Weapons

I have a rather crude saying that I use in sales…you have to eat you own dog food. Basically saying that you should use the products that you sell.

Have a look at this video where a CEO shows commitment to his company’s products.

Tell you what…I’d buy those vests after seeing that demo.

The British government is sending a strong message to Argentina…they are sending the HMS Dauntless to the Falklands.

The Type 45 destroyer is the most advanced anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic ship in the world equipped with 48 Sea Viper missiles and the Sampson radar, which is more advanced than Heathrow air traffic control

The ship is in a league of its own in air defence able to track dozens of multiple targets

Defence has recently bought a number of additional Benelli M3 (NZ) Shotguns to enhance its current fleet of weapons.

The Benelli M3 (NZ) is a 12 guage shotgun capable of being operated in either pump-action or semi-automatic mode. Check out the shotgun in action at a recent tri-service training day.

The Israeli Army is developing some pretty cool technology:

Nowadays, UAVs are controlled from a remote location (even thousands of kilometers away), while others fly autonomously based on pre-programmed flight plans. They are optimal for surveillance and reconnaissance but have other purposes as well, like transport, search and rescue and even commercial uses such as firefighting.

The drone featured in the video is the Skylark I-LE, specially modified by the IDF and chosen for its lightness and extraordinary stealth. Read more about the Skylark I-LE.

What goes on in the mind of a sniper?

Chris Kyle is a sniper, the best in the world. He describes his job:

As US forces surged into Iraq in 2003, Chris Kyle was handed a sniper rifle and told to watch as a marine battalion entered an Iraqi town.

A crowd had come out to greet them. Through the scope he saw a woman, with a child close by, approaching his troops. She had a grenade ready to detonate in her hand.

“This was the first time I was going to have to kill someone. I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to do it, man, woman or whatever,” he says.

“You’re running everything through your mind. This is a woman, first of all. Second of all, am I clear to do this, is this right, is it justified? And after I do this, am I going to be fried back home? Are the lawyers going to come after me saying, ‘You killed a woman, you’re going to prison’?”

But he didn’t have much time to debate these questions.

“She made the decision for me, it was either my fellow Americans die or I take her out.”

He pulled the trigger.

Kyle remained in Iraq until 2009. According to official Pentagon figures, he killed 160 people, the most career sniper kills in the history of the US military. His own estimate is much higher, at 255 kills.

According to army intelligence, he was christened “The Devil” by Iraqi insurgents, who put a $20,000 (£13,000) bounty on his head.

Married with two children, he has now retired from the military and has published a book in which he claims to have no regrets, referring to the people he killed as “savages”.

Israeli researchers have found something a little different:

But a study into snipers in Israel has shown that snipers are much less likely than other soldiers to dehumanise their enemy in this way.

Chris Kyle killed an estimated 40 people during the second battle of Fallujah in 2004

Part of the reason for this may be that snipers can see their targets with great clarity and sometimes must observe them for hours or even days.

“It’s killing that is very distant but also very personal,” says anthropologist Neta Bar. “I would even say intimate.”

She studied attitudes to killing among 30 Israeli snipers who served in the Palestinian territories from 2000 to 2003, to examine whether killing is unnatural or traumatic for human beings.

She chose snipers in particular because, unlike pilots or tank drivers who shoot at big targets like buildings, the sniper picks off individual people.

What she found was that while many Israeli soldiers would refer to Palestinian militants as “terrorists”, snipers generally referred to them as human beings.

There were about 20 gunmen escorting a convoy and one of them was unlucky enough to get in the sight of my scope. The distance was about 300m, almost nothing for a sniper.

A few seconds later I saw him lying motionless.

In the heat of the moment my only thought was to shoot more and more. I saw the figures rushing in panic and trying to hide.

We killed all of them, except three or four who were wounded and captured. Afterwards I blamed myself for not being cool-headed enough. I thought that if I had been calmer, I would have killed more enemies.

We were proud of ourselves, but now I am ashamed.

If I was asked today, I would say it’s very hard to kill, but more than 20 years ago I was too young.

“The Hebrew word for human being is Son of Adam and this was the word they used by far more than any other when they talked about the people that they killed,” she says.

Snipers almost never referred to the men they killed as targets, or used animal or machine metaphors. Some interviewees even said that their victims were legitimate warriors.

“Here is someone whose friends love him and I am sure he is a good person because he does this out of ideology,” said one sniper who watched through his scope as a family mourned the man he had just shot. “But we from our side have prevented the killing of innocents, so we are not sorry about it.”

It seems that Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak exists…in the lab at least:

SCIENTISTS in the United States have reported a further step towards a celebrated ”invisibility cloak” by masking a large, free-standing object in three dimensions.

The lab work is the latest advance in a scientific frontier that uses novel materials to manipulate light, a trick that is of huge interest to the military in particular.

Reporting in the New Journal of Physics, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin cloaked an 18-centimetre tube from light in the microwave part of the energy spectrum.

Those hoping for a Harry Potter-style touch of wizardry would be disappointed. To the human eye, the object was still visible.

But, say the researchers, the experiment is important proof of a principle that so-called plasmonic meta-materials can achieve a cloaking effect.

A war plane cloaked with such materials could achieve ”super-stealth” status by becoming invisible in all directions to radar microwaves, said co-lead investigator Andrea Alu.

There is no way an instructional video like this could be made in a Muslim country, women are chattels. There is no way that the Maritime Union could make one either.

This video seriously makes me want to join the IDF though, for precise and exceptional weapons training:

It’s a well known fact that the IDF trains some of the best soldiers in the world, but at the source of every good soldier lies an exceptional instructor – and that’s where Cpl. Daniella Stepanoe steps in. Originally born in Israel, she moved to California as a teenager before finally returning to Israel to serve with the IDF. Since then, she has risen through the ranks of the military to become a weapons instructor, and now travels from base to base training everyone from paratroopers to elite special forces units in the use of their weapons.

There is no denying that this face would scare the crap out of you as it spat lead from it’s mouth:

The Israeli Defense Force blog has some 5 cool weapons technology products designed by or for the Israeli Defense Forces. I like this one, The Simon door breaching charges:

One of the most dangerous tasks of urban warfare is entering a building with enemy fighters inside. The sounds of movement outside of a door can give away the soldier’s position and should the door be booby-trapped, the lives of the soldiers are in danger.

With this in mind, Rafael developed the SIMON. It is an advanced, lightweight door-breaching device that easily attaches to almost any conventional assault rifle and is fired from a safe distance of 15-30 meters. A fail-safe mechanism ensures that the SIMON is only armed after it has travelled a minimum distance of 15 meters. When the SIMON’s tip hits the door, the explosives in the warhead are triggered and blast open the door. SIMON contains only 120-150 grams of explosives, but its special shape ensures that the energy from the explosion is directed straight at the door, with very little damage to people inside and outside.

Simon says: “Open door!”

Harder than you think. Try this quiz to see if you can identify whether the subjects are cops or soldiers.

I got 15 out of 21.