Isegoria

Roy F. Dunlap almost followed McBride’s example (A Rifleman Went to War), but instead he joined the US Army and worked on small arms:

Even before Pearl Harbor I had ideas about getting free board and room with my shooting and was toying with the notion of joining the Canadians, who cordially recommended the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the “Princess Pats,” who I gathered consisted mostly of Americans who couldn’t wait.

[...]

In the spring of 1942, Mister, the U. S. Army was in sad shape. We didn’t have from nothin’. They were in a hurry to get us on our way — four weeks’ basic. After three and a half a large percentage, including me, were transferred into the “cadre school,” or school for noncoms. A big honor or something, but I didn’t like it, since I was very sick of close-order drill and calisthenics, which was what the basic training at Aberdeen Proving Ground amounted to, except for short lectures given by officers who had learned them by rote, apparently.

He belonged in the ordnance unit:

The first thing he asked me was how to put in a front sight on a .45 pistol. I knew I’d arrived.

[...]

There wouldn’t be a thing wrong with the gun [M2 Aircraft machinegun] except it wouldn’t work. All you could do was switch parts here and there till it did. Then you had to change it over to feed from the opposite side and do it over again. And so on ad infinitum.

[...]

Anyway, we suddenly were issued helmets (most of us got new ones but a few lads caught the old 1917 soup dishes). This was the first time any of us had seen a helmet. I told you the army was short of stuff, remember? We were all armed with Remington-made 1903 rifles, with straight stocks.

These were fairly well made, since they came out before the stamping mania hit the production lines, and all parts were as made on regular pre-war service Springfields. Of course, the floorplate would probably pop out if you dropped the butt more than two inches when lowering it to the ground, and the safety usually flew off when you slammed the bolt open on inspection, but we could cure little things like that, being an ordnance outfit. Machine work wasn’t bad at all, compared with later stuff.

Roy F. Dunlap was a competitive shooter before he went to war, and, as he explains in Ordnance Went Up Front, he came back still enamored of guns and shooting:

Fort Sheridan, Illinois, was our “home” range. Forty (now fifty) firing points, all the way back to a thousand yards, and the army manned the telephones and the pits for us, costing us anywhere from thirty cents to a dollar an hour per target, depending on the number of targets rented. After the day’s match or matches we’d rent a few on our own hook and have our fun and practice. Our gang used to go down to the short ranges and practice rapid fire (small wagers here and there, etc.!).

[...]

And not one of all the men I know is tired of guns. Rather, the opposite — we’re more anxious to shoot than ever. One ex-platoon sergeant of the Rangers, for fifteen months a prisoner in Germany, spent his furlough Sundays before discharge on the firing line at Fort Sheridan, back in the matches! Another, who fought the Japs under very messy conditions for a couple of years, worried in every letter that he hadn’t greased his match rifles well enough in 1941. A third, who finished the war a Major, after seeing Burma as one of the leading lights of Merrill’s Marauders promptly traded one of the boys back from Germany out of two Mausers. A man I knew in New Guinea, who eventually collected a couple of Nip bullets in the chest, is irritated mainly because he can’t shoot any gun with heavy recoil until he heals up a little more. I have rheumatism or something in my right elbow and shoulder (and the rest of my joints, too, for that matter) so that I may have to do my future pistol shooting lefthanded, but don’t believe it will affect my rifle holding. Riflemen are hard to discourage.

A few months back, commenter Bruce mentioned Roy F. Dunlap’s Ordnance Went Up Front. It’s an odd mix of lighthearted stories about Dunlap’s time in World War 2 and dry details about the weapons fielded by both sides in both theaters:

This [book] isn’t really my fault: I was parked peacefully beneath a coconut palm splitting a banana with a monkey and wondering if I’d live through the coming invasion of Japan when some hopeful soldier who had attended mail call threw me a letter from T. G. Samworth, “who gets out the books on firearms,” starting everything. The monkey ate the envelope, and since he looked smarter than I felt, I asked him what I should do — tell the man the truth, or write him a gory story.

(Mr. Samworth had the idea I was the Second Rifleman to go to War, à la McBride.)

Anyway, I wrote and explained that I was usually the snipee instead of the sniper, and that there wasn’t much I knew to write about except small arms, which would be OK but for the fact that a batch of other guys had been doing the same thing all through the war, though it was evident that two-thirds of them never handled the items they publicized. Besides, I had to work for a living, instead of fighting — most of the time anyway — so I wasn’t glamorous. The answer was, in effect, “Write it up anyway, you’ve seen enough guns, in enough places, and know enough about them to make a book.” Besides, he offered money. So I then had a post-war project. This is it.

[...]

If the following manuscript can be classified at all, it must be as an elaborated technical diary of an American gun nut through the rifles, pistols and machine guns of World War II, both enemy and allied.

Dunlap was a competitive shooter before the war and an armorer during the war:

I’m the rifleman who went to war — to fix ‘em.

Again he cites McBride’s A Rifleman Went To War, one of the first great books about sniping by one of the first great snipers.

Most of the book is wry commentary, not dry gun specs:

• We had a lot of good stuff and a lot of stuff not so good, but as a rule only about half the quantity or quality the home front thought we had.
• The propaganda this country swallows would make Goebbels roll in his grave. In envy. He had suckers, but not so many.
• I have a fine battle dress jacket so covered with insignia and bars and brassards it looks like a military store window showpiece, but I am now so wide I can’t wear it any more, so, as the man said, what price glory?
• I’m satisfied. My malaria hasn’t bothered me for eight months; I wasn’t hurt too much by jungle rot although my ankles and feet and legs are now sort of a purplish-brown color; I didn’t get a Purple Heart, for which I am very happy, and though my joints complain sometimes that I slept on the ground a night or so too often, I’m not bad off. A lot of things could have happened to me that didn’t. I hated the army, but I didn’t mind the war so much.
• This probably really started when I was about three years old, since somebody is pretty sure to have given me a toy gun about then. Business picked up when I grew up to six years and enough strength to operate an air rifle. At nine I altered one of them into a workable pistol, and have been maltreating guns ever since.

The United States Air Force has lost its way, Jerry Hendrix argues — and most of its bombers, too:

It has forgotten what business it’s in, mistakenly believing that its raison d’être is air supremacy while forgetting that the core of its mission is long-range strike. If the nation is to be successful in the great-power competition it finds itself in, the Air Force will need to find its way home and regain its strategic relevance in an environment dominated by anti-access/area-denial systems employed by China and Russia.

[...]

The Air Force once understood its purpose with stark clarity. In the first half of the 20th century, air-power advocates continually stressed the importance of bypassing tactical skirmishes and penetrating to the enemy’s vital centers to coerce either the foreign government or its population to submit. Independent air forces in Great Britain and Italy focused their procurement efforts on larger and longer-range heavy bombers. Non-independent air forces, such as the U.S. Army Air Corps, sought the same even as their parent service (the U.S. Army, in the American case) pressed them to buy tactical aircraft and perform direct-combat air-support missions for ground infantry and armor units. This made some sense during World War II, when long-range bombers found themselves in need of fighter escorts to fend off enemy fighters and establish temporary air dominance for the bombers to get through to their targets. But after the war, science and engineering combined to alter circumstances.

The jet engines that came to dominate aircraft design during the early years of the Cold War changed the nature of force employment, as jet fighters no longer had the range to escort the jet bombers of the newly established and very powerful Strategic Air Command to targets inside the Soviet Union. Fighters then became specialized for air-defense and air-dominance missions within a radius of a couple of hundred miles of fighter bases. Strategic Air Command bombers, which numbered in the thousands, soon began to specialize themselves, evolving towards designs that could fly higher and faster in order to penetrate Soviet air defenses. The Soviets responded by building new surface-to-air missiles and high-altitude/high-speed interceptors to rob American bombers of their advantages. It was only at the end of the Cold War, with the introduction of the stealth B-2 Spirit bomber, that bombers regained the upper hand in the U.S.–USSR strategic competition. But by then, the Strategic Air Command had been disestablished, and the Air Force felt that its mission had changed.

The change began during the Vietnam War, in which fighters flying from land bases in South Vietnam were loaded up with bombs to hit land targets in North Vietnam and along supply routes in neighboring countries. The improved accuracy of smaller aircraft carrying lighter loads of bombs and providing combat air support to American ground forces in direct contact with the enemy began to subtly alter the internal culture of the Air Force. The bomber “tribe,” based in the politically powerful Strategic Air Command, had supplied six of the first ten Air Force chiefs of staff, but it began to lose influence within the service to the fighter “tribe.” In the 36 years since Chief of Staff Lew Allen Jr. retired, no bomber pilot has occupied that office, and the Air Force’s inventory of bombers has shrunk from over 10,000 aircraft during the 1950s to fewer than 200 today. Fighter pilots gained ascendency based upon the assumptions of access to bases within range of their enemies, the ability of their supporting tanker force to survive, and the greater importance of air supremacy than long-range-strike capability.

Air supremacy is a straightforward concept. It seeks a degree of superiority over an opposing air force such that the enemy is incapable of effective interference with friendly aircraft or ground and naval forces. This definition of air superiority held for regional wars such as those in Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq (both times), and Afghanistan (where the enemy had no opposing air power to speak of). Air Force theorists also state that air superiority applies to theater campaigns (those that range across an entire region of the globe), enabling larger aircraft, cargo haulers, refueling tankers, and bombers to operate freely — except when they cannot, and that is where the modern United States Air Force lost its way.

Air supremacy is all about fighting a long war. It assumes proximity of air-power units to the front lines and/or to the adversary’s coast. It also assumes that the U.S. will fight the next war the way it has fought small wars over the 70-plus years since the end of World War II — deploying combat and support forces from the United States; gradually building up forces and supplies in theater; “rolling back” adversary defenses to gain air, sea, and ground control; and decisively defeating the adversary’s military in force-on-force engagements. All these assumptions are wrong.

Both China and Russia have noted how effectively the United States has fought its wars over the past 50 years and have invested in a new series of sensors and weapons that seek to push American forces back from their shores. Broadly grouped under the label of “anti-access/area-denial” systems, these radars, satellites, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and submarines all seek to ensure that U.S. power-projection forces cannot reach their vital political, economic, and military centers. Because of these investments, most of America’s most recent weapons systems, including all three variants of the new F-35 multi-role fighter, will be unable to reach Chinese or Russian targets. There will be no proximity to “front lines” — not that it matters, as there will be no front lines. The next battlefield will be fluid and spread out over vast areas. Moreover, both legacy fighters and just-fielding F-35s are already vulnerable to modern integrated air- and missile-defense networks. The enemies get a vote, and they have cast it.

[...]

When World War II ended, the Army Air Forces understood these lessons, and when the U.S. Air Force was established in 1947 and the Strategic Air Command thereafter, the long-range bomber and the long-range strike mission lay at the center of their culture. But then regional wars and the end of the Cold War happened, and the Air Force forgot what business it was in. It got into short-range fighters and fought small, short-range wars.

He’s a big fan of the B-21 Raider.

Flash-bang grenades are great, but what if you want to deliver 14 flash-bang grenades from 1,000 meters away?

“Currently the armed forces are unable to deliver non-lethal effects at extended ranges,” Michael Markowitch, an engineer involved in designing the munition, said in an Army press release in 2016. “Our goal was to develop a mortar that would be capable of delivering a non-lethal payload at ranges typical of mortar systems.”

“We took our inspiration for our design from the family of illumination mortars. They use parachutes attached to an illumination candle to slow its descent and illuminate an area. The team determined that similar designs could be used to control the descent of the metal parts,” Markowitch added.

This first field-test occurred during this year’s Rim of the Pacific exercise, which occurs every two years and involves more than 20 nations and dozens of warships.

The modified round is compatible with existing 81 mm mortar tubes and flies through the air like a standard mortar. The round’s effective range is between 450 and 1,500 meters.

When the round is roughly 250 meters above the target, a time-delay fuse detonates. The mortar’s nose and tail sections separate and the 14 nonlethal cardboard-encased submunitions are released.

Parachutes also release from the mortar’s nose and tail, and the mortar floats to the ground while the flash-bang grenades fall, stabilized by drag ribbons.

The nonlethal cartridges are designed to detonate simultaneously, covering an area of roughly 30 meters. Each cartridge, like the M84 stun grenade, emits a roughly 180-decibel bang and a flash of more than one million candela within five feet of the initiation spot.

Developers of the system have also shown interest in adding infrared or ultraviolet ink to the mortar in order to paint anyone near the detonation. This could help soldiers identify people in a crowd who may disperse from the impact site, according to the Defense Department release.

Someone mentioned “Spanish conquistador helmets” on Twitter, and I helpfully added that the iconic helmet is known as a morion. What I didn’t realize is that the Spanish conquistador helmet wasn’t worn by the Spanish conquistadors we’ve all heard of:

The iconic morion, though popularly identified with early Spanish explorers and conquistadors, was not in use as early as the conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortez or Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas in South America. Thirty to forty years later, it was widely used by the Spanish, but also common among foot soldiers of many European nationalities, including the English; the first English morions were issued during the reign of Edward VI. Low production costs aided its popularity and dissemination although officers and elite guards would have theirs elaborately engraved to display their wealth and status.

The crest or comb on the top of the helmet was designed to strengthen it. Later versions also had cheek guards and even removable faceplates to protect the soldier from sword cuts.

The morion’s shape is derived from that of an older helmet, the Chapel de Fer, or “Kettle Hat.” Other sources suggest it was based on Moorish armor and its name is derived from Moro, the Spanish word for Moor. The New Oxford American Dictionary, however, derives it from Spanish morrión, from morro ’round object’. The Dictionary of the Spanish Language published by the Royal Spanish Academy indicates that the Spanish term for the helmet, morrión, derives from the noun morra, which means “the upper part of the head”.

In England this helmet (also known as the pikeman’s pot) is associated with the New Model Army, one of the first professional militaries. It was worn by pikemen, together with a breastplate and buff coat as they stood in phalanx-like pike and shot formations, protecting the flanks of the unarmored musketeers.