by Gatimu Juma Publisher’s note: Gatimu Juma, who reports from the Horn of Africa, told me he was working on a story about the Al-Shabaab terror group. Nearly a year went by, and I couldn’t reach him. Finally he surfaced to tell me where he was all that time: convalescing. …
Read More »Galil ACE: The AK Beast Blasting the Competition Battlefield
by Austin Lee The IWI Galil ACE has earned its status in the competition world as a top contender in the modern AK platform, much to the dismay of diehard original AKM purist competitors. Merging the legendary reliability of the Kalashnikov design with modern enhancements, it has become a favorite …
Read More »How Drones Broke the Rules of War
by Susan Katz Keating A wave of drone attacks lit up targets on June 1 deep inside Russian territory – another clear signal that unmanned warfare is rewriting the rules in real time. But the idea of drones doing the killing – or at least the hunting – isn’t as …
Read More »‘Mercenaries, Gunslingers, and Outlaws’: Staring Down Death From Above
by Robert M. Kurtz Excerpted from Mercenaries, Gunslingers, and Outlaws: Two Years as a Security Contractor in Iraq. Whoever set up the last IED that directly targeted my vehicle showed a little more ingenuity than usual. We were somewhere just outside of Bagdad; all the convoys seem to run together …
Read More »Moroccan Puma Helicopter: A Graceful Warhorse
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 …
Read More »Soldier of Fortune Jumps Into the Unknown With the Phantom Airborne Brigade
by Heath Hansen The wind within the body of the bird blows me back and forth as I try to maintain my balance. “Thirty seconds!” the jumpmaster yells, before telling the man at the front of the stick to “Standby.” Then, a loud “GO!” gets us moving towards the door. I cover …
Read More »‘The Mother’: A Soldier’s Haunting Encounter in Iraq
by Cliff Wade Iraq, 2006 We found ourselves in the home of an Iraqi family during a massive clearing operation in an area characterized by terrain varying between urban landscape, farmland, palm groves, and small villages. We had been clearing routes of improvised explosive devices all morning. We had been …
Read More »Death in the Desert: A Texas Cowboy’s Gruesome Encounter
by Bobby Dee Editor’s note: Bobby Dee first made his appearance in SKK’s previous story about Bodies and Gunfire in the Texas Wilderness. Now Bobby writes about his encounter with a bad scene at sunrise. The sun wasn’t even high yet, but the heat was already pressing down on me. …
Read More »When an Ex-KGB Man Helped Stage a Daring Heist in Soviet Moscow
by Nikolay Shevchenko It was late evening when a cash truck pulled up in front of a fancy department store on Mozhayskoye Highway in Moscow. Leaving two partners behind in the truck, the third guard stepped over the store’s threshold to collect the cash that had piled up there throughout …
Read More »Shooting on the Move: Tactical Training That Saves Lives
The benefits of training to shoot while moving. by Gary Paul Johnston Traditionally, cops have been trained to shoot while standing still. By now it should be pretty clear where this is going, and going should be the name of the game when the going gets tough. When I became …
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