Guns & Gear

by Austin Lee In the escalating drone wars, where fiber optic and First-Person View (FPV) drones threaten soldiers and civilians alike, one man is turning the art of clay shooting into a battlefield advantage.  Lieutenant Marco Angelelli, an Italian Air Force reserve officer and Italian Clay Pigeon Shooting Federation (FITAV) …

The rifle is billed as a domestic weapon, but building the production capability required Belarus to look beyond its borders, sources say. by A.R. Fomenko VIENNA BUREAU – When Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko visited a weapons plant in the Minsk region over the summer, he was shown a rifle presented …

When C-17’s leave the runway in the dust. Two C-17 Globemaster III aircraft out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, flew into the Nevada Test and Training Range to support a training exercise for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). The massive cargo planes, part of the 62nd Airlift Wing, …

Some never made it off the drawing board. Others are carried, worn, and remembered more than a century later. Walk across a modern military installation and WWI keeps turning up. It’s in the arms room, the protective-equipment locker, procurement contracts, and even over the radio. The war produced an extraordinary …

by Sean “Sako” Sakinofsky Few movie knives are as famous as the custom Jimmy Lile survival Bowie carried by John Rambo in First Blood. It became one of the defining images of 1980’s action films. The likelihood of a Green Beret medic like Rambo walking out of military service with such …

by Royce de Melo I was sitting in my hotel room in London in early 2016, catching up on business while attending a discreet security and law enforcement event. I was following up on a shipment of US Ordnance M60E6 Light Machine Guns (LMGs) that had gone to Canada. Little …

by Igor Rozin The world’s most popular rifle, with 100 million units in circulation, is not without its drawbacks. The AK platform is popular worldwide for its reliability and ease of production. Today, there are roughly 100 million Kalashnikov rifles in 55 countries around the globe. And that’s only those …

The Moroccan Puma helicopter is a battlefield veteran with decades of dust and fire under its rotors. Morocco first struck a deal with France in 1974 to acquire 40 of these durable workhorses for its armed forces. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, Moroccan Pumas played a key role in the …

by John “Wolf” Wagner She was built for one job: find downed American airmen before the sea claimed them. Today, the boat known as P-520 is the last surviving 85-foot World War II Army Air Forces crash-rescue boat still afloat in her original configuration. Built in Wilmington, California, in 1944, she …

by Susan Katz Keating The first time I gave serious thought to shoulder holsters was not at a gun counter or on a range. It was when I spotted the ones worn by the men following me. That story is for another day. I was working on an investigative story, …