Shortly after the adoption of the Kalashnikov design in 1949, Soviet small-arms development found itself at a doctrinal crossroads. The AK emerged as the final survivor of a rigorous postwar rifle competition, and, in an odd twist, it was accepted despite not fully meeting the full-auto accuracy ...
Your rifle doesn’t need to be “cool.” It needs to be the same every time, for every officer, under every dumb condition.
The procurement of individual gear to support military, police, or civil defense has a long, convoluted, but necessary history. Choosing what gear best suits your needs becomes a balance of practicality and assumption. Whether you are riding a tractor, enforcing a warrant, or running the back hil...
Hemorrhage control isn’t about looking tactical. It’s about buying minutes until definitive care arrives—and sustaining the skills to make those minutes count.
In the years after World War II, the Soviet military asked a simple question: how could an infantry squad bring a higher volume of automatic fire without surrendering mobility? A lesson they learned from the Eastern Front, where volume of fire was king. The answer, in part, was the RPD; this ligh...
Hearing, comms, performance, and downstream liability all get better when the rifle is less abusive to everyone standing near it.
Even positive changes can be hard to accept. Long before the M1 Garand rifle was in widespread service in the US military, it had its share of detractors. A number of these objectors simply disagreed with the Army’s decision to adopt a semi-automatic rifle at all. They argued that the...
A weekly look at duty-grade gear, training, and decisions that have to work on your worst day—not just photograph well on someone else’s best day.
In 2015, photographs and videos began circulating of several prototype rifle designs from the mid-2010s, chambered for an obscure experimental round, the 6x49, which was the Soviet Union's unified 6mm cartridge . The photos and videos show new developmental rifles chambered for the Soviet-er...