Technology – Page 2 – The Freedomist

The Arsenal of Democracy’s Empty Shelves

Michael Cessna October 24, 2025

By and large, your humble author has largely avoided talking about the war between Russia and Ukraine that entered its “hot” phase in late-February of 2022, even though it actually began in 2014 – but don’t expect the mainstream media to talk about that too much.

Breaking the “Fourth Wall” a bit, I hate politics, in general. I have strong and rigid opinions, and I am not going to beat dead horses here. So, don’t expect political moralizing. I write about the technical aspects of defense and security – which are completely agnostic, until some idiot decides that their juice is better than that of the other guy across the river.

Moving on.

There has been a toxic fantasy in the West – especially in the United States – that has arisen in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Caused by a putrid mix of slavish devotion among politicians desperately wanting to look good to voters, greedy and craven defense contractors, and military officers looking to pad their retirement portfolios, all of whom adopted the idiotic ideas of Alvin Toffler – a subject we recently touched on – have combined to weaken the military capacity of the West to levels of incapacity not seen in nearly a century.

After the Cold War ended, there was a frenetic rush to make the “butter not guns” dream a reality. The problem? Like all utopian concepts – especially when backed up with “sciency”-looking graphs and densely written tomes filled chock-full of techy-sounding wording – that paradigm drove Western defense infrastructure over a cliff.

What all of those lofty hopes-n-dreams deliberately ignored, was that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the only enemies left – so it seemed – were minor states, like Serbia and Iraq, and later, against various terrorist groups like al-Qaeda as part of the grandiosely-named “Global War On Terror” (GWOT).

The idea of a massive conventional war in Europe was completely dismissed as a thing of the past. In this, to be both as blunt and honest as possible, was a level of “genteel racism” that has run as an undercurrent (and occasionally not so “under”) through the psyches of the Western establishment, as massive conventional wars happened throughout those parts of the world the mainstream media chooses to ignore since the Cold War’s end.

As a result, modern (i.e., 21st Century) Western militaries are barely-hollow shadows of their former selves.

This particular Emperor’s lack of clothing became starkly apparently in 2022, as the war goaded into being by the “globalists”, led by Joe Biden’s autopen, revealed that there were no functional reserves of war material in the West, including within the United States…while Russia – with only minimal support from its allies – was able to easily maintain operations throughout the war, hysterical screaming from the Western/globalists.

*Destroyed military vehicles on a street in Bucha, Ukraine, near Kiev, during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, March 1, 2022. Picture by REUTERS/Serhii Nuzhnenko. CCA/2.0 Generic.*

In a word – the “Arsenal of Democracy” is empty. And deliberately so, in the interests of greed.

Coming Clean

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered a sobering assessment to London audiences in the summer of 2025: “Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year” when it comes to ammunition. The statistic encapsulates one of the most profound strategic failures of the post-Cold War era – the systematic dismantling of the Western defense industrial base just as the world was returning to the high-intensity conflicts it was designed to support.

Three years after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine remains critically short of the basic ammunition needed to defend itself, despite receiving unprecedented Western military aid. The shortage isn’t due to lack of political will or financial resources, but something far more fundamental: the West simply cannot produce enough ammunition to meet the demands of modern warfare. What was once called the “Arsenal of Democracy” now struggles to keep a single medium-sized conflict adequately supplied.

The Arithmetic of Industrial Failure

The numbers tell a stark story. Before the war, [the United States produced approximately 14,400 artillery shells per month – roughly 180,000 annually. Europe’s combined capacity for 155mm shells ranged between 240,000 and 300,000 pieces per year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces were using 2,000 to 9,000 shells daily in active combat – potentially consuming the entire annual Western production in a few weeks.

Russia, by contrast, ramped up to producing an estimated 4.5 million shells annually by 2024, supplemented by millions more from North Korean stockpiles. This allowed Russian forces to fire 10,000 to 80,000 shells daily at their peak – a volume that Western production couldn’t match even if every shell manufactured went directly to Ukraine.

The disparity became operationally decisive. The fall of Avdiivka in early 2024 occurred not because Ukrainian defenders lacked courage or competence, but because they lacked ammunition. Soldiers withdrew from a town successfully defended since 2014 simply because they couldn’t shoot back.

How We Got Here

The post-Cold War “peace dividend” seemed reasonable at the time. With the Soviet threat vanished and conflicts shifting to counterinsurgency operations requiring precision strikes rather than mass artillery barrages, Western militaries optimized for quality over quantity. Production lines closed, skilled workers retired, and long-standing supply chains atrophied. The assumption was simple: modern warfare would be short, decisive, and technology-intensive. Artillery-intensive wars of attrition belonged to history.

A recent academic analysis suggests deeper psychological factors at work. Western militaries over-invested in visible weapon systems – aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, advanced tanks – that could be showcased to signal military strength while neglecting unglamorous stockpiles of shells and propellant. Like luxury goods in consumer markets, these prestige platforms satisfied political and institutional desires for status while the mundane logistics of sustained warfare received inadequate investment.

The result: warehouses that looked full but weren’t. NATO’s own ammunition stockpile targets, set in 2014 to sustain a 30-day high-intensity conflict, were never met. When Ukraine needed support, European nations were drawing from “half full or lower warehouses,” as Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, acknowledged in 2023.

The Response: Too Little, Too Slow

Western nations recognized the crisis early but struggled to respond effectively. The U.S. has invested billions to increase 155mm production from 14,400 monthly shells to 40,000, with targets of 100,000 by late 2025. Europe set goals of 2 million rounds annually by 2025. These are impressive percentage increases but remain inadequate to both supply Ukraine and replenish depleted Western stocks.

The problem isn’t just production capacity – it’s the entire industrial ecosystem. Explosive production, particularly TNT, relies on a single Polish factory. Specialized steel alloys, propellants, and precision components all face similar bottlenecks. It takes two to four years to establish new production lines for high-intensity military equipment, meaning decisions made today affect battlefield realities years hence.

European efforts face additional complications. The EU produces around 170 different weapon systems, with 16 different types of 155mm shells alone. Ukrainian soldiers call this diversity a “zoo,” forced to constantly recalibrate equipment as they receive incompatible ammunition batches. National defense industries resist standardization to protect domestic jobs and capabilities, creating inefficiency precisely when efficiency matters most.

*President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy visiting the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania, where components for artillery and mortar shells are produced. Public Domain.*

Strategic Implications

The ammunition shortage reveals uncomfortable truths about Western military power. The United States and its allies possess overwhelming technological superiority in sensors, precision weapons, and command systems. They can see the battlefield better, strike more accurately, and coordinate more effectively than any adversary. But modern wars – particularly wars of territorial conquest – still require mass. You cannot hold ground with satellites nor break fortified lines with precision alone, when the enemy can absorb losses and continue fighting.

Russia’s production advantage doesn’t reflect superior technology or efficiency – Russian shells are cruder and less accurate than Western equivalents. It reflects strategic focus and industrial mobilization. Russia maintained cold-war-era production capacity, kept supply chains intact, and prioritized ammunition stockpiling even when it seemed unnecessary. When war came, this unglamorous preparation proved decisive.

The West now races to rebuild what it spent thirty years dismantling. New contracts are signed, facilities are being constructed, and production targets are set. But wars don’t wait for industrial mobilization. Ukraine needs ammunition today, not in 2026 or 2027. Every month of shortfall translates to lost territory, casualties that might have been prevented, and strategic opportunities foreclosed.

The hollowed-out “Arsenal of Democracy” stands as testament to what happens when military planning assumes future wars will resemble preferred scenarios rather than probable realities. Preparing for the wars we want to fight while ignoring the wars we might have to fight is a luxury no serious power can afford – a lesson being relearned at terrible cost on Ukrainian soil.

Russia bet long, and is succeeding. The West bet short, and is failing….It’s as simple as that. The only good thing is that we are not in direct combat with Russia.

Yet.

I can’t tell you how we’re going to fix this, because there are entrenched actors in the West – in government, industry and military departments – absolutely unwilling to bend the knee to take the actions needed to fix the problems outlined above.

Not least, when the United States Army can only seem to feed its troops lima beans and toast on Thanksgiving.

Take note.

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

The Myth of the Surgical Strike: Precision, Promises, and Reality

Michael Cessna October 10, 2025

For the longest time, at least fifty years, military forces in the West – and especially in the United States – have held fast to the dream of “clean” warfare, where civilian casualties are greatly minimized, if not eliminated. This dream grew out of the nightmare of World War 2’s “Strategic Bombing” campaigns, which were not simply failures, overall, but verge into war crimes territory, if one looks too closely.

While technically requiring fewer weapons dropped, as “smart bombs” are certainly more accurate, the dream of airpower alone ending wars is still a phantasm of science fiction – for all the damage precision munitions can inflict, airpower alone stopped neither Saddam Hussein, nor the Taliban, nor the “Islamic State”. Those forces were definitely damaged by technology, but that damage did not stop those forces on their own, by any stretch of the imagination, or suspension of disbelief.

Modern militaries have spent decades cultivating an image of warfare transformed by technology — conflicts resolved through clean, precise strikes that eliminate threats while sparing innocent lives. Defense contractors promote weapons that promise “one target, one bomb” accuracy. Military briefings showcase grainy video footage of munitions threading through windows and down ventilation shafts. Politicians assure anxious publics that twenty-first century warfare has evolved beyond the brutal arithmetic of earlier conflicts.

The reality on the ground tells a different story.

The Promise of Precision

The evolution of precision-guided munitions represents genuine technological achievement. During the 1991 Gulf War, only 9% of munitions were guided, yet they accounted for 75% of successful hits, proving 35 times more effective per weapon than unguided ordnance. Modern systems like the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) can achieve circular error probabilities of approximately 20 feet, transforming standard “dumb bombs” into satellite-guided weapons for roughly $20,000 per kit.

*GBU-31/32 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). 2006 photo by USAF. Public Domain.*

These capabilities have fundamentally changed how militaries plan operations. Where previous generations of commanders compensated for inaccuracy through overwhelming volume — dozens, if not hundreds, of aircraft dropping hundreds or thousands of bombs to ensure target destruction — contemporary planners can theoretically strike with surgical economy. The technology exists, and in controlled conditions, it performs as advertised.

But technology is only one variable in an equation that includes intelligence, decision-making, environmental conditions, and the fog of war. These factors, environmental and otherwise, have not changed for millennia, and are unlikely to change anytime soon.

“Accuracy” Is Not “Effectiveness”

The critical distinction between “accuracy” and “effectiveness” undermines much of precision warfare theory. A weapon might strike precisely where it was aimed while failing utterly to achieve its intended effect, a phenomenon researchers call the “Precision Paradox“.

Consider the 2003 strike against “Chemical Ali” — Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s cousin and a high-value target. Two JDAM satellite-guided bombs hit his residence exactly as planned. The strike was accurate. It was also completely ineffective — Chemical Ali survived and remained active for months. When targets are hardened, mobile, or simply more resilient than anticipated, accurate strikes create a destructive feedback loop: the initial precise attack fails, requiring follow-up strikes, then more strikes, with each iteration expanding the circle of destruction and increasing civilian casualties.

This pattern repeated throughout recent conflicts. In battles like the siege of Mosul, accurate but ineffective strikes accumulated, generating precisely the widespread destruction and civilian harm that precision warfare was supposed to prevent.

The Intelligence Problem

Even perfect weapons cannot compensate for imperfect information. Precision-guided munitions hit their designated coordinates with remarkable consistency — but those coordinates are only as good as the intelligence providing them. One USAF officer notes that “the term ‘precision’ does not imply, as one might assume, accuracy. Instead, the word precision exclusively pertains to a discriminate targeting process.”

*A view of an Iraqi Su-25 fighter aircraft destroyed in a Coalition attack during Operation Desert Storm. March 1991 photo by US Army SSGT D. Wagner. Public Domain.*

This distinction matters profoundly. Military spokespeople describe “precision strikes” knowing that civilian audiences will interpret this as “accurate strikes” — a deliberate misunderstanding military force have little incentive to correct. Yet targeting failures remain common: the 2015 Kunduz hospital strike that killed 42 people, the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade, repeated incidents of strikes on Afghan weddings and Iraqi civilian gatherings.

The Hidden Costs

The gap between precision warfare rhetoric and empirical evidence manifests in sobering statistics. Between 2002 and 2020, U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people — with 800 to 1,750 confirmed civilians among the dead. More recently, drone strikes across six African countries killed over 943 civilians in just three years — casualties that governments either disputed or attributed to “terrorists.”

These figures understate the full toll. Collateral damage — the antiseptic military euphemism for dead civilians and destroyed homes — extends beyond immediate blast effects. Infrastructure destruction cascades into humanitarian crises: a “precision strike” on a power station is “surgical” in execution but indiscriminate in consequence when hospitals lose electricity, water treatment fails, and disease epidemics follow.

Environmental and Technical Realities

The technology itself faces inherent limitations that military public relations rarely acknowledge. GPS-guided munitions are vulnerable to electronic warfare—jamming and spoofing that can render satellite guidance useless. Laser-guided weapons struggle in adverse weather, smoke, and dust—precisely the conditions created by ongoing combat operations. An Australian military study found that 45.5% of laser-guided weapons used in early Desert Storm operations missed their targets due to weather, technical malfunction, or pilot error — hardly the “near-unerring accuracy” promised by manufacturers.

*Extended Range Interceptor (ERINT) launch, c.2006. US Army Photo. Public Domain.*

Moving targets compound these challenges exponentially. While military marketing showcases successful strikes against vehicles, such footage represents carefully selected successes, not typical outcomes. The failure rate for strikes against mobile targets remains classified, a telling omission.

The Attrition Reality

Perhaps most damning for precision warfare theory: history provides no clear example of precision strikes hastening wars to swift conclusion. Instead, conflicts like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine demonstrate that precision-capable forces still find themselves mired in grinding wars of attrition. When strikes prove accurate but ineffective, belligerents escalate to saturation bombardment — the very approach precision warfare was meant to supersede.

The U.S. military now formally institutionalizes procedures for civilian harm mitigation, acknowledging what operational reality has long demonstrated: even with advanced technology and genuine efforts to minimize casualties, modern warfare remains fundamentally destructive. Recent policy shifts — including the 2025 dismantling of offices dedicated to addressing civilian harm — suggest this institutional knowledge remains fragile and subject to always shifting political winds.

Beyond the Mythology

None of this argues that precision-guided munitions offer no improvement over unguided ordnance. They do, significantly. The problem lies not with the technology but with the mythology surrounding it — the dangerous fiction that modern militaries can wage “antiseptic” wars where force is applied with surgical precision at minimal cost.

This mythology serves multiple audiences. It reassures domestic populations that their military operates with restraint and discrimination. It provides political cover for interventions that might otherwise face stronger opposition. It allows defense planners to minimize discussions of civilian casualties by framing them as aberrations rather than inevitable consequences.

But for those living beneath the drones and missiles, the distinction between precise and imprecise warfare often proves academic. The “smart bomb” that destroys a wedding party because faulty intelligence identified it as a terrorist gathering is no less devastating than a “dumb bomb” that misses its military target. The family killed when an accurate strike proves ineffective and requires three follow-up missions experiences no comfort from knowing that each bomb hit exactly where planners intended.

The path forward requires abandoning comfortable fictions in favor of uncomfortable truths. Precision-guided munitions are powerful tools, but they remain tools of war — and war remains, as it has always been, inherently destructive and unpredictable. Acknowledging this reality doesn’t diminish efforts to minimize harm; it makes those efforts more credible and more effective by grounding them in operational truth rather than technological fantasy.

Until military and political leaders stop marketing “surgical strikes” and start acknowledging the messy, costly reality of modern warfare, the gap between precision rhetoric and bloody fact will continue to undermine both strategic effectiveness and moral credibility.

To restate what should be the obvious, war is inherently destructive; it always has been, and always will be. Sometimes, war is a necessary evil…

…Because sometimes, “peace” is merely another word for “surrender”.

Is Cyberwarfare Ready For Primetime?

Michael Cessna September 26, 2025

Within the military sphere, there are two constants: the idea that newerr is always better, and that a good goal to shoot for is to risk as few of your own people’s lives as possible…Neither of these things are true, but they do remain constants.

As we pointed out last week, the “newer is always better” mantra is fundamentally flawed, both in concept and in execution. The perfect example of this is a situation this author was made aware of just a couple of days ago: there is now, apparently, an offering out there for a belt-fed AR-15 type upper receiver chambered in .300 Blackout. To be clear, this is basically a toy for big kids with big bank accounts – it has zero utility for any real-world tactical application. The .300 Blackout cartridge is designed for a very specific role, at which, it does very well…but for anything outside that role, it is basically dead weight.

But it is neat.

This is not a digression – the .300 Blackout perfectly fits the “newer is always better” paradigm…but ignores the “general use” nature required of almost every type of “tactical” system. And, in line with that idea, is various drives for incorporating “cyberwarfare“.

The evolving landscape of modern conflict has fundamentally altered how nations project power and pursue strategic objectives…in the public eye, at least. As military and political leaders grapple with the complexities of 21st-century warfare, the integration of conventional kinetic operations with cyber capabilities has indicated the possibilities of both a strategic imperative and a source of significant operational challenges. This seeming convergence may represent a paradigm shift that demands careful analysis of the distinct advantages and limitations of each domain…or, it could be simply a re-branding of older, traditional tool kits, with eye-wateringly expensive toys.

The Traditional Foundation: Conventional Warfare’s Enduring Strengths

Conventional warfare retains several critical advantages that cyber operations cannot fully replicate or counter. Physical destruction remains the ultimate form of military persuasion — when infrastructure is physically destroyed, it requires substantial time and resources to rebuild. The psychological impact of conventional military action is immediate and visceral, creating clear demonstrations of state capability and resolve. Moreover, conventional forces operate within well-established legal frameworks under international humanitarian law, providing clearer rules of engagement and attribution mechanisms.

The command and control structures of conventional military operations have been refined over centuries, offering predictable hierarchies and time-tested operational doctrines. When NATO recognized cyberspace as a domain of operations alongside air, land, and sea in 2016, it acknowledged that traditional military structures provide the foundational architecture for multi-domain operations.

Additionally, a little-spoken of aspect of conventional warfare is that it requires little in the way of advanced communications, power systems or satellite support – those things all certainly help, but plenty of lower-tier conventional forces repeatedly fight and win without them.

The Digital Revolution: Cyber Warfare’s Strategic Appeal

Cyberwarfare, however, offers unique advantages that conventional operations cannot match. The speed of digital operations allows for near-instantaneous effects across vast distances, while the relatively low cost of entry democratizes access to sophisticated capabilities. Research indicates that cyber attacks have become increasingly prevalent, with Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine jumping by nearly 70% in 2024, surpassing 4,000 incidents targeting critical infrastructure.

The important thing to remember, though, is that cyberwar campaigns have to be targeted for maximum and immediate impact in support of the conventional battle, versus the “pre-kinetic” oeprational phase.

Perhaps most significantly, then, cyber operations excel in the “gray zone” between peace and war, enabling states to pursue strategic objectives out of public sight, while maintaining plausible deniability about what could be viewed as actual acts of war. This ambiguity complicates adversary response calculations and allows for persistent, low-level campaigns that can achieve strategic effects over time without triggering conventional military responses.

Integration Challenges: Technical and Operational Complexities

The convergence of conventional and cyber warfare presents substantial integration challenges. The UK’s establishment of CyberEM Command represents one approach to addressing the fragmentation of cyber and electromagnetic capabilities across different military units. However, coordinating across multiple government agencies and military branches requires overcoming significant bureaucratic hurdles and distinct organizational cultures.

At the same time, technical integration poses equally complex challenges. For states dependent on legacy military systems, those systems must interface with cutting-edge cyber capabilities, creating potential vulnerabilities and incompatibility holes while demanding substantial investment in both personnel and infrastructure. The military cyber security market, valued at $17.0 billion in 2025, reflects the significant resources required to achieve effective integration.

This creates a significant divide, where wealthier nations with stronger economies potentially have a distinct advantage over poorer nations. However, the inverse is also true, where the perception of dominance is not actually the case, because the poorer nation’s electronic systems cannot be directly impacted by the richer state’s cyber systems.

Strategic Advantages of Hybrid Integration

When successfully integrated, conventional and cyber capabilities create magnified effects that exceed the sum of their individual contributions. Cyber operations can disable enemy communications and sensors immediately before conventional strikes, while kinetic operations can destroy hardened targets that resist digital infiltration. This combined approach enables more efficient resource allocation and creates multiple dilemmas for adversaries who must defend across both physical and digital domains simultaneously.

Recent exercises like Cobra Gold 2025’s CYBEREX demonstrate the value of integrating cyber capabilities into multinational military training, building interoperability and collective defense capabilities essential for modern warfare.

The caveat, of course, is that the targets must be dependent on systems that can be attacked via cyber tools. This is the fundamental flaw in Tofflerian-derived concepts, because cyber advantages do not work in reverse.

Limitations and Vulnerabilities

Despite these advantages, integrated warfare approaches carry inherent risks, as noted above. Cyber weapons can be unpredictable, potentially causing unintended collateral damage or being reverse-engineered by adversaries. Analysis suggests that in sustained conflicts, cyber attacks tend to be “scattershot, unfocused and ineffective against hardened systems“, particularly military command-and-control networks designed with cyber resilience in mind.

The attribution challenge in cyberspace can complicate escalation management, while the interconnected nature of modern military systems creates new vulnerabilities. A successful cyber attack on integrated systems could potentially cascade across multiple military functions, creating systemic failures that purely conventional forces might better compartmentalize. Worse, cyberattacks, as happened with the STUXNET virus, can easily spread far outside the “cyber battlespace”, directly attacking the deploying nation’s own computer infrastructure.

Future Implications

As hybrid warfare continues to mature with AI-enabled operations and increasingly sophisticated state and non-state actors, military organizations must develop comprehensive strategies that leverage the strengths of both conventional and cyber domains while mitigating their respective weaknesses. This requires not only technological investment but also doctrinal evolution, training adaptation, and international cooperation frameworks that address the borderless nature of modern conflict.

The path forward demands careful balance – embracing the transformative potential of cyber-conventional integration while maintaining realistic expectations about what digital operations can and cannot achieve in the broader context of national security strategy.

“Newer“, as stated, is not necessarily “better“. Like any software implementation, careful thought needs to be applied to any new injection into the calculus, because there are “do-overs” in a “digital Blackhawk Down“.

Trump, Vance Save TikTok Deal?

Paul Collier September 16, 2025

In what appears to be a victory for the Trump administration, specifically Trump and Vice President JD Vance, a difficult negotiation process came to an alleged close with the help of both men. A spokesperson for JD Vance claimed, “President [Donald] Trump and Vice President [JD] Vance provided the leadership and foresight necessary to produce a framework deal that fulfills another campaign promise and saves TikTok. Hundreds of millions of Americans will now be able to continue safely enjoying the highly popular app thanks to the president’s decisive leadership.”

How Vance, Trump Orchestrated Deal to Save TikTok– www.dailysignal.com
Source Link
Excerpt:

The White House has finally produced a framework deal to save TikTok after Congress banned usage of the Chinese-owned app in the United States, a White House official tells The Daily Signal.

“President [Donald] Trump and Vice President [JD] Vance provided the leadership and foresight necessary to produce a framework deal that fulfills another campaign promise and saves TikTok,” a spokesman for Vance told The Daily Signal. “Hundreds of millions of Americans will now be able to continue safely enjoying the highly popular app thanks to the president’s decisive leadership.”

This comes just two days before the Sept. 17 deadline that could have banned TikTok in the United States.

The Trump administration has not yet named the U.S.-backed buyer.

America’s Big Tech BUILT China’s Police Surveillance State

Paul Collier September 10, 2025

A report from Dake Kang and Yael Grauer for the Associated Press reveals companies such as IBM have been working with the Chinese Communist Party to help them build the powerful surveillance police state they have right now. This work has been going on for at least 25 years, according to the report.

From the report, “U.S. companies introduced systems that mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their movements. But this technology also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.”

Two Major Leaks Illuminate Censorship and Surveillance Sales Into and From China– chinadigitaltimes.net
Source Link
Excerpt:

New reporting on two large collections of leaked documents sheds light on the trade of surveillance and censorship technology into and out of China. One, by Dake Kang and Yael Grauer for the Associated Press, builds on an initial collection of thousands of documents leaked from Chinese surveillance company Landasoft to demonstrate how “partnership between American firms and the Chinese police laid the groundwork for China’s digital surveillance state as it exists today — the largest and most sophisticated on earth.” The other, by a consortium including Amnesty International and The Globe and Mail, focuses on Geedge Networks, a Chinese technology firm co-founded by “Father of the Great Firewall” Fang Binxing, and its sales of censorship and surveillance systems to countries including Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar.

The AP’s reporting includes the report itself, a collection of detailed findings, an account of the report’s creation, a photo essay showing some of the systems’ victims, and the following short film and summary of key points:

Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.

[…] U.S. companies introduced systems that mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their movements. But this technology also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed. The AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM in 2009 to design the main policing system for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome. IBM referred to any possible relationship it may have had with Chinese government agencies as “old, stale interactions”: “ … If older systems are being abused today — and IBM has no knowledge that they are — the misuse is entirely outside of IBM’s control, was not contemplated by IBM decades ago, and in no way reflects on IBM today.” Huadi did not respond.

Hunger Strikers Hope to Halt Artificial General Intelligence

Paul Collier September 8, 2025

San Francisco Resident Guido Reichstadter, 45, is leading a hunger strike to stop Anthropic from further developing artificial general intelligence. He is joined by other through his organization Stop AI, a “non-violent civil resistance organization” trying to stop the development of AGI and ASI (Artificial SUPER Intelligence).

Reichstag warned, “Experts are warning us that this race to ever more powerful artificial general intelligence puts our lives and well being at risk, as well as the lives and well being of our loved ones. They are warning us that the creation of extremely powerful AI threatens to destroy life on Earth. Let us take these warnings seriously.”

Activists launch hunger strikes outside Anthropic and DeepMind offices over race to build advanced AI– www.techspot.com
Source Link
Excerpt:

45-year-old Guido Reichstadter has been camped outside Anthropic’s San Francisco offices for just over a week now, during which time he has not consumed any food. He told Business Insider that he plans to stay there on hunger strike until the company addresses his concerns about its AI development.

In a message posted to online forum LessWrong, Reichstadter wrote, “I am calling on Anthropic’s management, directors, and employees to immediately stop their reckless actions, which are harming our society and to work to remediate the harm that has already been caused.”

Reichstadter said he has asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to completely cease work on frontier AI development. On the first day of his protest, he delivered a letter to Amodei’s desk asking “to stop developing that technology and to do everything in his power to stop the race that he’s participating in.”

A Puzzlement, Part 2.5 – The 7.62mm Mystery

Michael Cessna August 8, 2025

This is not the typical article that I write, here. In an odd way, this is unusually personal…and I have no real idea why.

What started as a curious observation, eventually became something of an obsession. I knew that something was wrong about my observation, but I couldn’t put my finger on why it was wrong. Many might see this as an odd — possibly disturbing — example of OCD, but as you will see, while it is certainly “odd”, it is not irrational…Not least, because it is properly placed between two earlier articles here. It is connected to the two, but because it was so odd, it appears here as the third installment, instead of its proper place as the second article in the series.

It took that long for me to parse out what had happened. As to why it happened…well, we’ll get to that point.

Firearms are curious things, when it comes to weapons. If you look back through all verifiable human history, there are no mentions of “firearms”, as we understand the term — going back as far as c.50,000 years ago, to the oldest cave paintings and petroglyphs — before about the 8th Century AD (c.900 AD). Every other weapon that appears is a club, a spear, a bow and arrow, a sling, and the occasional jawbone of an ass. But, once gunpowder was invented, and someone realized that it was useful as a weapon in more than rockets, development began in earnest.

Over the centuries, lessons were learned, and weapons, projectiles and propellants were improved, sometimes slowly, sometimes at breakneck speeds…Until 1945.

In the aftermath of World War 2, there were something like thirteen “calibers” of military small arms in general use in the world. As the Cold War began to dawn, the Soviet Union — in the form of Russia — established a regimen of standardization in small arms ammunition, beginning with the 7.62x54mmR caliber for rifles and machine guns, and the 7.62x25mm “Tokarev” for handguns and submachine guns. This was not unusual — the 7.62mm as a basic bore diameter had been settled on by the Soviet’s predecessor, the Imperial Russia of the Romanov Dynasty.

(Note: When reading a weapon’s caliber in millimeters, the numbers at the beginning are the bullet’s diameter in millimeters; the number following the ‘x’ is the overall length of the cartridge, again in millimeters.)

But, before the Warsaw Pact was formally organized, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in 1949. As a purely and openly military alliance, the NATO member states quickly decided that the alliance’s national militaries needed to standardize on a common caliber, even if they did not adopt the same small arms.

To describe caliber in brief, caliber is determined by the diameter of the barrel, but is also determined by the chamber — which holds the cartridge case — and the spiral grooves (“rifling“) that stabilizes the projectile as it moves down the barrel. It is this combination of features that determine the caliber of a firearm, and is the reason why you cannot “trade” ammunition between different weapons, without a great deal of serious machinist work.

But…The first, and most critical step in making a barrel is to punch a bore down the length of the “barrel blank” (the steel bar stock you are cutting the barrel from) at the precise diameter, because as the old rubric goes, you can take material away, but you cannot add it back. With this established, you can move on to rifling the bore, and reaming our the chamber for the (usually) brass cartridge case, forming the overall “cartridge“.

This is not an academic exercise, because in the world of military procurement, few decisions are made without extensive documentation, cost-benefit analysis, and strategic rationale, because the cartridge — the bullet, propellant and case — represents a colossal expenditure of money and infrastructure. For NATO, a standard cartridge for rifles and machine guns made perfect sense, both in a manufacturing sense, but also in the tactical and strategic senses: being able to share ammunition would cure one of the chief problems the Allies had during World War 2.

So…What’s the problem? The problem is what the NATO nations standardized on…and no one knows why. One of the most significant standardization decisions of the 20th century — the global convergence on 7.62mm-diameter ammunition — remains curiously undocumented and logically inexplicable.

Consider the scope of this convergence: the Soviet 7.62×25mm Tokarev pistol cartridge for handguns and submachine guns; the 7.62×39mm “intermediate” rifle round for the AK-47/AKM; the 7.62×51mm NATO standard for the M14, FN FAL and H&K G3, as well as in the M-60 and MAG-58/M240 General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMG’s); and the 7.62×54mmR Russian full-power cartridge in the ‘Dragunov’ SVD “Designated Marksman’s Rifle” (DMR) and the PK-series GPMG. Four distinct ammunition types, serving five completely different tactical roles — pistol, submachine gun, assault rifle, battle rifle, and machine gun — yet all sharing the same precise bore diameter to within hundredths of a millimeter.

From a manufacturing perspective, this represents extraordinary efficiency. The same rifling buttons, bore drilling equipment, and quality control gauges can produce barrels for weapons ranging from sidearms to tripod-mounted machine guns. But this efficiency only matters if you’re planning coordinated, large-scale production across multiple weapon systems — exactly what you’d need for rapid global mobilization. More importantly, uniformity is a real concern, because of how “good enough” barrels can be made in very basic workshops.

The timeline of adoption makes conventional military explanations even more problematic. When NATO standardized on 7.62×51mm in the 1950s, superior alternatives were readily available. The .30-06 Springfield had proven performance and massive existing production infrastructure. The 8mm Mauser was the world’s most widely distributed rifle cartridge. The .303 British had decades of successful Commonwealth service.

Instead, NATO chose to develop an entirely new cartridge that required complete retooling of production lines and weapons systems. This makes sense tactically, strategically, politically and diplomatically. No doubt. You take the logistical and manufacturing infrastructure hits, but it makes everyone in the alliance feel like they’re not the only ones making sacrifices. The official justifications — improved efficiency and reduced weight — however, would apply equally to other available diameters.

So — why 7.62mm diameter, specifically? Why precisely the same diameter as the bullets used by the Soviet Union…not the cartridges, not the bullets themselves, but the bullet diameter?

The mystery deepens when examining the ballistic evidence. The abandoned cartridges — .303 British, 8mm Mauser, and .30-06 — all delivered essentially identical performance, despite bore diameters ranging from 7.57mm to 7.92mm. The differences are all within normal manufacturing tolerances and offer no meaningful ballistic advantages.

From a purely ballistics and physics perspective, these major “battle rifle” cartridges deliver functionally identical terminal performance despite NATO’s insistence on 7.62x51mm standardization. Cross-sectional analysis reveals the marginal differences:

The .30-06 Springfield (150gr @ 2910 fps) delivers 2,820 ft-lbs of energy
The 8mm Mauser (198gr @ 2600 fps) produces 2,800 ft-lbs
The .303 British (174gr @ 2440 fps) generates 2,300 ft-lbs
The 7.62x51mm NATO (147gr @ 2750 fps) yields 2,470 ft-lbs

These performance variations fall within normal manufacturing tolerances and environmental factors. At combat ranges under 400 meters (which is the normal range for most infantry engagements), the sectional density, penetration, and lethality differences in these cartridges are statistically insignificant. Wind drift, drop, and terminal ballistics vary by mere percentages.

The engineering reality is that any of these cartridges would have served NATO’s stated requirements equally well, as the FN-49 rifle would demonstrate, being made in multiple cartridges, depending on what the customer wanted. The choice of 7.62mm over existing alternatives cannot be justified by ballistic superiority – suggesting the true rationale lay elsewhere entirely.

*SAFN .30-06 Springfield 1951. 2007 photo by Wikimedia User “Ainat00”. CCA/4.0 Int’l.*

The technical evidence is clear: NATO’s choice of 7.62mm as a bullet diameter cannot be explained by ballistic superiority or manufacturing convenience alone. When military organizations abandon proven systems and invest billions in retooling for marginally different alternatives, there are usually compelling strategic reasons documented in procurement records. But those records, if they exist, remain conspicuously absent from public view. What we’re left with is a pattern that suggests coordination on a scale that transcends normal military alliance cooperation—and raises uncomfortable questions about what scenarios would justify such systematic preparation.

Manufacturing compatibility, not ballistic performance, appears to have been designed for rapid, large-scale interoperability — but between whom, and for what purpose?

Yet somehow, across different continents, political systems, and industrial bases, everyone converged on 7.62mm as a bullet diameter. The Soviets, developing their own weapons independently, chose the 7.62mm bore diameter for their entire small arms family, because they had been using it for so long, and wanted to make only the most minimal changes, as their industrial base struggled to recover from the devastation of World War 2.

But then, we have the example of NATO, deciding to completely retool their arms infrastructure to make a completely new round…whose diameter was precisely the same as that of their supposed enemies on the opposite side of the Fulda Gap…not the same cartridges, but the same bullet diameters — the most important part of a modern firearm. To put the proverbial ‘last nail’ on the problem, the only 7.62mm diameter weapon in wide use by NATO members at the organization’s formation in 1949 was the US .30 Carbine round, which is 7.62x33mm.

The only logical possibility is clear: This wasn’t market pressure or alliance requirements — this was systematic coordination at a level that transcends normal military procurement.

The implications become more unsettling when considering modern developments. Recent U.S. military procurement of obsolete M60 GPMG’s, massive ammunition purchases by US domestic agencies, and the recent emergence of “plug-and-fight” deployment systems all suggest preparation for scenarios requiring rapid mass armament using standardized systems.

The 7.62mm convergence may represent the most successful case of industrial coordination in military history — a decades-long effort to ensure global manufacturing compatibility for weapons systems across supposedly competing nations. Whether driven by legitimate defense planning or more extraordinary circumstances, the technical evidence suggests coordination at levels most people would find difficult to accept.

The question isn’t whether this coordination exists — the manufacturing evidence is too consistent to ignore. The question is, what scenarios would justify such systematic preparation, and why has the public never been informed of the reasoning behind these decisions?

As we pointed out in the “Hamlet” article above, none of the possible reasons for this subtle standardization are good…But there is one last wrinkle, that I cannot shake from my mind…

All of this happened very quickly…..after 1947.

Additional Resources:

– NATO Standardization Agreements (STANAGs)
– Congressional Defense Primer: Conventional Ammunition Production Industrial Base
– International Ammunition Technical Guidelines

The Shadow Fleets

Michael Cessna August 1, 2025

Illicit drugs are everywhere. Since at least the Imperial Chinese attempts at curbing the British opium trade, governments have – for one reason or another – tried to end, or at least restrict as far as possible, the flow of drugs they find objectionable. From cannabis to cocaine, and opium/heroin to fentanyl, massive, militarized law enforcement structures have been built up, to try and end the trade.

For the most part, these efforts have failed.

The problem are the iron laws of supply and demand, and the Streisand Effect: If you overreact to the problem, people get curious as to why…and when trust in government is problematic, that urge becomes obsessive. And in an environment of induced artificial scarcity, imposed by efforts to ban “Bad Thing X” – be that drugs or alcohol – both demand for that substance, as well as its price tends to skyrocket…and the harder law enforcement cracks down, the more creative the suppliers get in bringing their product to market.

Case in point: The “narco submarine“. We discussed the “big-state” military aspects of leveraging narco-sub technology last year, but now we take a deeper dive into the flip-side of the “big-state” use of this ecosystem.

The evolution of narco-submarine technology from crude, semi-submersible craft to sophisticated vessels capable of trans-Atlantic voyages represents more than just an escalation in drug trafficking capabilities—it signals a potential paradigm shift in how insurgent and terrorist organizations could maintain covert supply networks across vast distances.

*Trans-Atlantic range narco submarine in Aldán, Cangas, Galicia, Spain, 2019, following its capture by Spanish authorities. Photo by Estevoaei. CCA/4.0 Int’l.*

Traditional counter-insurgency doctrine has long emphasized the critical importance of disrupting enemy supply lines. However, the emergence of advanced narco-submarines, some capable of carrying multi-ton payloads across oceanic distances while remaining largely undetected, introduces a new variable into this equation. These vessels, originally developed by South American drug cartels to transport cocaine, have demonstrated remarkable sophistication in recent seizures, featuring diesel-electric propulsion, advanced navigation systems, and even air-independent propulsion capabilities.

The implications now extend far beyond narcotics. Intelligence assessments suggest these platforms could theoretically transport weapons, explosives, communications equipment, or even personnel across traditional maritime security perimeters. Unlike conventional smuggling methods that rely on commercial shipping or aircraft — both heavily monitored — narco-submarines operate in the vast expanses of international waters where detection remains extraordinarily difficult.

This point cannot be overstated: While the “old school” methods have long been known, and control measures developed to address them, the rise of covert submarine logistics at the small(ish) scale is a titanic problem, because almost any coastal beach, inlet or swamp is now a potential delivery point. While traditional inseriton methods like rough airstrips or road checkpoints can be easily identified, the sheer scale and unimproved nature of naval landing avenues severely hamstrings surveillance efforts – airstrips, roads and even drop zones are almost comically easy to identify, especially when they are not on official maps as crossing or entry points. Beaches, however, are everywhere.

Recent interdictions have revealed vessels with ranges exceeding 6,000 nautical miles, sufficient to connect South American manufacturing bases with conflict zones in Africa, the Middle East, or even Europe. The technical expertise required to construct these platforms has proliferated through criminal networks, with evidence suggesting construction techniques and blueprints have spread beyond their Colombian and Ecuadorian origins.

A primary case study of even non-submersible combat logistics support to an insurgent force comes from Mozambique, in 2020-2023:

The Islamist insurgency in Cabo Delgado demonstrated sophisticated maritime capabilities between 2020-2023 that transformed what began as a land-based rebellion into a complex amphibious threat. Ansar al-Sunna militants systematically leveraged traditional dhow boats and small craft to create covert supply networks that proved nearly impossible for Mozambican security forces to interdict.

The insurgents’ capture of the port of Mocímboa da Praia in August 2020 marked a strategic watershed, providing direct access to established heroin trafficking routes from the Makran Coast. Intelligence assessments suggest the group began “taxing” drug shipments landed from dhows, creating a maritime revenue stream that complemented traditional funding sources. This convergence of insurgent logistics and narcotics trafficking created a self-reinforcing cycle — drug money funded operations while operational control over landing sites enabled further revenue collection.

The tactical sophistication was remarkable. Insurgents used coordinated land-sea assaults, arriving simultaneously from multiple vectors to overwhelm defensive positions. They demonstrated proficiency with maritime navigation, successfully conducting what were functionally full-on amphibious operations across the island chains of the Quirimbas archipelago. Perhaps most concerning, they showed adaptive capabilities — after reportedly sinking a Mozambican patrol boat with an RPG-7, they captured additional vessels to expand their maritime fleet.

The geographic advantages were substantial. Cabo Delgado’s extensive coastline, numerous islands, and traditional reliance on dhow-based trade provided perfect cover for covert supply operations. The insurgents exploited the fact that legitimate maritime commerce — fishing, inter-island transport, and traditional trade — created background noise that masked military supply movements. With limited Mozambican naval capabilities and virtually no maritime patrol presence, the ocean became an uncontested highway for insurgent logistics.

For insurgent groups, the strategic value is clearly compelling. As the World War 2 OSS demonstrated, traditional arms trafficking routes face increasing scrutiny from international security partnerships and advanced surveillance systems. Port security measures, while effective against conventional smuggling, are largely irrelevant to vessels that can surface miles offshore and transfer cargo to smaller craft or coastal staging areas.

The financial model also aligns with insurgent economics. Drug trafficking organizations have demonstrated willingness to treat narco-submarines as expendable assets — vessels are often scuttled after single-use missions. This operational approach could extend to insurgent logistics, where the strategic value of delivered materiel outweighs platform preservation.

Counter-narcotics operations have struggled with these platforms despite significant resource investments. The U.S. Coast Guard estimates that even with enhanced detection capabilities, the vast majority of narco-submarine transits remain undetected. This detection challenge would be magnified in insurgent applications, where hostile groups’ operational security might be even tighter and cargo manifests wouldn’t trigger the same intelligence indicators as bulk narcotics shipments.

The convergence of criminal and insurgent networks is not theoretical — established precedents exist in regions where these organizations share operational space and mutual interests. The DEA has linked 19 of 43 officially designated foreign terrorist organizations to some aspect of the global drug trade, demonstrating that such collaborations are already occurring. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) provided a decades-long example of how insurgent groups can leverage drug trafficking networks to fund operations and maintain supply lines, activities that continue with the FARC’s splinter factions.

Perhaps most concerning is the adaptive nature of this technology. Each interdiction reveals new innovations: improved stealth characteristics, enhanced range capabilities, and increasingly sophisticated construction techniques. The rapid evolution suggests that by the time security services develop effective countermeasures, the threat may have already evolved beyond current detection and interdiction capabilities.

This potential weaponization of narco-submarine technology by hostile non-state actors represents a convergence of criminal innovation and insurgent logistics that could fundamentally challenge existing maritime security frameworks and force a reassessment of how covert supply networks might operate in an era of advanced surveillance.

The 30-Minute Apocalypse: How Coordinated Grid Attacks Could Cripple America

Michael Cessna July 25, 2025

Electricity if the foundation of modern society. Many people wistfully ponder the idea of living permanently in the wilderness, the old “back to Nature” idea. The fact is, most people – at least in the West – are going to survive in the wild for longer than a week. Electricity is what allows you to read this, and not simply because the immediate of an internet connection: electricity is fundamental to the industrial processes that made the device you are reading this on.

America’s electrical grid represents both the backbone of modern civilization and its most vulnerable single point of failure. Recent incidents at power substations across the country have revealed a terrifying reality: a relatively small number of coordinated attacks could plunge vast regions into darkness for weeks or months, with cascading effects that would make Hurricane Katrina look like a minor inconvenience.

The December 2022 attack on two Duke Energy substations in Moore County, North Carolina, illustrated the basic vulnerability. Two individuals with rifles caused a blackout affecting 45,000 people for several days. But this was amateur hour compared to what organized groups could accomplish with proper planning and coordination.

The math is sobering. The Department of Homeland Security has identified roughly 55,000 electrical substations nationwide, but destroying just nine of the most critical ones could theoretically black out the entire continental United States. Unlike the heavily fortified nuclear plants or major power stations, most substations are protected by little more than chain-link fencing and security cameras. Many critical transformer installations sit exposed in rural areas with minimal surveillance and lengthy emergency response times.

*Marelli coupling transformer in Italy. 2020 photo by Herbert Hönigsperger. CCA/4.0 Int’l*

What makes this threat particularly insidious is that it doesn’t require sophisticated weapons or technical expertise. The critical transformer equipment that steps down high-voltage transmission lines is custom-manufactured, expensive, and takes 12-18 months to replace under normal circumstances. A coordinated rifle attack, or even the intelligent use of a reciprocating saw, on multiple substations simultaneously could create a replacement bottleneck that extends outages for months across multiple states.

The cascading effects of a decently-coordinated series of attacks would be catastrophic. Within hours, water treatment plants would lose power, leading to pumping capacity failures. Hospitals could switch to backup diesel generators, but their fuel supplies typically last 72 to 96 hours. Cell towers would go dark as their backup batteries drain, as even those with some minimal solar backups would be drained faster than solar can recharge them. Gas stations could not pump fuel; grocery stores and ATM’s stop working – in the case of the grocery stores, that would be because few, if any,m are set up to switch to paper receipts. Supply chains would being to collapse, as refrigerated transport becomes impossible, electronic payment systems began failing, and regional grocery supply centers would not be able to fulfill orders, if they were even able to receive them.

Behind this vulnerability is the very thing that makes modern society as comfortable as we have become accustomed to: Just In Time Delivery. This is the system that dispatches all manner of inventory to retailers, homes and factories at will, usually arriving within 24 to 96 hours after ordering. This means that very few warehouse areas have more than three or four days of stock in their “back rooms”, at best. This is one of the reasons for the videos of stores being emptied in mere hours when a disaster strikes – it’s not simply damage to the structure, but the location’s inability to order replacement stock.

Most Americans have never experienced true grid-down conditions lasting more than a few days. The best estimates indicate that potentially 90% of Americans would be dead within one year of a sustained nationwide blackout due to starvation, disease, and violence. Even regional blackouts lasting weeks would likely trigger mass refugee movements, as happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that local authorities couldn’t manage.

The threat isn’t theoretical. In recent years, domestic extremist groups have conducted surveillance of electrical infrastructure. FBI investigations have uncovered plots targeting substations by nihilistic accelerationists larping as neo-Nazis who believe destroying the grid would trigger societal collapse and racial conflict. The knowledge required for effective attacks are spreading through online forums and training materials.

International actors represent an even greater threat. Chinese and Russian operatives have been caught conducting reconnaissance of American electrical infrastructure. State actors could coordinate cyber attacks on grid control systems with simultaneous physical attacks on key substations, maximizing damage while minimizing the chances of rapid recovery.

And what happens if such a series of attacks do happen? None of the possibilities are good. Aside from the initial casualties of the sick and injured as hospital generators run dry of fuel, and those dying in the panic after the lights go out, the near-term (60 – 90 days) will see vast deaths via starvation, as most people have perhaps only two or three weeks worth of food at home, and human performance degrades fast, the longer we go without food. Rural areas are better positioned, since those areas are food producers by default, but they do not have the capacity to absorb refugees, nor to suddenly step up food production, because of the physics and biology of agriculture: even without the fact that most farmland is sectioned off for corporate, single-crop “monoculture” products, it takes time, at least sixty to ninety days, to grow most plants into nutritious crops that will sustain a human. And although hog hunting in the South does produce meat, it is barely impacting the hog population – and the vast majority of Americans have no comprehension of how dangerous feral hogs really are.

The fix is neither quick, simple nor cheap. Hardening critical substations would cost billions and take years to implement. Installing backup transformer capacity requires massive infrastructure investments that utility companies stridently resist making without punitive federal mandates. Meanwhile, the grid continues operating with vulnerabilities that a competent adversary could exploit with devastating effectiveness.

The uncomfortable truth is that America’s electrical grid was designed for reliability and efficiency, not security. In an era of increasing domestic extremism and great power competition, that design philosophy represents a strategic vulnerability that adversaries understand better than most Americans. The question isn’t whether someone will eventually attempt a coordinated grid attack — it’s whether we’ll address these vulnerabilities before they do.

The only good thing in this, is that if we go down, we will take the reast of the “developed world” with us.

Yay. I guess.

The lights we take for granted could go out faster than most people imagine, and stay out longer than our society could survive. As with many things we report here, you are on your own – after reading this, you cannot claim that you weren’t warned to prepare, because the government will not be able to help you.

The DShK Heavy Machine Gun: Soviet Workhorse from World War II to Today

Michael Cessna May 16, 2025

As we have written elsewhere, “heavy” machine guns are essential tools for militaries around the world. While the US-made M2HB was originally intended as an anti-tank weapon, it evolved over time into a kind of highly lethal “Swiss Army Knife“, capable of engaging infantry, light vehicles (and some not-so-light), helicopters and other types of aircraft, while also being able to be fired from those same platforms…But the M2HB, as definitive as it is, is by no means alone on the battlefield.

Around the world, combat forces use a weapon just as capable, and nearly as venerable, and have done so since the end of World War 2, a weapon that has become iconic as the antithesis of the M2…And that is our subject this week.

Origin and Development

The DShK 12.7mm heavy machine gun stands as one of the Soviet Union’s most enduring weapons, remaining in active service more than eight decades after its introduction. Development began in 1929, when the Red Army identified the need for a heavy machine gun comparable to the American M2 Browning. The initial design was finalized by Vasily Degtyaryov in 1931, utilizing the same gas operation system found in his earlier infantry machine guns.

This first iteration, designated the DK (Degtyaryov Krupnokaliberny or “Degtyaryov Large Caliber“), had significant limitations. It relied on a cumbersome 30-round drum magazine and suffered from a disappointingly low rate of fire. Production began in 1933, but only small quantities were manufactured through 1935.

The breakthrough came when designer Georgy Shpagin significantly improved the weapon by replacing the drum feed with a belt-fed system using a rotary-feed cylinder. This redesigned weapon entered production in 1938 as the DShK 1938, with its name deriving from both designers (Degtyaryov-Shpagin Krupnokaliberny). Soviet troops affectionately nicknamed it “Dushka” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DShK], meaning “dear one” or “sweetie” in Russian.

*Georgy Semyonovich Shpagin. February 1945 photo by unknown photographer for Izvestiya. Public Domain.*

Technical Specifications and Capabilities

The DShK fires the powerful 12.7×108mm cartridge, a round slightly larger than its American counterpart, the .50 BMG. Operating at a rate of fire of approximately 600 rounds per minute, the weapon boasts an effective range of 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) against ground targets. Perhaps more impressively, it can penetrate up to 20mm of armor at ranges up to 500 meters, making it effective against lightly armored vehicles.

The weapon features distinctive “spider web” ring sights designed specifically for anti-aircraft use, highlighting its dual-purpose role as both an anti-vehicle and anti-aircraft weapon. The original DShK weighed approximately 34 kg (75 pounds) for the gun alone, but when mounted on its wheeled carriage with armor shield, the complete system weighed a substantial 157 kg (346 pounds).

*DShK 1938 version in Vietnam, in the anti-aircraft role, with the “spider web” sight. Date and photographer unknown. Image from the Vietnam War Archives. CCA/4.0 Int’l.*

During World War II, the Soviets made a critical improvement to the DShK by introducing a simpler, more cost-effective muzzle brake in 1944, patterned after the Polish Wz. 35 anti-tank rifle. This replaced the more complex original design and improved both production efficiency and reliability.

The DShK-M: Post-War Evolution

Following World War II, Soviet engineers further refined the design. In 1946, they introduced the DShK 38/46, more commonly known as the DShKM. This modernized version featured a redesigned feed mechanism that allowed belts to be loaded from either side, a simplified production process using more stamped sheet metal components, and a new disintegrating belt that broke apart in 10-round increments.

These improvements made the weapon more reliable and easier to manufacture at scale. Production of the DShKM continued until 1980, with more than one million units manufactured. The weapon was also produced under license in numerous countries including China and Pakistan (as the Type 54), Pakistan, Iran, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

Military Applications and Deployment

Throughout its service life, the DShK has been employed in multiple roles. During World War II, the Red Army primarily used it as an anti-aircraft weapon, mounting it on GAZ-AA trucks, IS-2 tanks, ISU-152 self-propelled artillery, and the T-40 amphibious tank. When deployed as an infantry support weapon, it was typically mounted on a two-wheeled trolley with an armor shield.

After the war, the DShK became a standard fixture on Soviet armor. Almost all Soviet-designed tanks prior to the T-64 featured the distinctive DShK mounted on the commander’s cupola, creating an iconic silhouette of Soviet military might.

*Members of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) Army fire the 12.7mm DShK machine gun from the top of a Soviet-designed T-55 main battle tank, January 1998. US Army photo by SSG K. Price. Public Domain.*

In the 1970’s, the Soviet military began replacing the DShK with the newer NSV “Utyos” heavy machine gun, which was significantly lighter and more accurate. However, the transition was never complete, and the DShK remained in widespread service.

Contemporary Combat Use

Despite being in current, limited, production only in China, Pakistan and Iran, the DShK continues to see active service in conflicts worldwide. During the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989), the weapon played a critical role for both sides. Soviet tanks deployed it as an anti-aircraft weapon, while Mujahideen fighters used captured DShKs and Chinese Type 54 copies to devastating effect against Soviet helicopters from mountainous positions.

*Kunar, Afghanistan October 1987: Jamiat-e Islami group shelter and “Dashaka” (DShK) .50 cal. machine gun position in the Shultan Valley. 1987 photo by Erwin Franzen. CCA/3.0*

The weapon featured prominently in the Vietnam War, where it was smuggled through Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia for use by Communist forces. Military historians estimate that a significant portion of the 7,500 American helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft lost during the conflict were brought down by DShK fire.

In more recent conflicts, the DShK has become a fixture of what military analysts call “technicals” — pickup trucks with heavy weapons mounted in the bed. These mobile weapons platforms have featured prominently in civil wars in Somalia, Libya, Syria, and other conflicts across Africa and the Middle East.

YPG fighter manning a DShK mounted on a “technical”. 2013 photo by **Kurdishstruggle**. **CCA/2.0 Generic**

In the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, Ukrainian forces have found innovative new uses for the DShK. Notably, Ukrainian troops have successfully employed DShKs fitted with searchlights to shoot down Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones. This approach has proven both cost-effective and reliable compared to using expensive MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems).

Ukrainian forces have also modified the DShK for infantry use by adding features like bipods, a shoulder stock, a pistol grip, and Picatinny rails for mounting modern optics. The resulting hybrid weapon functions as a heavy anti-materiel rifle with good accuracy out to 800 meters.

Legacy

The DShK holds the distinction of being, alongside the American M2 Browning, one of only two .50 caliber machine guns designed before World War II that remain in active service today. This remarkable longevity speaks to the fundamental soundness of its design and its versatility across different combat roles.

While newer weapons like the NSV and Kord have been developed to replace it, the massive quantities of DShKs produced and distributed worldwide ensure that this Soviet heavyweight will continue to appear on battlefields for decades to come — a testament to its reliability, effectiveness, and adaptability to evolving warfare requirements.

Like many weapons we discuss here, “obsolescent” does not necessarily equal “obsolete” – sometimes, “good enough” soundly trumps “newest”, something important to keep in mind.