As of 4pm EST, 4/28/2024, the Port of Baltimore has been partially reopened to commercial traffic. This comes as recovery and clearing efforts continue, following the fatal crash of the container ship MV Dali, on March 26 of this year. At present, only smaller commercial transport ships can exit via the port’s main channel, under escort from tug boats. This also indicates that the US Navy and Department of Transportation’s four Ready Reserve Fleet vessels that have been trapped in port since the accident can now also exit the channel, if needed, as their 35-foot drafts are less than the channel’s minimum clearance.
MARAD Ready Reserve Fleet ship locations, 2021. USDoT. Public Domain.
SS Cape Mendocino (T-AKR-5064), underway. Undated photo. US Dept. of Transportation. Public Domain.
The MV Dali remains in the position it came to rest in, following its 1:30am EST crash, as the delicate efforts to untangle the vessel from the remnants of the south bridge tower. These efforts are delicate due to the fact that if the recovery is handled improperly, many of the remaining containers – which are the size of a semi-truck trailer – could tumble and collapse over the side, further blocking the traffic channel, and potentially rolling the ship over on its side.
Additionally, the FBI has boarded the ship, opening a criminal investigation, alongside the NTSB’s accident investigation. Conspiracy theories aside, this is being done because the accident claimed the lives of six known workers who were on the bridge at the time of the accident, and were killed when the bridge collapse took them into the water. This is entirely normal in an investigation of this type – the methods that the FBI are reportedly using in this investigation are certainly open to question, and the possibility of a conflict of interest with the NTSB’s own investigation certainly exist.
The FREEDOMISTwill stay on top of this story, as it continues to unfold.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
By definition, anyone who enters the United States illegally has committed a crime. What this means, regardless of what side of the immigration debate the reader may fall on, is that any person entering the country illegally cannot – or should not – be able to legally possess or acquire a firearm for any reason or purpose, because of their status as a criminal.
But not according to Judge Sharon Coleman, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Ruling on March 8th, Judge Coleman reversed an earlier determination she had made in the case of U.S. v. Carbajal-Flores. Judge Coleman had earlier, in 2022, rejected Mr. Carbajal-Flores’ claim that 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(5)(A) unfairly criminalized his act of possessing a firearm as an illegal alien.
To say that this is an extraordinary ruling should be a given. In fact, when this author first heard of this case, I was mortally certain that it was a terrible ruling, as it opened the door to all manner of criminal abuses. At first brush, that would seem to be incontrovertibly true.
However, there is a much further-reaching set of implications implicit in this ruling.
In order to be legally protected in possessing a firearm, a person must have the ability to legally acquire a firearm, in the first place. The problem? An illegal alien, by definition, cannot produce the most basic legal documents needed to legally acquire a firearm in almost any state in the Union:
A valid and legal form of identification, such as a “green card”, a diver’s license listing an address in the state of purchase, or another type of identification issued by the state of residence and purchase
A legally filled-out Form 4473 (note question 21(l))
It is irrelevant if an illegal alien acquires a firearm through an unregistered private transaction; the above laws are applied to every person in the United States.
Until now.
What the judge’s ruling means, despite her repeated attempts in her revised ruling to apply her decision only to Mr. Carbajal-Flores is that all of the above documents are no longer required for any legal sale from a Federal Firearms License (FFL). While this may sound extreme, it most certainly is not – in order to exercise a right of any kind, a person must be able to have unfettered access the tools necessary to exercise the right in question, even if they have to pay a private entity to obtain those tools.
If the judge’s ruling applies to illegal aliens, it also applies to all legal citizens. There is no “wiggle room” on this, as all are deemed to be equal in the eyes of the law.
Various bad actors within both the United States and its “Several States” governments have, since 1934, engaged in the promulgation and enforcement of illegal restrictions on firearms sales, possession and transmission, usually to limit the access to weapons for racial or political groups that those entities do not like.
The difference is vital to understand: No person in the United States has a “right” to operate any kind of motor vehicle on public roads, anywhere in the United States, unless they possess a valid driver’s license. However, no one needs a license to exercise their rights under the 1st Amendment – this is why you are allowed to operate a website, or print and hand out flyers on a street corner (despite continual attempts at all levels to attempt to do so).
This especially applies to firearm ownership. The 2nd Amendment is explicit:
In the 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, the SCOTUS expanded the definition of the 2nd Amendment to include the right to own, keep, and possess weapons for self-defense, in addition to the originally understood purpose, which was to ensure the ability of the People to be adequately equipped to help defend the nation if called upon to do so in the form of an armed militia. While this use was clarified in subsequent rulings, various governmental parties within the nation have relentlessly sought to limit, if not outright criminalize, the ownership of firearms in general.
To the point of this particular case, while Judge Coleman’s ruling may seem outrageous, my opinion on it has changed since reading through her ruling. I am now foursquare in favor of the judge’s ruling, as it has – at a single stroke – the unlawful control mechanisms that have illegally destroyed lives and unjustly incarcerate American citizens for nearly one hundred years.
All that is wanting, is a lawsuit against an FFL holder for refusing to sell to someone who refuses to present identification at point of sale – based on Judge Coleman’s ruling, a seller cannot refuse a sale for lack of identification.
I don’t make the rules – I just read them.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Since the dawn of warfare, the most prized battlefield trophy that soldiers present to their commander is the enemy’s battle flag.
In the early Sixties, the objective of the Vietnam conflict, as established by Eisenhower and Kennedy, was to contain China’s Communist expansion in South East Asia. At the outset, our American leaders assessed the campaign with auspicious optimism. The Americans had the North Vietnamese out-gunned, and we enjoyed unassailed air superiority. How could we lose?
Indeed, up until 1975, when the South Vietnamese government lost in the Fall of Saigon, the American forces had decisively won every major kinetic battle in the war. Those victories would eventually grow hollow. Ho Chi Minh plotted to drag the American Forces into an endless hornets nest of guerrilla warfare.
A journalist once asked General Vo Nguyen Giap, Commander of the North Vietnamese Army, how long he would have continued to fight against the American forces had they not withdrawn in 1975. “Twenty years,” he replied. “One hundred years. Even more, if necessary. We would have fought indefinitely until we prevailed.”
In the Spring of 1968 the North Vietnamese Army suffered a bitter loss in their attempt to seize the Marine airfield at Khe Sanh. With B-52 bombers and F-4 fighter-bombers, the Americans dropped more bombs on the North Vietnamese defending that siege than all the bombs the US forces dropped in World War II. American commanders estimated that the NVA suffered as many as 15,000 KIAs at Khe Sanh.
Despite the horrific losses heaped on Giap’s army, Khe Sanh became a turning in the Vietnam War. The nightly news bombarded the American people with horrific images of the Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe Sanh. After the siege, Walter Cronkite broke his career-long tradition never to divulge his personal viewpoints on a news story. Cronkite declared on his nightly broadcast that the Vietnam War was a lost cause. President Johnson’s favorability rating plummeted so low that he closed his reelection campaign. Fed up, the American people were ready to bring the troops home.
And from the ashes of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese had discovered a surprising windfall – a political victory won on the American home front.
Finally, on April 30, 1975, at the Fall of Saigon, the North Vietnamese handed the mighty United States a humiliating defeat on the world stage.
Today Vietnam enjoys a thriving economy and a growing middle class. They have western shopping malls that sell the bourgeois brand names of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Lacoste, and Rolex. As of this writing, each year the country hosts 12 – 15 million tourists adding $27 billion to their annual GDP. Their thriving aviation industry has a superb safety record. Vietnam is on pace to be the world’s 10th largest economy by 2050.
Their economy can be labeled as anything but “Communist.” A more accurate description would be “Free Market Authoritarianism.” But wasn’t the defeat of Communism America’s prime war objective in 1965? Of course. And so in 1986, the Vietnamese politburo passed economic reforms that have led to the prosperity they enjoy today.
To this end, the United States actually won the Vietnam War against the Communists.
We should never have fired a single bullet. The 57,939 service members need not have given their lives. Nor did the countless service members need to have sacrificed the healthy bodies of their youth, nor the soundness of their souls. The cauldron of death we waged upon our own boys and against the Vietnamese people lay in abject waste.
Without firing a shot, we ultimately defeated the Vietnamese Communists. And we did so by General Giap’s own measure: not over a matter of years, but over the course of decades; over generations.
And who were the grand prizewinners of the war? The Vietnamese people. The war reunited the North and South Vietnamese people under a unified flag, and they now enjoy a cornucopia of wealth bestowed by the Free Market.
Today Vietnam is Communist in name only. The Vietnamese people offer the party only a grudging appearance of respect, hollow of any sense of personal loyalty or pride. They regarded me as a fool when I purchased these flags. “Party members are the only ones who buy those flags,” they snickered.
In the same way the North Vietnamese failed to recognize their political power on the American home front, so too did the American leaders, at the dawn of the Vietnam conflict, fail to recognize the might of the Free Market.
The last shot of the Vietnam War was fired on December 18, 1986, when the Vietnamese Communist Politburo surrendered to the Free Market.
This hammer and sickle flag is their tattered, defeated battle flag; our prized trophy of their surrender.
Obviously, anyone reading this is aware – or should be – that Israel and Iran are now trading missile volleys. This is a situation that rightfully scares anyone with the capacity to think, as it widens the scope of Israel’s response to the war that Hamas started with their massacre of October 7, 2023.
Beginning on April 1, 2024, Israel launched an airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. This attack demolished an annex (a stand-alone building within the embassy compound), wherein a major meeting was taking place. This meeting included at least eight high-rank officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) (including two general officers), members of Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Front for the Liberation of the Golan (FLG) (a puppet force organized and trained by Hezbollah in 2017), although further casualties have not been identified as of April 19. While the “usual suspects” instantly made hysterical condemnations against Israel over this attack (as well as Iran’s repost on the 13th), it should be pointed out that officers of Hezbollah – a group openly acknowledged as being under the control of the Iranian state – was assembled inside the Iranian embassy, and were clearly a primary target of the Israeli raid.
Iranian missiles passing over w:Al-Aqsa after IRGC hit Israel with multiple airstrikes. Mehr News photo. CCA/4.0
The legal issue with this first exchange is a complete non-starter. While embassies are considered to be inviolate to military action, there is a significant caveat: when those embassies are used as military planning and coordinating locations, they are no longer “civilian structures” under the Laws of War, but become legitimate military targets, in exactly the same manner that religious churches and temples are considered inviolate – until they are deliberately used by one combatant for military purposes. The inviolability of an embassy remains intact, technically, if that nation’s intelligence agencies run spying operations out of it, but not if the embassy is aiding in the planning and conduct of military operations against another power.
Both Hezbollah and the FLG have been engaging in active terror attacks on Israeli citizens and in military strikes against Israeli troops for years. Their personnel and commanders meeting with Iranian military officers, on Iranian soil (all national embassies are considered to be the sovereign territory of the nation they represent), means that Iran has openly admitted that its military forces are coordinating with force actively engaging in combat against Israel. This made the Iranian embassy to Syria a legitimate military target, whether Israel chooses to explain its actions or not. The public record speaks for itself.
Following the Israeli raid, Iran vowed to retaliate. It did so some twelve days later, firing a hail of drones and ballistic missiles into Israeli airspace, in coordination with the Houthi terror group in Yemen, and an Iraqi state-sponsored group, the Popular Mobilization Forces – both groups being sponsored by Iran, as well as the Shiite government of Iraq.
Then, in the early morning hours of April 19 (local time), Israel responded, attacking targets near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and Natanz – both cities being noted for their association to Iran’s nuclear weapons program – as well as SEAD strikes against Syrian and reportedly Iraqi bases, to knock out early warning radar sites.
An F-4G Phantom II wild weasel 1991. These aicraft conducted SEAD missions during the conflict. USAF photo. Public Domain.
The Israeli attacks were very limited and restrictive in nature. The speculation, as of April 19, is that Israel was sending a clear message to Iran, that they (Israel) were clearly capable of striking targets deep inside Iran at will. Much more interesting, however, is the current Iranian response.
Despite the posturing of Hossein Amirabdollahian, the Iranian Foreign Minister, in vowing an “immediate and severe” response to any Israeli attack on Iran, Iran seems to be backing down. Unless Iran attempts to launch another raid in the near future, this may represent a de-escalation on their part.
If true, this raises a very disturbing question:
Is the Iranian government losing control of its IRGC “Praetorian Guard”?
At this stage, de-escalation by Iran is a tacit admission of defeat, as it demonstrates that the Iranian chest beating over their military prowess does not intimidate Israel. This is certainly not something the religious leadership of Iran can afford, as the appearance of weakness places their regime – highly unpopular at home – on even shakier ground than it already is.
Iranian military losses over the last decade have been limited to the IRGC. It was IRCG troops from the Quds Force who entered Iraq to shore up the beleaguered Iraqi government and military in the early days of the Sunni Islamic State forces’ drive on Baghdad in 2014. Its senior commander, Qasem Soleimani, was targeted by the United States government in a drone strike in 2020, while he was inside Iraq, coordinating the organization of Shiite militias. Additionally, the force has been described as “an industrial empire with political clout”, in addition to the command casualties it suffered in the Israeli attack on the Damascus embassy…In many ways, it very much resembles the Waffen SS of Nazi Germany.
In a very real way, a perceived defeat against Israel will seriously undermine the IRCG, far more than the Iranian government and its regular armed forces. The problem, here, is that dismantling a Praetorian Guard is never easy, and is always violent. If this stewing situation turns out to be real, versus speculation, there is a very serious chance that it could result in a catastrophic collapse within Iran, one mimicking the swift collapse of the Shah’s regime in 1978. If either side continues shooting at the other, the regional expansion of the conflict will be guaranteed.
And this is something to be feared.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
If you read most media outlets, be they MSM or “independent,” you will mostly hear the attacks on Israel by Iran were a big dud, and that might not be the full story. Iran has done two successful things; they breached the highest level of air security Israel and the U.S. could offer and they cost Israel over $1 billion.
Israel’s main air defense nerve center, the Nevatim Air Base, was hit by 5 ballistic missiles, including two hits directly to the runway, and an airbase cloaked in secrecy (and connected to the U.S. directly), the Negev Air Base, was also struck. While none of the strikes did serious harm, they sent a message that the highest level of air defense can be breached.
“One Arrow missile used to intercept an Iranian ballistic missile costs $3.5 million, while the cost of one David Sling missile is $1 million, in addition to the sorties of aircraft that participated in intercepting the Iranian drones,” he said.
“I am only talking about interception to what the Iranians launched and not injuries that were marginal this time.”
Yehoshua Kalisky, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies think tank in Tel Aviv, told The Wall Street Journal that the costs “were enormous” and comparable to what Israel had spent during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
It is not known how much Iran spent on its attacks, though ballistic missiles in the country can cost up to $99,937 (₤80,000), The Guardian said.
It is one of the largest in Israel and has three runways of different lengths. Stealth fighter jets, transport aircraft, tanker aircraft and machines for electronic reconnaissance/surveillance, as well as the so-called Israeli Air Force One, are stationed there.
The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.
Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.
The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”
Spying is as old as human civilization. One of the foundational duties of any government, as we understand the term, is to obtain information on potential threats to the community…because there are always threats. That’s just the way of the Universe.
Over time, of course, simple scouting evolved into what we think of as “espionage”. People volunteer to be spies for many reasons. They may be passionate patriots to their nation; they may be base and mercenary in nature, selling information to the highest bidder. Conversely, they could be traitors, operating against their own nation on behalf of a foreign power, for any of a number of personal reasons. The saddest figures are those entrapped into spying on their homeland, and not having the moral strength to go to their own government, turning in the enemy spies, and taking their licks for getting themselves into trouble.
Dedicated and loyal intelligence operatives – such as the fiction James Bond – whatever the nation or era, are recruited at relatively young ages, usually in their early-to-mid 20’s; frequently, they are military officers bored with their lives in the military. These recruits are almost always enticed by the ideas of excitement and adventure, but certainly not money – government spies are always just ‘government civil servants’, and are paid accordingly.
The reality that these officers face is that actually going “into the field”, or worse, “undercover” is invariably not only extraordinarily dangerous, but frequently unrewarding, as the dangers they put themselves (and sometimes, their families) into often result in no results, or even highly negative results…And that is before they have to face betraying local contacts to their fate, as happened in locating Osama bin Laden.
Traitors who spy against their own nations of their own accord (as opposed to those entrapped into espionage against their will) do so for many reasons, as well.
Sometimes, the willing traitor is outraged by their government’s actions of varying kinds. This was the case of Christopher John Boyce, who was outraged to discover – as an accident of his Top Secret clearance working with spy satellites for TRW – that the CIA was directly involved in undermining an Australian government that they did not like.
Seal of the C.I.A. – Central Intelligence Agency of the United States Government. Public Domain.
Likewise, Polish intelligence officer Michael Goleniewski – who also spied for the Soviet KGB on Polish intelligence – began spying for the West in 1959 after having, as he put it, a “Damascus-like” conversion event, where he realized how fundamentally wrong and evil the Communist system. Goleniewski revealed copious amounts of intelligence to the West on spies within the United States and British intelligence agencies. He was one of the most valuable spies for the West during one of the tensest periods of the Cold War. Unfortunately, claims persist that the CIA – for its own reasons – played enough “mind games” with Goleniewski that it drove him into mental instability, to the point where he is now primarily known for claiming to be the deceased Tsarevich Alexei, resulting in him being relegated to history as a crank.
Emblem of the KGB. Image credit: jgaray. Public Domain.
However a spy is recruited, if that officer is not a “field agent”, they are usually relegated to the ranks of “analyst”, or a specialist researcher, focusing on a particular nation, region, group, or even a particular individual. Frequently, this involves using OSINT tools (some of which can be quite advanced) to glean information. The work is usually interesting for a certain type of personality, but is not what most people would regard as “spying”…even though it most certainly is espionage.
Those personality types who enjoy that kind of activity generally stay with an agency for decades. The levels of knowledge and information that they can accumulate during their years of service make them very “high value targets” (HVT) for hostile agencies to recruit. “Turning” a long-time analyst – whether for purely mercenary reasons, for political ideology, or just the raw excitement of stepping outside their boring “bullpen” world – is frequently the crowning achievement of a field agent’s career…If the traitor is eventually caught, that may be unfortunate for the traitor, but that will not usually weight too heavily on the conscious of the case officer.
The “case officer” is the closest thing in an intelligence agency to a movie spy. They are skilled at illegally entering a foreign country and conducting all manner of intelligence activities, including “running” a local asset who has volunteered to spy against their home nation. Sometimes, the will operate as “paramilitary officers”, conducting high-risk protection and/or extraction (such as evacuating an embassy when military special operations units are too far away to assist), training foreign armed groups (whether for a foreign government, or a group trying overthrow a foreign government), and possibly rescuing an HVT who has been captured.
An Operational Detachment Alpha being lifted off the ground by a CH-47 Chinook helicopter during a training event Eglin Base Air Force Base, Fl., Feb. 05, 2013. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Steven Young. Public Domain.
There are also “legal spies”, who are placed within their nation’s embassy in a foreign nation, usually with an innocuous-sounding title, such as the “Second Assistant for Agricultural Relations”, or some such. These officers are usually the ones to receive communications from “walk-ins”, or locals wanting to offer to spy against their governments. They rarely, if ever, actually try to “run” a walk-in as an “asset”, merely evaluating whether the walk-in is worth the risk of assigning them to a case officer.
And, although no one wants to talk about it openly, allies frequently spy on each other, as happened with Israeli intelligence “running” CIA and US Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard in 1984-1985. The revelation of the Israeli operation caused an immediate frost in relations between the US and Israel, something that happens frequently when intelligence operations are exposed, or “blown”.
Spying is far from a “glamorous” life. It is, unequivocally, a dirty, nasty proposition at any level outside that of the analyst’s cubbyhole in an office bullpen…and many times, even that it is not a “sterile environment”, because an analyst’s work can set in motion operations that are very “down and dirty”.
Watch the path in front of you carefully.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Mortars have been used by armies almost since gunpowder was invented. While cannons were direct-fire weapons – meaning that their barrels were more of less level with the ground when fired – mortars, almost without exception, only fire on a near-vertical angle. “Howitzers” are a compromise, firing heavier shells than mortars, but can more easily employ direct-fire.
Due to the technological limitations of shell and fuse design in past centuries, mortars were quickly eclipsed in most armies, being relegated to siege warfare and being used on specially designed warships. During the American Civil War, massive mortars were employed in both sieges, and were mounted on railroad cars. But still, the rudimentary fuse technology severely restricted the weapon’s use.
13 inch mortar “Dictator” and railroad cars in front of Petersburg, Virginia. 1865. Photo by Matthew Brady. Public Domain.
By the early 1900’s, however, technology had caught up. When World War 1 settled into its “trench warfare” phase on the Western Front, all sides began looking for anything that could break the deadlock. Among the solutions were massive barrages of cannon and howitzer fires, poison gas, sub-machine guns (SMG’s), heavier machine guns, the earliest tanks, and airplanes, it would be easy to view the mortar as an “also-ran”.
That would prove, very definitely, to not be the case.
In 1915, as the slaughter in the trenches ground on, Sir Wilfred Stokes, KBE, designed a mortar for the infantry that would not only bear his name, but would become the baseline for most infantry mortars for the next century.
The “Stokes Mortar” was a simple steel tube, of roughly three inches in diameter (it was actually 3.2 inches, or 81mm, in diameter). A simple, muzzle-loading design, the Stokes could be rapidly loaded and fired, dropping a steady stream of explosive rounds, up to twenty-five per minute, out to roughly 800 yards. The “bombs”, as the rounds were termed then, used a simple impact fuse…something that could problematic if the ground it landed on was soft or muddy. Aside from that, the Stokes Mortar was an excellent weapon for its time, and the design was quickly copied and deployed by armies around the world, with many armies immediately trying to improve the design.
Wilfred Stokes with example of his WWI mortar and bombs, c.1916-1918. Public Domain.
The main improvement that stuck all around the world was to make the ammunition more aerodynamic in shape, vaguely similar to the “Spitzer” bullet, first developed in 1898 to get the optimal performance from the new smokeless powder that was replacing the old type of gunpowder for rifles. This was coupled to “booster charges” – doughnut-like rings filled with powder that provide additional pressure and velocity to the mortar bomb when it is fired – that increased the range significantly; in the modern day, a garden variety 81mm tube can throw rounds out to nearly three miles (4.6km+).
Army Specialist of the 1st Squadron (Airborne), 40th Cavalry Regiment,Task Force Spartan, Afghanistan, loads a new computerized round with two “booster bags” into his 120 mm mortar system, 2012. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Ken Scar, 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment. Public Domain.
Tactically, this gave the infantry a powerful tool. Usually deployed at the company level, mortars provide immediate, fast-shooting fire support, able to hurl large amounts of explosives at enemies from behind cover, at short notice, without the need to call to a higher level.
Mortars in the 60- to 81mm range are reasonably light in weight, and can be broken into “man-portable” loads (which are still extremely heavy) for units without vehicles. Larger weapons – both 120mm mortars, but also units like the automatic Russian 82mm 2B9 “Vasilek” mortar – do need to be towed, but they are still light enough to be mounted in the back of relatively lightweight vehicles.
2B9 Vasilek mortar in Technical museum Togliatti. 2010. Photo by: ShinePhantom. CCA/3.0
In the “irregular warfare” sphere, analogues to the Stokes Mortar can be built in home workshops with relative ease (NB: This is NOT an encouragement to break the laws in your area; you are on your own, there), but the crippling aspect for do-it-yourself forces lays with the ammunition: although relatively simple in design for the modern day, mortar ammunition requires large amounts of explosives to make any useful quantity. This is such a daunting prospect, that guerrilla armies usually don’t bother with making their own weapons and ammunition, relying on stealing (or, “liberating”, depending on your viewpoint) heavier weapons and ammunition, or buying them on the black market…This is, however, slowly beginning to change.
A major issue with modern “dismounted” mortars is that the recoil of firing the weapon tends to pound it into the ground, continually altering the angle of the tube, which requires continual adjustment to keep the weapon on target. Mounting mortars in vehicles – or on boats – helps to correct this, but the mortar still requires more attention to its sighting controls than conventional cannons and howitzers. In recent decades, serious efforts have been made to develop precision-guided rounds for mortars; and some of them actually work. They remain only a limited option, however, because of their expense – a very serious concern that NATO is discovering has not gone away through “creative financing”.
Mk 2 Mod 1 81mm Mortar/M2 .50 caliber machine gun combination, on a light mounting for boats and ships, c.1960’s. US Navy photo. Public Domain.
Another serious issue for dismounted mortars on the modern battlefield is “battlefield radars”. These types of radars have been deployed since the late-1950’s to detect and track artillery rounds as soon as they are fired, allowing “counter-battery” fire (i.e., using your own artillery to directly attack the enemy’s artillery) to become vastly more effective. These units have been steadily shrinking in size, while becoming increasingly capable as technology improves. While unlikely to be encountered in the hands of guerrilla forces and small-sized, poorly equipped armies, that window is slowly closing.
For all of the foregoing, however, mortars remain the “go-to” heavy weapon for infantry companies and battalions around; indeed, in Africa, mortars are essentially the “heavy artillery” for most of the continent’s armies.
Modern mortars are now well over a century old. Better materials, fuses and targeting system have come and gone, but the basic, hand-loaded steel tube throwing a large explosive round that the infantry can easily carry with them has not disappeared – and will not – most likely for another century.
Shotguns are ancient technology, as firearms go. It is no stretch to say that the first handheld firearms that we would recognize as such were, in fact, “shotguns” as they usually fired multiple projectiles at ranges within one hundred yards…assuming, of course, that the weapon did not explode in your face. Saint Barbara was devoutly venerated for a reason.
Over the centuries, as metallurgy and chemistry made firearms increasingly reliable (and safer), the shotgun remained the main personal firearm, through the use of ‘buck and ball’ rounds. These combined a large musket ball with a few smaller pellets, essentially a middle ground between the ‘bird load’ used in hunting, the modern “double-aught” general purpose round, and the modern hunting slug.
As rifled weapons developed and matured throughout the 1700’s and into the 1800’s, shotgun-type loads began to fade out in military use. With the development of the ‘Minié ball’ in 1846, shotguns virtually disappeared from world armies as anything more than ‘foraging guns’.
This did not make the shotgun obsolete, however – far from it. Civilian hunting shotguns kept pace with military innovation, albeit for different purposes, and law enforcement still used shotguns for everything from countering rioters to concealed firepower for discrete protection of political figures.
With the United States’ entry into World War 1, however, the shotgun returned to the battlefield, with a vengeance.
In the confused, dirty and brutal world of trench warfare, the common handguns and bolt-action military rifles of the day simply did not function very well, resulting in all manner of impressively ingenious – and extremely vicious – improvised weapons. The German solution to this problem was the invention of the submachine gun, in the form of the MP-18. The Americans, however, brought in shotguns.
Winchester Model 1897 “Trench Gun” with bayonet, 1921. Public Domain.
Largely consisting of Winchester Model 1897’s, American units were very familiar with the use of shotguns in recent combat, having used them during the Philippine-American War in 1899, and in the 1916 expedition into northern Mexico, to chase the bandit Pancho Villa. These rapid-firing, pump action shotguns quickly made their presence felt, to such an extent that the Imperial German General Staff – who had initiated modern gas warfare – issued a formal protest over the use of shotguns. When the United States reminded them of the shotgun’s history, and pointed out that the shotgun caused no more unusual damage than their own chemical weapons, the Germans threatened to execute any US soldier captured with a shotgun, or shotgun ammunition. In response, the United States threatened to execute any German soldier captured wielding flamethrowers or serrated bayonets. The Germans not only are never known to have executed any US shotgun troops, but apparently issued some captured 1897’s to their own ‘stormtroopers’ alongside the MP-18.
The Model 1987 Trench Gun, as it came to be called, continued in US military service until at least the 1950’s. As the Vietnam War heated up, however, US troops began to arrive with more modern weapons, such as the equally legendary Remington 870. With better ammunition technology – the old waxed paper or fully metal cased shells, having been replaced with the brass-plastic case ammunition – the modern combat shotgun was born.
A member of the Marine detachment from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT (CVN-71) takes aim with an M-870 12-gauge shotgun during boarding team training in 1991.
With the ability to deliver devastating close-range firepower, the combat shotgun is an intimidating weapon in the extreme. Most combat shotguns run with eight rounds in their tube magazine, with another round “up the spout” in the chamber. If loaded with double-00 buckshot, that means a combat shotgun can fire about seventy to eighty.32 projectiles at high speed. Few, if any, other weapons can equal this level of fire. Additionally, unlike both pistol-caliber submachine guns and military select-fire rifles, most shotgun loads do not “over penetrate”, or pass through all manner of wall and roof materials, endangering civilians on the other side of those barriers.
Mossberg M590 breacher shotgun, 2021. Netherlands Ministry of Defence. Public Domain.
In addition, shotgun shells have evolved over time to fire all kinds of strange loads, from flares to rubber bullets, “bean bag”, tear gas, and door breaching rounds. This flexibility, coupled to ease of use and a generally less alarming appearance to the public, have guaranteed the combat shotgun’s continued use by police, but has also made it a favorite for the military when units have to operate at close quarters.
Despite repeated flirtations with “assault shotguns”, there has never been much real interest in the idea, as no design submitted does any one task in an overly superior way to the combat shotguns currently in service, and any advances in ammunition design can usually be accommodated with minimal changes to the weapon itself.
The M26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System. 2018. DVIDS photo. Public Domain.
The shotgun has been used in combat for centuries – and it isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. Good design works.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
The National Security Innovation Base (NSIB) Report Card for America’s Defensive Tech was released this week, giving the sector alarmingly poor marks. The report suggests there are “major warning signs” the defensive tech industry has reached a critical fail point as innovation appears to have ground to a halt, with no signs the innovation advantage can be regained anytime soon.
“Major warning signs” in the national security sector could hold back America’s ability to innovate at a crucial moment in the intensifying global competition with adversaries such as Russia and China, according to a report made public Tuesday.
The National Security Innovation Base (NSIB) Report Card, released by the Ronald Reagan Institute’s Center for Peace Through Strength, offers a deep dive into the overall health of American defense innovation. The Reagan foundation’s National Security Innovation Base Program said the report card examines “national security agencies and organizations, various research centers and laboratories, universities and academia, traditional defense ‘primes,’ commercial sector disruptors, venture capital and the innovative systems of American allies and partners” around the world, providing a comprehensive snapshot of the national security sector.
The controversy over the militarization of law enforcement has been a continuing question in the United States since the inception of the SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) concept of the late-1960’s. While some parties cover their own political biases on the subject by ranting about the US Federal Government providing “military equipment” to local law enforcement departments, primarily through Washington’s “LESO” program, such pandering to “fear-porn” is simply the willful refusal to acknowledge the reality that any “militaristic” expression of law enforcement is precisely what those hysterical parties demanded for years…and then were faced with results that they refused to believe were possible.
While rather clichéd, the popular idea of the “good police” was formed in the 1950’s by television shows such as Dragnet and the later Adam-12. As the years rolled by, however, it became increasingly apparent that the “good cop” – even if a real thing – was not capable of dealing with the new realities of criminal violence at the end of the 1960’s.
Increasingly, local police and county-level sheriff’s departments were faced with criminal gangs operating drug labs in remote rural areas, that offered criminals the ability to utilize military-style tactics to defeat police efforts at arrest. Similarly, worsening political violence in urban areas displayed a significantly different character than the violence of previous decades. In this context, armed groups – primarily Communist groups inspired by the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse Deng, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara – attempted to initiate urban revolutionary warfare against the United States establishment and its citizens.
The passage of time, as well as the shifting motivations of the popular media, has downplayed the levels violence involved, to the point where the resurfacing of old training videos sponsored by state-level police departments are seen as almost fiction, when in fact, the reality was that violent attacks and kidnappings were frequent occurrences. What would now be openly called organized terrorist campaigns were waged by groups as diverse as the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
For these reasons, long-time observers were in no way surprised at the recent uptick in “ambush attacks” against police officers around the nation; indeed, the wonder was that the surge in such attacks had not happened earlier.
In response to the increasingly complex violence of the 1960’s, first the Philadelphia Police Department – quickly followed by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) – established large teams of officer designated and trained to respond to various situation that were outside the realm of normal police duties. To a great degree, the SWAT concept was limited to dealing with bank robberies and hostage situations. This situation changed decisively after LAPD SWAT fought its landmark gun battle with the Symbionese Liberation Army on May 17, 1974. Police departments around the nation took note of a law enforcement unit being suddenly thrust into an openly military type of operation, and began to act accordingly.
LAPD SWAT officers, 2015. Photo Credit: Marc Cooper. Public Domain.
Beginning with larger departments, SWAT-type units were formed within departments, and began training and equipping those teams accordingly, frequently seeking training advice from prior-military service veterans of the recently concluded Vietnam War, as those soldiers usually possessed skills not previously taught to police officers. The Federal Government took notice, with the FBI laying out the basis for its Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) in the late-1970’s, leading to its actual founding in 1983.
Civil police departments, however, quickly realized that they needed more extensive assistance to maximize a unit like a SWAT team. With the US military establishment being both legally restricted from directly aiding civilian law enforcement by the Posse Comitatus Act, and not wanting bad press in the aftermath of Vietnam, police departments struggled to properly equip their teams. However, as there was a concurrent decrease in strictly political violence as the 1970’s drew to a close, local departments used their SWAT units for both “high-risk warrant service” and hostage rescue situations. Both type of operations, of course, straddle the line between strictly police enforcement and military operations.
FBI HRT during the 2011 the Aztec Fury exercise. USMC Photo. Public Domain.
Beginning in 1990, with the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1990-1991, the Federal Government opened up the direct sale of military surplus equipment – including weapons and certain armored vehicles – to civilian law enforcement agencies, under what was then called the “1208 Program”, after where is appears in the enabling legislation. In 1996, various wording was changed and the law was expanded, going into effect in 1997, becoming the current “1033 Program”.
The vast bulk of the weapons and equipment available to civilian law enforcement agencies is gear that is either excess to the military’s needs, or is older equipment that the military has completely replaced in its Active, Reserve and National Guard units. Because of the heavily discounted amounts (down to “free for the taking”) offered to civilian law enforcement, this has been a great boon to expanding the capabilities of local police departments and their various special teams. Since 1997, though, while high-risk warrants and hostage rescues by police have certainly happened, but SWAT units in most departments are usually used to raid drug labs and dealers, which actions are specifically encouraged in the 1997 legislation.
Tactically speaking, these operations are far from military-level actions. The reasons are simple: such raids will have, at most, one to four hostiles that the police are planning on arresting, and even if the police teams meet resistance, it is certain to be short, disorganized and ineffectual. Most importantly, the criminals the SWAT teams are trying to arrest rarely have any desire to “fight it out to the bitter end”; actions like that certainly happen, but it is very rare. Criminals, by and large, are more likely to surrender than to fight to the death.
Two incidents, however, revealed the weakness of the widespread reliance on SWAT teams.
On February 28, 1997, serial bank robbers Larry Phillips Jr. and Emil Mătăsăreanu attempted to rob a Bank of America branch in the Los Angeles suburb of North Hollywood, sparking one of the largest gun battles in US police history. While the details – and video footage – of the shootout are widely available, the takeaway is that responding police officers were categorically incapable of dealing with a single pair of largely untrained criminals, operating under significant amounts of illegals drugs, who had no intention of surrendering. The pair of gunmen were finally taken down because their own incompetence, Phillips dying by his own hand, and an already-wounded Mătăsăreanu being mortally wounded by a hail of point-blank fire from three SWAT officers after a bungled attempt to flee.
Worse, however, were “after-action” interviews with the SWAT officers. While all of the responding police officers – and certainly the SWAT officers – displayed outstanding levels of bravery that should be justifiably recognized and hailed, their attempts at conveying accurate technical information was terrifyingly abysmal.
This is not a case of pedantic criticism. One of the chief tenants of military ability is being both “technically and tactically proficient”, in this case, being able to correctly identify both the types and capabilities of equipment, but also in making realistic assessments of hostile force’s capabilities. This was very definitely not in evidence in the aftermath of the shootout, even years later.
The other case was exposed serious issues in police response to determined, non-criminal violence was the 2008 terrorist attacks on the city of Mumbai, India. A 10-man team of terrorists from the Pakistan-based Lakshar-e-Taiba conducted a highly complex infiltration and attack operation against the city – a metropolis of over 12 million – lasting four days, with a frightening level of competence.
Local police were essentially helpless, as the attackers were not there to commit simple crimes like robbery or kidnapping. The terrorists were there to kill as many Indian civilians as they could; only one terrorist would ultimately survive to lay out the details of the operation for Indian police and military operators.
A 2013 Naval Postgraduate Study examined the question of potential United States civilian police response to a hypothetical Mumbai-style attack. The results are far from encouraging, especially given the events of the subsequent decade.
While very large police departments – such as the LAPD, among others – have written detailed plans for dealing with multiple “active shooter” incidents, and while acknowledging that improvised bombing attacks can generate larger number of casualties than infantry/commando style shooting attacks, both the study and those department’s own manuals also acknowledge that such dedicated types of attacks would generate widespread fear and terror (hence, the designation of “terrorist attack”) throughout not simply the urban area affected, but also throughout the wider region, as well as the nation as a whole.
Lurking under these stolid studies is a fundamental issue: Police officers – hysterical screaming to the contrary – are not mentally or psychologically prepared for a confrontation with a group such as Lakshar-e-Taiba. Taking down drug dealers, child traffickers and the occasional unstable individual are one thing; dueling with an organized, focused and dedicated team of shooters who are not operating for any of the conventional criminal reasons is an animal of an entirely different stripe.
As incidents from the North Hollywood shootout, to the Columbine and Uvalde school shootings demonstrate, many police departments around the country – regardless of the level of material support they may have received from the 1033 Program – are not psychologically prepared to deal with a single shooter who is willing to fight to the end, much less a pair of shooters, even when the shooters are completely untrained; the response of Nashville, Tennessee police officer to the recent school shooting there is the exception that demonstrates the rule.
In light of the foregoing, the continued hysterical demonization of American citizens to not simply defend themselves firearms in the absence of police, and equally strident calls to limit not only the ability of American citizens to own firearms, but to restrict their ability to obtain competent and useful training with weapons they already own, is highly worrying, given the demonstrated willingness of left-leaning city administrations to not only actively restrict their police departments from dealing with organized, large-scale violence, but also giving criminals literal “get out of jail free cards” for “petty crimes”.
This demonstrates, more than anything else, that the “average American citizen” is very much on their own when it comes to crime in their nearby areas.
If you are reading this inside the United States of 2024 – take note.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
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