Cold in the South...small whine...

I hate the cold.  Always have.  First introduction?  Fucking boot camp on that little bullshit field op and since I went to the land of men, not sandfleas we were up on the side of a big ass hill, a storm front bringing freezing temperatures and high winds rolled in....suffice it to say it was the first of many unpleasant meetings with Mr. Jack Frost.

Why do I call him Mr. Jack Frost and not simply Jack Frost?

Because when something can kick your ass that hard without you being able to do a thing about it then you refer to that something with respect.

Oh and I know you New York bubbas and Canadian Lumberjack bastards are gonna chime in but we're talking about cold in the deep south of the United fucking States of a Gawd Damn America.

This cold is wet.

It gets into your bones.

It can crawl thru your layers and tag you no matter how warmly you think you've dressed.

The answer?

There is only one.

You stay inside and wait for the misery to pass.  Then you pray for normal weather.  Ya know.  98 degrees with 100 percent humidity!  That's more like it.

Cold.  Cold will test your manhood.  The jungle?  Yeah, everything crawls at night, you swear bushes are moving, glowing eyes are beside you--above you--behind you...and no one is wearing NVGs... and the insects are terrible.  Even that's tolerable.  The desert?  120 during the day with zero humidity?  Yawn.  Pass the water, find some shade and life goes on.

But cold?  Cold changes the course of nations.

Open Comment Post. Dec 29, 2017

Holy Shit! Ruger is bringing back its PC Carbine!!!!

I don't know the exact history of the original rifle but I think that some gunsmith worked out a way for it to run Glock mags which made them not only rare, sought after and collectors items, but they supposedly also ran well.

I despise the look of this thing.  Why must a carbine have the "Tacticool" look?  Just give me a classic streamlined beauty that's easily handled and wonderfully pointable and I'm good.

Regardless I can't wait to see how one of those things shoot.

Only in America. The Pentagon creates bureaucracy to solve bureaucracy....

via Defense News.

The first two months of 2018 will see two major shifts on the business side of the Pentagon, with the creation of three new offices that will report directly to the secretary of defense.

The goal, deputy secretary of defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters on Dec. 21, is to make the changes as irreversible as possible in a system notoriously impervious to substantive changes.

“We want to make sure that with the stroke of a pen or a few clicks of the keyboard, we can’t undo progress,” Shanahan said. “When you think about enduring change, you have to wire or alter the work so that you don’t regress. That’s the hard part about big bureaucracy — is making enduring change.”

The deputy acknowledged that the changes will lead to plenty of complaints from people whose offices are being moved around —“you’ll probably hear screaming and yelling because ‘change is bad,’ ” he predicted for reporters — but he said that “if you’re going to have a more performance-driven operation, you have to unwind the bureaucracy and reorganize.”

Story here. 

Amazing.

So they create three new offices to reform the Pentagon.

The dude that's probably gonna ramrod the effort says that people will scream NOT BECAUSE THEIR JOB IS BEING ELIMINATED but because they're being reorganized.

Only in America.

How much money could be saved if someone actually had the balls to go thru the Pentagon with a fine tooth comb and start slicing positions that make no bloody sense?

How much waste, fraud and abuse is actually going on in that building?

I think we're all afraid to find out.

IDF expands use of Namers across their entire force...

via Jerusalem Post.

The IDF is strengthening infantry units by expanding the use of its advanced Armored Personnel Carrier, dubbed Namer, or “leopard,” and supplying the purple barets Givati Brigade in addition to Golani units already using the vehicle.

“After extensive trials, by the end of 2020 the entire brigade will be operating the Namer,” said a statement by the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit, adding that the development was a part  of a process of integrating use of the Namer into the IDF as whole.

Story here. 

Namers for everyone huh?  Sure looks like it.  So who's gonna get that new wheeled APC?  Is it just for reserves?  By my count and by reading the article it seems like every active unit in the IDF that rates APCs will be equipped with Namers.

So when the IDF next goes to war, and they sure look like they're gearing up for it just like everyone else, they're gonna be using 2 infantry carriers instead of the huge number we see today.

Namers, and Eitans.

The various heavy APCs based on Centurion and T-55 MBTs are gone.  M-113s are gonna be gone too.  The IDF doesn't seem to be too in love with ANY MRAP vehicle to a large degree and the ones they do operate seem relegated to the police forces they have....

This is extremely interesting.

The rest of the world is massing on the idea of wheeled APCs and the Israelis are going all in on a heavy tracked APC instead.

I would so love to get my hands on combat simulations they've run to see what they came up with when it comes to survivability of the various models around the world.

Netherland Army receives its first Vector Special Forces Vehicle

The pic is via The Royal Netherlands Army Instagram page but the translation is via Google.  But it does look right!

Open Comment Post. Dec 28, 2017

Forged By The Sea campaign is not impressing...Small Rant Included...

When the fuck did it happen?

When the fuck did the US Motherfucking Army crack the code on doing effective ad campaigns and the rest of the Gawd Damn Services (to include the blessed and beloved Marine Corps) go batshit stupid?

Yeah the fucking Army was smart enough to include this SF bubba jumping out of a plane in an commercial...even crusty, cynical bastards like me were saying "ok...that's sorta badass"...

Forged By The Sea?  With some dude wearing a scuba mask coming at ya?

Is that suppose to be hard core?

Is that suppose to fucking inspire?

Jesus H. Christ!  Fire all the ad companies (except the bubbas working for the Army) and toss me the fucking contract.  I could do 10 times better than the bullshit I'm seeing pumped out!

Rant over.

British Army...Multi-national battlegroup receives orders while on Operation Cabrit in Poland.

Multi-national battlegroup receives orders while on Operation Cabrit in Poland. 
The British Army are currently deployed on operations supporting NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) and currently have forces located in Estonia and Poland

George Washington's betrayal of Thomas Paine...a misunderstanding or a sad but unknown part of US history?

via HistoryNet

George Washington refused to come to the rescue when the pamphleteer who put him on his high horse faced the guillotine.

On December 28, 1793, at the height of the Reign of Terror in France, Paris police rousted Thomas Paine in the cold hours before dawn, arrested him as a “foreign conspirator” and locked him in a wet, 10-by-8-foot cellar in Luxembourg Prison. The only light came from cracks in a boarded-up window. Paine was sure the guillotine awaited him.

Citizen Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution, was an enthusiastic early supporter of the French Revolution. He received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in Paris in 1792 and was even granted honorary French citizenship and a seat in the National Convention, the body charged with writing a constitution for the new republic. But Paine angered Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobin extremists when he urged the Convention to spare the life of the deposed French king, Louis XVI. Instead, Jacobins brandished the king’s severed head in front of a cheering crowd. Then they proceeded to round up thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries who, Paine observed, fell “as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off.” Now they’d come for him, too.

Story here.