Inside the palaces of Zhongnanhai, headquarters of the Communist Party, government and party officials seem to be hesitating. They obviously fear instability. But more importantly, interest groups that have long enjoyed the status quo are lurking in the systemic obscurity created by the single party. Now that China's economy is second only to the United States, the whole planet is counting on it to reform itself.
Reforming itself? Collectivists? Good luck with that.
The new shotgun is replacing the Army’s long-serving Mossberg 500. Unlike the Mossberg, the MASS is a hybrid weapon that can attach underneath the Army’s standard issue M4 rifle, or can be fitted with a stock and pistol grip to be a weapon of its own.
1st Lt. Anthony Frisone, 2nd Platoon’s leader, said he first saw the weapons last year in Afghanistan. The Pentagon ordered 9,000 of the attachable shotguns as of 2013. That number is likely to grow. Soldiers can use the M26’s bolt action handle right or left handed. And its ability to connect to an assault rifle or be a standalone weapon is a feature soldiers particularly like.The choice is important, because there are pros and cons to both configurations. As an add-on to a rifle–its original intent–a soldier wouldn’t have to switch between weapons during a fight. But Frisone explained that the combination makes the rifle incredibly heavy. To be sure, carrying a rifle and shotgun separately is still heavy, but a soldier can manage the weight by slinging whatever he or she isn’t using to the side. The switch is fast and carrying both allows a soldier to focus their attention. It’s all a matter of preference for each unit. In any case, the M26 is lighter than the Mossberg 500.
See also: M26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System
Hillary Clinton has Democrats in a panic
Trying to turn national security into a punchline is a stupid thing to do, especially when the FBI has your server.
Markings on this Confederate ammunition box:96 Lbs~1000~Cart. Cal. 57-58ELONGATED BALLRichmond ArsenalAugt. 1864
Pretty much since I began this blog, I have harped on the necessity of keeping ammunition in combat packing.
Last night, I reached over during my insomniac reading period and pulled down Volume III of Douglas Southall Freeman's classic, Lee's Lieutenants. The volume fell open to this paragraph about the fighting around Culp's Hill at Gettysburg:
Despite this inequality of firepower, Confederate losses were light. Steuart had his men well in hand and he instructed them to keep under cover. When his ammunition ran low, one of his staff took three men from the ranks, walked more than a mile to the ordnance train and brought back two large boxes of cartridges to the foot of the hill.
(MBV: Likely two 1000 round crates of .58 caliber minie ball cartridges as pictured above each weighing 96 pounds. This was heavy enough to be sure yet this wasn't much per man when distributed along the firing line. However it was likely all the four men could carry between them -- too bad they didn't have some pack mules.)
There they dumped the cartridges into a blanket, slung the blanket on a sapling and mounted the hill with the sapling over their shoulders. (Page 142.)
Note that this improvisation is evidence that neither the staff nor the ordnance train officers thought ahead to supply the troops during the night the unit spent on the hill before dawn. Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance.
"A group of Internet aviation fans once debated the subject of the worst fighter of World War II. Their hands-down favorite: the Brewster Buffalo. . . The Royal Air Force fobbed the Brewster fighter onto the Fleet Air Arm and British Commonwealth squadrons; the U.S. Navy gave it to the Marines. Pilots thought it was a sweet plane to fly, but noticed that the wheel struts sometimes broke, that the engine leaked oil, and that the guns sometimes didn’t fire. And when they flew it against the nimble fighters of Japan, too often they didn’t come back.
F'd: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World's Worst New Warplane.
“The F-35 is double-inferior,” Stillion and Perdue moaned in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press. The analysts railed against the new plane, which to be fair played only a small role in the overall simulation. “Inferior acceleration, inferior climb [rate], inferior sustained turn capability,” they wrote. “Also has lower top speed. Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” Once missiles and guns had been fired and avoiding detection was no longer an option—in all but the first few seconds of combat, in other words—the F-35 was unable to keep pace with rival planes. And partly as a result, the U.S. lost the simulated war. Hundreds of computer-code American air crew perished. Taiwan fell to the 1s and 0s representing Chinese troops in Stillion and Perdue’s virtual world. Nearly a century of American air superiority ended among the wreckage of simulated warplanes, scattered across the Pacific.
