Technology

The Next Carrier War…The Ghost of the Atlantic Conveyor

Michael Cessna June 2, 2023

We would like to express our thanks to naval OSINT analyst H I Sutton, of Covert Shores, for his kind assistance with this article.

Illness is an odd thing. One rarely pays close attention to outside events unless those events have a direct and immediate impact on the ill person. In the case of your humble author, 2022 was a rough year. As a result, I completely missed this article when it came out, and didn’t think clearly about the implications of using larger vessels in a DIY Navy when that article was written.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…Consider this to be Part 2.

For small national navies, as well as “guerrilla” navies, Part 1 is still absolutely true: limited funds and resources limit options when building a naval force of any kind. However, for the nation-state that is in the “middle sea” [sic], so to speak, those have more options.

As described in a previous article, a nation desiring to construct a navy needs to first decide on exactly what kind of navy they need – not want, but need. To briefly recap, there are three basic choices: Blue, Green & Brown:

A “blue” navy is basically the kind of navy used by the United States, Great Britain, and France, the kind of navy that Communist China aspires to: a naval force to maintain the “Sea Lanes of Communications” (the SLOC). This is the hardest kind of fleet to build, and far and away the most expensive.
A “green” navy is mostly a coastal force, whose main job is to facilitate amphibious operations, i.e., landing troops ashore. Still expensive, but the better choice for nations like the Republic of the Philippines.
A “brown” navy operates almost solely along rivers and close in to coastlines. These naval forces are comparatively cheap, but are very limited in range and capabilities, compared to the other two types of fleet.

Obviously, there is a good deal of overlap between the various types: brown and green navies complement each other well, where their environments meet. Likewise, green and blue navies can have a very great deal of overlap when projecting state power at a long distance. While there is little overlap between blue and brown fleets, blue water units can benefit from the lightweight/high-speed boats of the brown squadrons.

Iran, however, has taken the path of outside-the-box thinking to a different level.

Beginning in 2021, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commissioned the building of at least two “drone carriers,” former “Panamax” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax] box-carriers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship] refitted to operate combat and surveillance drone aircraft, “Shahid Mahdavi” and “Shahid Bagheri”. In form, the two ships initially looked like their recent sister ship, the “forward base ship” “Makran”.

*IRGC ship ‘Madahvi’ at dockside. Photo credit: H. I. Sutton, Covert Shores*

IRGC ship “Bagheri” in shipyard near Bandar Abbas, 2022. Photo credit: **H. I. Sutton, Covert Shores**

Unlike Makran, however, Mahdavi and Bagheri are apparently focused solely on drone craft operations. The Bagheri is being fitted with an overhanging deck extension on their port (left) side. While visually similar to US Navy carriers of the last c.65 years, this seems to have been designed in order to launch and recover heavier drone craft on an angle, from port to starboard, due to the container ships’ superstructure at the aft (rear) end, which cannot be easily modified. This seems to be confirmed, as Iranian state news is showing pictures of a “ski jump” being installed on the Bagheri. The “ski jump” flight deck has been used to aid in flight operations since at least the 1970’s, when the UK’s Royal Navy used them for their “Harrier carriers”, HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, during the Falkland Islands War of 1982.

IRGC ship “Bagheri” under construction in shipyard near Bandar Abbas, 2022, showing angled flight deck. Diagonal arrows show the non-standard flight deck. Photo credit: **H. I. Sutton, Covert Shores**

IRGC ship “Bagheri” under construction in shipyard near Bandar Abbas, c.early-2023, showing the ‘ski jump’ nearing completion on the flight deck. Photo credit: **H. I. Sutton, Covert Shores**

*Harrier Jump Jet, Farnborough Air Show 2014 by Christine Matthews. CCA/2.0*

This modification opens the possibility of launching much heavier drone craft, capable of carrying much heavier ordnance than other drones. While certainly incapable of handling heavier, manned craft, this bodes ill for anyone Iran chooses to focus on.

*Bayraktar TB2 on the runway. Credit: Bayhaluk, 2014. CCA/4.0/Int’l.*

There has not been a direct, “force on force”, aircraft carrier battle since WW2; the aforementioned Falklands campaign nearly resulted in one, but that turned out to be a false start. While there have been thousands – if not tens of thousands – of carrier-launched fighters and bombers attacking land targets and land-based aircraft, these were not “carrier” battles, in the naval sense. The concern, here, the nightmare of rational naval planners since the 1970’s, has been the “improvised aircraft carrier.” The naval dimension of the Falklands War, once again, informs on the problem.

When Argentina invaded the Falklands, Great Britain immediately assembled an amphibious task force for “Operation Corporate”. Like most post-WW2 navies, Great Britain had comparatively few naval supply and support ships in its fleet, and had to resort to “STUFT” (Ships Taken Up From Trade), civilian vessels requisitioned into military service as auxiliary vessels to carry supplies, and occasionally troops.

One of these vessels was the SS Atlantic Conveyor.

*SS Atlantic Conveyor, approaching the Falklands. About 19 May 1982. Photo: DM Gerard. CCA/2.5*

A combination roll-on/roll-off container ship, Atlantic Conveyor was used primarily to ferry aircraft for the British invasion force. When the vessel arrived in the combat area, the Harrier ‘jump jets’ she carried were launched from her, and flown off to the aircraft carries. On May 25^th 1983, during the ferocious air attacks by Argentine air forces during the Battle of San Carlos, Atlantic Conveyor was struck by two Exocet anti-ship missiles, killing twelve of her crew, including her captain; gutted by fires, the ship sank three days later, while under tow, joining several other vessels in becoming the first Royal Navy vessels lost in action since World War 2. The loss of all of the remaining aircraft aboard (all of them helicopters) would severely hamper British operations ashore for the remainder of the campaign.

But note the first part of that story: Atlantic Conveyor was able to at least launch manned fighter jets while underway. What the Royal Navy – long starved for funding for ships and manpower (HMS Hermes was scheduled for decommissioning – without a replacement – when the invasion happened) had built a “jack carrier”, effectively equivalent to a WW2 “escort carrier”, at very short notice, with the potential – had she not been destroyed – of being able to conduct combat operations at some level.

This capability had been recognized with helicopters for many years, but this was the first time it had been proven valid for manned combat jet aircraft. Although conjectural, this is likely the real reason why the US and UK defense establishments buried the Harrier’s proposed follow-on aircraft, the supersonic version of the Hawker Siddeley P.1154, cancelled in 1965. No serious attempt was made to perfect a supersonic-capable VTOL until the introduction of the F-35B by the United States in 2015. As there are few carriers in the world capable of operating conventional jet aircraft, this ensured the naval dominance of those states that possessed these massive and expensive weapons.

*F-35B Lightning taking off from a ski-jump, from HMS Queen Elizabeth, 2020. Photo: LPhot Luke/MOD. UK/OGL v1.0*

Now, however, we find ourselves in the 21^st Century, and technology has significantly progressed, across the board. Long-range drone craft, capable of carrying heavy ordnance, and armed – presumably – with anti-ship missiles and capable air- and anti-ship missile defenses, have now changed the structure of naval “battle calculus.” This is because the world’s second- and third-line military forces have relearned the fundamental truth of national military strength: it doesn’t matter how strong a nation’s military is overall, but how much of that force can be brought to bear against a particular target.

Iran’s naval deployment of ersatz carriers may seem laughable to many in first-line forces, but no one in second- or third-line navies are laughing. Iran has demonstrated that they are perfectly capable of worldwide naval cruises and deployments, and while their carriers and other vessels almost certainly stand no chance against a US or UK task force, they are more than a match for most of the other navies in the world. This is especially true for their “forward base ship” concepts, which are capable of deploying commando units via helicopter and speedboat, in a manner similar to first-line navies.

The deployment of these three vessels, the Makrun, Mahdavi and Bagheri, marks the first time since 1976 (in the days of the Imperial Navy of Iran) that Iran has had a truly capable naval arm for its military forces. Given the country’s friendly relations with Russia and Communist China, the possibility of joint fleet operations with at least China, if not Russia, along with their recent truce – brokered by the PRC – with Saudi Arabia, means than Iran can easily conduct far more complicated and wide-ranging power projection operations than they were able to in the past.

Much more worryingly, these ship commissioning’s are being done in public, and there are plenty of nations in the world at Iran’s tier who can take inspiration to boost their own naval capabilities.

The foundations of the world economy are set on the concept of the “freedom of the seas”, a concept enforced since World War 2 by the United States, Great Britain and France…but all three states are in financial trouble, and their navies are down to razor-thin numbers, in both ships and sailors. It will take careful, resolute and competent leadership to navigate through this.

The question is: is that leadership in place? Or even on the horizon?

The Future of Intelligence

Michael Cessna April 17, 2023

With the recent arrest of an Airman of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, the United States’ defence and intelligence establishments are once again under fire for apparently lax information security. In fact, this is the second time in less than a year that this has happened.

At first glance, this seems like a very bizarre thing…until you realize, sadly, that it is not.

In both cases, the leakers involved were not leaking classified intelligence – including casualty reports, battle plans, friendly agent identities, strategic concerns from and about allies, and technical intelligence, to name but a few – because they had been “honey trapped”. Likewise, the leakers were not employed by foreign state intelligence agencies, nor were they crusaders trying to expose crimes committed by the US defense and intelligence apparatus.

Instead, incredibly – or, sadly, not so incredibly – the leaks were the result of rabid video game players trying to prove how cool and ‘edgy’ they were.

While some of the leakers may be older, this is the result of the programming of the so-called “Generation Z”. This is the first generation to grow up with social media as a main facet of their lives. When “social media” as we would now recognize it, first arose in 1997, no one had any real idea of what its impact would be. Whatever the imagined intent, what it has evolved into, is a sort of electronic version of an elementary school playground at recess, with no adults present to regulate it.

Where older generations who entered the various defense and intelligence services would never, in their wildest nightmares, have taken classified materials to their local watering hole and deliberately passed them around to score social points, this is becoming increasingly common for a deliberately infantalized generation of youth. While there certainly were, and are, spies and informants stealing and passing on information for money, ideology or “love”, those reasons were at least tangible and understandable. Scoring social media points is, to be blunt, pointless in the extreme.

Coupled to the insanity of the RESTRICT Act (deliberately misconstrued as the “TikTok Ban” bill), this works to sweep away all the foundations of legality of the Rule of Law, in the fleeting hope of gaining some sort of security.

And, like the hysterical attacks from the music industry against services such as Napster and Grokster, idiocies like the RESTRICT Act are guaranteed to have exactly the opposite effect, as outraged online activists will find ways to send out increasingly large amounts of classified material – not for the older reasons, nor even the newer reasons, but simply out of anger at such tight restrictions. The fact of facing heavy penalties for doing so, are irrelevant once the information is “out in the wild,” as the saying goes: the damage will have already been done.

But the above does not address the real question: Why are these kinds of leaks so dangerous?

For those not familiar with intelligence gathering, as a discipline, the short answer is that, in the “old days,” obtaining intelligence – meaningful intelligence – on a hostile target was hard…very hard. An intelligence agency – from East or West – had to insert “non-official” (or “illegal”) agents into the target country; those illegal agents would then have to either infiltrate a facility, or suborn an intelligence worker (assuming that they could identify them). Conversely, they could hang out in bars, nightclubs or restaurants (good for staging a honey trap) outside the gates of military facilities, or take menial jobs at establishments outside the gates such as working as a barber or as a waitress, in an attempt to glean nuggets of information from random conversations…Not very flashy, and not very James Bond, but such methods did work.

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

(My favorite intelligence warning in the mid-1980’s, was an order that came down, telling service personnel to stop…”liberating”…large bottles of Tabasco® sauce from restaurants outside base main gates in preparation for going to the field or “rapidly redeploy strategically”, to make the early Meals-Ready-to-Eat (MRE’s) at least somewhat palatable. The problem had gotten so bad, those base-local restaurants developed their own internal intelligence networks, and were suddenly “out of Tabasco” when they learned of a local unit deployment…thus giving hostile agents a dead giveaway that large unit movements were afoot.)

With the rise of online gaming and their associated forums and chat servers in the early 2000’s, however, intelligence agencies quickly grasped that their agents could sit behind Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), in the comfort and security of their home nations. They could then “lurk,” monitoring boards silently, while not communicating very often, waiting to pounce on discussions where people who should know better would often drop bits – or entire files – of classified data…and those agents wouldn’t even have to hound the leaker, because the rest of the forum or chat group would do that for them, unwittingly.

This kind of thing came naturally to intelligence agencies, as it was a form of OSINT [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence]. OSINT, or “Open-Source Intelligence,” is a method, or discipline [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_gathering_disciplines] of intelligence collection where a person meticulously (some might say, “obsessively”) scours every publicly available source of information on a subject they can find, and attempt to collate and boil-down the resulting information into a general picture.

OSINT differs from more expensive, technological or hazardous methods of information collection – like finding human sources of information, satellite reconnaissance, radio signal interception, etc. – in that it simply requires an illegal agent to buy multiple piles of newspapers and magazines, and inhabit libraries relentlessly. While also not very flashy, OSINT analysis often leads to very clear pictures of a nation’s defense strategies. As well, it lends itself very well to crowdsourcing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing].

So…Where does this leave us, in mid-April of 2023?

Unfortunately, there are serious problems within the information security apparatus in the West, as a whole. With the need to bring in a new generation of intelligence workers, the West – as opposed to Russia and Communist China – is finding that the “Woke” agenda that has been allowed free rein over the last decade has badly polluted the potential recruiting pool, as people who have been raised in a culture where ephemeral “electronic cred” is as important, if not more important, than being a “quiet professional”.

And, as those who promoted that social context are discovering, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

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

RESTRICT ACT Designed to Restrict Americans, Not TikTok

Paul Collier April 17, 2023

RESTRICT ACT THREATENS TO BAN INTERNET FREEDOM, NOT JUST TIKTOK– Rather than creating a bill that would simply ban TikTok due to its overt connections to the Chinese Communist Party (which aims to destroy the American republic and turn us into a vassal of Xi Jinping), the bipartisan cabal in Washington has created a bill called the “Restrict Act” that would enable the state to censor and criminally prosecute individuals and companies for merely threatening American security.

The purpose of the bill is vague. In its own words, it states it is a bill “to authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes.” The bill gives near-God-like powers to the secretary of commerce and other Biden officials to destroy free speech on the internet under the guise of protecting American security. It states:

In general

The Secretary, in consultation with the relevant executive department and agency heads, is authorized to and shall take action to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate, including by negotiating, entering into, or imposing, and enforcing any mitigation measure to address any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States that the Secretary determines—

(1)poses an undue or unacceptable risk of—

(A)sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in the United States;

(B)catastrophic effects on the security or resilience of the critical infrastructure or digital economy of the United States;

(C)interfering in, or altering the result or reported result of a Federal election, as determined in coordination with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Treasury, and the Federal Election Commission; or

(D)coercive or criminal activities by a foreign adversary that are designed to undermine democratic processes and institutions or steer policy and regulatory decisions in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary to the detriment of the national security of the United States, as determined in coordination with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Treasury, and the Federal Election Commission; or

(2)otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons.

That last sentence, “otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States….” is where the real tyrannical, fascistic power of the bill comes to bear. The bill itself doesn’t address TikTok at all, and one doubts that the signing of this anti-American, pro-Chinese bill will actually result in TikTok being banned at all. It is more likely that platforms like Rumble will face Biden’s anti-American DOJ agents in criminal proceedings than will the DNC-CCP run platform TikTok ever will.

Facial Recongition Company Used Billions of Social Media Profiles without Permission

Freedomist Editor April 5, 2023

CLEARVIEW AI FACES POTENTIAL LAWSUITS FOR USING SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES TO BUILD FACIAL RECOGNITION SOFTWARE – Clearview AI has scraped the internet for faces to build an AI facial recognition software program. The company scraped over 30 billion photos of individuals without their permission, facing potential lawsuits from those same users. Meanwhile, the company “assures” us that it will “restrict” access to its ill-gotten profile library. Hoan Ton That is the CEO of the company. He is an Australian citizen born and raised in Vietnam.

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.

Meta to Drop 10,000 Employees

Freedomist Editor March 15, 2023

FACEBOOK TO FIRE 10,000 MORE WORKERS -Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announces plans to cut up to 10,000 more jobs in an effort to stem the losing revenue resulting from continuing to carry the water of the DNC-CCP, allowing its platform to become a Woketarian safe haven and enemy of American liberty.

Meet the 4D Printer That Prints Soft Robots

Paul Collier March 15, 2023

4D PRINTING BREAKTHROUGH COULD LEAD TO PRINTING SOFT ROBOTS – A breakthrough in 4D Printing was announced by researchers at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). The researchers claim to have created software and hardware for a 4D Printer that will allow the complete printing of complex electronic devices in biomorphic forms. From Science Daily:

“This research line focuses on the development of soft multifunctional structures, which consist of materials with mechanical properties that mimic biological tissues such as the brain or skin. In addition, they are capable of changing their shape or properties when actuated via external stimuli, such as magnetic fields or electric currents.”

Researchers Claim They Have Perfected Perfectly Secured Communications

Paul Collier March 8, 2023

Researchers from the University of Oxford and Carnegie Melon University claim to have created a completely secure method of digital transmission. The technique hides the intended content within other content in a way, they claim, cannot be detected. They use a technique called steganography, which involves sharing sensitive content within innocuous content. Up to now, the insertion of the sensitive data into the innocuous data creates enough of a change in the innocuous data that the cloaking can be detected.

From Scitech daily

The algorithm applies to a setting called steganography: the practice of hiding sensitive information inside of innocuous content. Steganography differs from cryptography because the sensitive information is concealed in such a way that this obscures the fact that something has been hidden. An example could be hiding a Shakespeare poem inside an AI-generated image of a cat.

Despite having been studied for more than 25 years, existing steganography approaches generally have imperfect security, meaning that individuals who use these methods risk being detected. This is because previous steganography algorithms would subtly change the distribution of the innocuous content.

To overcome this, the research team used recent breakthroughs in information theory, specifically minimum entropy coupling, which allows one to join two distributions of data together such that their mutual information is maximized, but the individual distributions are preserved.

ED.NOTE: Whenever one sees reports of perfect encryption, a healthy dose of skepticism is in order. It remains to be seen whether these researchers can further demonstrate the efficacy of their claims, but I have little doubt the advances tilt the balance of power towards anonymous, secure communication, though perhaps that goal is ultimately beyond our capacity.

If, indeed, they have stumbled upon the holy grail of secure encryption, the race to secure the technology and prevent it from reaching the general public is on. Hopefully, there are open source advocates working to duplicate this type of work, preventing it from being cut off from regular Americans behind Intellectual Property walls.

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.*

Robots in Drones Could Save Our Power Grid

Freedomist Editor February 9, 2023

Atlantic City Electric is working in cooperation with Fulcrum Air to combat bird strikes on power lines. The South Jersey company is hoping FulcrumAir’s drones and robots can keep birds from striking power lines, a problem that has increased over recent years. Airborne drones transport small robots to sites with high bird-strike occurrence that then deploy to deter birds from the power lines by making the power lines more visible to them.