Category: A Victory!
U.S. Air Force Colonel Gail Seymour Halvorsen was a transport pilot best known as the “Candy Bomber” or “Onkel Wiggly Wings,” who became famous for dropping candy to German children in Berlin during the Soviet Blockade of the city.
Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, the victorious powers divided the country into four occupation zones. The United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union each got a piece of the Third Reich. The conditions on the ground were horrible. Commodities were scarce, and Berlin was in ruins. There was no coherent plan on what to do with Germany now that the war was over.
On January 1, 1947, the U.S. and British sectors were unified, and in June, the announcement of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany further angered the Soviets. In early 1948, the Allied powers met to draw up a secret plan to form a new German state from the Allied-controlled sectors, and introduce a new Deutsche Mark, designed to take economic control from the Soviets as well as shut down a thriving black market. When the Soviet Union found out, they created the Ostmark. As relations between the countries worsened, something had to give.
Berlin Blockade
On June 24, 1948, the Berlin Blockade began when Soviet forces shut down road, rail and access to water to areas that were Allied-controlled, potentially reigniting World War II.
After the war, the drawdown of Allied forces left them severely outnumbered by the Soviets. The Truman administration decided that the only alternative was to use air assets in an unarmed humanitarian effort to supply the 2.5 million citizens of Berlin.
Operation Vittles
On June 26, 1948, the U.S. launched Operation Vittles, and Great Britain followed two days later. The Soviets offered to stop the blockade in exchange for the removal of the Deutschmark from the West. The Allies refused, and the U.S. stationed B-29 bombers in the United Kingdom.
The Airlift proved successful, and by spring 1949, cargo aircraft were landing every 45 seconds at Tempelhof airport.
Operation Little Vittles
Gail Halvorsen earned his pilot’s license in 1941 by graduating from the civilian Pilot Training Program, and shortly after joined the Civil Air Patrol. In May 1942, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and was stationed in Miami, Oklahoma, for Pilot Training. He spent the war ferrying aircraft to England, Italy and North Africa.
After World War II, he was assigned to Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama. On July 10, 1948, Lt. Halverson was ordered to duty in Germany and given one hour to pack up. He was assigned to the 7350th Air Base Group, 17th Military Air Transport Squadron (MATS) at Tempelhof Airport for Berlin Airlift duty. Initially, there were not enough transports, so Halverson flew three C-54 cargo missions daily into Berlin over Soviet controlled areas.
When not flying, Halverson would venture out with his movie camera and film throughout the city. One day, he was filming aircraft operations at Tempelhof and saw a group of children lined up along the fence line.
The children thanked him for the supplies the U.S. was bringing in and asked that no matter what, the Americans not abandon the airlift when the weather turned bad. The children told Halvorsen they could go without enough food for a bit, but ‘if we lose our freedom, we may never get it back.”
Seeing these children with nothing but the clothes on their backs touched him, and he gave them a couple of pieces of chewing gum he had with him. The kids broke up the gum and shared it as best they could. The kinder, without any gum, took to sniffing the wrappers.
After seeing this, Halverson told them he’d be back tomorrow with more candy and would drop it out of his plane! When the kids asked how they would know it was his plane, Halverson told them he would wiggle his wings to let them know it was him.
That evening, Halverson and his co-pilot and flight engineer pooled their candy rations for a drop. The candy was heavy, and he didn’t want anybody getting hurt, so he fashioned three parachutes out of handkerchiefs. During their morning supply run, the crew dropped their candy once a week for three weeks. Halverson noticed the number of children at the fence line increased each week.
When the Tempelhof airlift commander, General William Tunner, learned of their candy drops, he initially reprimanded Halverson. However, as the media got wind of it, he ordered them expanded, and on September 28, 1949, Operation Little Vittles was officially established.
Support grew throughout the squadron, and when the news reached the U.S., candy manufacturers began shipping their products for the operation. More support came from the states as volunteers began sewing and constructing parachutes.
Now, with the help of other pilots, candy drops were occurring every other day, and the children were writing letters and drawing pictures of the candy bombers for the pilots at Tempelhof.
In May 1949, realizing the blockade was hopeless, the Soviets lifted it. A few weeks prior, NATO was formed. A few weeks after the blockade ended, West Germany was established.
With the blockade ended, Halvorsen returned to the United States, married, and raised a family. He considered leaving the Air Force but was offered a permanent commission. Halverson attended the University of Florida, earning both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering.
He went on to Wright-Patterson AFB as a project engineer for cargo aircraft. Assignments to Air Command and Staff College in Alabama, Air Force Systems Command in Wiesbaden, and in February 1970, he returned to Tempelhof as the commander of the 7350th Air Base Group.
Candy Bomber Legacy
Halverson received accolades for several projects and humanitarian work he was involved with, and the newly designed USAF Halverson Cargo loader was named in his honor.
Of all that he accomplished, his “Little Vittles” had the most impact. It is estimated that the Candy Bombers of Operation Little Vittles dropped over 23 tons of candy using 250,000 parachutes. As one young Berliner told him, “It wasn’t just chocolate; it was hope.”
Halvorsen passed away in 2022 at the age of 101.
Nato leaders surprised by Turkish president’s gift of guns after summit
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan presented engraved revolvers – with bullets – to his guests in Ankara, causing security concerns
What does a world leader do with a gun and six bullets? That was the conundrum Nato leaders faced after the Turkish president offered them each a revolver after the Ankara summit.
Keir Starmer was the first to mention the highly unusual gift presented by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to his guests. On the flight back from Ankara, where Nato leaders had gathered for two days, the British prime minister said he and others had received a revolver engraved with their names.
Alongside the gun sitting in a red box lined in black were six live rounds and a note exempting the weapons from export controls.
It was a surprising gift to say the least, several officials from the different alliance member states said, and gave rise to some “insane” scenes among the various delegations’ security teams.
“An unusual gift from president Erdoğan at the Nato summit: a Magnum revolver with ammunition, engraved with my name,” the Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, said on X.
The Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, only “learned of the exact nature of the gift” after landing in Belgium. “The prime minister was surprised and immediately handed it over to airport police so it could be placed in a secure safe and the matter was handled in accordance with relevant procedures,” an official said on Thursday.
De Wever’s security team also handled the revolvers given to the EU chiefs based in Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, with all the security and protocol-related headaches such an effort brings.
Von der Leyen “expressed her thanks” to Erdoğan for the gift, her spokesperson said, adding that it would be decommissioned and donated to a military museum.
The revolver presented to the Polish president, Karol Nawrocki, also arrived safely, but with the necessary precautions and a previous incident still fresh in everyone’s minds.
In December 2022, Poland’s police chief brought back an anti-tank grenade launcher from Ukraine that he had received as a gift. The device exploded in his office, slightly injuring him and causing extensive damage to the police headquarters in Warsaw.
This time, “it is certain that no one is going to fire it”, an aide to Nawrocki told a local radio station.
Several revolvers, including those belonging to Starmer, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten, have for now remained in the Turkish capital.
Depending on the laws in force, transporting firearms is often far from straightforward, especially when they are fully functional.
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, took his revolver with him but left the ammunition in Turkey, Canadian officials said. They did not explain why.
The weapon given to the Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, “will have to be transported to Sweden in accordance with all applicable procedures”, his team said in a statement.
Beyond the logistical challenge, the gift also puzzled several delegations attending the summit, which focused on Ukraine, Iran, and relations with the US president, Donald Trump.
The question asked over and over again: why such a gift? While it is very common for heads of state to exchange various gifts during meetings or summits, such exchanges rarely require these kinds of precautions.
The Turkish presidency did not immediately respond.
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t good at rendering firearms, and that’s probably not a bad thing, for reasons that will soon be explored. It should also be noted that while AI rendered guns isn’t good yet, it is likely to improve. That might not be a good thing either.
First, we need some background on what exactly AI is, or more accurately, what is generative AI. It has been in development for decades, but it was only in 2022 that generative AI entered the public consciousness with consumer-friendly programs.
Suffice it to say that generative AI, which includes OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google Gemini, among many others, is the evolution of technology that emerged in the 1960s and is something that is now used every day, again both for good and bad.
That’s not just in how it renders firearms.
AI can create visual artwork, compose music, write papers and stories, and produce other content. Students are using it as a shortcut with homework, and anyone who has been on social media has likely seen images and videos of varying quality. With a few prompts, which are written instructions, AI can generate content that just a few years ago would have taken design teams days, even weeks to produce.
However, there is a lot of “AI slop,” as in low-quality, mass-produced digital content that shows a lack of human effort. Such content is seemingly created — if created is really the right term — by those seeking to flood the Internet to exploit algorithms and to generate quick ad revenue on some platforms.
How AI Works
It is important to understand how AI images are generated. How “intelligent” AI actually is remains a matter of debate.
Generative AI is based on “Large Language Models” (LLMs), which are trained on massive datasets of text and code to recognize patterns. Although they can be effective at parsing data, solving logic puzzles and even summarizing lengthy documents, LLMs can also produce factually incorrect, nonsensical, or made-up information that may seem plausible.
AI generates images by “learning” patterns from billions of existing pictures and their accompanying text descriptions. This process is called diffusion. AI is very good at generating images of well-known objects, where the attributes, including dimensions, color, and other properties, are clearly described.
It would seem that AI, therefore, should be good at rendering firearms, but a search of social media tells a very different story. AI-generated images of firearms depict weapons that would be impossible to produce in the real world, much like the fantastical settings created by the late Dutch artist M.C. Escher.
In the case of firearms, LLMs and AI have no shortage of information to draw from, yet generative AI platforms still struggle because they lack a true 3D understanding of the underlying mechanics, resulting in nonsensical attachments, bent barrels, missing triggers, and incorrect magazine placement. AI is still treating firearms as abstract collections of shapes rather than focusing on the functional mechanisms. That has resulted in impossible geometry.
There are now Facebook Groups and Reddit subs devoted to sharing AI-generated firearm images that defy reality. Even when it gets the basics right, AI still misses some key details. Several factors are at play, but the most basic is that generate AI is based on algorithms, and many are far less “intelligent” than it might seem.
Guns And Media — It’s Never Been Accurate
It is further worth taking a step back and remembering that mainstream depictions of firearms have long been questionable. Consider firearms in comic books and video games as just two examples.
Writers of the former and developers of the latter would routinely ignore basic mechanics, notably magazine capacities and recoil, opting instead to treat firearms as versatile plot devices that are only as accurate or deadly as the story demands at any given moment.
Likewise, the World War II-based comic books of the 1960s didn’t bother to feature realistic depictions of the enemy. The Germans were often presented with big red swastikas on their helmets, carrying weapons that were not an accurate drawing of the MP-40. It was a version that fit the narrative, even if it was far from accurate.
Video games have, in recent years, gone to great lengths to get many details of modern firearms right, including the look and sound, yet other attributes are often still very wrong, notably the weight and recoil. The guns may look correct, but they way they are employed and operate is anything but accurate.
Lack of Instruction?
AI continues to struggle with firearms for some very simple reasons. There is an old saying among computer programmers: “Garbage in, garbage out,” which is the principle that the quality of a system’s output is directly linked to the quality of input. Flawed or low-quality data will produce equally flawed or useless results.
In the case of AI, the “garbage in” is the lack of clear instructions.
“One of the reasons that guns are not properly rendered in AI is in the details,” explained Roger Entner, founder and principal analyst at Recon Analytics. “AI is only as good as the instructions you give it.”
AI often needs more information and details than it is given. It can get the basic shapes right, but it still doesn’t understand the mechanics.
“Guns are such intricate tools, with minuscule differences that are huge,” Entner told The Armory Life. “Gun owners may know these things so intricately, but AI does not.”
That is a key point to consider. There is already massive confusion in the mainstream consciousness about the differences between a commercial AR-15 and the military M16, so how can we expect AI to know better?
AI doesn’t just fall short with firearms, but all sorts of things.
“AI isn’t good at depicting a Cadillac XTS from a Chevrolet Malibu,” said Entner.
There is also the issue of bias, and it is firearm enthusiasts who are likely to notice the rendering problems of AI when it comes to guns.
“AI really does render firearms poorly. Many details range from implausible to outright wrong. But in perspective, AI renders many objects poorly,” noted Dr. Jim Purtilo, associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.
“If someone in the firearm community notices it with guns more than with other objects, then this could well be another example of a selective attention bias, which is where people with a decided interest in a given object will be much more inclined to notice when details are wrong. Show a young man the photo of a pretty young girl, and he will never notice what is in the background. ‘What monster?’”
Such a selective attention bias has cropped up in cinema for years.
“Show an old war movie and the gun enthusiast will complain, ‘that’s not a rifle they used,’ the history aficionado will say, ‘that’s not how it happened,’ and the linguists will lament that characters used words that didn’t become common until the modern era. This illustrates our biases,” Purtilo told The Armory Life.
Still, the implausible images result from how AI generates them today. There is ample data on firearm attributes, but few descriptions of how everything connects. AI’s LLMs make a best guess, often with comedic results.
“Pictures are tougher for AI than we understand,” added Entner. “Generic descriptions of something to AI will generate a generic description. It is like asking a five-year-old to draw a Single Action Colt.”
AI is thus like a child, and it may not provide all the details unless pressed. Even then, it may not fully appreciate how things go together without further explanation.
“Said simply, the program is averaging all the details of its training images when deciding which features to include,” said Purtilo. “It might know that a firearm has sights, a shoulder stock, and attachments, but it doesn’t know how these details might depend on one another.
The average sight across all the images it analyzed might have been a scope, the average stock might have a pistol grip, and the average attachment might be a laser pointer — and that is how it gives you a Revolutionary War musket with pistol grip, high power optic, and laser pointer.”
The Barriers of AI
The current technical barriers are just one of the main reasons that AI is bad at rendering firearms. The other is policy. AI developers are already cautious about how AI can be used.
“On the technical side, guns are complex objects with very specific features. Because they are so specific and have many parts that can be rendered incorrectly, it’s easy for a human to identify them as incorrect, as AI is not good at replicating specific weapons,” said Dr. Cliff Lampe, professor of information and associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
Lampe, who focuses on the study of misinformation in media, told The Armory Life that the policy reason is that many models specifically list firearms as a type of object to render poorly.
“You can imagine, for instance, that you don’t want to be able to have GenAI [generative artificial intelligence] create specific schematics for firearms. Different models may have different thresholds here as a matter of policy, but all of them will have some safety restrictions built in,” Lampe noted.
Microsoft’s Copilot and ChatGPT are now among the generative AI platforms that won’t even render a firearm if requested. Copilot won’t even render soldiers holding firearms. However, because of the rise in “AI slop,” it may be a good thing that AI can’t generate extremely accurate firearms in videos. No manufacturer would be happy to see their product — a car, gun, or something else — used irresponsibly in an AI-generated video.
For now, we may need to accept that AI doesn’t do guns well, just as comic writers and video game developers missed the mark in the past.
“I don’t know whether AI is more likely to generate silliness with firearms than other objects. But if so, then this may well reflect a selection bias in training materials,” Purtilo continued. “AI models are trained by ingesting a huge volume of raw content. The companies scrape pages from websites, books, social media, and more for this purpose.”
As Lampe noted, there is also the issue of policies that restrict many sites from including firearm images, which could impact how AI learns.
“This limits what material AI has for training,” said Purtilo. “If you can’t depict safe and responsible firearm use on the web, then no AI will be able to render images with safe and responsible use of firearms. Whatever it generates will be inherently gibberish.”
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