons from state inventories into non-state hands in volumes that no export control framework was designed to address.

 

What This Tells You

Conflict Armament Research documented in 2025 that at least twenty percent of the weapons held by Salafi jihadist groups in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso had been seized directly from the regular armies of eight North and West African countries. The AK variants are the most numerous – the PKM’s are the most tactically consequential, because they provide the sustained suppressive fire that turns a checkpoint or an ambush position into something that an enemy has to plan around rather than simply push through.

The PKM’s presence on a Sahel battlefield in 2025 traces a line through at least three to five previous owners: a Soviet export batch, a government military armory, a combat loss, the black market, and/or a jihadist weapons dump. What it does not represent, in most cases, is a fresh arms pipeline from Moscow or anywhere else. Conflict Armament Research found no evidence of systematic, long-range supply chains to Sahel jihadist groups. The weapons are already there because they have always been there — because when the Soviet Union armed the armies of the developing world between 1960 and 1991, it armed them comprehensively, with a weapon family designed from the start to cover every role from the infantryman’s bipod to the tank commander’s coaxial mount.

Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the PKM to be universal. He succeeded beyond any reasonable projection. The weapon that the Soviet Army adopted to simplify its own logistics has, sixty-five years later, simplified the logistics of every irregular force on earth that inherited a Soviet-pattern inventory — which is most of them.

The PK-series is the world’s most common general-purpose machine gun — not because it is the best, but because it is everywhere, and because being everywhere is a different kind of best.

 

 

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The Flying Crocodile

The Flying Crocodile

Michael Cessna October 30, 2026 0

 

 

 

 

In 1968, the Soviet defense ministry signed a directive no Western air force had been willing to issue: build a battlefield helicopter that could suppress a landing zone with rockets and cannon and then deliver the assault troops it had been carrying throughout. The Americans, whose combat helicopter experience in Vietnam was producing the two-airframe model — the AH-1 Cobra providing fire support while the UH-1 Huey delivered infantry — had concluded that the two roles required two aircraft.

The Soviets concluded that two aircraft meant two maintenance chains, two logistics trains, and one irreducible vulnerability: the moment when the gunship and the transport arrive over the same landing zone at different times. Mil designer Mikhail Mil had proposed the concept years earlier and spent years winning over a skeptical ministry. His answer — designated V-24 during development, accepted into Soviet service in 1972 as the Mil Mi-24, and given the NATO reporting name “Hind” — has been in continuous combat somewhere on earth ever since. More than fifty nations have operated it. No Western air force ever built anything like it.

The Mi-24’s coexistence alongside the Mi-8 and Mi-17 transport fleet is not a contradiction of its design philosophy — it is a confirmation of it. The Soviet model was never “one airframe does everything alone.” It was “one airframe that can do both when the situation demands it, without waiting for the second aircraft to arrive.” In practice, Mi-24s escorted Mi-8s on assault missions; the difference from the Western model is that the Hind could reverse that relationship instantly — suppressing and then delivering — when the tactical situation required it and no transport was available.

 

The Hind

The only helicopter ever built to suppress a landing zone and carry the assault troops into it in the same airframe, the Mi-24’s prototype first flew on September 19, 1969, and from the first, the design reflected its dual mission. Behind the crew cockpit sits a fully enclosed cabin capable of carrying eight combat-equipped soldiers — so a single aircraft can suppress a landing zone with rockets and cannon and then land and deliver the infantry to the same patch of ground the fire just cleared. Its stubby wings carry anti-tank guided missiles, rocket pods, bombs and/or gun pods on six hardpoints.

The definitive version, the Mi-24D (Hind-D), introduced the tandem double-bubble cockpit that became the type’s visual signature: weapons operator in the lower forward bubble, pilot raised behind, both wrapped in armored glass, sitting inside cockpit bulkheads made of titanium armor (in contrast, the AH-64 Apache only uses Kevlar for armor). A four-barrel 12.7mm Gatling gun occupies the nose turret on the D; the Mi-24P (Hind-F) replaced the turret with a fixed, twin-barrel 30mm cannon. The entire fuselage is armored to resist 12.7mm rounds from all angles, and the titanium rotor blades were designed to take a direct hit from the same caliber without failing. Soviet crews called it the ‘Krokodil‘ — the Crocodile — partly for the reptilian camouflage of early variants and partly for the long armored snout of the tandem-cockpit nose.

Front view of a Soviet Mi-24 HIND E ground-attack helicopter. US Navy photo, 1983. Public Domain.

The combination came at a cost. The Mi-24 is heavier and less maneuverable than a dedicated attack helicopter; the troop cabin adds weight and bulk whether or not it is occupied. Mil accepted these tradeoffs. His assessment was that an army fighting across a continent cut by rivers, forests, and defended ridge-lines needed an airframe that could deliver fire and infantry to the same point without requiring a second aircraft to be coordinated, fueled, and timed. The West has never accepted that tradeoff. The AH-64 Apache carries no troops. The UH-60 Black Hawk carries troops but no meaningful offensive armament – and if it fitted with real weapons, it, too, carries few/no troops. The Mi-24 carries both simultaneously (although the troop capacity turned out to be more useful for special operations units than actual air assault), and has for more than half a century.

Helicopter-tank operation in Afghanistan, c.1984. United States Department of Defense photo. Public Domain.

 

Mujaheddin Teaching Points

The Mi-24’s first combat use came in 1977, when Ethiopian forces — with Soviet pilots flying the aircraft under Ethiopian markings — used it in the combined-arms counteroffensive that expelled Somali forces from the Ogaden by early 1978. The helicopter proved decisive in that fight. Two years later, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan put more than a thousand Mi-24s into the world’s most demanding rotary combat environment, and the lessons have shaped every subsequent conversation about the type.

Early in the Afghan war, the Hind was nearly invulnerable to available Mujaheddin weapons. Its armor absorbed small-arms fire; RPG hits that would have destroyed lighter aircraft often failed to bring down the Hind. Soviet pilots ran roadrunner missions escorting convoys through the mountain passes, and hunter-killer sweeps in pairs across the valleys, attacking at speed and breaking away in tight turns. The Mujaheddin called the Mi-24 “Shaitan-Arba” — “Satan’s Chariot” — and learned to scatter the instant Soviet target-designation flares appeared overhead.

Afghan Mujaheddin with Stinger missiles, c.1987-88. CIA photo. Public Domain.

Afghanistan also revealed the tension written into the design from the start. Combat experience quickly demonstrated the practical difficulties of using a maneuvering gunship as a simultaneous troop carrier. Soviet doctrine migrated toward using Mi-24’s as dedicated gunships, with Mi-8 and Mi-17 transports carrying assault elements under Hind escort — the very two-aircraft model Mil’s design had been built to replace. In practice, the assault helicopter had become a gunship with a passenger cabin only used by tiny special forces teams.

That migration proved situational. In 1985, the CIA introduced the FIM-92 Stinger into the Mujaheddin supply chain through Pakistan, and the calculus shifted again. The Stinger’s range forced Soviet helicopter crews to fly higher and slower, where conventional ground fire could reach them. Soviet engineers added flare dispensers in 1987, but the lesson was already written: the Mi-24 was effectively immune to everything the Mujaheddin had until the United States specifically armed them to kill it.

 

The Flying Tank Goes to the Sahel

The Mi-24 has taken part in more than thirty conflicts since the Ogaden, exported as the Mi-25 and Mi-35 to Soviet client states and, after 1991, to any government with the currency to buy surplus stock. The current production variant — the Mi-35M, with fixed undercarriage, shortened stub wings, and updated night-attack sensors — represents Russia’s continued investment in the family and its continued relevance to the export market that matters most to Moscow right now: the Sahel.

Malian Air Force Mi-35M on the flight line. Voice of America photo, 2022. Public Domain.

 

Beginning in 2021, Russia delivered Mi-35Ms to Mali, eventually equipping the Malian Air Force with eleven aircraft. Russian African Corps personnel — the reconstituted successor organization to Wagner PMC — have operated them alongside Malian crews. In July 2024, Tuareg rebels at Tinzawaten shot down a Malian Mi-24 and an Mi-8, with a Russian crew aboard the downed Hind. The loss reportedly reduced Mali’s functional attack helicopter fleet to ten airframes; a subsequent rebel seizure of an abandoned Mi-24P brought the operational count lower still. The aircraft that Mikhail Mil designed in 1968 to escort Soviet assault forces across a European river was meeting the same end it had in the Hindu Kush: engaged from the ground by a lightly armed irregular force that had, or would acquire, the means to make it pay for flying low.

 

The Question Still Open

The Western doctrinal answer to the helicopter combat problem has been consistent for sixty years: separate the roles. A dedicated attack platform for fire support; a separate transport for troops. It is a correct answer to the resources available to a force that can afford two fleets.

The Mi-24 was built for forces that could not. In the Sahel, where eleven Mi-35Ms represent the entirety of a country’s attack aviation and there is no second fleet of transports waiting to fill the gap, Mikhail Mil’s tradeoff still makes operational sense. The troop cabin may spend a conflict empty, occupied only when the arithmetic of available aircraft makes it necessary. But the aircraft that can do both is worth more to that force than the aircraft that can do only one — and the flying tank, fifty-five years after its first flight, is still the flying tank.

Mikhail Mil asked the question in 1968. The Mujaheddin answered it in 1985. The Malian Air Force is still living with it now, and the answer is still flying.

 

 

 

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Before The Tank Boats: The Danube Fleets

Before The Tank Boats: The Danube Fleets

Michael Cessna October 2, 2026 0

 

In the summer of 1907, four armored warships slid into the Danube at Galați, Romania, attended by the royal family, government ministers, and a crowd that understood they were witnessing something significant. The ships were monitors — low-hulled, heavily armored river warships carrying naval guns in purpose-built turrets — and their appearance on the lower Danube completed a quiet arms race that had been running for nearly four decades along one of Europe’s most contested river frontiers. Austria-Hungary had been building Danube monitors since 1871. Romania had watched, waited, and was now answering in kind. The weapons they were building were not improvised solutions. They were purpose engineered warships, designed from the keel up by naval architects with established shipbuilding industries behind them. Understanding what they were, and what distinguished them
from the tank boats that would appear on the same river thirty years later, begins with understanding why the Danube needed warships in the first place.

 

The River As A Frontier

The Danube in the late nineteenth century was not merely a river. It was a political boundary, a commercial artery, and a military problem of the first order simultaneously. For Austria-Hungary, the Danube connected Vienna to the empire’s Balkan frontier, running through Hungarian territory and then tracing the border with Serbia and Romania before it reached the Black Sea. A river that wide and that long required armed patrols — not to fight fleet actions, really, but to enforce sovereignty, project firepower along banks where roads were absent or unreliable, and deny the river to an enemy seeking to use it for their own movement.

Budapest, Hungary, 2016. Photo by Visions of Domino. CCA/2.0 Generic.

The Habsburgs had recognized the military requirement for river warships long before the monitor era. What the wars of the mid-nineteenth century demonstrated, however, was that the kind of vessel the Danube demanded was specific: shallow enough in draft to operate in channels that would strand a seagoing warship, armored well enough to absorb shore fire, and armed well enough to answer it. The American Civil War’s river monitor campaigns on the Mississippi and its tributaries had provided a template that European naval architects were paying close attention to. What the Austro-Hungarian Navy took from that experience was the principle of the purpose built river fighting ship — not a gunboat improvised from a commercial hull, but a warship designed for riverine conditions from the outset.

 

The Austrian Solution: Leitha And Her Descendants

The SMS Leitha and SMS Maros, completed in 1872 and built at the Pest Flumaner Schiffbau yard in Budapest], were the first river monitors in Europe — a distinction that sometimes surprises readers who assume the type was purely an American invention. Naval architect Josef von Romako oriented his design along the American monitor principle but adapted it specifically for Danube conditions: twin screws driven by high-pressure steam engines, a draft of just 1.3 meters, and an armament of two 150mm guns behind an armored casemate, later refitted with a 120mm gun in a rotating mount. At 50.5 meters in length and 310 tons, the Leitha class was small enough to navigate the middle Danube’s shallower reaches while carrying firepower that no riverbank fortification could ignore. SMS Leitha fired the first shot of the class in anger against Ottoman forces in Bosnia in 1878, during the occupation that followed the Congress of Berlin — the same campaign that gave Austria-Hungary control of territories that would be burning with nationalist conflict by 1914.

The restored river monitor Sava on display at the Belgrade waterfront on the Sava River, 2021. Photo by Srđan Popović. CCA/4.0 International.

The Austro-Hungarian monitor program continued in measured pairs across the following decades, as was the parliamentary custom — one hull for each legislature to fund. The Körös class of 1892 represented a significant upgrade: 448 tons displacement, a twin 120mm gun turret forward, belt armor running to 50mm, and a complement of 77 men. Then came the Temes class, the most capable of the pre-war generation, carrying 120mm Škoda naval guns and 70mm belt armor on a hull long enough to project genuine firepower across any reach of the river. By 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Danube Flotilla deployed six monitors in various states of modernity, the oldest — Leitha and Maros, both over forty years in service at that time — still capable enough that they were kept in commission rather than scrapped. On the morning of July 29, 1914, the flotilla fired the first artillery shots of the First World War, bombarding Belgrade from the Sava River — the Temes and Bodrog opening up against Serbian positions while the diplomats in Vienna were still drafting their final messages.

 

Romania’s Answer

Romania’s relationship with the Danube was as foundational as Austria-Hungary’s, but its strategic geometry was different. Romania lay along the river’s lower reach, where the Danube defined the border with Bulgaria and provided the only practical avenue for projecting military force toward Ottoman and later Bulgarian territory — or, critically, for defending Romanian soil against forces crossing from the south. Romanian independence, formalized in 1878 after the Russo-Turkish War, brought with it Black Sea access through the Dobruja coast, but it also brought the long-term challenge of maintaining a credible military presence on a river that Austria-Hungary was actively arming.

The Romanian Danube Flotilla had existed in some form since 1860, accumulating gunboats through the 1880s and 1890s — small, lightly armed craft adequate for patrol but not for battle against armored opponents. The monitor program of the early twentieth century was Romania’s answer to the regional arms environment, and it was ambitious. The four ships of the Bratianu class were built in sections by the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino in Austria-Hungary, transported to Romania by rail, then assembled and launched at the Galați naval yard between 1907 and 1908 — an arrangement that reflected both Romania’s limited industrial capacity for major warship construction and the paradox of a state purchasing military hardware from the power it was quietly arming against.

Monitors of Austria-Hungary on the Russe in 1916: SMS Bodrog (forward), SMS Temes (left), SMS Enns (middle, 2nd row). Original photo from the Imperial and Royal War Press Headquarters, Photographic Section – Vienna, 1916. Public Domain.

The result was formidable by river standards. At 680 tons displacement and 63.5 meters in length, the Bratianu-class monitors were larger than their Austro-Hungarian counterparts. They carried three 120mm Škoda naval guns in individual turrets arranged in a triangular pattern, along with 120mm howitzers for plunging fire against troops on the riverbanks — a weapons fit designed not just for ship-to-ship action but for the direct fire support of ground operations across the river. Belt armor ran to 70mm. At 13 knots they were faster than the older Austrian monitors they might one day face. When all four were commissioned in September 1907, Romania named them after the 19th-century statesmen who had shaped the nation’s independence: Ion C. Bratianu, Lascar Catargiu, Mihail Kogalniceanu, and Alexandru Lahovari — a deliberate statement that these were instruments of national sovereignty, not just naval hardware.

 

A Notable Footnote: Rozhestvensky On The Danube

Before the monitor era fully matured, the Danube theater attracted at least one figure whose later career would define the limits of nineteenth-century naval thinking. Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, best known to history as the commander who led the Russian Baltic Fleet to catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, spent the years 1883 to 1885 seconded to the newly formed Bulgarian Navy, organizing its nascent naval forces and designing a coastal defense scheme along the Black Sea — operating, that is, at the far end of the same river system where the monitor arms race was taking shape. The connection is oblique, but worth noting: the same geopolitical reorganization that followed the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War that created Romanian independence and redrew the Balkan map also created Bulgaria’s autonomy and the need for a Bulgarian naval force. Rozhestvensky, wiedly regarded as a fine naval officer, was one of Russia’s answers to that need — a gunnery specialist sent to instill European naval practice in a new state. That his career ended in the worst naval disaster since Trafalgar is, in this context, a footnote rather than the story. The story is the environment he moved through: a region of new states, contested rivers, and the urgent question of who controlled them.

 

What The Monitor Represented — And What It Didn’t

The pre-WWI Danube monitors were, in the fullest sense, genuine warships. They required established naval architecture, purpose-built shipyards, specialized gun mounts, trained crews, and supply chains for naval-grade ammunition that did not overlap with anything an army used. The Bratianu class’s Škoda naval guns were not the same weapons in any logistical sense as the Škoda field artillery serving Romanian or Austro-Hungarian ground forces — different mounts, different ammunition, different maintenance regimes, different institutional homes. This is precisely the distinction that the tank boat concept would later dissolve: the idea that a riverine fire support vessel had to be a warship in this full sense, drawing on naval industry and naval logistics, rather than a hybrid that reached sideways into the army’s supply chain.

Romania’s monitors demonstrated the strengths of the purpose-built approach during the First World War. During the Battle of Turtucaia in 1916, the monitors supported Romanian ground forces and evacuated the besieged Romanian 9th Infantry Division under fire — exactly the kind of combined-arms riverine operation that justified the investment in armored hulls and heavy guns. The Austrian monitors did the same on their side of the line, shelling Romanian positions and supporting river crossings. Both fleets performed as designed.

A U.S. riverboat monitor deploying napalm during the Vietnam War. US Navy photo c.1968. Public Domain.

What neither fleet could do was be improvised quickly, or cheaply, or by a state without a shipbuilding tradition. The Soviet engineers who developed the bronekater in the early 1930s were not building monitors because they didn’t know what monitors were. They were building tank boats because they understood the monitor’s industrial prerequisites — and because post-civil-war Soviet Russia did not reliably possess any. The Danube monitors represent the high road of riverine warfare, the answer available to states with the industrial depth to build genuine warships. The tank boat represents the other road — the answer available to everyone else. The same river eventually saw both solutions at work, often within artillery range of each other, which is perhaps the most concise possible illustration of why the distinction matters.

 

 

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Three Flags, Three Arsenals – One Book

Three Flags, Three Arsenals – One Book

Michael Cessna September 18, 2026 0

 

 

 

 

 

The global arms market has long sorted itself into a predictable hierarchy: the United States and its European partners at the top, Russia and the People’s Republic of China in the middle, and everyone else buying what they can afford from whoever will sell to them. That hierarchy is not collapsing — but it is developing significant cracks. Three Muslim-majority states have built defense industrial bases capable, at varying levels of ambition and success, of competing in that market on something other than price alone: Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran. The three cases share little except religion and the broad definitions of geography. What they share analytically is the common experience of being told, at one point or another, that they couldn’t have what they needed — and deciding to build it themselves.

 

Turkey Makes The First Leap

The Turkish case is the most dramatic, because the numbers are now difficult to dispute. Turkish defense and aviation exports reached $10.05 billion in 2025, up 48 percent year-on-year — a figure that would have been unimaginable in 2002, when the country’s defense exports stood at $248 million. The growth reflects a deliberate, decades-long state project to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers. The share of domestically produced systems in Turkish defense procurement has now exceeded 80 percent, and Turkey now manufactures two out of every three military unmanned aerial vehicles sold worldwide.

Bayraktar Ground Control Station truck-mounted module cutaway. Image by Bayhaluk. CCA/4.0 Int’l.

The platform that made Turkey’s name globally is the Bayraktar TB2 drone, which has proved itself in Libya, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine — but Ankara has not been content to remain a drone exporter. Indonesia has signed a contract for 48 KAAN fifth-generation fighters from Turkey in an agreement valued at around $10 billion, and Indonesia also became the first export customer for the Bayraktar Kizilelma unmanned combat aircraft, with deliveries set to begin in 2028. The pivot from tactical drones to stealth combat aircraft represents a qualitative shift — Turkey is no longer competing in the cheap-and-cheerful tier of the arms market. A €2.6 billion contract was signed for the export of 30 HÜRJET aircraft to Spain — which is a notable data point: NATO’s founding members are now buying Turkish military aircraft.

What distinguishes Turkey from the other two cases is the depth of its industrial base. ASELSAN, TUSAS, ROKETSAN, ASFAT, and MKE all appeared in the Defense News Global Top 100 list in 2025 — not one flagship company but five, spanning electronics, airframes, missiles, shipbuilding, and ammunition. Turkey is not exporting a product. It is exporting an ecosystem.

 

Pakistan’s Combat-Tested Moment

Pakistan’s story is different in character, though the trajectory is similar. For years, Pakistan occupied an awkward middle tier: a nuclear-armed state with modest ambitions in the conventional arms market, but was completely dependent on American F-16’s and whatever China was willing to co-develop. The JF-17 Thunder, a joint venture with the PRC’s Chengdu Aircraft Corporation assembled at the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex in Kamra, was widely categorized as a budget fighter for buyers who couldn’t afford better. That categorization survived until May 2025.

Infantry weapons systems displayed in the exhibition booth of Pakistan Ordnance Factories, 2008. Image by SyedNaqvi90. CCA/3.0 Unported.

When India’s Air Force launched Operation Sindoor against targets in Pakistan following a terrorist attack in Kashmir, the Pakistan Air Force responded with JF-17’s armed with Chinese PL-15 air-to-air missiles. The military balance sheet of the clash remains contested between the two governments, but the international perception of the outcome was clear: the JF-17 had performed acceptably in high-intensity combat against Western platforms, and the global arms market noticed. Pakistan’s defense exports hit an all-time high in 2025, with approximately $10 billion in contracts, particularly for JF-17 fighter jets and the Mushshak trainer aircraft. In December alone, Libya entered into a $4.6 billion deal to procure 16 JF-17s and 12 Super Mushshak aircraft.

The JF-17’s appeal to the global south is structural, not just financial. Unlike Western systems, the JF-17 is exempt from the political vetoes and usage restrictions typically attached to American or European exports — a selling point that has become more resonant as Washington’s reliability as a security partner has grown more conditional. Pakistan is marketing its platforms as cost-effective alternatives to Western and Russian equipment, offering middle-power countries affordable solutions amid rising global defense spending.

The honest caveat is industrial capacity. Pakistan’s ability to produce the JF-17 is limited to roughly 25 units per year, shared between domestic requirements and exports. The pipeline of announced deals — potentially reaching $13 billion — is more ambitious than current production lines can realistically service in the near term. But Pakistan has something it did not have before May 2025: a combat record that export marketing teams can use, in conditions that the buyers who matter most were watching closely.

 

Iran: The Degraded Pole

Iran’s case requires the most careful handling. Before February 2026, Iran had assembled one of the more impressive indigenously developed defense industrial bases outside the major powers — remarkable precisely because it was built entirely under sanctions. Despite those restrictions, Iran acquired dual-use technologies through a global network of intermediaries and front companies, with drone components traced to over 70 manufacturers across 13 countries. The Shahed-series loitering munition had become a genuine export product, proliferated to Russia for use in Ukraine and to proxies across the Middle East.

Iranian Shahed-136 combat drone on display, 2023. Image by Behrouz Ahmadi. CCA/4.0 Int’l.

Operation Epic Fury, the 38-day U.S.-Israeli campaign launched on February 28, 2026, changed the equation. U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine stated that approximately 90 percent of Iran’s weapons factories had been attacked, and that Iran’s missile industry was shattered, with solid rocket motor production capability effectively eliminated. These figures come from governments with obvious interest in maximizing their claimed success, and should be treated with some analytical caution — Reuters reported that U.S. intelligence could confirm with certainty that only about one-third of Iran’s missile arsenal had been destroyed as the campaign progressed. The picture is severe regardless of where the precise numbers fall.

What is not in dispute is the structural damage. Iran’s military industrial base depends on foreign dual-use and commercial items that historically arrived through UAE intermediaries — a route now unlikely to function as before. Iran retains institutional knowledge and engineering personnel. Its own Defense Ministry has stated its intention to restructure and modernize based on lessons from recent conflicts. But reconstitution of physical production infrastructure under expanded sanctions, without access to previous supply chains, is a project measured in years, not months.

As a pole of Muslim defense industrial capability capable in open-market competition, Iran is, for the foreseeable future, off the board.

 

What The Three Poles Mean

The portrait that emerges is not a single phenomenon but three distinct paths to the same destination: the determination to produce, not merely purchase, military capability. Turkey arrived there through sustained political will and a modernizing industrial policy. Pakistan arrived through a combination of Chinese partnership and an unexpected combat demonstration. Iran arrived through four decades of enforced self-reliance — and has now had much of what it built taken away.

The significance for the global arms market is less about whether any of these three will displace Lockheed Martin or Rheinmetall in the near term than about what they represent for the buyers at the lower end of the defense procurement food chain. Countries that cannot afford Western prices, cannot accept Western conditions, or cannot obtain Western approval now have more options than they did ten years ago.

That menu is expanding — even with one of its major entries temporarily removed from it.

 

 

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The King Of Chemicals And The Danger No One Is Watching

The King Of Chemicals And The Danger No One Is Watching

Michael Cessna August 21, 2026 0

 

 

 

Supply and commodity trading is boring stuff…Right?

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” is a very real thing. Many people, however, refuse to see them when they appear…and sometimes, they refuse to acknowledge it amid the wreckage of their error. To his credit, John F. Kennedy did acknowledge this – albeit parsed for public consumption – when he said, in the aftermath of the disaster that was the Bay of Pigs, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”

When we covered the opening weeks of Operation Epic Fury in March, in our monthly subscription edition, we flagged a supply chain casualty that most of the financial press was too focused on crude oil to notice: sulphur.

We noted that a Hormuz closure extending beyond 30 days would begin to bite into agricultural input supply chains, drive spot sulphur prices sharply upward, and extend inflationary effects well beyond the energy sector into global food commodity markets. We were right – and the situation has since become considerably more complicated than even that analysis anticipated.

And this is, in fact, what actually happened.

 

Commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf near Hormuz Island, Iran. 2011 photo by ninara. CCA/2.0 Generic.

 

The Invisible Commodity

Sulphur is not a commodity that generates headlines under normal circumstances. It does not trade on the nightly news. Most people could not tell you what it is used for, beyond a vague association with volcanoes and the smell of struck matches. That invisibility is precisely what makes it dangerous as a supply chain vulnerability.

Sulphuric acid – the primary derivative of elemental sulphur – is the most widely produced industrial chemical in the world. It is not an exaggeration to call it the nervous system of industrial civilization. It is the essential reagent for processing phosphate rock into the fertilizers – MAP, DAP, SSP and TSP – that sustain the yield levels modern agriculture depends on. It is a critical processing agent for copper, nickel, and the battery metals that underpin the energy transition. It is used in steel production, petroleum refining, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and water treatment. When sulphur supply tightens, the consequences do not stay in one sector.

They cascade.

The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately 45-50% of global seaborne sulphur trade. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the dominant exporters, with Qatar contributing significantly as a byproduct of its LNG operations. When the strait effectively closed in late February 2026, that flow stopped – approximately 4 million metric tons of sulphur per year, originating from Iranian, Qatari, and UAE export terminals, were cut off from world markets.

 

But How Bad Is The Disruption, Really?

Before going any further, it is worth establishing what “closed” actually means in practice – because the picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and the nuance matters for understanding how long the sulphur crisis persists.

Maritime shipping analysts tracking tanker movements through Kpler data estimates that actual Hormuz transits peaked recently at roughly 7.5 million barrels of oil per day equivalent on a seven-day rolling basis – against a pre-war flow of approximately 20 million barrels per day. Rerouting through Saudi pipelines to Yanbu and UAE facilities at Fujairah adds perhaps 4 million barrels per day of incremental bypass capacity. The net picture, properly benchmarked against total pre-war Middle Eastern outflow of approximately 23 million barrels per day, puts the region running at just over 50% of pre-war export levels.

Complicating the picture further: tanker AIS tracking data is being actively gamed. Ships are running dark – disabling their automatic identification systems – making real-time flow estimates inherently uncertain. What satellite imagery of loading docks can confirm is that the disruption is real and sustained, regardless of what official statements claim. CENTCOM reported on August 14th that U.S. forces had redirected 62 commercial vessels and boarded two to ensure compliance with the blockade. The UAE’s ADNOC shipping line reported two vessels attacked within a single week.

The Houthi dimension adds a further layer. Saudi oil rerouted through Yanbu and heading toward Asia must transit the Bab el-Mandeb – where Houthi forces, operating in conjunction with Iranian interests, are now targeting Saudi-linked vessels specifically. Tanker transits through Bab el-Mandeb have fallen approximately 40%, with more vessels running dark. The bypass route that was supposed to partially compensate for Hormuz is itself under attack.

And on August 14th, President Trump told a crowd of law enforcement officers in New York: “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated – pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States“. He followed that on August 18th by posting a map on Truth Social labeling the strait “New US Territory”. Iran responded that the strait “will remain Iranian.” Whatever the legal merits – and they are essentially nonexistent under international maritime law – the political signal is clear: the disruption is not resolving quickly, and the diplomatic pathway to normalization just became considerably more complicated, assuming that Trump’s statements are not simply another example of his grandstanding, as he did in referring to making Gaza into a resort town.

 

The Triple Shock

What began as a Hormuz disruption rapidly evolved into something considerably more severe, because two major sulphur exporters seized the moment to protect their own domestic supply chains.

On April 10, China announced a full export ban on sulphuric acid through August 2026 – replacing a 700,000-ton annual quota with a complete cessation. China is the world’s largest sulphuric acid exporter, with Chile, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia as its primary markets. Chile uses it for copper solvent extraction. Indonesia uses it for high-pressure acid leach nickel processing. Saudi Arabia and India use it for fertilizer production and industrial applications. The Chinese ban effectively removed a critical secondary supply option precisely when buyers most needed it.

Russia extended its own sulphur export ban through the end of 2026. Turkey imposed export restrictions for Q2 and Q3. The result was a triple supply shock – Hormuz, China, and Russia/Turkey simultaneously – that no single alternative supply source could absorb. China’s sulphuric acid exports are projected to fall from 4.6 million tons in 2025 to approximately 1.2 million tons in 2026 – a reduction of nearly 75%.

The price response was swift and severe. Spot prices for granular sulphur FOB Arabian Gulf jumped from $80-90 per ton to $160 per ton in the first week of April alone, according to Argus Media data. Fertilizer costs overall are projected to rise more than 30% in 2026, according to the World Bank’s April Commodity Markets Outlook.

 

The Fertilizer Cascade

The downstream consequences for agriculture are where the sulphur story intersects with food security in ways that deserve serious attention.

Urea prices – the bellwether of nitrogen fertilizers – roughly doubled in a matter of weeks following the strait closure, jumping from $400-490 per metric ton to over $850 per metric ton in April 2026, before softening somewhat as China lifted its separate urea export ban and northern hemisphere spring application demand eased]. Diammonium phosphate prices climbed from approximately $580 to around $770 per metric ton. Indian and Brazilian phosphate fertilizer producers, facing shortages of sulphuric acid, reduced operating rates by 15-20%.

Brazil’s exposure deserves particular attention. The country imports more than 80% of its fertilizers and relies heavily on Gulf sources now blocked by the strait closure. Brazil is the world’s third-largest agricultural exporter – its soy, corn, and sugar output affects food prices globally. A sustained reduction in Brazilian fertilizer access does not stay in Brazil.

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) leads a formation of Carrier Strike Group (CSG) 5 ships as U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress aircraft and U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets pass overhead; 2018 U.S. NAVY photo. Public Domain.

 

Morocco’s OCP Group – the world’s largest phosphate producer and exporter, a company that underpins fertilizer supply for much of Africa and Asia – was already operating under sulphur supply constraints before February 28, following production outages at a major Qatar LNG facility in H2 2025. The Hormuz closure found OCP with sub-optimal sulphur inventory and no easy alternative supply source. The knock-on effects for African agricultural input availability are not yet fully visible in the data, but they are coming.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) chief economist was direct in his June 2026 assessment: the strait’s closure has reduced tanker traffic by more than 95%, disrupting millions of tons of fertilizer shipments monthly and creating an unprecedented shock to agricultural inputs. FAO estimates suggest cereal producers could face income losses of up to 5% in 2026, with lasting impacts through 2030. As one Ninety One analyst told CNBC: “Unfortunately, the poorer countries in the world are quite often more exposed to these crises“.

 

The American Position

The domestic picture for U.S. readers is more reassuring than the global picture, but the country is not entirely insulated. Approximately 54% of U.S. sulphur output is recovered at Gulf Coast refineries in Louisiana and Texas – a domestic supply source entirely independent of Hormuz transit. That physical insulation is real and significant.

However, approximately 17% of U.S. urea consumption and roughly 20% of U.S. phosphate consumption originate from Gulf exporters whose shipments must transit the strait. Trade policy decisions in recent years – countervailing duties on Moroccan fertilizers, export restrictions from China – had already concentrated U.S. phosphate sourcing toward Saudi suppliers now blocked by the Hormuz closure. American farmers planting spring crops faced higher input costs at precisely the moment the strait closed. The global market sets prices regardless of where the physical supply originates, and international tightness exerts upward pressure on domestic prices even for buyers who can source locally.

 

The Structural Gap Nobody Wants To Talk About

The 2026 disruption has confirmed something that commodity analysts have warned about for years and policymakers have consistently declined to address: sulphur has no internationally coordinated strategic reserve. No emergency release mechanism exists. When the International Energy Agency (IEA) convenes member states to coordinate a strategic petroleum release, there is an institutional architecture to do that. When the sulphur supply collapses, there is no equivalent.

Oil has the IEA. Natural gas has emergency sharing agreements within the EU. Sulphur – the feedstock for the fertilizer that feeds the world – has nothing.

The East Asia Forum‘s July 2026 analysis identified the compounding factors with precision: geographic bottlenecks, by-product dependence – most sulphur is a byproduct of oil and gas processing, not a primary product – and policy control combine to amplify disruption across global production networks in ways that are structurally difficult to hedge against. When the by-product source is disrupted at the same time the major exporting nations choose to restrict trade, there is no lever to pull.

Now add a U.S. president posting maps of the strait labeled “New US Territory” while ceasefire negotiations flounder, a June memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran expiring with no final deal in place, and Houthi forces actively interdicting the primary bypass route. The resolution timeline that commodity markets were pricing in three months ago is no longer visible.

And, hysterical cheerleading to the contrary, maneuvers around the strait have not “reopened” it.

 

So – How Did We Get Here?

Military service, generally speaking, tends to impart a healthy skepticism in veterans, especially those who have been in combat, because those veterans get to see the immediate impact of poor decision-making ability among politicians. This tends, by extention, to make veterans with those experiences who become politicians wary of both jumping into warfare, but equally wary of allowing problems to masticate, because that tends to evolve into a kind of “cultural gangrene“.

It is important to remember that this is not an absolute – both John F. Kennedy’s and Jimmy Carter’s military experience failed them, rather spectacularly, especially in Carter’s case.

With that in mind, it is equally important to understand that from 1945 to 2026, only four US Presidents have not had some form of military service in their resumes: Bill Clinton (1993-2001), Barack Obama (2009-2017), Joe Biden (2021-2025)…and Donald Trump (2017-2021, and 2025-Present). Studying these Presidents’ various administrations from a military standpoint reveal very uneven decision-making capacities.

The reasons for these situations are many, and we could spend the next few months arguing specifics but that fact is that, strategically speaking, the performance of the United States over the past c.35 years has been…”underwhelming” is a fair term.

In regards to the Strait of Hormuz – the center of the current sulphur crisis – the problem can be laid squarely at the feet of Jimmy Carter, who preferred that the then-Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza, be deposed and replaced by – of all people – the Ayatollah Khomeini. As a result, for nearly five decades, a cancer of a terrorist state being funded by stupendous oil profits to fester and metastasize into a cancer that endangers human civilization across the board.

For Donald Trump, the problem is different. Trump inherited the disasters left him by over forty years of objectively terrible leadership, and the allowance of the rise of an increasingly open corporate oligachy that runs the country, an oligarchy that is perfectly fine with the nationa’s foundations being destroyed entirely, if it makes their quarterly numbers look good.

Militarily, however, this translates into a particularly virulent form of brain cancer: the Toffler Effect.

Donald Trump, despite the breathless and hysterical screeds of abysmally educated and/or self-deluded “NPC’s“, is not a stupid person. Quite the opposite. However, with no grounding in actual military thinking, it appears that Trump has been misadvised on how to handle the Iran situation, in a way that is very attractive on its surface.

First, it appears that there was little, if any, pre-planning about how to actually deal with removing the openly psychotic and bloodthirsty terrorist regime ruling from Tehran. This means that when the Iranian Rial collapsed in December of 2025, Trump and his advisers jumped at the chance to undermine the regime, even if they had to “wing it”, and come up with a plan on the fly.

Fine – that’s not an optimal way of doing things, but it can be made to work…Except that this is where Toffler meets Billy Mitchell.

Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell was one of the early cheerleaders for what is now termed “strategic bombing”, the notion that air power alone can win wars. This frankly bizarre view has persisted since the 1930’s, despite repeated examples of its complete and utter failure…But for Trump, the airpower solution – aided by naval missile fires – is highly seductive.

If the regime in Tehran could be toppled solely through the United States and Israel using only airpower, that was an ideal solution: there would be no videos of US ground troops storming mud-walled compounds in the Iranian interior, with goats running for their lives, and the bodies of children caught in the crossfire – the sorts of images that the mainstream media froths at the mouth over, trying to skew the context to match their internal political narrative. Likewise, although air crews – both pilots, ground crew and missile defense troops – might be killed and wounded in action, the numbers would be comparatively tiny, compared to infantry companies having to fight house-to-house, potentially taking World War 2-scale casualties in the process.

Low-brow/low-information types (which really is a fair characterization) occasionally pontificate that the Iranian people need to “rise up and overthrow” the IRGC and the mullahs on their own…completely ignoring the fact that they tried that – and on January 8th and 9th, the IRGC promptly massacred over 36,000 of them in 48 hours. Passion and harsh language are a poor match for a DShK.

The problem with this, as has been shown clearly, is that airpower alone has not, can not, and will never win wars on their own. Without “boots on the ground” – be those boots American, non-terrorist Iranian, or otherwise – victory is impossible. Bombs can be dropped and missiles can be fired, but victory is impossible.

Another aspect of this is the utterly rampant Dunning-Kruger Effect that is rotting (primarily) Western minds. Dunning-Kruger, simply put, is the effect of people with little to no experience or knowledge of a subject being convinced that they are, in fact, very competent in that sphere.

While it may seem like a cliche, in the case of Trump’s war on the terror regime in Tehran, this translates into Dunning-Kruger being formulated by video games, and breathless war documentaries: Call of Duty, World of Tanks/Warships, and more. While the effects produced by these games are certainly not uniform, they do impact public discourse…which, in turn, impacts politicians who are equally susceptible to Dunning-Kruger, and the public fawning when said politician agrees with the “TikTok PhD’s“.

As just one example, many people are convinced that the first Gulf War/Desert Storm “was won in 100 hours“. Nothing could be further from the truth. Desert Shield/Desert Storm took 7 months, from August 7, 1990, to February 28, 1991. “Combat operations” actually began on January 19, 1991…And yet, “keyboard commandos” almost literally froth at the mouth if anyone dares to disagree with the “100 Hour” gospel.

We don’t even need to discuss the Dunning-Kruger disconnect between the US march on Baghdad in 2003 and Russia’s march on Kiev in 2022.

And worse – the enemies of the United States are all watching US combat operations in the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea very carefully, measuring what we are actually capable of doing in a short-term, short-planning window environment…and the look on our side is not good.

As a result, the Strait of Hormuz has been functionally closed since early-March of 2026. This does not overly impact the United States directly, but it is about to. It is already impacting the wider world…

…And there is no clear exit, for any side.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just an oil issue. It is not just a gas issue. It is, as the fertilizer industry has now learned at considerable cost, a food issue – and the mechanisms to manage that risk, at every level from strategic reserves to diplomatic architecture, do not yet exist.

 

 

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

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

Michael Cessna August 14, 2026 0

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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The M101 And M102 – A Tools of the Trade Joint

The M101 And M102 – A Tools of the Trade Joint

Michael Cessna August 7, 2026 0

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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

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

Michael Cessna July 31, 2026 0

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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Reading The School From Its Graduates

Reading The School From Its Graduates

Michael Cessna July 24, 2026 0

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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The Lion Roars To Life

The Lion Roars To Life

Michael Cessna July 17, 2026 0

 

 

 

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

 

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