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Category: War
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Ukraine: Rifle Periscopes Return
Just a quick show of hands, who here loves paying taxes? That is, of course, a rhetorical question. The only folks who enjoy paying taxes are New York socialists and Bernie Sanders, a man whose only extra-governmental real jobs were as an aide in a psychiatric hospital and a part-time carpenter. The rest of us think taxes pretty much suck.
The federal income tax rate in America ranges from 10 to 37%. State taxes are a wildly mixed bag. Alaska has reverse taxes. They actually pay people to live there. Eight predominantly-red states levy no income tax at all. California is naturally the worst at 13.3%. Every state charging above 9% is a Democratic stronghold. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
So, why all this talk of infernal revenue, might you ask? Because I have finally found something that makes me glad to pay my taxes. The AGM-114R-9X is the coolest weapon since the Roman gladius. Folks in the know call this the Ginsu Missile or the Ninja Bomb. Uncle Sam won’t reveal what these bad boys cost, but they’re worth every penny.
AGM-114 Hellfire Details
The AGM-114 Hellfire was first introduced in 1984. Hellfire stands for Helicopter-Launched, Fire and Forget. The Hellfire missile weighs about 100 pounds and is 64 inches long. Today’s Hellfires are precision guided via a semi-active laser homing system or a millimeter-wave radar. Max effective range is somewhere around 11 kilometers. The Hellfire was originally intended as a dedicated anti-armor weapon to be used on AH64 Apache gunships. However, they’ve gotten way cooler since then.
The problem in the modern era of ubiquitous camera phones is proportionality. The days of leveling a city to undermine a nation’s capacity to wage war or kill one seriously evil dude are over. We need weapons that will whack the bad guys without unduly cluttering up the place.
The basic AGM-114 isn’t bad. The Hellfire employs a top attack profile wherein the round climbs to a high altitude and then plunges down toward a target from above at around Mach 1.3. The intent is to defeat the thinner roof armor of most modern armored vehicles, and the Hellfire is magnificent at that. A single conventional Hellfire missile costs between $99,600 and $150,000 per round dependent upon the particulars. They are otherworldly accurate.
Hellfire warheads weigh about 20 pounds and come in a wide variety of flavors. Current rounds are equipped with a tandem HEAT (High Explosive Antitank) charge designed to defeat explosive reactive armor systems. However, when used against individuals, this shaped charge warhead is still fairly untidy.
The AGM-114R-9X first saw service in 2017. The Hellfire 114R-9X doesn’t have a warhead at all. Instead of explosives, this vicious little monster deploys half a dozen steel blades out of its central chassis immediately before impact. Now imagine a 100-pound swirling steel salad shredder coming at you at 1,000 miles per hour. As this is well above the speed of sound, you won’t even hear it coming.
The Dude
Abdullah Abd al-Rahman Muhammad Rajab Abd al-Rahman was also known as Ahmad Hasan Abu al-Khayr al-Masri. His friends, if ever he had any, would have called him Abu Khayr al-Masri. The general deputy to the notorious al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Khayr al-Masri was a proper psychopath.
I’ll spare you the gory details, but this reprobate guy blew stuff up and murdered people across a couple of continents because his dark god told him to. For this reason and some others, Donald Trump rightfully determined that al-Masri needed to die.
On February 26, 2017, al-Masri was toodling along in a car alongside another unwashed, bloodthirsty terrorist in the Syrian province of Idlib. Orbiting silently overhead was a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drone equipped with AGM-114R-9Xs.
There was a loud bang, and al-Masri’s car swerved to a stop amidst a massive shower of sparks. Bystanders rushed up to see what had happened. What they found was pretty tough to unsee.
The Aftermath
Photos of what remained of Abu Khayr al-Masri’s car were fascinating. We hit the vehicle with two of these weapons, leaving a pair of matching star-shaped holes in the roof.
The windshield wipers remained intact. At least one round punched all the way through and left a crater in the ground. The car rolled a short distance past the impact point prior to stopping. Suffice to say, Al-Masri’s gory encounter with the U.S. military didn’t enhance his vehicle’s resale value.
Thanks to the AGM-114R-9X, the United States of Freaking America can puree pretty much any Bad Guy on Planet Earth. Think of the Ginsu Missile as a supersonic Cuisinart that will pulverize the enemies of our great nation most anyplace in the world. I’d gladly pay taxes for that.
It’s December, the year 1941 is coming to a close as the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler, along with its Axis partners, declare war against the United States. There is about to be a dogfight in the skies, but it won’t be fought solely between Luftwaffe and P-51s. There is another battle going on in the European air.
Germany has found tremendous success using their radio intelligence to crack British naval ciphers, putting Churchill on his heels, and making the Allies more cautious than ever with their communication to the frontlines. To prevent any more leaks, the Allied forces dropped nearly 200,000 carrier pigeons into occupied territories, to communicate with soldiers and to gather intel directly from the combat zones.
The plan was a success. While not all flights carried valuable information, in fact only about 10% of the birds returned to England, the ones that did gave the allies key intel that allowed Britain to go on the offensive. Information such as bombing raids, troop positions, and even a country estate used by highly ranked Nazi commanders. All was going according to plan until the British soldiers spotted suspicious activity going on along the English coast.
Air Superiority
Just as the carrier pigeons were crossing over the English Channel, suddenly casts of peregrine falcons would swoop in, picking off the pigeons one by one. It was a slaughter, as the allies watched what could have been valuable intel fall to European waters by raptor carnage. Perhaps the most perplexing observation was that these predator birds had never been seen in numbers like this before.
It didn’t take long before rumors quickly floated around the London war rooms that the Nazis must have weaponized these falcons to patrol the coast of France, trained with only pigeon blood hunger.
It appeared the rumors were true, when mysterious birds of prey were found just west of Bournemouth, owned by suspected members of the fascist movement. The Nazis had adapted and quickly won the upper hand as the British remained clueless as to what their next move would be.
Hunting Nazi Birds
Sir David Petrie, Director General of MI5 at the time, had a somewhat taboo plan that may have just been crazy enough to work. MI5 organized a group of sharpshooters with a “license to kill” any predator birds they spotted interfering with their carrier pigeons off the English coast. It was officially called the Falcon Destruction Unit.
Thus the high-stakes bird hunting began. My vision of shooting birds over big water typically brings my mind to places like western coast, tucked in a boat blind leading heavy sea ducks at around 30 yards.
Picking off enemy-trained raptors, capable of diving over 240 miles per hour, all while feeling the pressure of protecting critical intel from falling—a far greater challenge than birds not working into my decoys, to be sure. Still, the sportsman in me wishes for a time machine just to spend one morning hunting with that group.
The program had its successes and failures. Eventually, it evolved into a counterattack unit, where the Allies would train their own groups of hawks and falcons to fight the Nazi birds.
To this day, MI5 claims that it is the only group they have given a license to kill. If the Falcon Destruction Unit ever does make a comeback, and they’re looking for recruits, I know a lot of people in Arkansas, Kansas, and Mississippi who will jump at the opportunity—including myself. Just so long as I can bring my A5 and some TSS 9 shot.
