Steampunk 2.0 – The Pneumatic Assault Rifle

Michael Cessna March 20, 2023

Last week, we discussed the nearly forgotten history of steam-driven, pneumatic artillery from the 1880’s, a set of inventions that resulted in the construction of two US Navy warships, one of which saw action in the Spanish American War.

However, there were other, smaller pneumatic artillery pieces used during the Spanish American War, primarily the 4-inch Sims-Dudley “Dynamite Gun”. The weapon received decidedly mixed reviews: while Frederick Funston, then an American officer advising Cuban guerillas, reported glowingly on it the weapon, Rough Rider commander Colonel (later US President) Theodore Roosevelt was decidedly not a fan.

*Sims-Dudley 4 Inch Dynamite Gun on Field Mount, 1898. Public Domain.*

But – these were not the first pneumatic weapons carried by US Forces.

Many Americans, confused by hysterical anti-gun propaganda, do not realize that the United States was on the cutting edge of military technology from its inception as an independent nation. From the first nation to issue breech loading, flintlock muskets (YouTube link) to flintlock machine guns (YouTube link), the United States armed forces rarely hesitated to embrace new technology, the American Civil War being the singular exception to the rule.

In 1803, French Consul (and soon-to-be Emperor) Napoleon Bonaparte sold the entirety of France’s “Louisiana” holding to the United States, a land deal that became known as the “Louisiana Purchase”, for $15 million (a paltry $337 million in today’s money), a price that amounted to about $0.03 per acre. Napoleon’s offer stunned the US diplomats sent to negotiate the deal, as they had expected to only buy the port and city of New Orleans. Napoleon offered the deal, as France’s hold over its North American territory was shaky, given that Napoleon was locked in an all-out war with great Britain, and trying to defend such a large territory, that France had never really capitalized on, was a headache he did not want.

It is important to understand the magnitude of this land deal: this massive purchase now comprises all or significant part of the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Minnesota, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, as well as parts of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This is quite literally the central third of the “Lower 48” states.

*A map of the acquired lands of the United States. US Government map. Public Domain.*

The problem? No one in the United States really knew what was “out there”: there were only the scattered – and edited – reports of fur trappers and “Mountain Men”, most of whom had good reasons to “creatively edit” their reports. Thus, after the deal was done, President Thomas Jefferson ordered the commissioning of the “Corps of Discovery,” now better known as the “Lewis and Clark Expedition”. The “Corps of Discovery” set out in mid-1804, and returned a little over two years later, in 1806, returning with a wealth of detailed maps and information, that sparked the Western Expansion…

…But that was all in the future.

One of the items carried along with the Corps was a unique and little-known object: an Austrian-made Girandoni Air Rifle.

*Various Austrian rifles; Girandoni Air Rifle at center. From the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum firearms collection, 2018. CCA/4.0.*

The Girandoni (or “Girardoni,” in some spellings) Air Rifle took its name from its eponymous designer, on Bartolomeo Girardoni, who hailed from the Tyrol region. Very little is known for certain about Girandoni, nor about the development cycle for the rifle named for him; in fact, the date of the invention is not absolutely known, as it was apparently sometime in either 1779 or 1780.

Approximately 1,300 rifles are known to have been made, most of them used by the Austrian Empire. A small number, however, were sold commercially, which is apparently how the Lewis and Clark Expedition acquired their example.

The Girandoni, for the late-18^th Century, is a stunningly impressive achievement in “firearms” design. It was a breech loading, lever-operated air gun, feeding from a twenty-round tubular magazine. While not silent, it was quieter than a musket, had no muzzle flash, and produced no smoke from firing, and all in a package that weighed in at just under ten pounds (4.5kg), and less than four feet long.

The air reservoirs were pressurized to between 750 and 1,000 psi (pounds per square inch), giving performances “downrange,” – out to ranges of c.100-125 yards – where the Girandoni’s projectiles would do about the same damage as a modern .38 Special cartridge, and possibly as much as a .45 ACP round, assuming that it was fired from a mostly-full air reservoir. The teardrop-shaped air bottle was screwed into place where the buttstock would normally be. As the rifle delivered almost no recoil to the shooter, the extra weight and mass of a normal stock was not necessary. The Girandoni’s rate of fire was around 20 to 30 shots per minute, depending on air pressure in the reservoir. The three air reservoirs provided with each rifle in Austrian service were refilled, initially, via a hand-pump, not unlike a modern bicycle pump; eventually, an automated pump was mounted in the bed of a small wagon, allowing air bottles to be refilled on the march.

*Recreation of an Austrian Girandoni System Accouterments Bag, including spare air flasks, air pump, wrenches, bullet mold and ladle. Army Heritage Museum, U.S. Army. Public Domain.*

The “firing mechanism” was almost the exact opposite of a conventional flintlock musket. After tipping the rifle up slightly (to drop a lead ball into position), the shooter would push a block protruding from the left side of the rifle to pull a ball from the tubular magazine into line with the bore. When the trigger was pulled, instead of the ‘cock’ (what we now call the ‘hammer’) falling and striking its flint against the frizzen (the latch over the powder pan) to strike a spark and ignite the powder charge, the Girandoni’s cock tripped an internal hammer that struck a pin; this pin pushed backwards, towards the shooter, and struck the head of a vale – not dissimilar to a trumpet valve – which depressed the valve just enough to release a blast of pressurized air. This burst of pressure struck the back of the ball in the chamber, and propelled it down the barrel. Because of the high pressure in the air bottle, the valve would snap shut almost instantly. The shooter would simply repeat the process, until either the ammunition tube was empty, or the air pressure in the reservoir had dropped too low to continue firing.

Needless to say, this seemed to be a definite revolution in military firearms. The Lewis & Clark Expedition made numerous comments in its reports about how impressed and intimidated the Native American tribes were when the Corps demonstrated the Girandoni to them.

The question, then, is: Why didn’t the Girandoni become the new dominant military rifle?

The Girandoni, for all its very impressive performance, was both an expensive and comparatively delicate weapon. Militaries of the time knew very well that when things “went sideways,” as they often do, troops needed a longarm that could withstand combat with bayonets, or be used as a very heavy club – actions that would shatter a Girandoni.

The Girandoni was very useful in the hands of well-trained, independent-minded skirmisher troops, but was not “soldier-proof” (to use the more polite modern phrase), and, even in the hands of well-trained troops, it did not provide enough of an advantage to justify its expense in even limited service.

As with many things, “newer” does not necessarily mean “better”. This is as true today, as it was c.120 years ago…

…Would that people in positions of responsibility would understand that idea more.

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

Steampunk Tech…What?

Michael Cessna March 10, 2023

The dawn of the 19^th Century heralded perhaps the greatest explosion of technological development in human history. While technologies in most areas had been advancing slowly for centuries, a little-understood combination of factors combined to radically reshape human societies, developing – for better or worse – faster in one hundred years, than at any other point in human history. Steam engines radically reshaped transport on land and sea, opening broad new ranges of products, both agricultural and manufactured; the telegraph radically altered patterns of human communication; medicine suddenly evolved from speculation and bloodletting to observable and testable practices, radically reshaping human mortality rates. The maturing of electrical power generation, transmission and use resulted not only in the telegraph and the light bulb, but of an early form of fax machine.

*Caselli’s pantelegraph tinfoil mechanism, 1866. Public Domain.*

In firearms technology, the developments were just as radical. In 1800, the only personal firearms out there were flintlock muskets (aside from some pretty radical one-offs). Less than thirty years later, the percussion cap significantly changed the calculus, by making the musket vastly more reliable. By the end of the 1860’s, self-contained rimfire and centerfire cartridges had begun to dominate the battlefield. Well before the end of the century, smokeless powder and functional machine guns had begun to fundamentally alter infantry warfare.

This steamroller of technological advancement held true in the world of artillery technology, as well. The muzzle-loading cannons of 1800 gave way to breech-loading guns by 1870…Which is where our story actually begins, when artillery met steam power, but off the railroad or warship.

Edmund Louis Gray Zalinski, (1849 – 1909) was a Polish-born American soldier, military engineer and inventor. Born to a Jewish family in Kórnik, Prussian Poland in 1849, he immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1853. Lying about his age to enlist, he joined the US Army and served during the Civil War. Commissioned a 2^nd LT in an artillery regiment from the state of New York, Zalinski served on the staff of General Nelson Miles. While not much is known of the details of his exact service, it was apparently enough to see him offered a commission in the Regular Army after the war, which is a notable thing, given the drastic post-war cuts in manpower and budgets. During his career, he served as an artillery officer at the Fort Jefferson military prison in Florida (where he authored an appeal to President Andrew Johnson to pardon Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had been convicted as a conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, for the doctor’s service during an outbreak of Yellow Fever at the prison), and as a professor of military science at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). During this time, he patented a number of inventions, including an artillery sight.

In 1883, Zalinski witnessed a demonstration of a pneumatic artillery weapon, designed by D. M. Medford of Chicago, Illinois. Zalinski began working on the idea, and eventually designed his own pneumatic gun. While the Army was not initially interested, the US Navy was intrigued. As chemistry had advanced, it had started to create high explosives, that were far more powerful than the older black powder; however, these new explosives were very unstable, and were liable to detonate when fired in a conventional gun. The Navy, wanting to find a way to use the new tool, thought that Zalinski’s new system might be the answer.

*USS VESUVIUS Dynamite Cruiser, 1888-1922. Photo: H.C. Peabody. Public Domain.*

In late 1887, the USS Vesuvius was laid down at the William Cramp & Sons yard in Philadelphia, PA; she would be commissioned some six months later. As fitted out, the Vesuvius (named for the Italian volcano) carried three 15-inch “dynamite guns” (a term coined by the press), that could each throw a 500-lbs shell (called a “torpedo”, because – Navy) out to about one-and-a-half miles, adjusting the range by varying the air pressure. Without a war to fight, however, the ship was mostly relegated to the dreaded “dog & pony” circuit, visiting port towns to help them celebrate various holidays. In South America, the Brazilian Navy also fitted a 15-inch model to an auxiliary cruiser named the Nichteroy, which was later sold to the US Navy, which named that ship the USS Buffalo.

*15inch ‘Dynamite Gun’, mounted on the Brazilian Navy ship Nitheroy, 1892. Photo by Marc Ferrez, 1982. Public Domain.*

Wanting to stay as far ahead of the game as possible, the Navy also commissioned the USS Holland in 1900, to see if an 8-inch version of Zalinski’s gun could be used on a submarine.

*USS Holland (SS-1), the first submarine of the U.S. Navy, showing the 8-inch dynamite gun muzzle open at the bow. Taken in 1898. US Navy Photo.*

Following a two-year stint in the yards for repairs, Vesuvius returned to the fleet in 1897, as relations with Spain worsened. These tensions would soon lead to the Spanish-American War, in 1898. While the Vesuvius performed well in nighttime raids on the Cuban city of Santiago, the ship was saddled with a number of flaws, not least of which was the fact that it was very difficult to aim her main guns, as they were set deep into her hull, instead of being mounted in more conventional turrets. This led the Navy to convert the Vesuvius into a torpedo test vessel in 1904, stripping her of her ”dynamite guns” and replacing them with a variety of torpedo tubes.

*U.S.S. Vesuvius, c. 1890-1901, showing its main gun barrels protruding from its deck. Library of Congress. Public Domain.*

As well, the US Army would abandon their experiments with Zalinski’s guns. The Army, which was responsible for coast artillery defense, had installed a number of 8- and 15-inch guns at various forts around the country. But, by 1900, the “dynamite guns” had all been dismounted and sold for scrap.

*“Battery Dynamite” at Fort Winfield Scott, San Francisco, CA. Photo c.1900. Public Domain.*

The reasons for the abandonment of Zalinski’s design are simple: the development of stable high explosives and the limited range of the guns made the “soft-launch” of the pneumatic guns irrelevant, as both issues were easily overcome by conventional artillery. As well, the low velocity of the shells forced them to fire at a high angle, limiting both their accuracy and impact force against armored targets.

While it is neat to speculate on “what if,” the fact remains that pneumatic artillery, although playing an interesting and important role in late-19^th Century artillery, has had its day: the support infrastructure to operate pneumatic guns, even using modern technology, is not sufficient for use in combat, even using rocket assist to increase their range.

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Philippine Coast Guard Tracks Chinese Warship in Disputed Waters

Paul Collier March 7, 2023

The Philippine Coast Guard released a photo of a Chinese warship off the coast of Philippine-claimed Pag-asa Island. The PCG issued a statement that read, in part, “The observed location of the Chinese vessels fall squarely within Pag-asa Island’s 12 [nautical miles] territorial sea. Their continuing unauthorized presence is clearly inconsistent with the right of innocent passage and a blatant violation of the Philippines’ territorial integrity.”

The Chinese military has not issued a statement denying or confirming the clams. The island is populated with 300-400 Philippinos. The move by the Chinese is considered an attempt to establish new territory by simply occupying it. This is the unofficial expansion police of the CCP, to claim any nearby territory that is unoccupied by occupying it, then daring the wronged nation to respond with force. India is long experienced in dealing with this aggressive expansionist policy, having had some territory taken and others protected from attempts by the Chinese to steal by occupation.

Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes – How The French Revolution Ruined Everything

Michael Cessna March 3, 2023

In human cultures, worlds and eras have a habit of disappearing. Sometimes, they disappear in a gentle fade-out; sometimes, they evolve, and sometimes, they die in fire. As one example, in mid-1914, Western society had reached a peak of culture, in literature, thought and technology that is hard to understand, some one hundred years later.

Of course, this culture was certainly not all roses: aside from “wealth disparity” and “social inequality,” both recent, and artificially moral, phrases of questionable utility, did have significant impacts on class relations, in the form of simmering anger among the urban poor and lower middle class, that frequently led to riots. Likewise, racism was rampant, despite some surprisingly modern views in many quarters; indeed, no sane person in the early 21^st Century would attempt to defend the actions of Imperial Germany in Southwest Africa, of those of the Belgians in the Congo…or of the United States in its own West, against its Native American population.

*A Rake’s Progress, Plate 4. William Hogarth, 1735. Public Domain.*

But for all that, early 1914 in Europe was still the world of Renoir…And six years later, it was gone, never to return. The places still existed – mostly – and most of the people were still alive, but six years of all-out industrial warfare, revolutions, and a crushing pandemic had left the survivors numbed. The result was a long period of despair, economic depression, social and political strife, that resulted in a tawdry cynicism.

Of course, this was certainly not the first time: Two hundred and thirty-four years ago – and some 131 years before 1920 – a similar event happened, an event that would destroy the Europe of the day, leaving it a pale shadow of its former self.

While the “gory details” (and they were gory) of the French Revolution are not really the point of this article, the earth-shaking similarities between that event and the aftermath of World War 1 are important to understand, because they help inform our modern reality.

*Nine émigrés are executed by guillotine, 1793. Unknown author. Public Domain.*

Taking inspiration from the recent end of the American Colonies’ successful rebellion against Great Britain, the French population rose up against King Louis XVI and the Ancien Régime in 1789, and hammered France into a Frankenstein version of a republic. Surrounding European monarchies, rightly fearing for their own existence, and attempting to return the Ancien Régime to power, wasted little time in launching invasions of France on multiple fronts. These wars would last for some twenty-three years, only ending in with Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat in 1815 on the battlefield of Waterloo, in what is now Belgium.

But, even before Napoleon’s ultimate defeat, the ‘great powers’ of Europe had already gathered in Vienna, Austria, in what became the “Congress of Vienna”, to establish a new European system – the system, in fact, that would be destroyed less than a century later…But that is the “60,000 Foot View.”

More practically, the Congress of Vienna solidified the previous Treaty of Westphalia, which we touched on briefly last year. The impact of the Congress, however, failed to deal with the impact of one of the little understood results of Revolutionary France’s effort to deal with the invasions that began in 1792:

The “Levée en masse” and the rise of Nationalism.

Before the French Revolution, military conscription in Europe was rather rare. Although used by some navies during this period, most nations found it highly distasteful, not to mention dangerous, as it greatly increased the chances of peasant uprisings, and in the middle of a war, that was last thing a nation needed (as the United States would discover in 1863).

While European states certainly preferred to recruit their regular soldiers from within their own nations after the Treaty of Westphalia, hiring professional officers that had been released by their native states (for any of a number of reasons) was considered perfectly normal and common. Although the word “mercenary” has developed a very negative connotation since the end of World War 2, in the 1790’s, it was considered a completely normal practice.

And the United States was certainly not immune – the Marquis de Lafayette (George Washington’s long-time aide), Baron von Steuben (who rebuilt the Continental Army at Valley Forge), the engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko and friends Casimir Pulaski (who would die at the Battle of Savannah) and Michael Kovats de Fabriczy (who would die defending Charleston, South Carolina) (together, known as the “Fathers of American Cavalry”), were quite common in the Continental Army. While many, like Lafayette and Fabriczy were certainly volunteers motivated by the American cause, most of the foreign officers certainly were not, following centuries-old common practice.

*Kazimierz Pulaski. Jan Styka, c.1920-1925. Public Domain.*

But, after the French Revolution, Nationalism began to take hold. Nationalism is the idea that the characteristics of “nation” and “state” are intertwined and inseparable. For example, in the United States, there are various “tribal nations” (such as the Navajo or Cherokee), or any of a number of ethnic “national people” groups from outside of North America, but those ethnic and cultural “nations” are a part of the “state”, in the form of the United States government.

This is not an insignificant point: After Revolutionary France instituted the levée en masse, serving in the military of a foreign state was often seen as something approaching treason. This view would eventually evolve into equating “foreignness” to “evil,” frequently resulting in little or no quarter being offered or given. Aside from some notable exceptions, it has only been in the first quarter of the 21^st Century, in which “mercenaries” (now euphemistically termed “security contractors” or “private military contractors) are seen as an acceptable alternative to “regular” military forces, despite their unreliability.

*Employees of PMC “FDG” in Al-Faluja, Anbar province (Iraq), 2007. CCA/3.0*

Over time, nationalism began to take on its own negative connotations – for obvious reasons – and was replaced, very briefly, with “globalism,” and its associate term, “globalization”, doctrines that are now beginning to collapse after a bare thirty years of experimentation, despite attempts to couch the terminology.

This brings us to 2023.

With technological acceleration and the rise of the online job market, skilled workers can frequently work from home, managing offices and even factories on the other side of the planet via online conferencing. Meanwhile, industrial production has evolved to the point where only moderate levels of skill are required to perform maintenance and repair on plant equipment.

These points, along with other factors deriving from the acceleration of technological development, are causing people to increasingly question the utility of “nationalism,” as well their own, personal, “national identity.”

The issue? “Evil,” despite attempts to dismiss or consign the term to the passé in recent years, still exists. And “Evil” does not negotiate. The response to this is, and always has been, direct military confrontation; while myriad examples of individual failures – and successes – in “anti-Evil” warfare can be cited, those are not the point.

Massed military force is needed to fight Evil when it stops being metaphorical, and enters the physical realm, lest it get out of hand.

*Bombed out streets of Mosul. Northern Iraq, Western Asia. 18 November, 2016. Photo: Mstyslav Chernov. CCA/4.0*

But, militaries around the world (and especially in the West) are finding it increasingly difficult to fill their ranks without resorting to conscription, and in many countries – including the United States – even instituting conscription, while certainly legal, is politically impossible, and could easily lead to widespread revolts, possibly rising to the level of revolution.

*U.S. Air Force Col. Becky Beers, administers the Oath of Enlistment to U.S. Air and Space Force recruits, Nov. 17, 2020. U.S. Space Force photo by Van Ha. Public Domain.*

But – Evil is still out there, waiting, training and planning. And it still needs to be dealt with.

The reasons for this situation are not well understood: Is it a failure of nationalism? A failure of globalization? “Wokeness”? No studies seem to be taking a look at this phenomenon…But it is something that needs to be addressed urgently, because – as Thomas Sowell, PhD (Economics, U. of Chicago, 1968) says in his 1980 book “Knowledge and Decisions”

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”

If Veterans Are Killing Themselves, Let’s Disarm all of them, Govt. Study Says

Paul Collier March 1, 2023

A committee obviously contaminated with anti-American seditionists recently concluded a study that purported to seek to solve ways to end the rising rates of suicide among our military veterans. The Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee “concluded” in a conclusion that was most likely baked in to the “study” from the start, that the answer lies to ending suicides is to create “policies that encourage (or require) secure firearm storage practices and slow firearm acquisition could prevent some military suicides.”

The report follows the tired and predictable pattern of DNC-CCP talking points of using a legitimate crisis to push for an authoritarian “solution,” even though the crisis mostly comes from those same authoritarians (in this case, the corrupt officers that were installed under Obama and Biden as American officers were removed under mostly trumped-up sex scandal charges under Obama, and being a Republican under Biden).

America has fallen, and this report is a bold assertion of that claim, even if its “Final Solution” is buried in the report in a small item listed on page 115.

Kalashnikov’s Immortal Children – The AK Series

Michael Cessna February 25, 2023

Near the end of World War 2, the Soviet Union was searching for a new rifle. While the country was very happy with the venerable 7.62x54mmR (Rimmed) cartridge (dating from the 1880’s), its primary service rifle – the Mosin-Nagant – was long past its due date. The Mosin was, and is, a terrible rifle. Its one major positive, was that the Soviet state arms factories had been producing it for so long, they could (figuratively) make the rifles in their sleep. The 7.62x54R was, and remains, a fantastic cartridge for machine guns, as well as for sniper weapons, but as a general-issue cartridge for infantry weapons, there are serious issues that run against the cartridge, as the Soviets discovered to their regret.

*SVT-40 Russian semi-automatic rifle (1940), without magazine. Caliber 7.62x54mmR. From the collections of Armémuseum (Swedish Army Museum), Stockholm, Sweden. CCA/4.0*

The solution presented itself in the form of the M43 cartridge. The M43 – developed in 1943 – was formally adopted in 1945, for use in the SKS rifle. But the SKS, although a perfectly fine weapon, was on the tail end of technical developments, much like the Western FN-49 rifle. The Soviets had found that as war had changed, so too did tactics need to evolve as well. We touched on these tactical concerns recently, but a short review is warranted.

In their fight-back against Nazi Germany, the Soviets had learned that massed, fully automatic firepower from the infantry, assaulting alongside tanks, was one of the main keys to victory. This was especially true in assaulting into urban areas, where suppressive fire, delivered in close concert with the infantry, was vital to success. In these tight, fast-moving combat environments, long, cumbersome and slow-firing weapons like the Mosin (even in its shorter cavalry carbine version) were simply incapable of getting the tasks done.

The Soviet solution was deploying massive numbers (YouTube link) of submachine guns. This, however, was only a stopgap solution, as almost all SMG’s fire pistol caliber only. Even when using a longer barrel than a handgun, this significantly restricted the range of the weapons, forcing Soviet infantry to not fire until almost at point-blank range. And after that, if ranges suddenly opened back up, SMG-armed troops were immediately thrust back into a severe range disadvantage.

The solution to this problem was not a smaller weapon, but a carbine-class cartridge – and hence, the M43 was born. Fired from a 14- to 16-inch barrel, the M43 is accurate to 300-400 meters.

*Home studio shot of the most common pistol and rifle cartridges. From left to right: 5.45×39mm, 5.56×45mm NATO, 7.62×39mm (**the M43 cartridge**), 7.62×51mm NATO and 7.62×54mmR. CC0/1.0*

As noted above, although the SKS was – and is – an excellent carbine, it is severely limited by its fixed, 10-round magazine. A different weapon was required, a weapon that could feed its ammunition through a detachable magazine, similarly to an SMG, and with a similar ammunition capacity, of preferably in the range of thirty rounds. It needed to be selective-fire (capable of firing either single shots, for accurate fire, or emptying its contents in bursts, in the assault), and it needed to be compact, to fit in tight confines in vehicles, and when maneuvering through trenches and urban areas.

*SKS Carabine, with charger strip of M43 ammunition inserted. CCA/4.0*

The Soviets had faced the German StG-44 – the first true “assault rifle” – on the Eastern Front, and it fit the requirements for their new weapon. Although certain quarters still try to insist that what became the AK47 is a copy of the StG-44, nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from a superficial resemblance on the outside, the AK47 and the StG-44 are completely different weapons under the skin.

Which brings us to Mikhail Kalashnikov.

*Senior Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov, c.1944. Mil.ru. CCA/4.0*

Although the story has almost certainly been embellished over the decades, Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919-2013) had grown up tinkering, as so many inventors do, with anything mechanical. But his “grease monkey” side was balanced with his love of poetry; he would go on to publish six books of poems over the years. In 1938, Kalashnikov was conscripted into the Red Army, where his engineering skills had him first assigned as a tank mechanic, and then a tank commander. When Nazi Germany turned on Stalinist Russia, Kalashnikov commanded his T-34 tank in several battles, before being seriously wounded at the Battle of Bryansk in October of 1941.

While recuperating in the hospital, Kalashnikov began designing small arms in earnest. His design for a submachine gun was rejected in 1942, but was seen as good enough to warrant assigning him to the Central Scientific-developmental Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate of the Red Army.

*The original prototype of the Kalashnikov rifle. CCA/2.0*

Over time, his design would evolve, eventually being adopted as the AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova, model 1947).

*English: AK-47 copies confiscated from Somali pirates by Finnish minelayer Pohjanmaa, during Operation Atalanta, c.2012. Public Domain.*

Comparatively light in weight and relatively cheap (especially after a stamping process was developed for the receivers), the AK47 was also more reliable than most of its Western competitors, and was a very easy weapon to learn. If the stock version of the AK47 has a major fault, it is the rifle’s “iron” (or, “manual”) sights, which – while usable – need real improvement. In this regard, however, it is no worse than most of the rifles and carbines that preceded it.

Once the design was perfected, the Soviet Union began producing them on a gargantuan scale. Factoring in licensing to non-Soviet manufacturers, a 2007 study (pdf link) estimated that, of the c.500million firearms in circulation in the world, approximately 100million are AK-variant weapons, with some ~75million being AK47’s.

AK47s are, quite literally, everywhere: in every conflict zone in the world – actual or potential – a person is guaranteed to run across an AK-variant rifle. The weapon is so ubiquitous, it is a central feature on national flags and emblems from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to East Timor, in the Pacific Ocean.

*PAIGC Carrying weapons to Hermangono, Guinea-Bissau. Kalashnikov AK-47. Photo: **Roel Coutinho**, 1973. CCA/4.0*

The only significant version to see widespread service to date is the AK74. Entering service in 1974, the AK74 is chambered for the 5.45x39mm cartridge. This caliber was chosen as a result of studies of infantry combat during the Vietnam War (1946-1975), where the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerillas battled with French and US forces, the latter of whom deployed the M-16, in 5.56x54mm. While sharing the simplicity and reliability of its older sibling, the –74 is merely different – “good different,” to be sure, but only that. The later Kalashnikov variants have never surpassed the older rifle in popularity, reinforcing the rubric, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

For good or for ill, Kalashnikov rifles have battled across the globe for over 75 years, and are not likely to disappear within the lifetimes of the readers of this article. Anyone who thinks that they may encounter a Kalashnikov model at some point, would do well to find a manual – if not an actual weapon – and learn how to employ it.

One never knows when that kind of information might come in handy.

*AK47 Manual, 2009. USMC. Public Domain.*

Spy Tech – Numbers Stations: The Immortal Dinosaur

Michael Cessna February 21, 2023

In the intelligence world, one of the key disciplines is communicating information securely. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is, albeit for different reasons. Since the invention of radio communication – or “wireless telegraphy,” if you prefer – has been the Numbers Station.

To understand what a numbers station (One-Way Voice Link, or OWVL), is the technical term) is, we briefly have to discuss cryptography.

In its simplest form, cryptography is the art of making and breaking codes. Over the course of human history, many states and leaders have come up with various, often ingenious, codes and ciphers, as well as the means to both break them and manipulate them. Sir Francis Walsingham, official spymaster for the first Queen Elizabeth, was responsible (among many other things) for the interception and breaking of the ciphers used by Mary, Queen of Scots – an intelligence operation that resulted in that monarch’s execution. Likewise, the “polyalphabetic substitution cipher”, invented by an Italian cryptographer named Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553 (better known as the Vigenère cipher), was so strong, it remained unbroken until 1863. There are many other systems – ancient, new and unique – but all share the same fundamental flaw: Key Distribution.

*Front matter of Cifra (1553), Bellaso. Public Domain.*

In cryptography, encipherment and decipherment are relatively easy, but only if both sender and receiver share the code – and written codes, as proved by Walsingham – can be intercepted, opening messages’ secrets that could and did lead to war, death and betrayal.

Heavy stuff.

The goal of key distribution was only solved – for a time, at least – by the invention of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in the 1990’s…but that’s for another time.

But the problem, ‘back in the day’, seemed insurmountable: in order to decipher a message, the receiver required a copy of the code, a serious problem if a considerable distance separated sender and receiver. The Vigenère cipher, however, significantly reduced that problem through what we would now call “keywords”. Still, as was proven in 1854 by English mathematician and scientist Charles Babbage, Prussian army Major Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski in 1863, and by American engineer William F. Friedman in the 1920’s, the Vigenère cipher model could, and was, breakable, via frequency analysis.

As early as World War 1, strange radio transmissions in the short-wave band began to be heard over the public airwaves. These stations transmitted signals in Morse Code, but the transmissions were not encoded. Instead, they were just strings of letters, numbers, and occasionally both. It quickly became apparent that these signals were almost certainly in a code of some kind, but no one – in public, at least – was able to decode the signals. They were resistant to frequency attacks, and seemed to be immune to proven forms of cryptanalytic attack.

This was the births of the One-Time Pad (OTP) and the Numbers Station.

*An example of a one-time pad. Mysid, 2007. Public Domain.*

First outlined in 1882 by the American banker Frank Miller, the OTP was reinvented in 1917, patented in the United States by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne (pdf link). In this coding system, random strings of letters or numbers (and sometimes both) were added or subtracted against a list of random numbers, to produce an enciphered message. The receiver – who would have a copy of the list of numbers – would, using their copy of the list – work in reverse, to reveal the message. Once received and decrypted, both sender and receiver would cross out the section of the numbers list they had used…and never use those exact sequences again.

And, up to this day, as long as the strict requirements of the system are followed, the messages are indecipherable, unless a decrypter has access to the key. (For a full discussion of the practical use of OTP’s, visit this PDF file).

What someone had realized was that an encoded signal did not have to go via telephone, telegraph or mail, all of which were open to interception. Instead, all a secret agent in the field needed, was a radio capable of picking up the Morse signals on the proper frequency, to receive a message. And, with the OTP, the agent’s “codebook” was shrunken to the size of a roll of postage stamps.

As time went on, wireless radio moved from Morse to verbal speech, helping to eliminate errors in transmission. National intelligence services constructed powerful shortwave transmission towers in areas they controlled around the world, and – in addition to the normal propaganda broadcasts and music they would play – would periodically pause, and transmit strings of letters and/or numbers at specific times of the day.

*Three portable shortwave receivers. CCA/3.0*

Counterintelligence officers found this highly frustrating, because there was no way to monitor who had a simple radio receiver. Capturing agents was usually through those agent’s mistakes, not through any kind of cunning technology.

And that is where things stand, to this day. Numbers stations transmit messages “in the clear,” and unless someone makes a mistake, there is no way to decipher the messages. No nation, incidentally, will openly admit to operating a numbers station, and will only rarely acknowledge their existence, as happened in the “Atención spy case”, where the bumbling of a group of agents from Fidel Castro’s Cuba rolled up a network of some twenty-seven agents, among many other operations.

There are civilian monitoring groups out on the internet for the interested sleuth, such as the Numbers Stations Research & Information Center, and PRIYOM.

…Just…please don’t get caught doing dumb things. If certain parties in government think you are up to no good, you won’t be able to catch our articles on time.

Priorities, you know.

Memory Lane – The First PDW…That Actually Worked

Michael Cessna February 11, 2023

As the Cold War wound down in the early 1990’s, militaries around the world were being forced to prematurely “beat plowshares into swords.” Part of the so-called “peace dividend” was interpreted to mean that military forces had to take on more “civic” missions, in order to remain relevant. As a part of that shift in focus, certain quarters thought that “reinventing the wheel” was a good idea. In that regard, one of their less-than-bright ideas was to reinvent the concept of the submachine gun (SMG)…and, since reactionary-anything is regarded negatively, they had to slap a new logo onto the idea.

And thus, the Personal Defense Weapon (the PDW) was born.

The idea was for something better than a handgun, but something not as powerful as an “assault rifle”. Readers may recall a recent article wherein we discussed this very concept. Without going into exhaustive detail, the results were less than spectacular…not least, since the PDW – then known as the “machine pistol” – had already been done some ninety-five years before, and had been done much better than the modern PDW.

The thirty-year period from 1884 to 1914 was a wild time for military small arms development, and for military arms development in general. It saw the development of high-pressure smokeless gunpowder, aerodynamically shaped projectiles, the first practical machine guns, and semiautomatic handguns. It saw the development not only of aircraft that didn’t relay on hydrogen gas for lift, but saw the first use of airplanes for bombing targets…and, unfortunately, saw the prelude to modern chemical weapons.

Amid the tumult, one weapon stood out: The C-96 Pistol, made by the legendary Mauser company.

Heavy and somewhat ungainly, the C-96 was a semiautomatic, that fed its ammunition from a ten round strip-clip; later models would use 20- and 40-round detachable box magazines. In a time long before neurotic and incoherent restrictions on firearms, the pistol’s grip was cut to accept a shoulder stock, allowing the shooter much more control over the weapon and increasing its accuracy considerably. Due to its compact size, even with a stock affixed, the weapon was easily wielded in very tight confines, making it one of the main choices for trench warfare when World War 1 settled into its slugfest phase, a role it would later play in China’s war against Japan.

*Chinese soldier aiming Shansi Type 17 while wearing a gas mask, c.1937-1945. Public Domain.*

As well, the pistol’s original cartridge, the 7.63x25mm Mauser cartridge, was no slouch: when the Royal Italian Navy tested what would become their 1899 Contract model, it was reliably punching 25mm-deep holes into 60mm-thick fir boards at a range of 1,000 meters (YouTube link).

The pistol was reliable enough, if having a problematic concept of a “safety” mechanism. Despite its clumsiness, however, Mauser quickly found itself with a hit to compliment its Gewehr 98 rifle, albeit not enjoying nearly as wide an acceptance. However, the steady stream of international orders for militaries quickly made the pistol a solid win for Mauser.

As World War 1 grew, the nations led by Germany needed more and more handguns, and Mauser greatly increased its production of the C-96, even changing its caliber to the more common 9x19mm; those pistols had a large, red-painted, numeral “9” engraved into their hand grips, to differentiate them from the originals.

*Mauser C96 M1916 “Red 9” with holster-stock fixed. CCA/4.0*

Post-WW1, Mauser continued the development of the C-96 for its foreign markets, eventually producing the Schnellfeuer (rapid fire) selective-fire pistol with detachable magazines in 1932, after the Spanish gun-makers Beistegui Hermanos and Astra had started making variants in the late 1920’s.

*Mauser C-96 machine pistol, model 712, with detachable magazine. Public Domain.*

Over the decades, attempts were made to put machine pistols into service, but weapons like the Vz-61 Škorpion and the VP-70 never really caught on like the C-96 had.

While the C-96 is long gone, its legacy has never really been equaled. The SMG came and went, displaced by the assault rifle for most functions, and after the painful silliness of the various PDW projects, militaries settled on just using a simple handgun for their ‘back-up’ weapon to a long arm…which is unfortunate, since there was once a complete package of weapon that fit the needs of the PDW precisely.

Infrastructure – America’s Jugular Vein

Michael Cessna February 4, 2023

Unless a person has paid essentially no attention to any news for the last twenty years, strident complaints and warnings about the abysmal state of basic infrastructure in the United States is nearly impossible to avoid.

Highways, local roads, bridges, railroads – the arteries that carry both commerce and the work force, both inter- and intrastate – are in terrible condition. The situation has become critical enough, that it has noticeably slowed the velocity of the supply chain, compounding the impacts of both the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the grounding of the MV Ever Given container ship in 2021.

Critically, failures in the railroad network caused by favoring profiteering over operational efficiency – one of the few examples of actual failure in deregulation policies – are leading to staff cuts of up to twenty-nine percent, while the mileage of operating rail track has steadily decreased, even though per-mile profits rise.

*An eastbound freight train at West Drive overpass in Brampton, Ontario. CCA/4.0*

This is a toxic situation, as the imbalance between railroads and over-the-road (OTR) trucking continues to grow. Even given the inefficiencies inherent in OTR vs Rail (as freight trains commonly haul between 200 and 300 intermodal containers, or dedicated freight cars, allowing a crew of three or four to do the work of 200 or more people), slowdowns caused by poor infrastructure increasingly impact the economy…

All of this has been known for decades, although it is little remarked about in the mainstream press, unless there is some major newsworthy nugget to titillate the audience…That said – what does this have to do with a critical strategic threat to the United States? What does this have to do with security and defense, aside from the obvious logistics advantages?

A recent YouTube video by the channel “Real Life Lore” (YouTube link) pointed out that the Continental United States, i.e., the “Lower 48”, is uniquely blessed with a unique terrain that practically guarantees global economic dominance to anyone who can control this territory. This has, in fact, been the reason for the meteoric rise of the United States over the course of the last one hundred and thirty-odd years.

*A map of the Mississippi River Basin, made using USGS data. CCA/4.0*

The driving engine behind this geological and geographical system lays in the facts that, first, no major agricultural or manufacturing center in the Lower 48 is further than 150 miles (240km) from a navigable waterway. East of the Rocky Mountains, the majority of navigable waterways feed into the Mississippi River system (which is itself navigable all the way to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota), which then flows south, to the port of New Orleans.

From there, the Intracoastal Waterway chain of barrier islands provides a near contiguous navigable seaway, for almost the entire length of the US coast, from Brownsville, Texas, to Virginia, and from there, to the Hudson River, which connects to the Great Lakes, all with little exposure to open sea conditions. No other continent has this precise mix of features. And, as water transport is anywhere from ten to thirty times more efficient than any other type of transport, the titanic economic advantages are obvious.

However – there is a catch: Vidalia, Louisiana.

Most readers will have never heard of Vidalia. This is not surprising, as it is a tiny town of barely 4,300 people, even though it is the seat of Concordia Parish. Vidalia, however, is home to perhaps the single-most critical point of physical security in the world:

The Old River Control Structure.

Completed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1963, the Old River Control Structure was built to prevent the Mississippi River from diverting its course into the Atchafalaya River. The Mississippi River’s tends to wander over time. For the entire existence of the United States as a nation, the Mississippi followed (more or less) its current course. As a result, the city of New Orleans – and its seaport – was built and expanded into the critical complex that it is today. Indeed, it was a pivotal point in the War of 1812, in a battle that launched the career of a future President, and later formed a cornerstone of Federal strategy in the Civil War.

*The delta of the Atchafalaya River on the Gulf of Mexico. View is upriver to the northwest. 1999. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.*

In 1953, however, the Corps of Engineers concluded that the Mississippi was beginning to shift its course again, and that if left unchecked, it would divert into the Atchafalaya Basin by 1990. Thus, they launched the Old River Control Structure project at their predicted point of divergence at Vidalia, as the result of such a diversion would be catastrophic, as the Mississippi river would quickly and violently carve a new channel and river delta complex, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico some sixty miles to the west of New Orleans, an even that would leave both New Orleans and the Louisiana state capital of Baton Rouge not simply ‘high and dry’, but would leave both major cities without a source of fresh water.

Aside from the catastrophic environmental impact on the United States and major cities along the river’s route –as well as the significant impact on the strategic military system of the US in the Lower 48 – the impact on the economy of the United States would almost certainly lead to another “Great Depression”, virtually overnight, an economic contagion that would almost certainly crash the world’s economy, as the United States’ economic system is not designed to flow “upriver”.

The Corps of Engineers did a fantastic job on the control project; the only significant natural threat to the structure was the Mississippi flood of 1973, with damaged the structure to a degree.

*Mississippi River inundating Morgan City, Louisiana, May, 1973. Environmental Protection Agency. Public Domain.*

But now, we live in the world of the early 21^st Century, and “lateral thinking” about security has to be taken into account…Specifically, the “Poor Man’s Nuclear Weapon”.

On April 16, 1947, an explosion in the port of Texas City, Texas mostly vaporized the SS Grandcamp, formerly, the SS Benjamin R. Curtis, a Liberty Ship built during World War 2 and later gifted to France to help rebuild that country’s merchant marine. The ship had been loaded with approximately 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate – used in fertilizer or explosives – as well as small mounts of other cargo. The explosion leveled nearly 1,000 buildings within 2,000 feet of the explosion, killing at least 560 people (including all but one of the town’s 28-man volunteer fire department) and injuring more than 5,000 people, almost 1,800 of whom were admitted to area hospitals. Some 63 people were unidentifiable, and were buried in a memorial cemetery; an additional 113 people were declared “missing”, because no identifiable parts could be found. The Grandcamp’s 2-ton anchor was hurled over 1.5 miles, digging itself into a 10-ft deep crater, while one of her propellers was thrown 2 miles inland. More than 1,100 vehicles, 360 rail freight cars and 500 homes were damaged; 10 miles away, in the city of Galveston, half the windows in town were shattered. All told, damages totaled between $1,000,000,000 and $4,500,000,000, in 2019 dollars.

*Texas City disaster. Parking lot 1/4 of a mile away from the explosion, 1947. University of Houston Digital Library.*

Then, on August 4, 2020, an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer – confiscated from an impounded ship nearly a decade before – detonated in a gargantuan explosion. The blast – estimated as equal to 1.1 kilotons of TNT – killed at least 218 people, injured over 7,000, and left nearly 300,000 people homeless.

*Port of Beirut, Lebanon. Before (Left, 7/30/2020) and after (R) comparison showing blast damage from the August 4,2020 explosion (circled area). Google Earth Pro and Maxar Technologies.*

Such a blast would critically damage the Old River Control Structure; two or three, should they happen simultaneously, would certainly destroy it outright. Neither ships, nor ammonium nitrate, are hard to come by. And they are not, comparatively, all that expensive. Both are within easy reach of many “extra-national hostile groups”. And the MV Rhosus, the ship at the center of the Beirut blast story, would have been capable of transiting for most of the Mississippi’s length…

…And yet, there are no real security measures in Vidalia that would prevent an American version of the St. Nazaire Raid.

Someone should really look into this.

Really.

Memory Lane: The MPC & Its Possible Return

Michael Cessna January 29, 2023

As strange as it may seem, the “Vietnam Generation” – meaning, those of age to have fought in that conflict – are in their very late 60’s, at best, and more likely in their early- to mid-70’s. In addition to the more “televisable” repositories of collective memory that have been lost, there are nuances within those repositories that fade into the background.

One such is the “MPC” – the “Military Payment Certificate.”

The MPC (pdf link) was a form of “occupation currency”, used by the Armed Forces of the United States from 1946 to 1973. The idea was to try and control inflation in occupied zones, as well as attempting to limit black market activity in the various occupied nations as close to the minimum as possible. The very first iteration of this practice, however, was the “HAWAII Overprint” note, issued from 1942 to 1944.

The Hawaii Overprint was an otherwise-valid US note that was printed by the US Mint in San Francisco, but that was stamped “H A W A I I” on the reverse. The rationale was that, in the event of the island chain’s invasion and capture by the Japanese Empire, all existing “HAWAII” stamped notes could be declared invalid, preventing Japan from trying to inflate the United States’ currency reserves by mass-dumping captured cash back into the US economy via Mexico. In fact, a version of this strategy was employed by the Nazi SS in their “Operation Bernhard”, which resulted in £15-20 million worth of nearly undetectable counterfeit notes being in circulation by the end of World War 2; adjusted for inflation, this amounted to approximately £493,146,000 – 657,528,000 (c.$611,052,280 – $814,736,370) in 2022 figures.

*Hawaii overprint note issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco during World War II. National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History. Public Domain.*

The United States’ MPC, along with various similar types of scrip from other occupying powers, accomplished this by paying Allied troops stationed “in country” in specifically made military scrip, instead of the normal national currency. In this way, the troops could spend their pay within the local economies, without injecting inflationary levels of hard currency – such as US dollars or British pound-sterling notes – that would trade at far higher levels of exchange on the local black markets, thus forcing the occupation governments, in turn, to print vast quantities of paper currency to compensate, devaluing the local currencies even further. In fact, such a resultant death spiral of currency hyperinflation in post-World War One Germany (albeit for different reasons) was one of the root causes that allowed the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.

*An Operation Bernhard forgery of the Bank of England five pound note. UK-Public Domain.*

The United States continued its use of the MPC throughout its occupation period in both Europe and various parts of the Pacific, into the 1960’s, when the war in Vietnam began to accelerate. In the same way as in the post-World War Two era, the South Vietnamese đồng (which had replaced the French colonial piastre in 1953, at their independence) was simply too weak to survive against the US dollar. MPCs were issued as pay for US troops posted in the country, to limit the arbitrage impact. The method the United States used to effect this was to arbitrarily convert to a new issue of MPC to US troops; US troops were never told when a “Conversion Day” (or, “C Day”) would happen, but would find themselves suddenly restricted to base, where they were informed that they had to exchange their old MPC issue for the new version, as the previous MPC issue would not be valid for exchange after that C Day. This, in turn, prevented the MPC from acting as a wholesale stand-in for the US dollar.

The MPC program was retired after the United States’ involvement in Vietnam ended. The MPC system was deemed unnecessary by then, as by the 1970’s, the nations occupied at the end of World War Two had been long ago released from their occupied status, and their economies were, in general, strong and flourishing. As a result, the circulation of US dollars paid out to US troops stationed there was not deemed to be destabilizing, and the United States went back to simply ferrying US dollars in cash to various bases for direct disbursements to troops stationed there.

In 1997, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the United States found itself deploying forces to semi-permanent stations for “peacekeeping” duties – occupation duties, in all but name – in portions of the former Yugoslavia, as the region exploded in a series of ethnic and sectarian wars.

The costs of transporting cash to troops stationed in the hostile areas quickly became very expensive. Given that the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) had established a vast, world-girdling logistical network by then, and given that there was very little available for purchase in the war zones, the DoD expanded what had been a pilot program used in various military basic training facilities within the US, into the “EagleCash” system.

EagleCash functions in a manner similar to a gift card, in that it allows deployed troops to use an ATM-like kiosk to transfer money from their bank accounts in the US to the EagleCash card, then use that card to purchase various goods and services from on-post stores and exchanges.

There is, however, a catch: The EagleCash system, like so many other things in the 21^st Century, is a great, streamlined system of finance that functions reliably to pay troops forward-deployed in hostile areas…as long as the backbone infrastructure the system relies upon works.

With the rise of cyber warfare, as well as the potential for a disruption of the satellite communications network – to say nothing of actual nuclear warfare – there is a very good chance that the United States and its allies may well need to return to an MPC-type system of finance for deployed troops. While there is a specific entry in the Code of Federal Regulations (pdf link) regarding MPC’s, it remains unclear if the US government is prepared to reissue paper MPC’s in the event of some major network disruption…

…And unpaid troops can become very unhappy and disgruntled troops, very, very quickly.

Food for thought.

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Memory Lane – The First PDW…That Actually Worked

Infrastructure – America’s Jugular Vein

Memory Lane: The MPC & Its Possible Return

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