The Blog of Record

Their names are Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline.

A couple of Taliban locals got to play supporting parts in establishing a new sharpshooting record in Afghanistan: 2475 meters, or 1.54 miles:

Craig Harrison’s record breaking shots felled the insurgents with consecutive bullets – even though they were 3,200ft beyond the official range of his rifle.

The Household Cavalry veteran’s kills from a distance of 8,120ft beat the previous record by 150ft.

He was using the British-built L115A3 Long Range Rifle, the Army’s most powerful sniper weapon.

He was so far away that the 8.59mm-calibre bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target. Scores of Taliban gunmen have fallen to the gun which has been nicknamed The Silent Assassin.

It is only designed to be effective at up to 4,921ft – just less than a mile – and capable of only ‘ harassing fire’ beyond that range.

But Corporal Harrison took his record-breaking shots after his commander and Afghan soldiers were attacked during a patrol in Helmand in November last year.

Some of those bearded guys in turbans ought to be good with rifles, too.  I wonder if they also make some impressive shots every now and then that we just don’t hear about.

I hope the girls giggling at the back were not executed, Sun Tzu style.

From here.

The physics of future space battles. We need to be prepared when Martian colonists rise up against the United Earth Empire in, say, 2776. And probably a lot earlier.

While Hollywood has turned the war movie into a vehicle for anti-American, anti-military propaganda with recent money-losers like Redacted and Lions for Lambs, the video game industry is making billions on war games in which American soldiers are the good guys.

Activision’s Modern Warfare 2, which is set partially in Afghanistan and lets you play as American and British soldiers hunting terrorists, is a cultural sensation.

When it came out Nov. 10, it became the biggest entertainment product launch in history, grossing $310 million in North America and the United Kingdom in its first 24 hours. In its first five days, Modern Warfare 2 sales hit $550 million.

Activision was quick to put that in perspective, noting that the largest worldwide five-day box-office take for any movie was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at $394 million.

I’m sure Hollywood bosses realize that Americans don’t want to see movies depicting their country as the source of all evil in the world, but that’s how Hollywood people see it, and I guess we should respect them for being true to their convictions and putting their money where their hearts are, or something.

It is not clear from the story how many – if any – of the ex-soldiers behind bars are non-combat veterans:

The Government was under fire for failing to support British troops returning from war today after figures revealed nearly one in 10 prisoners is an Armed Forces veteran.

Shocking research by the probation officers’ union Napo shows some 8,500 former soldiers are currently in prison in England and Wales.

Another 12,000 have criminal convictions and are on the books of the Probation Service.

This means there are more than twice as many veterans in jail, on probation or on parole in the UK than the number of troops currently serving in Afghanistan.

Veterans in Scotland and Northern Ireland are not included, meaning the true figure is likely to be much higher. . . .

Domestic violence was by far the most likely conviction for a veteran, accounting for one in three cases. Other violent crimes accounted for around one in five convictions.

One in four said they had post-traumatic stress disorder, but many went undiagnosed. Others cited depression and behavioural problems.

The group who took part included veterans from the conflicts in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although the sample was small, the figures give the best indication yet about the sheer scale of the struggle faced by ex-soldiers when they come home.

I have a high respect for British troops, who are fighting bravely in Afghanistan despite the scarce and primitive equipment their government grudgingly provides them with, but it could be that in Britain, the Armed Forces attract people who are more likely to have behavioural problems anyway. One in ten is a staggering proportion.

U.S. Air Force pilots who flew into the mushroom clouds after atomic and thermonuclear explosions.

(Via GeekPress.)

The sniper was so far away that the Taliban commander didn’t even realise he was being shot at when he first round missed him. The second one went into his chest:

Cpl Chris Reynolds, 25, camped on a roof for three days as he waited for perfect conditions to take the shot.

He calculated the range, wind and trajectory before pulling the trigger – and the bullet flew 1,853 metres before hitting its target.

It is the furthest distance any fatal bullet has ever been fired in Afghanistan.

The warlord, known as Mula, was thought to be responsible for co-ordinating several attacks against British and US troops.

Cpl Reynolds, of 3 Scots, The Black Watch, has already claimed 32 rebel fighters.

His latest kill came last week during a firefight in the town of Babaji in Helmand Province. Yesterday he told how the Taliban chief slumped into the arms of a stunned colleague after being hit.

Read the rest for Cpl. Reynolds’s own account of the record kill. His rifle is an Accuracy International L115A3.

Using virtual reality to design America’s supercarrier for the next hundred years – the USS Ford.

Bundeswehr General Inspector finds Germany’s professional soldiers to be a bunch of softies who don’t realise they are serving in the army. (This is in addition to being too fat to fight and drinking too much.)

German soldiers have been slammed as too soft, lacking discipline, hating responsibility and showing little desire to serve their country by the General Inspector of the armed forces.

Bundeswehr General Wolfgang Schneiderhahn told politicians in Berlin that the once-mighty German army had become a gang of gripers ‘of all ranks and age’.

‘We have given a good account of ourselves in Afghanistan,’ said the general in best-selling daily Bild – but he quickly went on to criticise troops.

‘We cannot guarantee an all-round,  feel-good feeling for our soldiers,’ he said.

He cited trivial complaints reaching him about the quality of sleeping bags used in a deployment in the Congo as an ‘embarrassment’ to the parliament.

He also said that complaints were rising from professional soldiers at being sent on  missions overseas. 

But Herr Schneiderhahn’s blunt message was: ‘There is no remedy for this – this is their profession.’

The inspector general, speaking before an audience of politicians, heads of industry and senior officers, complained of a tendency to delegate blame from officer to officer to other ranks with no-one willing to take responsibility for their actions.

The general urged soldiers to have ‘a better feeling for discipline and to show a greater readiness to serve the state’.

Well, if the purpose of German soldiers is to “serve the state” – as opposed to serving the country or the people, – then maybe we all should hope they keep them soft, fat and drunk.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is starting “Physical Intelligence” - a program that ”aspires to understand intelligence as a physical phenomenon and to make the first demonstration of the principle in electronic and chemical systems. A central tenet is that intelligence spontaneously evolves as a consequence of thermodynamics in open systems”. One of the program’s tasks is “building the first human-engineered systems that display physical intelligence in the form of abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems”.

Raytheon and Boeing have been awarded contracts for preliminary design work on a new free electron laser for U.S. Navy ships to shoot down incoming missiles.

The Navy SEALs made it three shots, three kills on Sunday, and around 2015 they will have a new .50 caliber sniper super rifle called EXACTO enabling them to kill bad guys at 2500 meters. This will be possible thanks to the use of an actively controlled bullet that will counter environmental effects such as crosswinds and air density:

The new .50 caliber gun and improved scope could employ “fire and forget” technologies including “fin-stabilized projectiles, spin-stabilized projectiles, internal and/or external aero-actuation control methods, projectile guidance technologies, tamper proofing, small stable power supplies, and advanced sighting, optical resolution and clarity technologies.” In other words, bullets that, once fired at a specific target, fly themselves into it by changing shape.

The Thule Air Base and missile defence radar station in northern Greenland, plus a secret city built beneath the ice.

It was 1939, and salvaging the sub without drilling holes in the hull to let air in was deemed more important:

The crew of a Royal Navy submarine were condemned to an agonising death because the Admiralty decided it was more important to save the vessel than the 99 men trapped on board, a newly unearthed official document proves.

HMS Thetis partly resurfaced with the men still alive inside and rescuers could have saved them in just five minutes by cutting air holes through the 5⁄8in-thick steel hull. A larger hole could then have been cut to let them out.

But the Admiralty refused to allow the rescue because the hull would have been permanently weakened.

At the time – June 1939 – with the Second World War looming, saving the submarine was deemed more important. After 50 hours trapped inside their metal tomb in Liverpool Bay, all the crew were dead of carbon dioxide poisoning, killed by the breath they had exhaled. It was the Royal Navy’s worst peacetime submarine disaster.

The new document was uncovered by author Tony Booth while researching Thetis Down: The Slow Death Of A Submarine. He found a memo at the National Archives in Kew signed by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s private secretary Sir John ‘Jock’ Colville and dated February 9, 1940.

Referring to the cutting of a hole, Colville wrote: ‘This was not attempted until matters became desperate, in order that the submarine might be as little damaged as possible.’

And then they screwed over the dead sailors’ families:

An official inquiry has long been regarded as a whitewash as it effectively made it a ‘no blame’ accident, thereby denying the families of the dead any compensation.

Including the Sea Shadow stealth ship:

Anybody want some top-secret seagoing vessels? The Navy has a pair it doesn’t need anymore. It has been trying to give them away since 2006, and they’re headed for the scrap yard if somebody doesn’t speak up soon.

One is called Sea Shadow. It’s big, black and looks like a cross between a Stealth fighter and a Batmobile. It was made to escape detection on the open sea. The other is known as the Hughes (as in Howard Hughes) Mining Barge. It looks like a floating field house, with an arching roof and a door that is 76 feet wide and 72 feet high. Sea Shadow berths inside the barge, which keeps it safely hidden from spy satellites.

The barge, by the way, is the only fully submersible dry dock ever built, making it very handy — as it was 35 years ago — for trying to raise a sunken nuclear-armed Soviet submarine.

Both are nuclear-powered and were carrying nuclear missiles. It’s hard to imagine that the sonars that allow subs to detect objects around them failed in both vessels. Were they just not watching them?

If bearded guys in turbans ever get their hands on spy or attack drones, the U.S. military will have weapons to shoot them down from the sky by messing up their electronics.

Germany makes an offer it knows France can’t refuse. At the same time, France is cutting its own troops deployed abroad in an attempt to save some $200 million.

It’s only 500 German soldiers, but with the amount of wine and beer they drink, the local French economy must be gearing up for a boost.