by Susan Katz Keating Not everything moving through war is a physical object. Some of the most valuable commodities in a conflict zone are identity, permission, and cover. You need the right document, the right credential, and the right story, at the right checkpoint. My team and I at Soldier of …
Read More »War Predators in Ukraine: They Come to Study the Killing Fields
by Susan Katz Keating China and other foreign actors are using Ukraine as a testbed, deploying cut-outs and deniable assets to gather real-time data on drones, intelligence sources told Soldier of Fortune. The grainy figures moved across the screen, creeping through murky terrain like shadows come to life. A blip …
Read More »Inside Jungle Warfare Training in Peru
In the Peruvian Amazon, U.S. soldiers are learning how jungle terrain turns routine movement into a test of endurance, fieldcraft and small-unit tactics. by Staff Sgt. Mickey Miller, U.S. Southern Command SAUCE, Peru — The jungle has a way of making even simple things complicated. Movement slows. Equipment gets heavier. …
Read More »The Airborne Jump That Got in My Face
Aboard a hot, bucking C-130, a young 101st Airborne paratrooper fought to hold himself together until the stick began to move. by David F. Crosby The C-130 rocked back and forth and lurched up and down. The late summer air made flying low in the afternoon turbulent, and the aircraft’s …
Read More »The Quiet Victory: 25 Years in Mindanao
In the months after 9/11, Green Berets were in the southern Philippines to help take on an al-Qaeda-linked force more than 1,000 strong. Two decades later, roughly 20 terrorist fighters remained. by Jose Campos The Green Berets moved through the jungle, cutting through undergrowth in the ungoverned space where violent …
Read More »The B-17 Crew That Refused to Turn Back
The B-17 called Old 666 was already a wreck when they claimed it. What happened over the Pacific turned the bomber and its crew into legend. During World War II, there was a crew with the U.S. Army Air Forces 43rd Bomb Group of the Fifth Air Force that became …
Read More »The Machinery Behind the Belarusian VSK-100B Assault Rifle
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 …
Read More »With the SAS in Mozambique, We Jumped Into Enemy Territory While Bombs Exploded Below
by John Gartner As I sat looking out the port side window of the Dakota, I could see below me the vast expanse of Lake Cahora Bassa dam. The grey skeletal branches of long-drowned trees dotted the shoreline and seemed, in my reverie, to be reaching imploringly skyward. The surface …
Read More »Blasting Through Steel in Latvia
U.S. Marines put field-expedient charges to work at a demolition range during exercise BALTOPS 26. by A.R. Fomenko VIENNA BUREAU — The steel beam lay twisted in the mud outside Skrunda, Latvia, its center torn open by an expedient cratering charge. Moments earlier, it had served as a target during a …
Read More »So You Want to Be a War Correspondent
COMMENTARY by Susan Katz Keating The work has been called the most dangerous form of journalism. Amid my daily influx of emails, text messages, and phone calls, I frequently am hit up by people who want to go downrange under my name. They approach me with variants on the following requests. …
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