A supervisory engineer at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division spent years building a jammer designed to defeat America’s own radars. The harder his team made it for friendly pilots to see through the jamming, the better they were doing their job. Then the question changed: what if the sam...
During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Yamato was feared due to its immense size and power. She was the most heavily armed battleship ever built, with nine 18.1-inch (460mm) main guns, the largest ever mounted on a warship. Each shell weighed nearly 1.5 tons and had a range i...
The Tiger II tank, officially designated as Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B and introduced in 1944, was Germany’s most advanced heavy tank of World War II. Known as the Königstiger (King Tiger) by the Germans and often referred to as the Royal Tiger by Allied forces, it was designed to dominate...
The Canadian Armed Forces are set to adopt variants of Colt Canada’s MRR as the Canadian Modular Assault Rifle (CMAR). The announcement stated that more than 65,000 rifles will be procured over the next 5 years to replace the Colt Canada C7 rifles and C8 carbines currently in Canadian...
The captive-piston (integrally silenced) ammunition concept is often assumed to be a Soviet invention; in fact, it dates back to 1902 in the United States (US Patent No. 692,819). Fast-forward to the Cold War, when the KGB carried out extensive clandestine espionage and counter-espionage worldwid...
American bombers in World War II represented the most significant leap in strategic air power the world had ever seen. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States Army Air Force (U.S.A.A.F.) deployed an unprecedented array of bombing aircraft across both European and Pacific theaters. From light att...
In the years after World War II, the Soviet military asked a simple question: how could an infantry squad bring a higher volume of automatic fire without surrendering mobility? A lesson they learned from the Eastern Front, where volume of fire was king. The answer, in part, was the RPD; this ligh...
The truck gun can be virtually any firearm, but to truly assess the multitude of modern applicable firearms as an effective defensive platform, a required evaluation necessitates the most offensive, the AK. The AK has earned two reputations in the 21st Century; the first is a reputation for simpl...
The subject of whether to use a pistol is not the focus of this article; let us assume we have decided to start with the handgun instead of a shotgun or rifle for the sake of debate. The best approach is to establish some basic standards for the modern pistol as a defensive weapon. The first ques...