Infantry Marine, based in the Midwest. Specifically interested in small arms history, development, and usage within the MENA region and Central Asia. To that end, I run Silah Report, a website dedicated to analyzing small arms history and news out of MENA and Central Asia.
Please feel free to get in touch with me about something I can add to a post, an error I’ve made, or if you just want to talk guns. I can be reached at miles@tfb.tv
Night vision for civilians used to be exorbitantly expensive, if not prohibited in some places. However, as technology has improved, the devices have gotten to a point where civilians can now afford very decent night vision devices at a price that you don’t have to take a second mortgage out [Read More…]
Your enemy is the best teacher when it comes to combat. In a move that appears to be imitating what the Kachin Independence Army pioneered in 2010 when it comes to bullet trap rifle grenades being fired from locally assembled Type 81 derivatives (the Chinese Type 81 [Read More…]
Images appearing on Burmese media networks have revealed that the Burmese state-run Defense Industries corporation has prototyped at least three different anti-materiel rifles (AMR), putting at least on of them into production and getting them into Tatmadaw service. [Read More…]
The Twitter analyst Everest65 has shared photographs of some bullpup Kalashnikov experimentation within the arms trade social media groups in Syria. There are a couple of iterations of the design, some appear to be more experimental and might be low in production while [Read More…]
The Ferguson rifle has been seen by some as an extraordinary design that could have changed the course of history and by others as a mechanical complexity that never would have worked in the real world conditions that the British infantry would have found themselves in. When it comes to either [Read More…]
Very and distinctly different from anything craft-produced in the Darra Adam Khel regions of the Kyberpukhtunkha region of Pakistan, the Kabul Arsenal pumped out railroad materials, coins, and most important to us at TFB, Martini-Henry’s and Martini-Metford license produced copies with the [Read More…]
During the interwar years, Springfield Armory shrunk drastically. To the extreme point of going from five thousand full-time employees to two hundred. One of the ways that Springfield Armory dealt with this was to commit to producing rifles for the National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio. At first the [Read More…]
The Arakan Army released a video in April of 2018 that was commemorating the 9th anniversary of the founding of the rebel group that shows a Barrett MRAD in a Multi-Role Brown Cerekote being fired during the promotional video. Due to the multi-caliber options of the [Read More…]
One of the odder inventions that eventually reached active service in an issued rifle, the rod bayonet existed in the 1800s and early 1900s. It was an attempt to reduce the load of the soldier by creating an extremely lightweight rod or tri-bladed bayonet that was internal to the rifle. A soldier [Read More…]
Recent news from the Department of Defense has shown that the 2nd Marine Law Enforcement Battalion, based out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina has been working with Marine Corps Systems Command in testing a new target system that the Marine Corps could possibly purchase [Read More…]
There is extremely little to nothing written about the Tatmadaw’s 40mm Low-Velocity standalone Grenade Launcher. Even when it comes to the name, we are actually unsure of it’s official nomenclature within the Burmese Army and Police Forces. For [Read More…]
Recent imagery of the Latin American-based special operations competition organized by U.S. South Command has shown that some members of the Panamanian contingent were using 5.56x45mm IWI X95 select-fire carbines during the small arms live fire portion of the course. In [Read More…]
Although located in some of the most remote parts of the Burmese jungle, the Kachin Independence Army has been able to build up an impressive arms assembly capability in the northern regions of the country of Myanmar. It is very difficult to acquire information and [Read More…]
Although the 9x19mm MA-13 MK II design was first seen online in 2012, there is still relatively not much known about it outside of the Myanmar Police Special Task Force that has been seen utilizing it as standard issue, albeit sparingly. Staying within the previous [Read More…]
At a recent amnesty program held by the Israeli Defense Forces, a first model Dror in .303 British turned up along with a number of other small arms that had been surrendered as part of a drive to return historical small arms from IDF veterans or otherwise. In this [Read More…]
Although not entering active service in large numbers, the Burmese state-operated defense armaments production wing, Defense Industries has been quietly working on what appears to be 9x19mm NATO Glock-pattern copy in the guise of a second generation variant without [Read More…]
In what would certainly make the gun makers of Darra Adam Khel blush with professional embarrassment, a recent so-called Islamic State of Khurasan (IS entity in eastern Afghanistan) propaganda video showed fighters of the group engaging enemy Taliban fighters with a [Read More…]
What usually happens to numerically significant firearms is that they get put in a museum and carefully guarded. Not the first Springfield M1903, Serial Number One though! Crazy enough, this particular rifle actually rolled right off the production line and into Army service when it was produced [Read More…]
A G3 patterned self-loading rifle with a collapsible stock has recently been observed through numerous online sources with Houthi fighters in Yemen and with an Al-Aqsa Brigade fighter in the Gaza strip. The rifle in question is a 7.62x51mm NATO G3-patterned rifle that [Read More…]
The craft-modified bullpup PKM design that has popped up in different iterations (albeit sparingly) throughout Syria, Yemen and Libya takes its roots in the Russian 7.62x54mmR Pecheneg PKP GPMG that became popular within the Russian Ministry of Interior due to the need [Read More…]
The Turkish firearm component manufacturing company MERTSAV Defense has recently unveiled an under barrel 40x46mm Low-Velocity grenade launcher, as revealed by posts on Pakistan Defense forum. The launcher utilizes an M1913 Picatinny rail attachment system to marry to [Read More…]
A recent flood of images from the excellent Turkish defense armaments based Twitter account Aybars have revealed that Turkish infantrymen are receiving the latest variant of the 7.62x51mm NATO MPT76 as a Designated Marksman’s Rifle. To be clear, this isn’t [Read More…]
Starting when the notorious terrorist leader found refuge in the company of Mullah Omar’s Islamic Emirate in the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden became a vociferous proponent of constantly appearing in propaganda footage armed with a Soviet AKS74U [Read More…]
The Iraqi Al-Kadesiah rifle was named after a battle bearing the same name in 636 AD which marked a key point in the Islamic conquest of what is current-day Iraq and Iran. The naming of weapon systems whether it be small arms or missiles in Saddam’s Iraq was often based on important events [Read More…]
For this episode, we took a trip to the folks at Battle Arms Development in Las Vegas and were able to get our hands on some of the companies newest rifle entries that were premiered at SHOT this year. The Tanker and the Paratrooper is sort of the manifestation of Battle Arms in the company [Read More…]
A recent story shared by a Chinese media site has showed a slide of photographs consisting of Military Police from the anti-chemical warfare unit in Guangxi Province shooting a 1960s era flamethrower developed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (most likely [Read More…]
After a brief hiatus, the infamous Mahama Tactical training team is back in the spotlight again. The group’s former leader, Uzbek national Abu Rofiq was killed a while back and since then the team appears to have lost some key leadership. Since then, a Twitter [Read More…]
Initial production runs of small arms are always objects of great interest and fascination. They represent the tangible beginning, the first of many, a historical landmark. Especially if they are of designs that go on to influence small arms history. Usually when they [Read More…]
Russian media has reported on the recent acquisition of .50 BMG HS .50 patterned Anti-Materiel rifles by the Syrian Arab Army in the fight against the ongoing insurgent groups within Syria. The article claims that the rifles are assembled from Iranian components [Read More…]
While completing some research at Springfield Armory National Historic Site in Massachusets, myself and the curators discovered an interesting phenomena when it came to previous curators at Springfield Armory recording their rifles coming into inventory. When we looked [Read More…]
Your Privacy Choices