The Battle of the Somme Began With Britain’s Biggest Artillery Barrage
WIB historyWIB land June 28, 2016
British artillery at the Somme. Source But the guns failed to cut the Germans’ wire by MATTHEW MOSS On June 24, 1916, the British Army launched what was, at that point, its largest bombardment of World War I. Four days of heavy shelling preceded the infantry assault in the Somme sector. A thousand... Read more
The British Army’s 100th Machine Gun Company Rained Down 1,000,000 Rounds in 12 Hours in 1916
WIB historyWIB land June 27, 2016
Barrage-fire tactics proved devastating by MATTHEW MOSS The British Army entered World War I with just two machine guns per battalion. In contrast, the Imperial German Army had long embraced the new weapon — and had already fully integrated it into its infantry regiments. As the stalemate of trench warfare took hold,... Read more
In 1965, U.S. and Dominican Tanks Fought Brief, Violent Skirmishes
WIB historyWIB land June 22, 2016
Tanks have rarely been used in battle in the Western Hemisphere — and fights between tanks are even rarer. But the Dominican Republic in 1965 was one of the exceptions, when Constitutionalist rebels fought the armored vehicles of invading U.S. Marines in the streets of the capital city, Santo Domingo. Stranger yet, the... Read more
These ‘military-style’ firearms have a long history in private hands by JOSEPH TREVITHICK On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded as many more at a gay club in Orlando — the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The massacre reignited a now long-standing debate over whether civilians have any... Read more
Chinese peacekeepers in Mali. MINUSMA photo Beijing learns that peacekeeping is dangerous by KEVIN KNODELL On May 31, a rocket attack in the Water Tower neighborhood of the Malian town of Gao struck Chinese peacekeepers. The attack killed 29-year-old First Sgt. Shen Lianlian and injured several of his fellow soldiers. A... Read more
General Dynamics Land Systems will start to deliver the first production M-1A2 SEP V3 Abrams to the U.S. Army starting in 2017. Out of a total of nine prototype tanks, the company has delivered seven of the prototypes for field-testing at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona and Aberdeen Proving... Read more
For all the videos coming out of the Syrian civil war, a one minute, 31-second clip of a U.S.-made TOW missile slamming into a T-90 tank got more attention than most. In the video uploaded in February, Russia’s most advanced operational battle tank met one of the United States’... Read more
The U.S. Army Is About to Double Its Howitzer Range
WIB land March 28, 2016
On March 19, U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant Louis Cardin, a field artilleryman assigned to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, died during an attack on Fire Base Bell outside of Makhmur, Iraq. Coincidentally, the U.S. Army is hard at work developing a farther-firing howitzer that could help keep artillery... Read more
Running around the battlefield with a rapid-firing, grenade-lobbing machine gun sounds like something Arnold Schwarzenegger would do in a movie. But in the 1960s, the U.S. Army experimented with one such weapon. After introducing the crude but functional M-79 in the late 1950s, the ground combat branch saw fully... Read more
Iran’s Latest Tactic Against Islamic State — Send in the Battle Buggies That’s one way to swarm the enemy by GARRETT MCKINNEY SAMPLES The Iraqi push into Tikrit features loads of Iranian weapons. And the pint-size Safir jeep is one of the most distinctive of them all. Dozens of the rocket launcher-equipped, Iranian-made buggies are... Read more
