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SWITZERLAND WILL NEVER BE CONQUERED IN WAR
SWITZERLAND WILL NEVER BE CONQUERED IN WAR
OTTO THEUDORICUS
Switzerland is in a unique position in Europe. It is landlocked and borders three potential big players in an all-out war. Besides its neutrality, which would by no means guarantee protection from an invasion (e.g., Netherlands in WW2), there are many practical reasons why this small country can offer shelter and safety from an armed conflict even if the country were to be invaded.
It has a small but highly trained military
The Swiss army is made up of 21,000 active personnel and another 150,000 in reserve. National service is mandatory for every able-bodied male citizen, making just about every man in the country having a basic level of combat training and the ability to use a firearm. At age 35 you become part of the reserve and the government issued assault rifle is given to you. The idea behind your assault rifle being so readily accessible is for the scenario where in the event of war each civilian becomes a soldier almost immediately, making mobilisation very fast and efficient.
The Stgw 57. Although no longer in production or used by the army this assault rifle is widely owned privately.
An armed population
Gun ownership is extremely high. Unlike most other countries in Europe, the Swiss government encourages an armed populous and requires active personnel to store their assault rifle at home and, up until 2008, even store live ammunition. Over 600,000 citizens belong to shooting clubs, including children.
The population of Switzerland stands at around 8.2 million, of this 2.7 million are male aged between 15 and 64. With 3.4 million guns this makes for an impressive force for an invading army to face.
However, with globalism and the cancer that it is spreading to all corners of the planet, gun rights are being eroded and limitations are slowly being implemented. In just 20 years, the militia has shrunk from 600,000 to less than 200,000. Every time there is a shooting, the subject resurfaces and there is a knee-jerk reaction of some who want a total gun ban. With guns so deep rooted into Swiss culture, every referendum so far has failed, but small changes have been made. This being said, crime is very low and the high number of guns does not correlate with the number of homicides, as the left loves to claim.
Natural borders
Geography
The entire southern border is made up of the Alpine mountain range, with most of the highest peaks concentrated in this region and forming the natural divide between Switzerland and Italy. An invading army would simply not be able to enter through this formidable obstacle with heavily armed defenders on every cliff edge.
Yes, Napoleon marched his Grand armee up and through the St Bernard pass but there was no opposition to hamper his progress.
The Northwestern border is also protected by mountains, much smaller but still a logistical headache for an invader. Along the North and East, you have the Rhine river and lake Constance, so this leaves very few flat entry points. The only realistic routes are in and around Geneva and Basal, but even these are quite narrow and would bottleneck the invaders. Monumental efforts would be needed to either navigate through mountain passes or cross large rivers and lakes.
Disguised bunkers like this are dotted all across the mountains
Eventually, a well-equipped and determined army would probably breach the border in combination of full frontal attacks in the urban areas mentioned above and amphibious assaults across the Rhine. This would only be the start however as Swiss militia and regulars retreat into their natural defenses, trying to flush them out will be nearly impossible short of dropping nuclear weapons.
This would eventually descend into guerrilla warfare which could last for years. It is unlikely that the occupiers could be pushed out and defeated without some kind of foreign intervention depending on the belligerents involved. For example, Italy and Austria would not stand a chance of even invading in the first place due to the Alps. France and Germany would also have a hard time but would probably be able to invade and hold at least part of the country.
Individual nations invading is very unlikely, though the EU could turn tyrannical and mount an invasion. Russia would be a distant second and I don’t see any other foreign powers capable of reaching Switzerland to invade.
A well-built fallout infrastructure
There are enough nuclear fallout bunkers to shelter the entire population. Regulations since 1963 made it compulsory for every new building to have such shelters
If Switzerland is left alone and the war takes place just outside its borders but involves nuclear weapons, the large mountains will offer good protection from such strikes. Large cities are the primary targets of nuclear attacks, so if we look at which cities are the closest to Switzerland, this can help to work out where the safest place would be.
If we assume the worst case scenario and a 50 megaton warhead is dropped, Paris, Berlin, and London are all far enough away to escape the blast and even the thermal radiation. Therefore the safest places are the towns and villages directly behind mountains deep within the Alpine regions away from the borders, mainly the South and Central parts.
Conclusion
Entering Switzerland now is very easy since it is a part of Schengen and one can literally walk across the border with seldom checks at crossing points that are actually manned. For those who think all-out war is just not going to happen, don’t be surprised when it does, especially with the polarisation we’re currently seeing. At best there will be armed insurrections across Europe, which will be mostly isolated but numerous and could easily escalate. Worst case is of nuclear bombs leveling the entire continent. Either way I predict most survivors will find themselves in Switzerland.
Read Next: 10 Reasons Why Switzerland May Be The Best Country In The World
The Navy SEAL Who Went to Ukraine Because He Couldn’t Stop Fighting
Daniel Swift was in his element waging America’s war on terror from Afghanistan to Yemen. After his marriage failed back home, he found a new purpose: killing Russians.
by By Ian Lovett and Brett Forrest
Daniel Swift’s nerves were shot. By the start of 2019, his Navy SEAL colleagues said, he was hardly eating or sleeping.
He had separated from his wife. A court had barred him from seeing his four children, and he was facing legal charges for false imprisonment and domestic battery.
Mr. Swift told fellow SEALs in San Diego, where he was based, that he was planning to go to Africa to fight wildlife poachers. They brushed off the comment, convinced that Mr. Swift, a soldier’s soldier, would never abandon his post.
A week later, he disappeared. Navy investigators searched for him, but Mr. Swift was always a step ahead.
He resurfaced in March of last year when he slipped into a group messaging chat of current and former SEALs. He was now fighting Russians in Ukraine, he texted. He petitioned the group for supplies, and later invited members to join him on the front lines. None did. Some advised him to come home. Others marveled as word of his exploits spread.
Mr. Swift was among thousands of young men who flooded to Kyiv from the West, including American veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many said they were drawn to the cause of a democratic country resisting a larger autocratic one.
But there was another side to Mr. Swift’s quest, as revealed in interviews with his colleagues and a memoir he published online under a pseudonym. Mr. Swift was part of a large group who spent years fighting America’s war on terror and have struggled to settle back into civilian life.
The military has acknowledged the impact on servicemembers and their families, particularly special forces, who suffered the outsized casualties during the later years of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Long deployments have pushed up divorce rates, while suicides among special forces spiked to the highest in the military. The government has launched programs to help lessen the psychological burden on spouses as well as troops.
Daniel Glenn, a psychologist who works with veterans at the University of California, Los Angeles, said many tell him that the U.S. military does a great job preparing them to go to war, but not to return from it.
“They’ve been in some of the most intense, dangerous, awful situations. They’re really good at that,” he said. “Comparatively, back in the civilian world, everything feels mundane. It’s hard to have anything that feels like a rush or makes you feel alive.”
Daniel Swift serving in Severodonetsk, Ukraine.
Many of the men who fought with Mr. Swift said this feeling was part of what drew them to Ukraine.
“A lot of people won’t admit it, but lots of people are here because war is fun,” said a 43-year-old U.S. Army veteran. Civilian life, he added, didn’t offer the same camaraderie or sense of purpose: “War is easy in many ways. Your mission is crystal clear. You’re here to take the enemy out.”
‘Viet Dan’
Mr. Swift had wanted to be a Navy SEAL since childhood. After graduating from high school in rural Oregon in 2005, he married his high-school sweetheart and enlisted in the Navy.
Two years later, he enrolled in the SEALs selection program, a grueling process highlighted by “Hell Week,” when candidates train physically for more than 20 hours a day, run more than 200 miles and sleep for about four hours total.
The vast majority of candidates wash out. Mr. Swift, just 20 years old, made it. Soon after, his wife gave birth to their first child.
A teetotaler, Mr. Swift sometimes drove fellow SEALs on bar crawls, though he often stayed in and studied tactics in military manuals.
On deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he won a reputation for dependability, a rare Legion of Merit award and a nickname, “Viet Dan,” inspired by his fondness for action.
“Tough kid, humble, quiet, and a little bit crazy,” said a SEAL who was the third in command of Mr. Swift’s first platoon.
In 2013, when his wife was pregnant with their fourth child, Mr. Swift decided to quit. “I thought maybe God was trying to tell me to settle down and be a family man,” he wrote in his memoir, which he self-published in 2020.
He joined the Washington state police and reveled in time off with his kids, exploring logging roads through the woods, cooking hot dogs and shooting guns.
The new job didn’t suit him, though. Police officers were rewarded for giving out tickets rather than helping people, he wrote in his book. Sitting in his cruiser scanning for speeders, Mr. Swift texted friends in the SEALs and told them he missed life among them, according to Navy comrades.
In 2015, a friend from the SEALs died, and Mr. Swift decided to re-enlist as a fight with Islamic State beckoned. “I wanted my piece of the pie,” he wrote.
In Iraq again, Mr. Swift took on Islamic State militants in city streets. Later, he deployed to Yemen.
Navy SEAL candidates train during ‘Hell Week.’ PHOTO: PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS ABE MCNATT/U.S. NAVY
Most candidates wash out of the SEALs selection program. PHOTO: PETTY OFFICER 1ST CLASS ABE MCNATT/U.S. NAVY
The overseas missions took a toll on his marriage. In October 2018, shortly after Mr. Swift returned from seven months in Yemen, his relationship with his wife collapsed.
In court documents, Maegan Swift said he’d returned home angry, prone to yelling at her. He disputed this account in his book, but both agreed that one night when they were arguing at home, she threatened to call the police if he prevented her from leaving with the kids.
Mr. Swift went to the bedroom and returned with a pistol.
He said in the book that it was unloaded and that he told her: “See what happens when the cops try and take my children from me.”
Ms. Swift moved the children to her sister’s house while Mr. Swift was traveling. When he returned, a scuffle ensued as he tried to put his younger daughter in his car and Ms. Swift and her sister tried to stop him. Mr. Swift said he was fending off the women as they attacked him; they said he choked Ms. Swift’s sister. The police arrived and arrested him.
Ms. Swift declined to comment for this article.
A Navy psychologist said Mr. Swift had adjustment disorder, a term for difficulty re-entering civilian life, Mr. Swift wrote in his memoir. He dismissed the diagnosis.
Mr. Swift was charged in state court with false imprisonment, child endangerment and domestic battery, which threatened his military career. If convicted of a felony, Mr. Swift would lose his right to carry a gun, and this prospect shook him, according to SEALs who knew him. Being a warrior was nearly all he’d known.
Most of all, he worried about losing his kids, the oldest of whom was the oldest of whom was 11.
Mr. Swift wrote that while the U.S. government has helped veterans cope with war trauma, “what we don’t seem to care about is when they return home to things they’ve been fighting for, only to have them ripped away.”
“I have been face to face with death multiple times, and it has never been more traumatic than having my children taken away,” he wrote.
In the early months of 2019, Mr. Swift disappeared. His passport pinged at immigration control in Mexico, then in Germany, a former SEAL colleague said.
Mr. Swift tried to join the French Foreign Legion, according to another SEAL colleague, but was rejected because the recruiters worried his kids could be a distraction. He ended up in Thailand where he fought kickboxing matches and taught English.
He wrote his memoir, he said, to explain himself to his children. “If you ever want to talk to me just make a Facebook page,” he wrote, addressing his kids. “I look.”
He titled the book “The Fall of a Man.”
No retreat
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February of last year, news reports of the war’s child victims reminded Mr. Swift of his own children and stirred him to action, he later told friends.
He entered Ukraine in early March and joined a platoon running missions behind enemy lines near Kyiv, according to soldiers who fought with him there.
During his first operations, he taped body armor to his chest under a white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt because he arrived without a vest to hold bulletproof plates. His teammates called it the “Dan special.”
Conducting reconnaissance and hunting armored vehicles with a Javelin antitank missile, he soon developed a reputation as highly skilled, methodical and most comfortable in the middle of a firefight, according to men who fought with him.
Adam Thiemann, a former U.S. Army Ranger, recalled one mission, where he and Mr. Swift set off with five others to ambush a Russian barrack. Outside the compound, they surprised a handful of uniformed Russian soldiers and quickly killed them. The Ukrainian commander ordered a retreat. Mr. Swift, who’d been quiet up to that point, was incredulous.
“Retreat?” Mr. Swift said, according to Mr. Thiemann and another team member. “We didn’t even get shot at.”
When Russian troops pulled back from Kyiv at the end of March, many foreign fighters went home, feeling they’d helped fend off the existential threat to Ukraine. Mr. Swift stayed.
His foreign legion team—a unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence, made up of about 20 foreigners and a Ukrainian commander—was dispatched to the city of Mykolaiv in the country’s south.
There, Mr. Swift led the squad on aquatic missions, often using inflatable boats to travel across open sea at night to target Russian positions, according to several soldiers in his unit.
During down time, teammates said, he was quiet and uncommonly disciplined. He didn’t drink or smoke, and worked out obsessively. Even near the front, he’d go out for long solo runs.
Men fighting with Mr. Swift in Ukraine said he would accompany them for shawarma in Mykolaiv, walking around shirtless in jeans and sandals and getting waitresses’ phone numbers. In photos, he rarely smiled; he was more likely to crack a joke during missions, they said.
He told only a few comrades about his life outside the military.
One teammate, a 29-year-old American who goes by the call sign Tex, said Mr. Swift confided in him about his troubles at home.
“He loved his kids,” Tex said. “A lot of things didn’t bother Dan. But the thought of his kids maybe being told who he was and not actually knowing him, that worried him.”
Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern city of Bakhmut in January. PHOTO: EMANUELE SATOLLI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In early June, the team headed to the eastern city of Severodonetsk, which the Russians were flattening with artillery.
The group had earned a reputation for taking on missions that others turned down. As the situation in Severodonetsk grew worse, Mr. Swift joked that if they were surrounded, at least they could shoot in every direction.
On its last trip into the city, the team tried to hit a building where they believed about 10 Russians were hiding. As soon as they fired the first rocket, however, they found themselves under heavy assault. Dozens of Russians were in the building. Mr. Swift ended up trapped in a corner, trading machine-gun fire with a Russian.
The legion team’s Ukrainian commander, Oleksiy Chubashev, was shot through the neck.
With a Russian tank approaching, Mr. Swift laid down covering fire to free a group of pinned-down comrades, who put Capt. Chubashev on a stretcher and carried him out the back of the building.
Mr. Swift joined them outside to help carry the stretcher. A video seen by The Wall Street Journal shows them hauling the body through the city in daylight, without cover, while artillery shells whistle and crash around them.
After about a half a mile in the June heat, an exhausted young soldier dropped his corner of the stretcher.
“Dan just tore into him,” a member of the team from Minnesota recalled. “He never yells. But he screamed, like, ‘What are you saving your energy for?’ ”
Capt. Chubashev died before making it back to base.
The next morning, Mr. Swift sat down beside several teammates who were drinking coffee. He said he was thinking about calling his children.
The men were shocked. They didn’t know he had kids.
Soon after, Ukrainian forces started to retreat from Severodonetsk. Several of the men on Mr. Swift’s team decided they’d had enough. They went home.
‘I’ll walk out’
Mr. Swift, by contrast, began setting up for life in Ukraine. He was looking for an apartment in Kyiv and sorted out a Ukrainian visa for a Thai woman he’d met when he was living there. He spoke of establishing an academy in Ukraine after the war to teach military tactics.
He returned to Mykolaiv, where he again led aquatic missions into Russian-held territory.
In August, Mr. Swift led an attack on a Russian-held village across the Inhulets River. Working with Ukrainian special forces, the team forced the Russians to retreat, calling in a strike on a house full of enemy soldiers and taking seven prisoners.
But they ended up sheltering in a basement under Russian artillery fire. Mr. Swift called the unit’s new Ukrainian commander, asking to pull back, according to team members. The commander said no.
Mr. Swift pulled the team out anyway. In the middle of the night, he and the team medic swam upriver to retrieve a half-inflated boat to bring their comrades and gear back across to Ukrainian-held territory. When they got back to the base, Mr. Swift quit and moved to another foreign legion team.
A spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign legion declined to comment.
By the new year, Ukraine’s hold on Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, was tenuous. Mr. Swift’s unit, dispatched there, found Ukrainian troops scattered in basements around the city sheltering from withering Russian artillery fire.
“I’m just here in the basement,” Mr. Swift said in a phone call with a former Green Beret, who’d fought with him earlier in the war. “Trying to plan missions that are not going to get us killed.”
Mr. Swift was scheduled to leave Bakhmut later in January and planned to meet the Thai woman in Romania and bring her to Kyiv.
On the night of Jan. 17, Mr. Swift led a small team of Western fighters into a cluster of homes and began clearing them of fighters from the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, according to Mr. Swift’s unit commander. As Mr. Swift led his squad between buildings, a Russian soldier fired a rocket-propelled grenade.
A projectile, either shrapnel or a bullet, penetrated Mr. Swift’s helmet and lodged in his brain.
His commander found Mr. Swift lying prone, yet coherent. As the unit hurried to evacuate, Mr. Swift fought to remain lucid and asked for help getting to his feet. “I’ll walk out,” he said.
He lost consciousness and died three days later at a trauma center in Dnipro, a nearby regional capital. He was 35 years old.
A memorial service for Daniel Swift in Lviv, Ukraine. PHOTO: STANISLAV IVANOV/GLOBAL IMAGES UKRAINE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Swift died while still a SEAL, though AWOL, in a war to which the U.S. hasn’t committed troops. This has complicated his family’s effort to collect benefits from Washington.
A Navy spokesman said Mr. Swift was considered to be an active deserter at the time of his death, and that “we cannot speculate as to why the former Sailor was in Ukraine.” The Pentagon has yet to make a ruling on the family’s petition.
On Feb. 11, several SEALs attended Mr. Swift’s funeral in Oregon. In a video viewed by the Journal, one by one they punched metal SEAL pins into the surface of his casket, a SEAL ritual to the fallen.
Nikita Nikolaienko contributed to this article.
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South Africa supplying Russia War Effort
A Russian ship, the Lady R, docked at South Africa’s Simon’s Town naval base outside Cape Town in December. PHOTO: ESA ALEXANDER/REUTERS
JOHANNESBURG—South Africa supplied weapons and ammunition to Russia with the help of a Russian cargo ship that surreptitiously docked at the country’s largest naval base in December, the U.S. ambassador to South Africa said in a briefing with local journalists on Thursday.
The comments from Ambassador Reuben E. Brigety II were reported by local media outlets and confirmed by a person present at the briefing. They are bound to further complicate the relationship between the U.S. and South Africa, a country that has officially pledged neutrality on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that Washington and Europe have tried to draw closer to the Western alliance against Moscow.
Now, the U.S. and its Western allies will have to decide whether to place sanctions on South African officials and entities involved in the alleged supply of potential war materials to Russia and risk alienating Africa’s most developed economy and one of its most established democracies.
“Among the things we noted was the docking of the cargo ship in the Simon’s Town naval base between 6th to 8th December, 2022, which we are confident uploaded weapons and ammunition onto that vessel in Simon’s Town as it made its way back to Russia,” Mr. Brigety, the ambassador, was quoted saying on online news site News24.
“The arming of the Russians is extremely serious, and we do not consider this issue to be resolved, and we would like SA to [start] practicing its nonalignment policy,” he said, according to the news site.
A spokesman for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the government would launch an inquiry into the matter, led by a retired judge, but added that the U.S. had provided no evidence for its ambassador’s allegations.
“The ambassador’s remarks undermine the spirit of cooperation and partnership that characterized the recent engagements between U.S. government officials and a South African official delegation,” the spokesman said in a statement.
South Africa’s defense minister, Thandi Modise, has previously declined to say what the Russian ship, the Lady R, had picked up in South Africa when it docked at the Simon’s Town naval base just outside Cape Town between Dec. 6 and Dec. 9 while its transponders were turned off.
“Whatever contents this vessel was getting were ordered long before Covid,” Ms. Modise said at a December media briefing, adding that the U.S. “threatens Africa, not just South Africa, of having anything that is even smelling of Russia.”
The U.S. State Department declined to discuss the alleged weapons transfers and whether it planned to sanction anyone who would have been involved.
“We have serious concerns about the docking of a sanctioned Russian vessel at a South African naval port in December of last year,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said in response to reporters’ questions Thursday.
Mr. Patel said that American officials have raised their concerns directly with multiple South African officials and that Washington remains committed to the “affirmative agenda of our bilateral relationship with South Africa.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose spokesman said a retired judge would lead an inquiry into the alleged weapons transfers to Russia. PHOTO: THEMBA HADEBE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The U.S. had already sanctioned the Lady R and its owner, MG-FLOT, based in Dagestan, Russia, in May 2022 for allegedly carrying weapons on behalf of Moscow.
MG-FLOT, which previously used the name Transmorflot, didn’t respond to an email sent to addresses listed online seeking comment. The press attaché for the Russian Embassy in Pretoria couldn’t be reached for comment.
The Wall Street Journal reported in January that the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria had alerted the South African government to the fact that the Lady R was under sanctions before it docked at the Simon’s Town base, but received no response.
Vessel-tracking services indicate that the Lady R switched off its automatic transponders, which relay a ship’s identity and position to other vessels and maritime authorities, on Dec. 6. Two South African navy tugboats then helped it to a berth at the Simon’s Town base near Cape Town, according to witnesses.
Witnesses said they saw trucks with escort vehicles carrying shipping containers onto the base under the cover of darkness. One resident said she was chased down Simon’s Town’s empty streets after she tried to follow an empty truck leaving the base.
The Lady R left Simon’s Town the morning of Dec. 9. When the ship started transmitting a position again in the evening of that day, it was anchored more than 100 miles east of Simon’s Town, tracking services showed. According to tracking service ShipNext, the Lady R arrived in the Russian Black Sea city of Novorossiysk on Feb. 16, where it stayed for seven days.
John Steenhuisen, the leader of South Africa’s largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said the U.S. ambassador’s comments were “a chilling and deeply troubling confirmation that President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government are actively involved in the Russian Federation’s war on Ukraine.”
Benoit Faucon in London, Laurence Norman in Berlin and William Mauldin in Washington contributed to this article
————————————————————————————- Its nice to know who your REAL friends & Enemies are during this fight! Grumpy
Last year the Army awarded Vortex Optics the contract for the Next Generation Squad Weapon-Fire Control program to include the design and production of the XM157. The contract for the NGSW-FC includes a provision to build up to 250,000 XM157s during the next decade at a starting price of around $2.7 billion. While Vortex is obligated to meet the initial Army demand, they plan to sell to civilians as soon as they are contractually able to.
So what is the XM157 or the NGSW-FC? Well, the FC is the fire-control or XM157 optic system that will be used for the next-generation squad weapon. From the ground up, the XM157 is a 1-8x30mm optic that features Vortex’s revolutionary “Active Reticle®” technology. At its heart, it works just like a standard low-powered variable optic or LPVO, but encompassed in the housing is the fire-control system that sets this optic apart from everything else available today.
The XM157 is what many call a “smart scope” due to its integration of a digital display overlay, laser range finder, ballistics calculator, atmospheric sensors, compass, visible and infrared aiming lasers, and Intra-Soldier Wireless. However, the XM157 still works in a zero power state due to its core utilization of a standard 1-8x FFP optic with an etched reticle. This provides an analog image with a digital overlay for calculated holds.
This new optic will allow soldiers to quickly and accurately engage targets at a distance. While this new optic works great at 1X like other LPVO’s for close-quarters engagements, it is going to revolutionize how targets are engaged past a few hundred yards. With the press of a button, the XM157 will range a target and immediately display the appropriate hold in the reticle dependent upon the saved ballistics profile and the current atmospheric conditions. Simply aim at the target, and press a button either on the remote pressure pad or on the side of the scope itself.
Hands-on with the XM157
I was given the opportunity to get hands-on with the XM157 and it was quite impressive. After pressing the ranging button, it took less than a second to overlay the calculated drop in the display of the scope. I could range the furthest objects visible from where I was positioned hundreds of yards away even with the rain coming down.
The XM157 is factory set to display the wind holds for a 90-degree 10MPH crosswind on either side of the center aiming point. These overlayed points will account for any cant of the rifle from shooting at an angle as well. Twisting the rifle around while looking through the optic I was able to watch the displayed holds rotate around to give me a true impact location for rounds that would be fired.
The etched reticle provides useful information while not overcrowding the field of view. The glass clarity also looked great with edge-to-edge clarity. However, I was not allowed to take any pictures of my own, so you will just have to imagine it for yourself.
Another awesome feature is that the XM157 utilizes an Active Reticle® that is not dictated by fixed points on an etched reticle. Because it uses a display, the XM157 can overlay any desired information. As time goes on, and technology changes, newer software will be able to be downloaded to keep the XM157 up to date with the newest evolving threats.
Vortex incorporates two different enablers into the XM157, one of which had the rangefinder attached. They mentioned the ability to use a camera that could pair with the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System. This would allow the XM157 to link to helmet-mounted systems to allow the user to see through the scope without actually peering through the optic. Pairing with devices such as the IVAS would allow soldiers to shoot from behind cover while sticking their weapons around the corner and seeing through the optic via the wireless heads-up display.
Currently, this optic will still work with traditional PVS-24/30-night vision clip-on systems, but Vortex hinted at the ability to add a thermal overlay or other types of sensors to the XM157 to give more functionality at night.
While weight was not disclosed, the XM157 with the range finder removed felt slightly lighter than a Trijicon VCOG 1-6 with a Larue Tactical QD mount. It also felt slightly lighter with the range finder mounted than a RAPTAR sitting on top of a NightForce 1-8 in a Badger Ordnance mount.
I have heard people complain about how heavy this system looks, but when configured to match similar systems, it is very comparable, while being more effective. Incorporating a ballistics calculator into the display instead of a reading via a Wilcox RAPTAR mounted somewhere on the rifle is much quicker and seamless while simultaneously saving weight.
Embedded below is a great overview of the system and some first impressions from Mike actually shooting the system:
The future is now, and while the XM157 is mostly an assembly of existing technologies, the incorporation and implementation of all of these varying components make for an effective and lethal package. While I didn’t have the opportunity to shoot with this optic, I had the chance to get hands-on, and ranging targets was effortless. Vortex Optics is making some big waves with the XM157 and for good reason. Just like the ACOG revolutionized quick-effective engagement distances past a few hundred yards, the NGSW-FC is extending that distance even further while providing accurate holds for anything within the effective range of the NGSW platform.
———————————————————————————- As reported in Guns.com: “The 10-year contract… covers the production and delivery of up to 250,000 XM157 Next Generation Squad Weapons-Fire Control systems. The NGSW-FC will be the common sight for the Army’s new NGSW-Rifle, set to replace the M4 Carbine in front line service, and the NGSW-Automatic Rifle, the intended replacement for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon.
The contract minimum is set at $20 million, with a fantastic $2.7 billion maximum mentioned if all options are taken, pointing to a unit price for each NGSW-FC optic as being in the neighborhood of ****$10,800****.
However, it should be noted that, going past the sights themselves, the contract includes supporting accessories, contractor support, spare parts, repairs, and engineering efforts, likely pointing to a significantly lower per-unit cost than the basic math would imply.”
Grumpy – Now I am all for giving our Grunts stuff that will help them win the next firefight. But would’nt an Airstrike or a TOT from Arty be cheaper!?! TALK about rapeing and pillaging the American Tax Payer by the Military Industrial Complex!!!!!!!!!!!
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DIFFERENT WAR TACTICS WW1 & WW2
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Sink the Bismarck!
Sorry about the video Cluster F*ck & circle jerk! Grumpy