In late May Chinese leaders travelled to the Zhoushan National Oil Reserve and discovered the nation’s strategic oil reserves weren’t there. For over a year, the disruption of oil supplies from Venezuela and Iran had left Chinese oil reserves reduced. Despite that, government documents indicated that China still had 1.2 billion tons of oil reserves. That’s equivalent to 8,756,117,022 barrels.
China’s strategic oil reserve, to the surprise of the government officials who went to verify the reserves in May, was instead composed of water, sludge, various debris and overflow from nearby sewer lines.
Because the Americans dominated global energy supplies, the Chinese oil reserve served as a major cushion to any disruptions to Chinese oil imports from the Persian Gulf, especially Iran whose main customer was China. Under America’s global energy stranglehold, Chinese crude oil stockpiles have reached the verge of collapse at the slightest exposure.
The current Chinese vulnerability stems from the American disruption of Venezuelan oil exports to China and more recently a similar situation with Iranian oil exports to China.
China’s strategic oil reserve was insurance against disruptions in Venezuelan and Iranian imports. With its oil reserves revealed as a sham, China finds itself in a desperate situation.
What happened to Chinese oil? It was soon discovered that corrupt government officials and oil reserve personnel had sold the oil and pocketed the proceeds. The local buyers were often operators of small, locally owned refineries that turned the oil into commercial products that were sold throughout China.
Most of these oil criminals then fled, often leaving China for sanctuary states that would welcome any affluent Chinese and their new wealth. The only winners were a few conniving Chinese and the Americans, who continued to dominate the global energy system.
In China corruption is not just an economic issue. For thousands of years there was corruption in the military as well. China has had a corruption problem in its military for a long time. Think thousands of years. One reason the communists won the civil war against the Nationalists in the 1940s was because the Nationalists were much more corrupt.
For about a generation, the communists kept corruption under control. But for the last four decades, corruption has been a growing problem. This despite several major efforts to stop it.
The theft of China’s strategic oil reserves is only the latest of several recent awful discoveries of massive corruption impeding the ambition of its leader, President Xi, to conquer Taiwan.
The last one concerned military corruption in building equipment to invade Taiwan, and was discovered in 2023. Missile fuel tanks were found to be filled with water, missile silo lids could not be opened, and the protective concrete missile silos themselves were so defective they might as well have been made of wood.
The air force and navy lacked sufficient spare parts for even a week of operations against Taiwan and many aircraft and naval vessels were outright inoperable. This postponed the earliest possible date for the invasion of Taiwan from 2025 to 2027.
The non-existence of China’s strategic oil reserve will probably have the same effect. The on-going closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to the war with Iran means China cannot begin to refill its oil reserve until several months after that war ends, due to the need to clear the Strait of anti-ship mines.
Then it will take at least another 18 months for China to rebuild, at exorbitant expense to its hard currency reserves, the 1.2 billion ton oil reserve it thought it had. China’s natural gas reserves, to the extent those were believed to exist, were quite inadequate to its needs in the event of a US blockade in a war with Taiwan. Closure of the Strait of Hormuz has made that clear. It will take still longer and cost more to build a strategic natural gas reserve.
There are at least major possibilities that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has been postponed for another two years, to 2029, and perhaps indefinitely due to further discoveries of calamitous-scale corruption.
So now the Chinese are really getting serious. They are installing cost control systems, with regular audits, to monitor their military spending. In the past, budgeting was pretty primitive, mainly because cost accounting was expensive to implement.
In the past, detailed spending data was collected after the fact, if at all. This made it easier for corrupt officers to steal. Noting how effectively Western, Japanese and Taiwanese companies dealt with corruption using detailed budgets and frequent audits, China installed similar systems throughout its armed forces.
This caused some morale problems among senior officers, but this was not believed to be serious. Meanwhile, the program cut costs an average of ten percent in units where it had been installed.
A rookie police officer pulled a biker over for speeding and had the following exchange:
• Officer: May I see your driver’s license?
• Biker: I don’t have one. I had it suspended when I got my 5th DUI.
• Officer: May I see the owner’s card for this vehicle?
• Biker: It’s not my bike. I stole it.
• Officer: The motorcycle is stolen?
• Biker: That’s right. But come to think of it, I think I saw the owner’s card in the tool bag when I was putting my gun in there.
Officer: There’s a gun in the tool bag?
• Biker: Yes sir. That’s where I put it after I shot and killed the dude who owns this bike and stuffed his dope in the saddle bags.
• Officer: There’s drugs in the saddle bags too?!?!?
• Biker: Yes, sir. Hearing this, the rookie immediately called his captain. The biker was quickly surrounded by police, and the captain approached the biker to handle the tense situation:
• Captain: Sir, can I see your license?
• Biker: Sure. Here it is. It was valid.
• Captain: Who’s motorcycle is this?
• Biker: It’s mine, officer. Here’s the registration.
• Captain: Could you slowly open your tool bag so I can see if there’s a gun in it?
• Biker: Yes, sir, but there’s no gun in it. Sure enough, there was nothing in the tool bag.
• Captain: Would you mind opening your saddle bags? I was told you said there’s drugs in them.
• Biker: No problem. The saddle bags were opened; no drugs.
• Captain: I don’t understand it. The officer who stopped you said you told him you didn’t have a license, stole this motorcycle, had a gun in the tool bag, and that there were drugs in the saddle bags.
• Biker: Yeah, I’ll bet he told you I was speeding, too.
Private Dwayne Hicks sat in an expansive classroom alongside the rest of his platoon of newly minted boots. Each Marine had a well-used Pulse Rifle sitting on the table in front of them. The weapons were clean enough to be used as surgical implements and smelled vaguely of CLP.
The Armat Battlefield Systems M41A Pulse Rifle is the standard-issue combat weapon for the United States Colonial Marines in the Aliens universe.
Gunnery Sergeant Mike “Madman” McGehee stepped to the front of the class carrying his own Pulse Rifle as though it was something with which he had been born. Holding the weapon at arm’s length, he said, “I want to introduce you to a personal friend of mine. This is an M41A pulse rifle… 10 millimeter with over-and-under 30 millimeter pump action grenade launcher.”
Hicks made a mental note. Though he was brand new to the U.S. Colonial Marines, he felt he might someday have need of that snappy bit of prose.
Aliens was a hit movie, and it is frequently cited as being one of the best movie sequels made. In this image, actor Michael Biehn playing Cpl. Hicks stands with his M41A pulse rifle. Image: 20th Century Fox
The following narrative presupposes that you have already seen the movie Aliens at least a time or two. If that is not the case, I sure wouldn’t admit that to anyone. I’ll hang on until you have rectified that.
Origin Story
It is not hyperbole to say that James Cameron is the most successful movie maker in history. His films have made more than $11 billion worldwide. Titanic and Avatar would be more than enough to cement a director as a legit success. Add to that Terminator,True Lies, and The Abyss, and you have a skillset that is equally at home across comedic, sci-fi, action and dramatic genres. However, I would assert that all of those movies pale in comparison to his one true masterpiece.
Few sci-fi firearms are as recognizable as the Armat M41A, and this facsimile sits in the author’s collection as proof of it. Modern 3D-printed construction made the replica extremely convincing.
The story goes that Cameron walked into a meeting with studio executives equipped with nothing more than a white board and a dry erase marker. He supposedly then wrote the word, “Alien” in big letters across the board.
This was an obvious reference to Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi opus of the same name. Then he simply added a single character to form the word, “Alien$.” The clear implication was that his vision for the Alien sequel was about to make them a whole pile of money.
And that it did. Aliens returned $180 million against an $18.5 million budget, and those were 1986 dollars. However, all that cash is secondary to what that incredible movie actually represented. Aliens showed us just how cool a deftly executed combat science fiction film could be.
Details
For the sci-fi movie nerd purist, Aliens really hit the sweet spot. Falling as it did right at the end of the era of analog special effects, the film showcased Cameron’s writing and directing skills, James Horner’s epic musical score, and Stan Winston’s preternatural special effects. The cumulative end result captured lightning in a bottle.
The screen-used M41A pulse rifles were actually finished in Humbrol Brown Bess, a brownish hue like shown here that turned distinctly green under the film’s lighting.
While the monsters, uniforms, and miniature spacecraft effects were both superlative and groundbreaking, it was the weapons that really raised the bar. Simon Atherton and the mob at Bapty outside of London supplied the hardware.
Founded in 1919 by Major PS Bapty, this company did the guns for such classics as Star Wars, the Indiana Jones films, scads of James Bond movies, and a bunch of Marvel superhero flicks, to name but a few. Cameron himself played an integral role in the design of the ordnance.
Particulars
The handguns were fairly pedestrian. The standard Colonial Marine sidearms were generally unmodified pistols from the era.
Private Vasquez fires the M41A pulse rifle during the movie Aliens. The gun seen in the film replaced an earlier version that produced a much smaller muzzle flash. Image: 20th Century Fox
Corporal Hicks carried a cut-down Ithaca 37 12-gauge shotgun. This custom one-off weapon closely resembles an Ithaca Stakeout, a curious 1970s-vintage AOW shotgun that saw some modest commercial success. However, Hicks’ unique version sported a pistol grip adapted from that of a German MP40 submachine gun.
The M56 Smart Gun was a heavy support weapon carried by PFCs Jenette Vasquez and Mark Drake in the film. These beastly guns were created by mating a German MG42 belt-fed machinegun to a Cinema Products Model III Steadicam camera harness.
The prop guns were accentuated with a variety of motorcycle parts, specifically the handlebars from a 1976 Husqvarna Magura 360, the control panel from a 1981 Kawasaki KZ750, and the footpegs from a Kawasaki AR-125. As this was the era before digital effects, all of those epic star-shaped muzzle flashes you see in the movie were produced in real time using 8mm blanks.
Star Power
All that stuff is fairly mesmerizing, but the real hero of the movie was the M41A Pulse Rifle. The original plan was to build the Pulse Rifles around MP5 submachine guns with straight magazines.
The astute gun nerd truly committed to his craft can see an image of the prototype of the MP5-based Pulse Rifle on PFC Frost’s “Peace Through Superior Firepower” t-shirt worn in the film. (You can find a decent reproduction here.)
However, the blank-adapted 9mm MP5 hosts did not produce the sort of dynamic muzzle flashes Cameron wanted for his movie. As a result, the Bapty crew switched to .45-caliber M1A1 Thompson submachine guns.
The original M41A pulse rifle prop gun was made with parts from the M1A1 Thompson and Remington pump-action shotgun.
The film’s backstory held that the M41A was produced by Armat Battlefield Systems based in Saginaw, Michigan. These weapons purportedly fired 10x24mm explosive-tipped caseless light armor-piercing rounds from a 99-round magazine. Astute Jarheads typically downloaded their magazines to 95 rounds to enhance reliability. A digital counter on the side of the gun kept track of rounds remaining. Slung underneath the barrel of the M41A was a four-shot 30mm pump-action grenade launcher.
Proper Props
There were either three or four actual operational Pulse Rifles created for the movie along with several inert foam versions. These original lightweight polymer props come up for sale from time to time and typically command upwards of twenty grand apiece. Only one of the live prop weapons had an operational grenade launcher. These guns were painted in Humbrol “Brown Bess” paint that appeared green under the lighting conditions used in the film. Each Pulse Rifle chassis was formed from sheet aluminum and was actually fairly crude up close.
At top is the author’s earlier attempt at putting together his own replica Pulse Rifle. Below is the one he built from the 3D-printed kit.
The M41A props were crafted from three different guns. The host Thompsons had the furniture removed and were blank-adapted, but were left otherwise unmolested. The grenade launcher was built from a severely shortened Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun.
The handguard and forearm were taken from a Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun and reversed. The rest of the weapon was bodged together by the mad geniuses at Bapty. All but one of the prop weapons was disassembled after the film so the components could be reused for other projects.
Revolutionary Replicas
I have coveted one of these guns ever since I sat in the CINE 4 theater in Oxford, Mississippi, back in 1986 to see the film for the first time. The Pulse Rifle is the apex predator of firearms. There is an airsoft version, but these are both expensive and hard to find. As I result, my homeschooled kids and I whipped up a replica.
Note the realistic “round counter” on the side of the 3D-printed replica of the M41A Pulse Rifle. The author fitted out the replica and did all the painting himself.
The foundation for my first non-firing M41A was a piece of 1-inch square steel tubing. The SPAS-12 bits came from a cheap airsoft gun. The fire control group was genuine WWII surplus and subsequently expensive. The rest was handcrafted from pine lumber and weathered to suit. The round counter was painted on and covered with a little square of Plexiglas.
A pulse rifle kit takes the guesswork out of recreating the Colonial Marine weapon, supplying the major pieces in one batch. Note these M1A1 Thompson-style 3D-printed parts.
The end result is far from perfect, but it’s not half bad, either. However, Information Age 3D printing tech now offers something much more realistic. I sourced the new parts from OuterRim Armorer via Etsy. Etsy has a lame prohibition against selling realistic-looking firearms. Just message Bryan at OuterRim if you’re interested in a Pulse Rifle of your own. You can find him here.
All the 3D-printed parts for the Pulse Rifle were exceptionally well-executed. However, they did not come with instructions. It was a challenging (but fun) puzzle for the author.
Finishing out the project takes a little talent. Unlike a conventional model kit, there are no instructions, and many of the parts seem a bit incongruous. However, everything does indeed have a place, and the end result is frankly spectacular.
If afforded a decent optical sight and a little tactical bling, a live and functional.45 ACP Pulse Rifle would actually make a superb home defense tool. One can only dream!
The M41A is yet another aspect of James Cameron’s inimitable artistic skill. Now, thanks to Bryan at OuterRim, sci-fi nerds with a little mechanical aptitude can add a facsimile to their own collections for not a lot of cash. You can contact him directly at outerrimarmorer@gmail.com if you’re interested in getting your own 3D-printed Pulse Rifle kit.
A rookie police officer pulled a biker over for speeding and had the following exchange:
