The National Interest

Patricia Illingworth

History, Americas

Jeffrey Epstein faced sex trafficking and conspiracy charges when he died in July 2019. 

I teach a course on ethics and philanthropy and have written about how to donate to charities ethically.

Recent news about people who make big charitable gifts acting badly is making me wonder whether philanthropy really does make the world better.

Think about it: Members of the Sackler family, who have given millions to arts institutions, also own Purdue Pharma. That’s the company that patented and aggressively marketed Oxycontin, an approach that helped bring about the opioid crisis. Between 1999 and 2017, close to 218,000 people died from overdoses connected to prescription opioids.

Then there’s Warren Kanders, a major donor to New York City’s Whitney Museum. He stepped down as vice chair of its board in July 2019 over his role as the chief executive of Safariland – a manufacturer of bulletproof vests, bomb-defusing robots and other security products. Artists and activists demanded his ouster after learning that Safariland made the tear gas launched at migrants at the border between Mexico and California.

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Walter Olson

Politics,

Ohio offers an example of a bad outcome.

This is just absurd: to comply with federal regulations barring owners of daily newspapers from also owning local broadcast stations, the owner of the venerable Dayton Daily News in Ohio may knock it down to three-times-a-week publication so that it won't count as a daily anymore. Keith J. Kelly of the New York Post spotted the story, Cox Media Group outlined the plan in a press release a few weeks ago, and Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab has more:

To increase the quality of local journalism in Ohio, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring three newspapers to stop printing daily....

Did you get that? To strengthen the local news ecosystem in Dayton, the government is making its biggest newspaper publish less.

The rules date back to 1975 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted regulations barring cross-ownership of local broadcast and newspaper properties while grandfathering in existing arrangements. It was never a good rule, but progressive social critics then as now traced countless social ills to media concentration and for-profit ownership of the press (what's new these days is that populist conservatives crusade against the corporate media too).

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Diane Winston

History, Americas

Salvation Army Captain Joseph McFee’s legacy lives on – providing inspiration to millions of Americans, whether they care about religion or not. Tinseled trees and snowy landscapes are not the only signs of the upcoming holiday season. Red kettles, staffed by men and women in street clothes, Santa suits and Salvation Army uniforms, also telegraph Christmastime.

The Salvation Army is among America’s top-grossing charities. In 2018, its 25,000 bell-ringers helped raise US$142.7 million. That was part of the charity’s $3.8 billion year-end revenue from bequests, grants, sales, in-kind donations and investments as well as direct contributions.

William Booth, an English evangelist, founded the Salvation Army in 1878 as a religious outreach to London’s poor. How a British evangelical church became an American icon is an ongoing interest of mine.

Entry into the United States

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Kyle Mizokami

Security,

You decide.

Key point: For those that want a slightly unconventional handgun, revolvers such as the Smith & Wesson Governor are an equally conventional, though entirely practical, solution.

One of the most interesting trends in the world of handguns is the revolver than first not only handgun ammunition but also shotgun shells. The ability to shoot both high-powered handgun ammo above .40 caliber and small caliber shotgun shells makes these revolvers far more versatile than most. Although seemingly a new phenomenon, the development of handheld shotguns actually goes back to before the U.S. Civil War.

The unusual nature of the revolver shotgun requires a bit of history and explanation. The first revolver/shotgun combination was the LeMat revolver. Developed by Jean LeMat, a French emigre to the United States, LeMat’s creation was a cap and ball revolver, state of the art at the time, but it featured two barrels and a nine-round cylinder. This gave the LeMat a highly unusual appearance, both then and today. The cylinder held both .40 and .42 ammunition and a larger .60 caliber/20 gauge shotgun ammunition. The latter gave the revolver the nickname “The Grape Shot Revolver.” Up to 2,400 LeMats were smuggled into the Confederacy to arm cavalry units.

The modern “grapeshot revolver” movement was sparked in the 1990s by the MIL Thunder 5 revolver. Although only briefly in production, the Tennessee-made firearm was able to shoot both .45 Long Colt handgun rounds and .410 shotshells. This unusual combination sparked industry-wide interest. The Thunder 5 was followed up by Brazilian gunmaker Taurus and their Judge revolver, which is similar in appearance and shoots the same combination of cartridges.

Why a revolver shotgun?

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Warfare History Network

History, Asia

Never leave a man behind.

Key point: Success came at a high price.

In the predawn darkness of Dobodura, New Guinea, 2nd Lt. William J. Smith of the U.S. Army Air Corps was roughly awakened by a noncom announcing that it was time to get dressed and get to the mess tent for breakfast.

Smith had not slept well, having spent most of the night fighting mosquitoes that had managed to get inside his cot’s netting. The nervous anticipation of flying another combat mission in the morning did not exactly make for peaceful slumber either. Five days earlier, eight North American B-25D Mitchell medium bombers of the 71st Bomb Squadron, 38th Bomb Group, Fifth Army Air Force had flown north over the Owen Stanley Mountains from their permanent base near Port Moresby to Dobodura, their temporary base of operations. The 38th Bomb Group, known as the “Sun Setters,” was composed of the 71st, 405th, 822nd, and 823rd Squadrons, and 16 other Mitchells from the 38th would join today’s mission. Their target on February, 15, 1944, was Kavieng Township on the northern tip of New Ireland, deep in Japanese-held territory. A long flight lay ahead of the Army aviators, even from this forward airstrip.

At the mess tent Lieutenant Smith sawed into his pancakes and hit a pocket of unmixed batter. As he watched the powder spill down into the syrup, he daydreamed of biscuits with red eye gravy, eggs, bacon, sweet cream, homemade preserves, and all the other delights of his mother’s breakfasts back in Kentucky. As he came back to harsh reality, Smith put sugar in his coffee and then with experienced precision skimmed off the floating ants. Soldiers in South Pacific territories learned that you could not keep ants out of the sugar, and it was just easier to strain them out of your coffee. It was not a great breakfast by stateside standards, but about the best the Army Air Corps personnel could expect in primitive New Guinea.

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Caleb Larson

Security, Americas

A game-changer or just some really cool marketing?

U.S. forces reportedly killed a senior jihadist leader in Syria. While such strikes are typically carried out by drones and not so unusual, this particular strike used a new type of "ninja" missile. These missiles have been reportedly been used only a few times. Designed to minimize civilian casualties, the ninja missile is a specially modified Hellfire—without a warhead. In place of explosives, razor-sharp folding blades are used to literally chop the target to bits.

Hell in a Handbasket

The Hellfire family was originally developed in the 1980s as a tank-busting, surface-to-air missile designed specifically to counter armor. Several variants are used today, including fragmentation, incendiary, and high explosive anti-tank, or HEAT. The Hellfire missiles weigh in the 100 to 110 pound range, including a 20-pound warhead and are guided through a millimeter wave radar seeker, or by laser.

Years after their development, Hellfire missiles have become the armament of choice in the war on terror, and are often used on Reaper and Predator drones in strikes against militants in crowded, urban environments. The relatively small 20-pound warhead is crucial in these environments, where unnecessary civilian casualties or infrastructure damage could be detrimental to long-term mission success. Still, an explosion, regardless of size, runs the risk of civilian casualties. So how could a missile be improved for greater precision and pose less risk to civilian bystanders?

Chop-Chop

The R9X was developed to answer just this question. The R9X Hellfire variant is outwardly quite similar to the other Hellfire variants—except that it paradoxically isn’t equipped with an explosive warhead. In the missile body, where explosives would normally be located, are six razor-sharp blades.

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Claude Barfield

Technology, Asia

The app is posing a serious national security challenge.

The developing TikTok chronicle actually consists of two linked developments: First, the aggressive plans of TikTok (and parent company ByteDance) to expand its current business, while also pushing rapidly into other social media business opportunities; and second, the implications, both businesswise and politically, of the current national security investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

Globally, ByteDance and TikTok are targeting their growth in East and South Asia, particularly large countries such as India and Indonesia. India is a rapidly developing success story, as TikTok downloads over the past two years have exceeded 400 million users in the country (four times as many as in the US). Unemployed teenagers form a major cohort of users, as they have few outlets for entertainment and tend to avoid English language outlets such as Facebook and Instagram. Since they enjoy little privacy in their lives, they do not worry about security. There has been some backlash from governments in Asia, but largely stemming from issues of lax security against child predators and violations of Hindu norms.

ByteDance has pledged to invest $1 billion in India over the next few years “through expansion and the construction of a data center.” As a number of outside observers have recently noted, TikTok’s success in emerging markets such as India and Indonesia will determine its future even if it encounters major obstacles in the US.

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Mark Jamison

Technology, Americas

How is that affecting consumers?

“Theory and practice should not contradict one another.” George J. Stigler

Sometimes researchers make claims that can grab headlines, but upon further investigation, their theories don’t line up with reality.

A recent paper and accompanying blog follow this pattern. They conclude that merger policy in tech should block more mergers, including mergers that would make consumers better off, because doing so increases innovation. That’s pretty surprising! Even if each approved merger makes consumers better off, the overall effect is consumer harm? How could that be?

The paper develops a theory in which blocking even good mergers makes more consumers drop their old services in favor of those offered by new entrants, leading to more successful startups. More startups mean more innovation because incumbents never innovate, according to this paper’s theory.

To show that the theory works in practice, the paper looks at nine tech acquisitions and concludes that, true to the theory, investment in startups declined once an acquisition occurred. Less investment means fewer startups, which means less innovation, according to the paper.

But does the theory really align with the cases as the paper and blog claim? No.

The theory makes a few key assumptions that drive its results. These include:

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Richard Javad Heydarian

Security, Asia

China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, has completely discarded the low-key diplomacy of his predecessors in favor of an all-out bid for global primacy.

Reflecting on the future of the global order, the late Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew warned that the rise of China is so consequential that it won’t only require tactical adjustment by its neighbors, but instead an overhaul in the global security architecture. As the former Asian leader bluntly put it, though “[t]he Chinese will [initially] want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S.” they ultimately have the “intention to be the greatest power in the world” eventually.

Not long after the demise of the Singaporean leader, his prophetic insights are congealing into an indubitable geopolitical reality. Today, China is the world’s largest exporting nation, the largest consumer of basic goods, and increasingly also the leading source of investments, particularly in strategic infrastructure, especially in Asia and across the developing world. Meanwhile, economic vigor has translated into strategic assertiveness and military muscle, as China opens up overseas bases, beginning in Djibouti but more stealthily across the Indian Ocean, expands its blue water navy, and coercively transforms adjacent waters into its “blue national soil.”

Above all, China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, has completely discarded the low-key diplomacy of his predecessors in favor of an all-out bid for global primacy, going so far as promoting a “uniquely Chinese model” of development overseas and gradually establishing an ‘Asia for Asians’ order across the Eurasian landmass to the exclusion of Western powers and Japan. Though packaged as ostensibly a trillion-dollar connectivity initiative, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is, above all, about laying the foundation of a ‘Chinese world order.’

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Mary Clare Amselem

Education,

Some degrees are not worth their price.

Americans have long suspected that, for many, a college degree simply isn’t worth the price.

American taxpayers—two-thirds of whom do not have a college degree—are likewise increasingly skeptical of the notion that they should pay off loans that someone else made the decision to take out.

With recently published College Scorecard data, American students and taxpayers have more reason than ever to reject the left’s “college for all” agenda.

The College Scorecard recently released program-level data on individual schools. Students can now go online and see how much debt the average student graduates with in a certain degree program, along with expected starting salaries.

The results indicate that choosing a major matters immensely, especially when relying on federal student loans to finance one’s education.

According to The Wall Street Journal, 15% of programs graduate students who carry more federal student loan debt than their annual income.

Interestingly, graduate programs—which are generally perceived to be good investments—are some of the worst offenders.

Students who graduate from the University of Miami Law School, for example, hold a median total debt of $150,896, but earn a starting salary of just $52,100. Even more problematic, students who obtain a master’s degree from New York University in film/video and photographic arts graduate with a median total debt of a whopping $168,568, but earn a median starting salary of $29,600.

Those findings are particularly concerning, considering that there is virtually no cap on how much students can borrow for graduate school under the PLUS loan program.

There is simply no reason that American taxpayers should be footing the entire cost of the bill upfront for degrees with such a low return on investment.

The new College Scorecard data provides not only valuable insights into the debt burden of college students, but also underscores the deep-rooted inefficiencies in our federal student loan programs.

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Charlie Gao

Security,

We have the details.

Key Point: The tendency for Sig Sauer to promote a new rifle every few years is probably disconcerting to potential users.

When the HK released the HK416 in the early 2000s, it rapidly became a hit with elite military and police forces worldwide. Driven by a slick marketing campaign and favorable (albeit disputed) test results from the U.S. military, the HK416 represented a “better mousetrap” version of the AR-family of rifles for many users. Though the advantages of the HK416 have become debatable in modern years, with upgrades to traditional AR rifles enhancing their reliability, Sig Sauer, Inc looked to create their answer to the HK416 in the late 2000s. The result, released in 2010, was the SIG 516.

While Sig doesn’t like to emphasize the connection, the SIG 516 was conceived in many ways as a direct counterpart to the HK416. According to the late Jim Schatz, a former H&K employee and H&K expert, one of the key people involved in the HK416 was the lead on the SIG 516 development team. The name “SIG 516” is likely just a riff on HK416.

In the basic layout, the SIG 516 also heavily resembles the HK416. Both rifles use a short-stroke tappet system placed above the barrel, which drives back a modified bolt carrier in the upper receiver. This allows the rifles to be easily compatible with most AR lowers without much modification.

However, Sig Sauer’s design was found to be relatively close to an existing piston AR, the LWRC IC-A5. This resulted in both LWRC and Sig Sauer, Inc. being brought to court in 2016 on patent claims on the original design of the SIG 516’s piston system.

The 516’s piston design does have some advantages versus the 416. The 516 has a 4-position gas regulator, allowing for reduced recoil and wear. The 416’s piston is self-regulating in theory, but in the default position tends to give increased recoil over an adjustable gas system. The HK416 would receive an adjustable regulator in the HK416A5 variant.

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Sebastien Roblin

History, Europe

That solution came in the form of Operation Diver—a multi-layered defense system designed to thin-out the incoming V-1 barrages.

Key point: London and Washinton came up with a wide variety of innovative defenses to stop Berlin's buzz bombs.

London was under siege as it never had been before. Starting June 13, 1944—merely a week after the triumph of the D-Day landings—V-1 cruise missiles launched from Nazi-occupied France began raining down upon the metropolis, their rapid-firing pulset jet motors emitting a horrid buzzing drone. 

These attacks—which increased in volume to 100 a day—killed thousands, and the threat posed by them caused over a million Londoners to flee for the countryside, leading to major economic disruptions.

Unlike the bombardment during the Battle of Britain in 1940, during which Royal Air Force fighters inflicted unsustainable losses on German bombers, the unmanned V-1s were cheap and expendable.

While Allied armies struggled to breakout of the hedgerows of Normandy to seize V-1 launch sites around Calais, the British military had to devise solutions to the new threat—fast.

That solution came in the form of Operation Diver—a multi-layered defense system designed to thin-out the incoming V-1 barrages. 

Fighter Versus Cruise Missiles

Fortunately, the V-1—described in greater detail in a companion article—flew in a straight line from its launch site, meaning they would approach from certain predictable avenues and couldn’t dodge defensive fire.

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Charlie Gao

Security,

Even without radar

Key point: The fuel explains the smoke.

For most sailors who served on the Admiral Kuznetzov, Mazut is the stuff of legends. The ultra thick, tarry black substance that powers the ship is known for being rather toxic, sticky, and not easy to get out of clothes. But why did the Soviet navy keep powering its ships with Mazut? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the fuel? Why exactly is the Kuznetsov so smoky?

Not all Russian ships run on Mazut. Of all the large ships the current Russian Navy operates, only the Sovremenny-class destroyers and the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier run on Mazut. Given the large profile the Admiral Kuznetsov on the global scene—being Russia's only aircraft carrier—naturally, some curiosity has arisen about what it runs on and why it produces so much smoke.

Mazut is a heavy petrochemical fuel. While most sources refer it to being taken from the very bottom of a distillation stack, this is inaccurate as "mazut" is a blanket term for very-heavy oil products, including those that can be formed from blending heavier oils with some slightly lighter ones.

In the West, Mazut would fall into the Bunker B and Bunker C fuel oil classifications, although the ISO 8217 standard has superseded these categories. Under the ISO 8217 standard, Mazut may be classified as RMG or RMK fuel.

These thick, heavy fuels were, by and large, the standard for both military and commercial vessels up until the 1960s and 1970s. Their thick nature gave them a very high volume to energy ratio compared with lighter distillates. But to be burned, they often had to be preheated and pressurized in a complex series of boilers and pipes.

Burning these fuels could also produce large amounts of sulfur, as such heavy minerals tended to settle to the bottom of a distillation stack. As a result, these fuels can be expensive to procure in nations with higher environmental standards as they must be distilled from crude with a low initial sulfur content or removed via a chemical process.

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Crispin Rovere

Security, Asia

North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not merely about regime survival, for all would agree that its existing capabilities are more than sufficient for dissuading unprovoked regime change. Rather, it seeks mutual nuclear vulnerability with the United States to prevent military responses to North Korea’s current and future aggression towards U.S. allies in the region. 

Key point: Pyongyang might not be subject to the same constraints as other nuclear regimes.

Many believe that North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons, along with its conventional arsenal, rules out war.

A conflict would indeed prove more horrific than many apprehend, and being enthused by the prospect of another Korean war would truly be insane. However, what is even more insane is telling the President of the United States that the greatest nation in history, and all its 300 million+ citizens, must live in the shadow of annihilation at the whims of a sadistic cult. This is simply not going to happen, and observers insisting that there is no military option ignore reality and all senior members of this administration and the president himself. The United States will not live with a North Korea that can destroy American cities with a nuclear-tipped ICBM, end of story.

Those arguing against war insist that traditional nuclear deterrence with North Korea can work, just like with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Before proceeding everyone should re-read the last paragraph and understand fully that their argument is an academic exercise and not a realistic course of action. They are also totally wrong, for these reasons:

1. Deterrence has already failed

North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not merely about regime survival, for all would agree that its existing capabilities are more than sufficient for dissuading unprovoked regime change. Rather, it seeks mutual nuclear vulnerability with the United States to prevent military responses to North Korea’s current and future aggression towards U.S. allies in the region.  

This is already being demonstrated. On September 14, North Korea stated that:

“The four islands of the [Japanese] archipelago should be sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb of Juche. Japan is no longer needed to exist near us.”

Hardly a declaration that nuclear weapons are for deterrence! The very next day residents on Hokkaido island received a text – ‘a missile from North Korea has been detected, take cover.'

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Kyle Mizokami

Technology,

An expert tells us what he thinks--and if it can take out the legendary Glock 19.

High capacity nine millimeter pistols were first introduced to the public as service pistols. Built for military and police without regard for size, service pistols were full-sized handguns that prioritized recoil reduction and magazine capacity over concealability. Over the years a compromise has evolved, resulting in a pistol mixing all three features. The Glock 19 is cited as the ideal compromise, and Taurus’ G3 pistol very much runs in that vein--but at a substantially lower cost.

The Glock 17 handgun was originally designed for the Austrian armed forces and then exported to civilian markets worldwide. The Glock 17 is a reliable handgun that, while lightweight, still has enough heft to absorb the modest recoil of the nine millimeter round. This makes it an excellent gun for conscript armies, where soldiers may not have a background in firearms. It also features a large, seventeen round magazine allowing soldiers to carry more rounds on their person.

The Glock 17 did well in the American commercial market but many buyers clamored for a handgun with a shorter barrel and slightly shorter magazine, resulting in the Glock 19. This defined the “sweet spot” for many compact nine millimeter handguns, and Brazil’s Taurus steps into that spot with the G3 pistol.

Forjas Taurus, or Taurus, was established in Brazil in 1939 as a tool and die manufacturing company. The company produced its first pistol, the 38101SO, in 1941, and began exporting pistols to the United States in 1968. Briefly controlled by Smith & Wesson, the Brazilian company broke with its American parent in 1977--but not before absorbing many handgun technologies. The company became adept at producing clones of Smith & Wesson style .38 caliber revolvers, and by the 1980s was copying firearms such as the Beretta 92.

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Neal McCluskey

Education,

The Department of Education is overseeing $1.5 trillion in federal student loans. 

The U.S. Department of Education was not created to be a giant lending institution. But that is what it has become, overseeing nearly $1.5 trillion in federal student loans. At a meeting of college financial aid administrators in maybe-symbolic Reno, NV, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos proposed to change that by turning the department’s student aid offices into an independent “government corporation.” It would have its own governing board that would, she suggested, be freed of political meddling and motivated to “deliver world-class service to students and their families.”

Color me dubious.

For sure, it is hard to imagine an independent agency running less efficiently than the U.S. Department of Education, though that is mainly because the bigger the organization, the greater the red tape. I am not aware of evidence that given its size and that it is a government institution, ED is a particularly atrocious steward of student loans. The fact is, as DeVos pointed out in her speech, it is Congress, with approval of the president, that has created the inscrutable profusion of loans, grants, and loan repayment plans—not to mention tax-favored savings accounts and Work Study—that has made federal student aid a tangled web only a professional financial adviser could love. Probably no one could make that into a well-oiled machine.

DeVos laid out few specifics for her proposal, but if an independent Federal Student Aid (FSA) agency had to follow all the rules and qualifications of the current aid programs—and Congress put them in there for a reason—it is hard to imagine the system getting much more efficient no matter who oversees it. With its only mission running aid programs, an independent FSA might be more efficient in watching over schools and loan servicers, but probably not by a lot. And DeVos suggested it would not just be a narrower focus that would make it work better, but greater incentives: a need to “work to secure its financial strength and sustainability.”

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Paul Szoldra

Security, Asia

A perfect Christmas vignette. 

Key point: Even in the midst of batlte, there can be some levity.

The Battle of Iwo Jima, which began Feb. 19, 1945, was one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history, as former Cpl. Don Graves knows firsthand and will never forget.

He'll also never forget the time a Japanese soldier smelled hot chocolate being brewed near him and called out for him to bring him some. The moment, as he recounted in a video posted to the Marine Corps Facebook page Tuesday, was almost like the Christmas truce that wasn't.

Sitting in a fox hole with two other Marines on the fifth week of the battle, he said, Graves decided to make himself some hot chocolate. "So my other two buddies, they said, 'make enough for three of us.'"

So there he was, slicing up his chocolate ration with a Ka-Bar and chopping it into a powder. Then he cut off a piece of his Composition C2 demolition charge and used it to light a flame.

"Just a nice little fire going, and we sat there and we watched it," he said. "And then all of sudden I could smell hot chocolate."

Of course, so could everyone else, including enemy soldiers.

A few minutes later, he heard a Japanese voice calling out to him, "hey Marine, very good chocoletto. You bring chocoletto here."

"If you want chocoletto, you come here and get it," he said back. "He says, 'oh no, you bring here,'" Graves said, laughing.

"There's humor in combat. Every man that's been in combat knows that sometimes funny things happen."

This article originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter. This article first appeared earlier in 2019 and is being republished due to reader's interest.

Media: Wikipedia

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Warfare History Network

Security, Americas

Legendary.

Late in the day on October 24, 1944, all of the available 39 patrol torpedo (PT) boats of the U.S. Seventh Fleet were traveling at high speed into the Mindanao Sea just south of Leyte Gulf. By dusk they had taken up position in a patrol line. The journey of the boats from New Guinea to Leyte Gulf, which was approximately 1,200 miles, presented a difficult problem for the U.S. Navy. The distance was considered too far for the boats to complete in one hop, even if they were escorted by tender, so the Navy set to work to devise a more viable plan.

The Navy decided to have the PTs fueled from the tenders. As for the tenders themselves, they would be fueled by tankers. The journey of the boats would represent the largest movement of PTs under their own power during the war. The U.S. Navy’s ship commanders in the Philippines depended on the PT boats at Leyte for an advance warning of the approach of the Japanese fleet.

The PT boats’ first contact with the Japanese Imperial Navy in the unfolding Battle of the Leyte Gulf was an encounter with a group of battleships. Ensign Peter Gadd, who operated the radar aboard PT-131, picked up the battleships on radar at 10:36 pm. Three PT boats began closing on the target to make their attack. The Japanese battleship crews soon sighted the PT boats and began firing on them. The PT boats radioed their sighting to Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, commander of Task Group 77.2 that was guarding the Surigao Strait. The PTs made repeated attacks over three hours but were unable to score any hits. Unable to thwart the Japanese battleships, the PT boats retired and the next day U.S. destroyers moved in to engage them. The incident shows the critical role that PT boats performed in the Pacific Theater to screen U.S. bases and warn U.S. fleets of threats.

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Michael Peck

Security,

Clearing mines.

Key point: Except they will now be autonomous and unmanned.

At dawn on June 6, 1944, the German troops defending the Normandy beaches glimpsed a terrifying sight.

Landing craft were disgorging M-4 Sherman tanks on the beaches. But these were no ordinary tanks: on their hulls were fitted rotating drums to which chains were attached. The chains flailed the beach, detonating any mines buried in the sand.

These were the legendary British “Crab” tanks of the 79th Armored Division, whose job it was to clear minefields. And now the U.S. Marine Corps is bringing back the Crabs, but with a twenty-first century twist.

The Crawling Remotely Operated Amphibious Breacher, or CRAB, will be a robot vehicle that will clear naval mines that threaten Marine amphibious assault troops. The Marines are developing CRAB as a  “submersible, remote-autonomous system with front-end equipment—including a mine flail, tiller and rake—capable of breaching or proofing amphibious assault lanes for landing forces,” according to a Marine Corps news release.

“The robotic crawlers will splash into the water from a littoral utility craft and travel along the seafloor to remove explosive and nonexplosive obstacles from the assault lane. Each CRAB is intended to be expendable.”

The surf zone, where waves break onto shore, is a challenge for amphibious landings because turbulent water makes mine detection difficult. The Marines currently rely on the Assault Breacher Vehicle—an M1A1 tank chassis with a mine plow, and Mine Clearing Line Charges, which are rocket-fired lines festooned with explosives. Neither system is designed to operate in the surf zone.

“The CRAB system is important because currently, the Naval Force can only breach in the surf zone with significant risk to mission or personnel,” said Capt. Anthony Molnar, a project officer for Marine Corps Systems Command. “This would alleviate that by having an inexpensive and expendable piece of equipment going through there.”

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Charlie Gao

Technology,

We take a look.

Key point: The SU-16 is an interesting design, but it fails to do anything better than most of its competitors.

Kel-tec’s Sport Utility 16 (SU-16) rifle is an odd compromise. 

Designed to compete with budget AR-15, the rifle features a highly similar layout to the AR, but an AK-like operating system that uses a long-stroke gas piston and a charging handle integrated on the bolt carrier group. The recoil spring is placed in front of the bolt carrier group on the gas piston itself, which allows the rifle to fold to be more compact. But are these design changes actually an improvement?

In short, no. While placing the recoil spring on the gas piston itself may seem like a good idea to shorten the rifle, it means that if the piston or its connection to the bolt carrier breaks in some way at any point along its length during the recoil stroke, the bolt carrier risks being shot back into the rear of the receiver with nothing slowing it down, possibly cracking the receiver and injuring the user. While Kel-tec made some changes to the design, such as staking the operating rod in the carrier, to fix this issue, it’s notable that in their next design, the RDB, they moved the recoil spring back behind the bolt carrier group as in almost every other military firearm.

Even under normal recoil, the SU-16 has issues with the bolt contacting the rear of the polymer receiver. While official statements suggest that the polymer the SU-16’s receiver is made of can take this abuse, most military rifles will include a rubber buffer at the rear of the receiver to dampen the shock on their metal receivers. There have been some reports of SU-16 receivers cracking at the rear due to these impacts, but these are largely individual issues and some SU-16s have run for thousands of rounds without this occurring.

The SU-16 also has many other questionable features. Similar to the Steyr Scout, it features a split handguard that can be folded down to act as a primitive bipod. However, unlike the Scout, when done so the barrel is completely exposed, requiring the handguard to be folded up again to be used normally.

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