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If you ask Sgt. Robert Flak, he’ll tell you it’s not fair that infantrymen who’ve earned the Combat Infantryman Badge and Expert Infantryman Badge are not allowed to wear both awards at the same time — and he’s not even a grunt.

“I was always around the infantry, and I’d hear them talking about how they had to pick between the EIB and the CIB, and … they never get passing recognition from their peers or subordinates or superiors,” said Flak, a human resources specialist. “I thought, ‘this is not fair,’ but they said, ‘this is how it is.’”

But Flak feels so strongly about it that he has designed a new badge that would represent both infantry awards, and he’s actively spreading the word about the award, talking to anybody who will listen. He’s even pitched a written proposal to senior Army leaders, including Sergeant Major of the Army Dan Dailey.

via www.armytimes.com

As a dual qualified guy, I kinda like this idea.

I fairly often ignored a minor provision of AR670-1 and wore the EIB from time to time, as I actually had to work for that.

But I was (and stil am) proud of my CIB.

This should be a fairly simple process.

And let us not forget our medic brothers, and do the same for them.

A truck crashed into a crowd of revelers Thursday night during a Bastille Day celebration in the southern French town of Nice, killing at least 73 people and wounding dozens of others.

The celebrations quickly turned to chaos as the truck ploughed through a crowd at the Promenade des Anglais during the end of a fireworks show.

The driver was shot dead by police, said Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for French Interior Ministry.

Sylvie Toffin, a press officer with the local prefecture, said the truck “hit several people on a long trip” down the sidewalk near Nice’s Palais de la Méditerranee, a building which fronts the beach.

via www.nydailynews.com

We should probably import tens of thousands of refugees who despise our culture.

Well, not for all the troops, it doesn’t appear.

First, don’t put too much credence on the folderal in this article. You can hardly expect the press to understand a damn thing about guns, and not much about wars. Still:

British troops are to be issued with a new infantry combat rifle for the first time in 20 years to cope with the fierce fighting conditions of the Afghan war.

The Sharpshooter will use larger 7.62mm bullet rounds in order to engage with Taliban fighters over longer distances. The change comes after the military found that the standard Nato 5.66 rounds lost velocity at ranges over a thousand feet.

The 5.56 rounds, used by the SA80 rifles, had proved adequate in previous conflicts in Iraq, Kosovo and Sierra Leone where much of the exchanges had taken place in urban battlegrounds. However, in the valleys and mountains of Afghanistan the insurgents often start shooting matches at distances of up to 2,500 feet. The Taliban, on the other hand, are using guns which can date back to the 1890s but have proved to be effective over further distance and their simpler mechanism makes them easier to maintain. Around 400 of the new rifles have been purchased for £1.5m from funds available under Urgent Operational Requirements (UORs) and will be issued to the most proficient shots.

While there might be one or two Taliban running around with an 1890 Enfield, the vast majority are equipped with AKs and similar Soviet small arms.

Now, on to the Sharpshooter.

Based on the number of rifles being bought, it looks to me that the British Army is adopting a variant of the US Army’s highly successful Designated Marksman program.

The DM is equipped with a rifle, usually 7.62mm, as opposed to the standard M4 carbine. Along with optics, this give him reach out to well beyond the effective range of an M4.

But what the program isn’t is a sniper program.  The DM is a regular member of the Rifle Squad, and fulfills the regular duties of a squad member. But much like other members of the squad have specialized duties within the squad (say, Grenadier or Automatic Rifleman), so to the DM, that is, to place aimed accurate rifle fire upon targets in his squad’s sector.

Interestingly, the Brits appear to have gone with a modular AR platform rifle, much like the US Army chose the M110. That’s slightly surprising coming from an Army that carried the 7.62mm L1A1 Self Loading Rifle (the FN FAL) for many, many years.

I saw this at War History Online, and it’s worth a read in and of itself:

While many people know the story of the “Little Ships of Dunkirk”, Great Britain was not the only nation to call upon its civilian sailors to come to their nation’s aid. In early 1942 the US Navy and Coast Guard were facing a crisis: they had a massive coastline to protect from U-Boats, and nowhere near enough craft to do it.

Every day they were losing ships to German fire, and weren’t able to produce patrol vessels fast enough to ensure safety at sea. They were searching for a solution, but little did they realize that it was right in front of them.

In 1941, Alfred Stanford, Commodore of the Cruising Club of America, offered his ships and crews to Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations. But King was an old traditionalist and immediately dismissed the idea of civilians going out looking for submarines. The yachtsmen, though, didn’t relent and created a public outcry. After numerous letters and newspaper articles called for the use of these yachts and their crews, Admiral King finally gave in, and put the volunteers under the command of the Coast Guard, because of their experience with the Coast Guard Auxiliary, a force made up those too old, too young, or unfit to fight.

The Auxiliarists were usually unpaid volunteers, but could be temporarily brought in as paid members of the main fighting force. In 1941 this force stood around 7500 members, with 2-3 thousand craft, most of which were only suitable for inland or coastal operations. The Auxiliary’s main duty at the time was to supplement the Coast Guard’s main force, assisting with safety inspections, lifesaving, as well as patrolling coastal beaches looking for spies and saboteurs.

Now, let’s return to the 21st Century.

The US Navy has spent a lot of time and money on signature reduction of its surface warships, such as the first tentative steps with the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyers, both classes of Littoral Combat Ships, the DDG-1000 class, and even the LPD-17 class amphibious transport docks.

You can do a lot to hide warships at sea, much of which involved being very quiet, and standing offshore a fair bit.

But sooner or later, you have to close the enemy coast. While the surface ships of the US Navy might, on radar, appear to be just another ship, there really isn’t much you can do to disguise them during the day. And China has an enormous fleet of fishing vessels, and other coastal craft. Properly deployed, they would be in a position to almost certainly visually detect any surface task force eventually, and in a position to very quickly disseminate that information back to the mainland. And it is highly unlikely the US Navy will be able to sink or seize every vessel that has the potential to spot them.

I hope there are some smart naval minds out there trying to come to terms with this problem, because I don’t have a solution on hand.

Marquez was visiting his girlfriend when two armed suspects approached him with their guns drawn. He was shot multiple times in the chest and abdomen before the suspects ran away.

One of the suspects was wounded in the leg and arrested. The other suspect fled and has not been identified.

One of Marquez's bullets struck the suspect's pistol, traveling straight down that gun's barrel and disabling it. Officials say such a shot is "one in a billion."

via www.9news.com

That's truly remarkable.

Best wishes to Deputy Marquez for his recovery.

Pics at the link.

We talked about the Army’s long range missile, the Pershing, in an earlier post. Let’s discuss it’s little brother, the Lance. Development of the Lance began at roughly the same time as the Pershing, but technical issues meant it would not be fielded until a full eight years after the Pershing.

The Lance, MGM-52, was a short range ballistic missile utilizing inertial navigation to deliver either a nuclear or (eventually) a conventional warhead to a range of from 45 to 75 miles.

The missile was stabilized in flight by spinning. The spin was imparted by four small solid rockets that gave off a characteristic black smoke. Main propulsion was a boost/sustain liquid propellant rocket motor that used a unique throttle technique to adjust the range. The initial boost phase was about what you’d expect, but afterwards, the inertial guidance system detected accelerations and either throttled up or down to bring the missile back to the proper ballistic path. It was in large part this complex throttle technology that accounted for the lengthy development time.

After this lengthy development, Lance was finally fielded in 1972 to replace the earlier Honest John unguided rocket, and the Sergeant short range ballistic missile.

The Lance was carried on the M752 launch vehicle, which was based on the ubiquitous M113 personnel carrier. A second vehicle based on the same chassis served as a loader and transporter for two spare missiles. A firing platoon would consist of two launchers (each with a six man crew) and two transporters.  The firing apparatus could be dismounted from the carrier, and converted to a trailer for use in airborne and air assault operations. While the system was very mobile, in either its tracked or trailer version, one drawback was that firing points had to be pre-surveyed.

Lance was initially fielded with only a nuclear warhead options, using the W70 with a yield of between 1kt to 100kt. Later, the W70-3 “Enhanced Radiation” warhead was fielded. The “Enhanced Radiaton” warhead was also widely known as the Neutron Bomb. That is, fast neutrons shed by the detonation would be the primary casualty causing mechanism. It was hoped that using this variant would mean less devastation inside West German, while still producing the desired casualty effects on any Soviet targets.

By the late 1970s, the Army started to think that maybe tossing nuclear weapons around on a European battlefield wasn’t really the best idea, but that something like the Lance was still pretty handy. Evolving doctrine at that time meant corps commanders would increasingly utilize “Deep Strike” well beyond the first echelon of Soviet forces to influence the battle. The AH-64 Apache was developed very much with this role in mind. But the corps commander could also use a conventional variant of Lance. And so, a conventional warhead, armed with about 800 submunitions, was issued. The submunitions were ideal for dealing with targets such as assembly areas, logistics and fuel depots, and air defenses. Unfortunately, as the conventional warhead weighed quite a bit more than the nuclear warhead, the range was considerably reduced, to about 45 miles.

Once the conventional warhead was available, the missile became popular with several allied nations, including Germany, Britain, Belgium, Italy and Israel.

With the unilateral US decision to forego battlefield nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, the Lance was quickly withdrawn from service. In its place, the M270 MLRS and especially the Army Tactical Missile System gave commanders a better, faster, cheaper conventional long range artillery system.

This video is fairly long, but gives an excellent overview of the Lance.

If that’s too long for you, this short video shows the British Army conducting some live firings.

Some are pretty legit, and others, well, I’m not above stealing a kill…