Photo Of The Day: Smoking guns and a lot of action, the way we like our pictures best. Here we have U.S. Naval Special Warfare Task Unit Europe in a bi-lateral training exercise in Limassol (Cyprus), together with the Cypriot Underwater Demolition Team (MYK). You can see a suppressed FN SCAR above.

The Swedish Army is looking for a New Multi-Caliber Sniper Weapon System, until then they are using the Accuracy International AI AW (PSG 90B) in 7.62×51 mm. The riflescope is usually a Schmidt & Bender 3-12×50 PMII. The Swedish rifle is the Arctic Warfare version of the British L96A1, and it was adopted in 1990. Above you can see a sniper from Sweden aiming downrange during European Best Sniper Team Competition at Hohenfels, Germany.

The Norwegian Armed Forces just awarded FN Herstal with a multi-year contract to supply up to 4,000 FN MINIMI 7.62 Mk3 Light Machine Guns. In association with this order is also a supply of spare parts over a 7-year period and maintenance and support equipment over a 20-year period. This gives you an idea of the lifespan of a product like machine guns. It will be interesting to see which country will be the first to adapt FN’s new Evolys?

The European Best Sniper Team Competition is over but continues to deliver amazing photos for TFB’s Photo Of The Day. The videos I’ve seen from this competition show some really difficult and demanding stages, to differentiate the teams from each other. Here we can see Greek snipers searching and engaging targets during the European Best Sniper Team Competition at Hohenfels, Germany, (Aug. 11, 2021).

Photo Of The Day: Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, August 26, 2021, just a few days before the evacuation ended. You can imagine the pressure of working there, day and night with just a few hours of sleep between the shifts. Above we see a paratrooper assigned to the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division. He’s armed with the M110A1 CSASS, a contract awarded to Heckler and Koch. The setup is similar to the HK G28. It would be interesting to know if HK could deliver a solution in 6.5 Creedmoor if the U.S. Army wanted.

Photo Of The Day: Modern history in action as we take a look at Swedish Special Forces (SOG) at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. They are working in collaboration with other nations’ units on the site. The soldiers live inside the airport and have the opportunity to sleep about two to four hours a day according to a SwdishSwedish Armed Forces article. These are official photos from the Swedish Armed Forces and as such, they are pixelated not to reveal certain “abilities” and other details that are considered secret.

Welcome back to the  Photo Of The Day! Here is the place where we honor outstanding photos and the person behind the camera. Above you’re looking at a German Army Sniper adjusting his scope during morning shooting rehearsals at the International Specialty Training Center’s (ISTC) Desert Sniper Course. The location is Chinchilla, Spain and the event took place earlier this year in July. Below you see a Dutch Special Forces sniper.

Photo Of The Day – Established in 2014 this is TFB’s way to show carefully selected photographs on a daily basis. Today we have photos of the Danish Army’s 2nd Armored Infantry Battalion soldiers. They are conducting a live-fire exercise called “Wild Leopard”. The location is the well-known Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany. The purpose of the exercise was to train platoon and company-sized infantry forces together in wooded and urban terrain

I showed the pictures in today’s Photo Of The Day to a friend and he called them “adult entertainment“, except in other words that we must not publish here. He wasn’t wrong, the album “Taktiskais snaiperis” (Tactical Snipers) contains a lot of hot material to get excited about. We have bolt-action and semi-automatic sniper rifles in a wonderful combination. There are firearms from a lot of countries here. You can see the Heckler & Koch HK417 used by the Latvian snipers, which is similar to the German G28. Can you spot the Italian ARX200 Assault Rifle? Take a look and do your best to identify what they’re using.

Photo Of The Day: There is just one photo today, but considering what’s in it, there should be enough for long discussions. There is no exact date when it was taken, but the guess is that sometime between the end of ’77 and ’79.

While in the last 20 years many European firearms industries faded into obscurity (just look at France, Spain, and Portugal), other countries seem to successfully expand their industries. At the recent IDEF 2021 exhibition in Istanbul, Turkey, I came across several new Turkish gun manufacturers that were founded in recent years, and perhaps the most interesting one was System Defence.

Photo Of The Day:  The world’s first photograph, made by a camera, goes back to the year 1826. It was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Here we are today looking at a picture taken with the help of Night Vision as the last American soldier leaves Afghanistan. This is history in the writing whether we like it or not.

Austrian Kampfschwimmer with Steyr AUGs getting ready to jump out of a perfectly fine C-130 Hercules.In the late 80’s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released a suitable song for this Photo Of The Day. It was named “Free Fallin'”. The chorus goes:

…it remains the same fearsome tank-busting battlewagon operated over land, equipped with a chain gun capable of spitting out a hail of 30mm lead at 600 rounds a minute, CRV rockets to knock out buildings and Hellfire anti-tank missiles.

Our Photo Of The Day brings some French cuisine to the table. I understand why the manufacturer abbreviated “Fusil d’Assaut de la Manufacture d’Armes de Saint-Étienne” the way they did. FAMAS is a lot easier to pronounce and remember. Don’t you agree?

Photo Of The Day: Above you have the new German MG6. The MG6 is a Dillon Aero M134D Gatling Minigun. It is chambered in 7.62x51mm and has a firing rate of over 3000 rounds per minute. During the summer, TFB had the pleasure to examine and play around with some of the Concamo products. I gave some of their Ghosthood products to my kids and they quickly disappeared, literally…

Back in 2018, the USMC announced some fundamental changes to the basic squad’s make up. The dedicated grenadier returned and the new 40mm grenade launcher, the M320, deployed at the fire team level. Unlike his Vietnam-era counterparts, the modern grenadier is expected to carry a rifle along with the M320 – though not attached to the weapon, as in the previous M203.

The Norwegian Army and their Home Guard must be among the most well-equipped armies and forces in the world, and they have plenty of good combat photographers as well. It’s only natural that we see them quite often in TFB’s Photo Of The Day.

It’s that time of the year again when some of the best sniper teams in the world gather to compete in the European Best Sniper Team Competition. Above you can spot a Lithuanian soldier as he scans a field for targets in a downed aircraft. The pictures are taken in Hohenfels Training Area, Germany.

The 14.5x114mm cartridge proved to be very effective in an anti-materiel role in modern warfare. Ukrainian companies have designed multiple anti-materiel rifles chambered in this cartridge within the past several years. In fact, the 14.5mm Snipex T-Rex and Alligator rifles have been recently adopted by the Ukrainian army and their semi-auto sibling, Snipex Monomakh, is being tested by the government. Another Ukrainian company that is extensively exploring the capabilities of this cartridge is the Mayak Plant. Earlier, we took a look at Mayak Plant’s Horizon’s Lord anti-materiel rifle and their new 12.7x114HL cartridge created by necking down the 14.5×114 to .50 caliber. Today, we’ll talk about another Mayak Plant design, the PG-14.5 Night Predator (ПГ-14,5 Нічний Хижак), an anti-materiel rifle chambered in 14.5x114mm.

The Mk 19 grenade launcher has been around for a while, since 1968 in fact. In some ways, it reminds me of a gigantic MAC-10 made out of cheap sheet metal, but still able to throw those 40 mm high-explosive potatoes with high reliability. It seems someone spent a few hundred thousand dollars on the Mk 19 pictured above. It got all sorts of thermals, laser rangefinders and ballistic computers attached to it. To compare, the price of a Mk 19 is $20,000 ( Wikipedia).

Our Photo Of The Day comes with some spicy sauce. What’s up with the empty Tabasco bottle at the front of the M110A1 CSASS? It all reminds me of our 2018 April Fool’s Day joke called the No Hassle Tactical Tassle.

Photo Of The Day, or the Heckler & Koch of the day, is the G95K. Here seen with German Special Forces KSK and a quick burst of 5.56mm NATO in the air. The Heckler & Koch G95K (HK416) has a barrel length of 14.5″.

Photo Of The Day: A soldier from Bulgaria engages targets with an H&K MSG90A1 sniper rifle during the 2021 Best Sniper Team Competition at Hohenfels Training Area, Germany. The 2021 European Best Sniper Team Competition is a U.S. Army Europe and Africa-directed, 7th Army Training Command hosted contest of skill that includes 14 participating NATO allies and partner nations at 7th ATC’s Hohenfels Training Area.

Photo Of The Day: An unknown soldier overlooking a beatutiful scenery somewhere in northern Sweden, most likely above the Arctic Circle. He’s participating in the High North Indoctrination Course.

Pictures of Special Forces from North Macedonia are not so common, but in our Photo Of The Day, we have some examples. Here they can be seen together with U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers demonstrating room-clearing tactics during the Trojan Footprint 21 exercise, held in May 2021.

Do you love photography? Without images TFB would not be the same. TFB has been running our very special Photo Of The Day series for years, sharing great photos from around the world and the world of firearms onto the screen you’re looking at right now. Today we have various rifles from Accuracy International, including their AWM model (L-115A3 LRSR). AWM is short for Arctic Warfare Magnum, indicating the caliber is  .338 Lapua Magnum. Spain also uses the AI AW in 7.62x51mm. The camouflage painting on these rifles looks quite effective for blend into the nature. Also note the front Picatinny rail, most likely there to accommodate night vision or thermal imaging devices. 

Ever since photography was invented in the early 1800s, it has been a medium of almost limitless possibilities. From the beginning, the availability was extremely limited until today where most people have at least one smartphone or camera to capture what’s going on around. Here at TFB, we’ve been running our Photo Of The Day for longer than we can (almost) remember. This is the place where we share the best photos we can find, quite often from Special Forces. Today we are taking a look at pictures from the Black Swan 21 annual multinational special operations forces exercise.

Photo Of The Day and the  173rd Airborne Brigade is back with some more images. We’re looking at platoon exercise evaluations in the Hohenfels Training Area (Germany) where The Rock and the 8e RPIMa from France spent some time together. The training was a part of Exercise Rock Topside II, taking place at the Joint Multinational Training Center in Hohenfels, Germany. Above we have a HK416F with an EOTech sight. Yellow means it’s been configured for training.

Another day another Photo Of The Day: This collection comes from the  173rd Airborne Brigade where U.S. Army paratroopers assigned to Able Company, 2nd Infantry Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, can be seen laying down suppressive fire while assaulting an objective. This happened during the African Lion 21 exercise, on the Grier Labouie Airbase, Morocco, June 10, 2021.