Tag Archives: Assault

News

U.S. Army unveils revolutionary XM25 rifle in Afghanistan

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HK XM25 25mm GL Airburst Rifle
HK XM25 25mm GL Airburst Rifle

Here’s the story from Fox News.

Excerpt:

Since the dawn of modern warfare, the best way to stay alive in the face of incoming fire has been to take cover behind a wall. But thanks to a game-changing “revolutionary” rifle, the U.S. Army has made that tactic dead on arrival. Now the enemy can run, but he can’t hide.

After years of development, the U.S. Army has unleashed a new weapon in Afghanistan — the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, a high-tech rifle that can be programmed so that its 25-mm. ammunition detonates either in front of or behind a target, meaning it can be fired just above a wall before it explodes and kills the enemy.

It also has a range of roughly 2,300 feet — nearly the length of eight football fields — making it possible to fire at targets well past the range of the rifles and carbines that most soldiers carry today.

Lt. Col. Christopher Lehner, project manager for the semi-automatic, shoulder-fired weapon system for the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier, said that the XM25’s capability alone is such a “game-changer” that it’ll lead to new ways of fighting on the battlefield, beginning this month in Afghanistan.

“With this weapon system, we take away cover from [enemy targets] forever,” Lehner told FoxNews.com on Wednesday. “Tactics are going to have to be rewritten. The only thing we can see [enemies] being able to do is run away.”

[…]Lehner said the first XM25s were distributed to combat units in Afghanistan this month. The 12-pound, 29-inch system, which was designed by Minnesota’s Alliant Techsystems, costs up to $35,000 per unit and, while highly sophisticated, is so easy to use that soldiers become proficient within minutes.

“That’s how intuitively easy it is, even though it’s high-tech,” Lehner said. “All a soldier needs to know how to do is laze the target. It decimates anything within its lethal radius.”

Sample usage:

A potential battlefield scenario, according to Army officials, might go something like this:

— A patrol encounters an enemy combatant in a walled Afghan village who fires an AK-47 intermittently from behind cover, exposing himself only for a brief second to fire.

— The patrol’s leader calls for the XM25 gunman, who uses the weapon’s laser range finder to calculate the distance to the target.

— He then uses an incremental button located near the trigger to add 1 meter to the round’s distance, since the enemy is hiding behind a wall.

— The round is fired, and it explodes with a blast comparable to a hand grenade past the wall and above the enemy.

Video:

It is laser-guided. You know how you can’t hit the broad side of a barn with an underslung M203 grenade launcher past a hundred yards? Yeah, well this thing is laser-guided. Laser-guided grenade launcher. Semi-automatic laser-guided grenade launcher!

You don’t even have to do standard 4F military tactics (Find, Fix, Flank, Finish). (Not to be confused with Patricia Churchland’s 4Fs of evolutionary theory – feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproducing). You can just explode a grenade right over their heads!

Made by Heckler & Koch, naturally. By the way, I fired an HK USP9 recently on my annual trip to the firing range. It rocked! Unfortunately they did NOT allow me to try the HK CAWS or the caseless HK G11. Phooey!

You can see more H&K stuff here.

Now if we could only scrap the JSF and revive the F-22, I would be much happier and safer.

Next story: U.S. Navy unveils new electromagnetic rail gun weapon system.

News

In the UK, socialists attack police and lay siege to Tory headquarters

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Story in the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Thugs who hijacked the tuition fees protest narrowly avoided seriously injuring or even killing police when they threw a fire extinguisher off the seventh floor roof of the Tory HQ, it emerged today.

The dramatic moment was captured on video footage, showing the extinguisher crashing to the ground just inches from a group of officers desperately battling to regain control in Millbank.

A youth was seen on pictures clutching the missile on top of the building and the film showed it being launched over the edge and falling at speed.

It glanced off the helmet of one territorial support group officer and grazes the knees of another. Had it properly hit any of the thousands of people below, it would almost certainly have left fatal injuries.

[…]Militants from far-Left groups whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy, setting off the most violent student unrest Britain has seen in decades.

The focus of the violence was Tory HQ in Central London, where hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage was caused.

The glass frontage was smashed and protesters swarmed seven floors up to the roof, from where a fire extinguisher was hurled down at police below.

Effigies of David Cameron and Nick Clegg were burned to cheers from the roaring mob. At least 14 casualties were taken to hospital, seven of them police officers, and 51 demonstrators were arrested.

Notice that the signs in the pictures have logos from socialist organizations on them. These are violent left-wing thugs and they nearly killed police officers. And why? To protest against anyone who would cut the flow of taxpayer money that subsidizes their work-free lifestyle.

News

Muslims attack unarmed Christians in India and Turkey

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Story from the Hindu.

Excerpt:

Two activists of the Popular Front of India (PFI) were arrested on Monday in connection with the attack on a professor at Muvattupuzha in Ernakulam district. Sources said 12 others, most of them with extremist links, were also taken into custody for interrogation.

Ashraf, 37, of Mundeth, Mekalady, and Jaffar, 28, of Eramaloor, Kothamangalam, were remanded to judicial custody by the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court, Muvattupuzha.

The right palm of T.J. Joseph, 53, professor of Malayalam in the Newman College, Thodupuzha, was chopped off by the assailants on Sunday. He, along with his mother and sister, was returning home from church when a gang of six waylaid his car and attacked him with an axe.

PFI is a Muslim organization. Kerala is not reputed to be a particularly extremist state. I heard that TN and AP are the two best ones. Maybe Shalini can correct me.

And I think the general trend in India is in favor of more religious liberty for Christians. But not so in Turkey.

National Review reports on more violence in Turkey.

Excerpt:

For all the attention Turkey has gotten lately, very few Americans are aware that the Roman Catholic bishop serving as apostolic vicar of Anatolia was stabbed to death and decapitated last month by an assailant shouting, “Allahu Akbar! I have killed the great Satan!”

There are fewer than 60 Catholic priests in all of Turkey, and yet Bishop Luigi Padovese was the fifth of them to be shot or stabbed in the last four years, starting with the murder of Fr. Andrea Santoro in 2006, also by an assailant shouting, “Allahu Akbar!” (An Armenian journalist and three Protestants working at a Christian publishing house — one of them German, the other two Turkish converts — were also killed during this period.)

What’s going on? Why has traditionally secularist Turkey, with its minuscule Christian community (less than 0.2 percent of the population), lately become nearly as dangerous for Christians as neighboring Iraq? And why has this disturbing pattern of events so far escaped notice in the West?

In a nutshell, all these violent acts reflect a popular culture increasingly shaped by Turkish media accounts deliberately promoting hatred of Christians and Jews.

As it happens, Bishop Padovese was murdered on the same day (June 3) that the Wall Street Journal published an eye-opening report on how Turkey’s press and film industry have increasingly blurred the distinction between fact and fantasy, especially since the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2002.

“To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness.” That’s how Robert L. Pollock, editorial-features editor of the Journal, summed up the trajectory of the daily fare that shapes Turks’ attitudes toward the outside world — and toward non-Muslims in their midst. Indeed, much of what passes for fact in Turkish public discourse would be comical if not for the deadly consequences.

Turkey is really starting to scare me. They’re going the wrong way.