In the 100 years since Lenin’s coup in Russia, the ideology devoted to abolishing markets and private property has left a long, murderous trail of destruction

A century ago this week, communism took over the Russian empire, the world’s largest state at the time. Leftist movements of various sorts had been common in European politics long before the revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (which became Nov. 7 in the reformed Russian calendar), but Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were different. They were not merely fanatical in their convictions but flexible in their tactics—and fortunate in their opponents.
But a century of communism in power—with holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism.
Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since 1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina, Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers.
Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror—a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It has been widely imitated.
Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.

For these epic crimes, Lenin and Stalin bear personal responsibility, as do Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Kim dynasty in North Korea and any number of lesser communist tyrants. But we must not lose sight of the ideas that prompted these vicious men to kill on such a vast scale, or of the nationalist context in which they embraced these ideas.
Anti Capitalism was attractive to them in its own right, but it also served as an instrument, in their minds, for backward countries to leapfrog into the ranks of great powers.
The communist revolution may now be spent, but its centenary, as the great anticapitalist cause, still demands a proper reckoning.
In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated under pressure from his generals, who worried that bread marches and strikes in the capital of St. Petersburg were undermining the war effort against Germany and its allies.
The February Revolution, as these events became known, produced an unelected provisional government, which chose to rule without the elected parliament. Peasants began to seize the land, and soviets (or political councils) started to form among soldiers at the front, as had already happened among political groups in the cities.
That fall, as the war raged on, Lenin’s Bolsheviks undertook an armed insurrection involving probably no more than 10,000 people. They directed their coup not against the provisional government, which had long since become moribund, but against the main soviet in the capital, which was dominated by other, more moderate socialists.
The October Revolution began as a putsch by the radical left against the rest of the left, whose members denounced the Bolsheviks for violating all norms and then walked out of the soviet.
The Bolsheviks, like many of their rivals, were devotees of Karl Marx, who saw class struggle as the great engine of history.
What he called feudalism would give way to capitalism, which would be replaced in turn by socialism and, finally, the distant utopia of communism. Marx envisioned a new era of freedom and plenty, and its precondition was destroying the “wage slavery” and exploitation of capitalism.
As he and his collaborator Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, our theory “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
Once in power in early 1918, the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Communist Party as they sought to force-march Russia to socialism and, eventually, to history’s final stage. Millions set about trying to live in new ways.
No one, however, knew precisely what the new society was supposed to look like. “We cannot give a characterization of socialism,” Lenin conceded in March 1918. “What socialism will be like when it reaches its completed form we do not know, we cannot say.”
But one thing was clear to them: Socialism could not resemble capitalism. The regime would replace private property with collective property, markets with planning, and “bourgeois” parliaments with “people’s power.”
In practice, however, scientific planning was unattainable, as even some communists conceded at the time. As for collectivizing property, it empowered not the people but the state.
The process set in motion by the communists entailed the vast expansion of a secret-police apparatus to handle the arrest, internal deportation and execution of “class enemies.”
The dispossession of capitalists also enriched a new class of state functionaries, who gained control over the country’s wealth. All parties and points of view outside the official doctrine were repressed, eliminating politics as a corrective mechanism.
The declared goals of the revolution of 1917 were abundance and social justice, but the commitment to destroy capitalism gave rise to structures that made it impossible to attain those goals.
In urban areas, the Soviet regime was able to draw upon armed factory workers, eager recruits to the party and secret police, and on young people impatient to build a new world. In the countryside, however, the peasantry—some 120 million souls—had carried out their own revolution, deposing the gentry and establishing de facto peasant land ownership.

With the devastated country on the verge of famine, Lenin forced reluctant party cadres to accept the separate peasant revolution for the time being. In the countryside, over the objections of communist purists, a quasi-market economy was allowed to operate.
With Lenin’s death in 1924, this concession became Stalin’s problem. No more than 1% of the country’s arable land had been collectivized voluntarily by 1928.
By then, key factories were largely owned by the state, and the regime had committed to a five-year plan for industrialization. Revolutionaries fretted that the Soviet Union now had two incompatible systems—socialism in the city and capitalism in the village.
Stalin didn’t temporize. He imposed coercive collectivization from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even in the face of mass peasant rebellion.
He threatened party officials, telling them that if they were not serious about eradicating capitalism, they should be prepared to cede power to the rising rural bourgeoisie.
He incited class warfare against “kulaks” (better-off peasants) and anyone who defended them, imposing quotas for mass arrests and internal deportations.
Stalin was clear about his ideological rationale. “Could we develop agriculture in kulak fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms” as in “America and so on?” he asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet country. We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in industry, but in agriculture.”
And he never backtracked, even when, as a result of his policies, the country descended into yet another famine from 1931 to 1933. Forced collectivization during those few years would claim 5 to 7 million lives.
The Soviet Union’s awful precedent did nothing to deter other communist revolutionaries. Mao Zedong, a hard man like Stalin, had risen to the top of the Chinese movement and, in 1949, he and his comrades emerged as the victors in the Chinese civil war. Mao saw the colossal loss of life in the Soviet experiment as intrinsic to its success.

His Great Leap Forward, a violent campaign from 1958 to 1962, was an attempt to collectivize some 700 million Chinese peasants and to spread industry throughout the countryside. “Three years of hard work and suffering, and a thousand years of prosperity,” went one prominent slogan of the time.
Falsified reports of triumphal harvests and joyful peasants inundated the communist ruling elite’s well-provisioned compound in Beijing. In reality, Mao’s program resulted in one of history’s deadliest famines, claiming between 16 and 32 million victims.
After the catastrophe, referred to by survivors as the “communist wind,” Mao blocked calls for a retreat from collectivization. As he declared, “the peasants want ‘freedom,’ but we want socialism.”
Nor did this exhaust the repertoire of communist brutality in the name of overthrowing capitalism. With their conquest of Cambodia in 1975, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge drove millions from the country’s cities into the countryside to work on collectives and forced-labor projects. They sought to remake Cambodia as a classless, solely agrarian society.
The Khmer Rouge abolished money, banned commercial fishing and persecuted Buddhists, Muslims and the country’s ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese minorities as “infiltrators.” Pol Pot’s regime also seized children to pre-empt ideological infection from “capitalist” parents.
All told, perhaps as many as 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the population, perished as a result of starvation, disease and mass executions during the four nightmarish years of Pol Pot’s rule. In some regions, skulls could be found in every pond.
Marx’s class analysis denied legitimacy to any political opposition, not just from “bourgeois” elements but from within communist movements themselves—because dissenters “objectively” served the interests of the international capitalist order. The relentless logic of anticapitalist revolution pointed to a single leader atop a single-party system.

From Russia and China to Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba, communist dictators have shared key traits. All have conformed, more or less, to the Leninist type: a fusion of militant ideologue and unprincipled intriguer. And all have possessed an extreme willpower—the prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could bring.
Communism was hardly alone over the past century in committing grand carnage. Nazism’s repression and wars of racial extermination killed at least 40 million people, and during the Cold War, anticommunism spurred paroxysms of grotesque violence in Indonesia, Latin America and elsewhere.
But as evidence of communism’s horrors emerged over the decades, it rightly shocked liberals and leftists in the West, who shared many of the egalitarian aims of the revolutionaries.
Some repudiated the Soviet Union as a deformation of socialism, attributing the regime’s crimes to the backwardness of Russia or the peculiarities of Lenin and Stalin.
After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder or Gulag labor camps. Nowhere did he argue that the secret police, deportation by cattle car and mass death from starvation should be used to establish collective farms.
But if we’ve learned one lesson from the communist century, it is this: That to implement Marxist ideals is to betray them. Marx’s demand to “abolish private property” was a clarion call to action—and an inexorable path to the creation of an oppressive, unchecked state.
A few socialists began to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property.
When they made their peace with the existence of capitalism, hoping to regulate rather than to abolish it, they initially elicited denunciations as apostates.
Over time, more socialists embraced the welfare state, or the market economy with redistribution. But the siren call to transcend capitalism persists among some on the left.
It also remains alive, though hardly in orthodox Marxist fashion, in Russia and China, the great redoubts of the communist century.
Both countries continue to distrust what is perhaps most important about free markets and private property: Their capacity to give independence of action and thought to ordinary people, pursuing their own interests as they see fit, in private life, civil society and the political sphere.
But anti capitalism also served as a program for an alternative world order, one in which long-suppressed nationalist aims might be realized. For Stalin and Mao, heirs to proud ancient civilizations, Europe and the U.S. represented the allure and threat of a superior West.
The communists set themselves the task of matching and overtaking their capitalist rivals and winning a central place for their own countries on the international stage.
This revolutionary struggle allowed Russia to satisfy its centuries-old sense of a special mission in the world, while it gave China a claim to be, once again, the Middle Kingdom.
Vladimir Putin’s resistance to the West, with his peculiar mix of Soviet nostalgia and Russian Orthodox revival, builds on Stalin’s precedent.
For its part, of course, China remains the last communist giant, even as Beijing promotes and tries to control a mostly market economy. Under Xi Jinping, the country now embraces both communist ideology and traditional Chinese culture in a drive to raise its standing as an alternative to the West.
Communism’s bloody century has come to an end, and we can only celebrate its passing. But troubling aspects of its legacy endure.
Mr. Kotkin is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. His latest book, “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” was published last month by Penguin Press.
Appeared in the November 4, 2017, print edition as ‘the communist century by Stephen Kotkin.’
by Paul Helinski
Colt Firearms
http://www.colt.com
Colt’s Manufacturing has a long history of working with other gun companies for Colt-branded bolt action rifles. The Colt Sauer rifle was produced by J.P. Sauer & Son in Germany from 1973 to 1984, and the 27,189 rifles that came out of it are still highly sought after by collectors. These days, Colt has updated its game with an American company called Cooper Firearms of Montana. Cooper was started in 1990 by ex-Kimber employees and has beena staple in the custom rifle market for more than two decades. The first Colt/Cooper came out a couple years back, called the M2012. They still make it today, and as you can see from the picture here, it looks like what it is, a high-end tactical rifle meant to look tactical. Since the introduction of the M2012, a lot of high-end shooters, especially ex-military snipers, have said that they would love a Cooper rifle that says Colt on the side (who wouldn’t?), but that what they would have in mind was something more along the lines of a US Army issue M24 or USMC M40. Colt, and Cooper, have listened, and the result is a whole new version of the M2012 that more resembles those rifles, while sacrificing nothing in performance. These rifles aren’t cheap. Our test gun as you see it here retails for $3,195. But as you will see, it is well within the world class division when it comes to bolt guns. If you are a Colt fan who just loves to see that name on the side of your gun, like back in the old Sauer days, or you are just in the market for an extremely thoughtful and well-made long range rifle, look no further than the new Colt Model 2012.
Colt sent us the M2012MT308T, which if you decode it, means Model 2012, from Montana, in .308, with a T stock, whatever T means. The stock is made by Manners from aircraft-grade carbon fiber and fiberglass, making the stock much lighter than your standard solid polymer of the same look and feel. Our test rifle weighs barely over 10 lbs. without the scope. This tan-stocked model only comes in .308 Winchester, but the laminate-stock hunting rifle (the G model) also comes in .260 Remington, a favorite among long range varmint hunters right up to whitetails. The laminate-stock models are also a pound and a half lighter at 8.5 lbs. due to a slightly less heavy barrel, built for carrying in the field. All of the guns come with a single stage Timney adjustable trigger set at about 3 lbs., and all have 22” button-rifled barrels. The .308 guns have a 1/10 twist and the .260 is a 1/8. Our gun (and yes it is ours because we are buying it) has a stainless fluted barrel, as does the original M2012, and the laminate guns have a blued chome-moly steel fluted barrel. A five-round box magazine is included, and 10-rounders are available. The length of pull on our test rifle is 13 3/4” from the front of the trigger to the absolute back of the recoil pad. An optics rail comes mounted on the top of the receiver.
![]() |
Our best ammo with the gun was Hornady Superformance 150gr. GMX. It isn’t as good as the test target, but with a casual shooter and factory ammo, not so bad. |
Accuracy, or more of a correct term is precision, is of course what these guns are about. Our gun came with a hand-signed and laminated test target showing a three-shot group of .319 center to center. The bullet itself is .308. That should give you an idea of how precise your shooting can be with the right load and the right shooter. The test group was shot with a custom handload using a Sierra MatchKing 168 grain bullet and IMR 4064 powder, and it reflects the fact that few true long range accuracy shooters are using factory ammo. I don’t know if you call Cooper that they will tell you exactly how many grains of 4064 they use and the seating depth, but they might! The point is that you will eventually work up your own loads to shoot in the gun, and that these results are possible based purely on the precision manufacturing of the Colt/Cooper.
We tested the rifle with Hornady American Whitetail 150gr. lead-tipped deer hunting ammo and Hornady Superformance in the same weight, but with the 150 Hornady GMX bullet. My groups came in at .654” and .543” respectively. It would have been a shock if these groups were anywhere near as good as those shot by Cooper’s professional shooter using tuned handloads, and he used a 36x Leupold as compared to our 24x NightForce. Nonetheless, not bad! This rifle is a keeper and we’re keeping it.
![]() |
The only problem that I had with the gun was this spear that sticks out the end of the bolt. If you hold your thumb there, it’ll ouch it! |
As you can see from the pictures, the fit and finish on this rifle are flawless. The three lug bolt is as smooth as butter (without actually having to lube it with butter, or anything else), and the compensator on the front can be taken off to put on a suppressor. I personally am not a big fan of the fluted barrel look, but when in Rome… Fluted barrels are very popular in the high-end rifle community. I also would have preferred that the barrel be blued instead of the silver stainless color. It would make the rifle more homogenous and at unity with itself. (That last comment was for our new ex-hippy gun owners who have finally seen the light). The Timney trigger is crisp and light with zero creep, and there is really little else to say about the Colt M2012 except go buy one while the serial numbers are still low. It is a superb firearm, and while there is more to red-blooded American liberty loving life than an AR-15, it is always awesome when the side of the gun says Colt.
Bid on One of 13 Limited Edition Desert Eagles to Benefit the Foundation of Fallen Benghazi Hero Glen ‘Bub’ Doherty
Here’s your chance to participate in something truly special. Right now on GunsAmerica you can bid on one of 13 limited edition Desert Eagles to benefit the Glen “Bub” Doherty Foundation.
Glen, or as he was known by close friends and family “Bub,” Doherty was one of four Americans killed during the 2012 Benghazi attack. A former Navy SEAL sniper and combat medic, Doherty served in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the Global War on Terror.
The auction on GunsAmerica is part of a larger effort to support veterans spearheaded by Magnum Research, a subsidiary of Kahr Firearms Group and manufacturer of the iconic Desert Eagle, and author John “Tig” Tiegen.
***CLICK HERE TO BID NOW***
Tiegen co-wrote the book,“13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi.” In keeping with the theme of the book, Magnum Research and Tiegen decided to auction off 13 limited edition “13 Hours” Desert Eagles.
All the proceeds from each gun are being donated to different veterans charities across the U.S. (See the complete list of charities below). The one up for auction on GunsAmerica is numbered “4 of 13.” We’re calling it Bub’s Desert Eagle because the money raised will go to his foundation.
Like the rest of the “13 Hours” Desert Eagles, Bub’s Desert Eagle is chambered in .50 AE, sports a Kryptek Typhon pattern and is engraved with Tiegen’s logo and signature.
The grip of the gun features a Beyond the Battlefield Logo on one side, which is Tiegen’s personal foundation, and the Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation logo on the other side.
The auction is now live and runs until Veterans Day. Bub’s sister Kate specifically chose Veterans Day to honor Bub and every other hero who made the ultimate price serving our country.
To place a bid and to learn more about the gun, click here. Good luck and happy bidding.
Beyond The Battlefield The Tiegen Foundation
Beyond the Battlefield The Tiegen Foundation® is a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization dedicated to Our Wounded Veterans. Our mission is to provide support for Wounded Veterans as they face the many challenges encountered during their rehabilitation, reintegration and healing process. Often when our veterans return from their tour of service, the tolls of war have been too great to bear alone.
Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation
The Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation has been established to ease the transition from military life and work to that of a civilian by helping fund educational costs for Special Operation individuals and their children. We do this knowing Glen’s spirit will continue to touch us all.
The Charities Benefiting from the “13 Hours” Desert Eagles
Tyrone Woods Wrestling Foundation
The Journey Home Project
Wishes for Warriors
Valor Clinic
The Reveille Project
Halo For Freedom
Vacations For Warriors
Hunts for Healing
Salute Heroes
American Military Family
American Valor Foundation
Now sadly I have come to the conclusion after reading this article below. Is that it is steel on target on.
Since it seems to me that if we had a Eisenhower, Patton, Smedley Butler or a Chesty Puller in charge of our troops over in the Sandbox.
Then we would have of had a Victory Parade down Pennsylvania Ave with the troops several years ago.
I just hope that a lot more high powered folks than I. Have read this article below.
YOUR FAVORITE ARMY GENERAL ACTUALLY SUCKS

THE U.S. ARMY only seems impressive. Yes, it’s got plenty of tactically competent and physically heroic enlisted soldiers and low-ranking officers. But its generals are, on the whole, crappy, according to a new book that’s sure to spark teeth-gnashing within the Army.
That book is The Generals, the third book about the post-9/11 military by Tom Ricks, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the *Washington Post’*s former chief military correspondent. Scheduled to be released on Tuesday, The Generals is a surprisingly scathing historical look into the unmaking of American generalship over six decades, culminating in what Ricks perceives as catastrophic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The basic problem is that no one gets fired. Ricks points back to a system that the revered General George Marshall put into place during World War II: unsuccessful officers – defined very, very liberally – were rapidly sacked, especially on the front lines of Europe. Just as importantly, though, getting relieved of command didn’t end a general’s career. Brig. Gen. “Hanging Sam” Williams, was removed as the assistant commander of the 90th Infantry Division in western France in 1944 for lacking “optimism and a calming nature” in the view of his superior. Six years later, Williams commanded the 25th Infantry Division in Korea and retired as a three-star. Marshall’s approach simultaneously held generals accountable for battlefield failures while avoiding a zero-defect culture that stifled experimentation.
Over the course of six decades, Ricks demonstrates at length, the Army abandoned Marshall’s system. It led to a culture of generalship where generals protected the Army from humiliation – including, in an infamous case, Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster covering up the massacre of civilians at My Lai – more than they focused on winning wars. On the eve of Vietnam, “becoming a general was now akin to winning a tenured professorship,” Ricks writes, “liable to be removed not for professional failure but only for embarrassing one’s institution with moral lapses.”
It’s not an airtight case. Ricks is sometimes at pains to explain why good generals who probably should have been fired under Marshall weren’t (George Patton) or why adaptive generals later on weren’t driven out of the Army (David Petraeus). And it’s overstated to blame dumb wars on dumb generals. But the fact is, the Army almost never fires generals for cause, unlike the Navy, to the point where a lieutenant colonel famously wrote in frustration during the Iraq war that a private who loses a rifle is more likely to be disciplined than a general who loses a war.
Ricks explains how it got to be that way. And it’s something the Army has to reckon with as it deals with its future now that its decade of perpetual warfare is ending, and ending inconclusively. He spoke with Danger Room right before The Generals dropped its bomb on the Army.
Danger Room: So how poor are today’s Army generals? What percentage of them would you say need to be fired outright? Is the public wrong for seeing the Army as an uber-competent institution, a learning organization and a meritocracy?
Tom Ricks: The U.S. Army is a great institution – tactically. Our soldiers today are well-trained, well-motivated, cohesive, and fairly well equipped.
But training is for the known. For the unknown, education is required. You need to teach your senior leaders how to address problems full of uncertainty and ambiguity, and from them, fashion a strategy. And then be able to tell whether it is working, and to adjust if it isn’t.

Our generals today are not particularly well-educated in strategy. Exhibit A is Tommy Franks, who thought it was a good idea to push Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda from Afghanistan into Pakistan, a larger country that also possesses nuclear weapons. Franks also thought that he had won when he took the enemy’s capital in Afghanistan and Iraq — when in fact that is when the wars really began.
When generals don’t know what to do strategically, they tend to regress back down to what they know, which is tactical. That’s one reason why in Vietnam you saw colonels and generals hovering over company commanders giving orders. It is also why our generals were so slow to adapt in Iraq. By the time they became operationally effective, it was 2007, and we had been fighting in Iraq for nearly four years, longer than we had during all of World War II.
What percentage of them need to be fired? All those who fail. That is how George Marshall ran the Army during World War II. Failures were sacked, which is why no one knows nowadays who Lloyd Fredendall was. Successful generals were promoted – which is why why we know names of younger officers of the time such as Eisenhower, Ridgway and Gavin. This was a tough-minded, Darwinian system that reinforced success. Mediocre wasn’t enough back then. It is now, apparently. Back in World War II, a certain percentage of generals were expected to be fired. It was seen as a sign that the system was working as expected.
DR: How would George Marshall’s system of relieving failing generals and placing them in remedial positions work today? Wouldn’t a relief inevitably be seen as an irredeemable black mark?
TR: Relief today is indeed a black mark. The system only works if relief is so frequent that it isn’t seen as a career-ender. Of the 155 men who commanded Army divisions in combat during World War II, 16 were fired. Of those, five were given other divisions to command in combat later in the war. Many others who were fired got good staff jobs, or trained divisions back home.
That said, Marshall was pretty hardnosed about this. He didn’t run the Army for the benefit of its officers. In a war for democracy, he wrote, the needs of the enlisted came first. He believed that the Army owed its soldiers competent leadership. That was not the case with the Army in Vietnam, where officers were rotated in quickly to get some time in combat command and then rotated out.
DR: Isn’t it too simplistic to blame bad generalship for lost wars and good generalship for successful ones? Tommy Franks may have been “dull and arrogant,” as you write, but he didn’t decide to invade Iraq; David Petraeus may have been his polar opposite, but Afghanistan is in shambles.
TR: Yes, it would be too simplistic. That’s why the major second theme of the book is the need for good discourse between our top generals and their civilian overseers.
By good discourse, I don’t mean everyone getting along. I mean dialogue that welcomes candor, honesty, and clarity, and is guided so it does two key things: explore assumptions and dig into differences. For example, the Vietnam War was guided on the assumption that the enemy had a breaking point and that it would come before ours. Turns out that was wrong. Likewise, the 1991 Gulf War was run on the assumption that giving Saddam Hussein a good thumping would remove him from power. Didn’t happen.
I came away from the book thinking that the quality of civil-military discourse is one of the few leading indicators you have of how well a war will go. George Marshall was not the natural choice for Army chief of staff (Hugh Drum probably was) but FDR picked him in part because Marshall twice had stood up to Roosevelt in the Oval Office, respectfully but forcefully dissenting on key military issues.
DR: Isn’t relieving generals when they’re generals too late? Why shouldn’t the relieves and reassignments you describe in the book come earlier in their tenures as officers? Or can you really teach a general new tricks?
TR: Yes. And yes – if generals see that getting promoted requires some prudent risk-taking, some adaptation, they will do so and learn those tricks. But they won’t if they see that cautious mediocrity is rewarded equally.
DR: Can you make up your mind about Gen. Ray Odierno already? He was a villain in your first book about the Iraq war, a hero in your second, and now he’s a villain again, for giving one of his subordinate commanders a slap on the wrist for obstructing an inquiry into his soldiers’ abuse of Iraqis. Is Odierno fit to serve as Army chief of staff?
DR: I am of two minds about Gen. Odierno. I do think he screwed up when he commanded the 4th Infantry Division early in the Iraq war. But the bottom line is he adapted. You got to learn to live with a little ambiguity, Spencer!
DR: You write that “It seems a good bet that there will not be a ‘Petraeus generation’ of generals.” I took that to mean a more competent and far-sighted general officer corps, but you might also have meant one steeped in counterinsurgency. If you mean the former, why shouldn’t we expect one, since Petraeus remains a remarkably influential figure in the Army even to soldiers who never served under him? If you mean the latter, why is that something to lament? There’s an argument to be made that one of the reasons Afghanistan remains a mess is because the Army and Marines drank the counterinsurgency Kool-Aid too deeply.
TR: Nah, I mean competent, adaptive generals. But one aspect of being adaptive is being able to think critically. I think COIN worked for Petraeus during the surge, but it was a very tough-minded, violent COIN strategy. And it involved risk-taking – like Petraeus striking a private ceasefire with the Sunni insurgents and putting 100,000 of them on the American payroll, and doing it all without asking permission from President Bush.
An aside on COIN: It was in fashion a few years ago. It is out of fashion now. But we shouldn’t fight our wars based on what the cool kids think. We should use what works, and be willing to try other things if what we try doesn’t work. That’s my gripe with Petraeus’ predecessor in Iraq, George Casey [who later became Army chief of staff].
THE U.S. ARMY only seems impressive. Yes, it’s got plenty of tactically competent and physically heroic enlisted soldiers and low-ranking officers. But its generals are, on the whole, crappy, according to a new book that’s sure to spark teeth-gnashing within the Army.
That book is The Generals, the third book about the post-9/11 military by Tom Ricks, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the *Washington Post’*s former chief military correspondent. Scheduled to be released on Tuesday, The Generals is a surprisingly scathing historical look into the unmaking of American generalship over six decades, culminating in what Ricks perceives as catastrophic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The basic problem is that no one gets fired. Ricks points back to a system that the revered General George Marshall put into place during World War II: unsuccessful officers – defined very, very liberally – were rapidly sacked, especially on the front lines of Europe. Just as importantly, though, getting relieved of command didn’t end a general’s career. Brig. Gen. “Hanging Sam” Williams, was removed as the assistant commander of the 90th Infantry Division in western France in 1944 for lacking “optimism and a calming nature” in the view of his superior. Six years later, Williams commanded the 25th Infantry Division in Korea and retired as a three-star. Marshall’s approach simultaneously held generals accountable for battlefield failures while avoiding a zero-defect culture that stifled experimentation.
Over the course of six decades, Ricks demonstrates at length, the Army abandoned Marshall’s system. It led to a culture of generalship where generals protected the Army from humiliation – including, in an infamous case, Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster covering up the massacre of civilians at My Lai – more than they focused on winning wars. On the eve of Vietnam, “becoming a general was now akin to winning a tenured professorship,” Ricks writes, “liable to be removed not for professional failure but only for embarrassing one’s institution with moral lapses.”
It’s not an airtight case. Ricks is sometimes at pains to explain why good generals who probably should have been fired under Marshall weren’t (George Patton) or why adaptive generals later on weren’t driven out of the Army (David Petraeus). And it’s overstated to blame dumb wars on dumb generals. But the fact is, the Army almost never fires generals for cause, unlike the Navy, to the point where a lieutenant colonel famously wrote in frustration during the Iraq war that a private who loses a rifle is more likely to be disciplined than a general who loses a war.
Ricks explains how it got to be that way. And it’s something the Army has to reckon with as it deals with its future now that its decade of perpetual warfare is ending, and ending inconclusively. He spoke with Danger Room right before The Generals dropped its bomb on the Army.
Danger Room: So how poor are today’s Army generals? What percentage of them would you say need to be fired outright? Is the public wrong for seeing the Army as an uber-competent institution, a learning organization and a meritocracy?
Tom Ricks: The U.S. Army is a great institution – tactically. Our soldiers today are well-trained, well-motivated, cohesive, and fairly well equipped.
But training is for the known. For the unknown, education is required. You need to teach your senior leaders how to address problems full of uncertainty and ambiguity, and from them, fashion a strategy. And then be able to tell whether it is working, and to adjust if it isn’t.

Our generals today are not particularly well-educated in strategy. Exhibit A is Tommy Franks, who thought it was a good idea to push Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda from Afghanistan into Pakistan, a larger country that also possesses nuclear weapons. Franks also thought that he had won when he took the enemy’s capital in Afghanistan and Iraq — when in fact that is when the wars really began.
When generals don’t know what to do strategically, they tend to regress back down to what they know, which is tactical. That’s one reason why in Vietnam you saw colonels and generals hovering over company commanders giving orders. It is also why our generals were so slow to adapt in Iraq. By the time they became operationally effective, it was 2007, and we had been fighting in Iraq for nearly four years, longer than we had during all of World War II.
What percentage of them need to be fired? All those who fail. That is how George Marshall ran the Army during World War II. Failures were sacked, which is why no one knows nowadays who Lloyd Fredendall was. Successful generals were promoted – which is why why we know names of younger officers of the time such as Eisenhower, Ridgway and Gavin. This was a tough-minded, Darwinian system that reinforced success. Mediocre wasn’t enough back then. It is now, apparently. Back in World War II, a certain percentage of generals were expected to be fired. It was seen as a sign that the system was working as expected.
DR: How would George Marshall’s system of relieving failing generals and placing them in remedial positions work today? Wouldn’t a relief inevitably be seen as an irredeemable black mark?
TR: Relief today is indeed a black mark. The system only works if relief is so frequent that it isn’t seen as a career-ender. Of the 155 men who commanded Army divisions in combat during World War II, 16 were fired. Of those, five were given other divisions to command in combat later in the war. Many others who were fired got good staff jobs, or trained divisions back home.
That said, Marshall was pretty hardnosed about this. He didn’t run the Army for the benefit of its officers. In a war for democracy, he wrote, the needs of the enlisted came first. He believed that the Army owed its soldiers competent leadership. That was not the case with the Army in Vietnam, where officers were rotated in quickly to get some time in combat command and then rotated out.
DR: Isn’t it too simplistic to blame bad generalship for lost wars and good generalship for successful ones? Tommy Franks may have been “dull and arrogant,” as you write, but he didn’t decide to invade Iraq; David Petraeus may have been his polar opposite, but Afghanistan is in shambles.
TR: Yes, it would be too simplistic. That’s why the major second theme of the book is the need for good discourse between our top generals and their civilian overseers.
By good discourse, I don’t mean everyone getting along. I mean dialogue that welcomes candor, honesty, and clarity, and is guided so it does two key things: explore assumptions and dig into differences. For example, the Vietnam War was guided on the assumption that the enemy had a breaking point and that it would come before ours. Turns out that was wrong. Likewise, the 1991 Gulf War was run on the assumption that giving Saddam Hussein a good thumping would remove him from power. Didn’t happen.
I came away from the book thinking that the quality of civil-military discourse is one of the few leading indicators you have of how well a war will go. George Marshall was not the natural choice for Army chief of staff (Hugh Drum probably was) but FDR picked him in part because Marshall twice had stood up to Roosevelt in the Oval Office, respectfully but forcefully dissenting on key military issues.
DR: Isn’t relieving generals when they’re generals too late? Why shouldn’t the relieves and reassignments you describe in the book come earlier in their tenures as officers? Or can you really teach a general new tricks?
TR: Yes. And yes – if generals see that getting promoted requires some prudent risk-taking, some adaptation, they will do so and learn those tricks. But they won’t if they see that cautious mediocrity is rewarded equally.
DR: Can you make up your mind about Gen. Ray Odierno already? He was a villain in your first book about the Iraq war, a hero in your second, and now he’s a villain again, for giving one of his subordinate commanders a slap on the wrist for obstructing an inquiry into his soldiers’ abuse of Iraqis. Is Odierno fit to serve as Army chief of staff?
DR: I am of two minds about Gen. Odierno. I do think he screwed up when he commanded the 4th Infantry Division early in the Iraq war. But the bottom line is he adapted. You got to learn to live with a little ambiguity, Spencer!
DR: You write that “It seems a good bet that there will not be a ‘Petraeus generation’ of generals.” I took that to mean a more competent and far-sighted general officer corps, but you might also have meant one steeped in counterinsurgency. If you mean the former, why shouldn’t we expect one, since Petraeus remains a remarkably influential figure in the Army even to soldiers who never served under him? If you mean the latter, why is that something to lament? There’s an argument to be made that one of the reasons Afghanistan remains a mess is because the Army and Marines drank the counterinsurgency Kool-Aid too deeply.
TR: Nah, I mean competent, adaptive generals. But one aspect of being adaptive is being able to think critically. I think COIN worked for Petraeus during the surge, but it was a very tough-minded, violent COIN strategy. And it involved risk-taking – like Petraeus striking a private ceasefire with the Sunni insurgents and putting 100,000 of them on the American payroll, an
COLT 1855 CARBINE
The only problem that I could see with this big step forward looking rifle.
Is the fact that if all the chambers went off due to a mistake somewhere. Then the operator would very quickly become a one handed man.
Here is some more information about this interesting colt!
Colt Model 1855 Revolving Carbine | |
---|---|
![]() |
|
Type | Rifle |
Place of origin | United States |
Service history | |
In service | 1855-1863 |
Wars | American Civil War |
Production history | |
Designed | 1855 |
Produced | 1856 – 1864 |
Specifications | |
Length | 15-,18-,21-,and 24-inches |
|
|
Action | Revolving |
The Colt revolving rifles were early repeating rifles produced by the Colt’s Manufacturing Company 1856 until 1864.
They were mainly based upon the Colt Model 1855 Sidehammer Pocket Revolverdeveloped by Elisha K. Root.
History
Revolving rifles were an attempt to increase the rate of fire of rifles by combining them with the revolving firing mechanism that had been developed earlier for revolving pistols.
Colt began experimenting with revolving rifles in the early 19th century, making them in a variety of calibers and barrel lengths.[1]
Colt revolving rifles were the first repeating rifles adopted by the U.S. Government, but they had their problems. They were officially given to soldiers because of their rate of fire.
But after firing six shots, the shooter had to take an excessive amount of time to reload. On occasion Colt rifles discharged all their rounds at once, endangering the shooter. Even so, an early model was used in the Seminole Wars in 1838.[2]
In March, 1836, Colt formed the Patent Arms Company and began operation in an unused silk mill along the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey.
His first product was a ring-lever revolving rifle, available in .34, .36, .38, .40, and .44 caliber, in which a ring located forward of the trigger served to cock the hammer and advance the cylinder for each shot.
This was soon followed with a revolving pistol. These five-shot “Paterson” revolvers featured folding triggers, and were available both with and without loading levers in .28, .31, and .36 caliber.
Patent Arms produced smoothbore revolving carbines and shotguns. The outbreak of war between the U.S. government and the Seminole tribe provided Colt with his first break.
Seminole warriors had learned that soldiers were vulnerable while reloading their single-shot firearms, and they developed a tactic of drawing fire, then rushing the temporarily defenseless soldiers and wiping them out before they could fire a second volley.
Colt’s revolving rifles were quite effective against this, and the army purchased his products for use by troops in the Florida campaign.[3]
In 1855, with his Model 1855 patent, Colt introduced a spur-trigger revolver that featured a fully enclosed cylinder.
These handguns were officially named Sidehammer revolvers, but they also were known as “Root” revolvers after Elisha K. Root, who at that time was employed as Colt’s factory superintendent and Chief Engineer.[4]
Based on the Sidehammer design, Colt produced the Sidehammer Model 1855 rifles and carbines for military and sporting use, as well as a revolving shotgun.
In failing health, Colt expanded his factory on the eve of the Civil War, and began production of a new, lightweight .44 caliber Army revolver, followed a year later by a .36 caliber Navy version.[5]
This was produced in a rifle version as well as a shortened carbine. In 1855 it became the first repeating rifle to be adopted for service by the U.S. Military, but problems with the design prevented its use until 1857.
The principal problem was that gunpowder would sometimes leak from the paper cartridges in field conditions, lodging in various recesses around the firing cylinder.
Hot gas leaking from the gap between the firing cylinder and the barrel would ignite this powder, which would in turn, ignite all of the powder in the chambers waiting to be fired.
This is known as a “chain fire” and was a relatively common failure with early percussion revolving firearms. When this happened with the Colt Revolving Rifle, a spray of metal would be sent forward into the left arm and hand of the user.[6]
A distrust in the weapon developed as a result. Commanders attempted to get around the problem in a number of ways.
The rifle had to be properly and thoroughly cleaned, since sloppy cleaning would leave residue behind that would increase the risk of a chain fire.
Some commanders instructed their men to fire the weapon only while supporting it directly in front of the trigger guard or by holding the lowered loading lever, which moved their left hand out of the path of danger during a chainfire.
Other commanders instructed their men to load only a single chamber, preventing any chain fires from occurring.
Loading a single chamber at a time also reduced the weapon to a single shot weapon, and effectively defeated the entire purpose of having a repeating rifle.[6]
Brevete Colt Dragoon revolving rifles were made in Belgium under license from Colt during the 1850s to 1860s.
Design and Features
The design of the Colt revolving rifle was essentially similar to revolver type pistols, with a rotating cylinder that held five or six rounds in a variety of calibers from .36 to .64 inches.[7]
The Model 1855, which was the most widely produced revolving rifle, was available in .36, .44 and .56 caliber. Four barrel lengths were available: 15, 18, 21 and 24 inches. A six shot cylinder was used if the caliber was .36 or the .44. If the caliber was .56, a five-shot cylinder was used.[8]
A revolving rifle used percussion caps, like revolving pistols of the time. A cartridge (consisting of powder and a lead ball) was loaded into the front of the chamber and then compressed with a plunger that was located beneath the barrel.
Once the cylinder’s chambers were loaded, percussion caps were placed over the vent nipples at the rear of the cylinder.
The weapon was now ready to fire. In addition to being susceptible to chain fire problems, the revolving cylinder design also tended to spray lead splinters into the wrist and hand of the user.[9]
Revolving pistols did not suffer from this problem since the user kept both hands behind the cylinder while firing a pistol.
Some models could be fitted with sword style bayonets. In these rifles, the front sight would double as the bayonet lug.
Use
A combination of Colt revolving pistols and revolving rifles were used on the Pony Express by the eight men who guarded the dangerous run between Independence, Missouri, and Santa Fe.
When doubts were expressed about the ability of these eight men to deliver the letters on this run reliably, the Missouri government declared that “these eight men are ready in case of attack to discharge 136 shots without having to reload. We have no fears for the safety of the mail.” All mail deliveries on this route were completed safely.[10]
The U.S. government had purchased 765 Colt revolving carbines and rifles prior to the Civil War. Many of these were shipped to southern locations and ended up being used by the Confederacy.[9]
After the war began, the Union purchased many more rifles and carbines. Sources disagree over the exact number purchased, but approximately 4,400 to 4,800 were purchased in total over the length of the war.
The weapon performed superbly in combat, seeing action with the 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry Union forces at Snodgrass Hill during the Battle of Chickamauga during the American Civil War.[11][12]
The volume of fire from this weapon proved to be so useful that the Confederate forces were convinced that they were attacking an entire division, not just a single regiment, but still, the Ohioans ran out of ammunition, and surrendered.[7]
Despite these victories, the rifle’s faults would prove fatal for the weapon. A board of officers evaluated the evidence and decided to discontinue its use. The rifles were sold for 42 cents each, a fraction of the original purchase cost of 44 dollars.[6]
Use in film
In 3:10 to Yuma (2007) the Mexican sharpshooter Campos (Rio Alexander) carries a Colt Model 1855 fitted with a full length telescopic sight and converted to fire metallic cartridges.[13]
In The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly one of Angel Eyes’s killers uses a Remington revolving rifle.
In the John Wayne movie El Dorado, actor Arthur Hunnicut’s character, Bull Harris, carries a Model 1855 revolving carbine as his main weapon.[13]
In The Mask of Zorro, Captain Love carries an early revolving rifle. In the sequel, the Legend of Zorro, a cavalry captain carries one as well.
In the Quentin Tarantino film The Hateful Eight, the character John Ruth (played by Kurt Russell) carries a Remington revolving rifle as his main weapon.
Top Five Revolver Myths
Editor’s Note: The following is a post by Mark Kakkuri, a nationally published freelance writer who covers guns and gear, 2nd Amendment issues and the outdoors. His writing and photography have appeared in many firearms-related publications, including the USCCA’s Concealed Carry Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @markkakkuri.
Read Mark’s previous articles in this “Top Five” series:
- Top Five Questions People Ask When They Find Out I Carry Concealed
- Top Five Ways to Secure Your Gun at the Office
- Top Five Reasons to Carry a Backup Gun
- Top Five Backup Guns
- Top Five Security Measures to Take While Traveling Unarmed

Jon Hodoway does gel testing on a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum. Click here to read the article.
We love the Internet because it is chock full of useful information. But we also hate the Internet because it is chock full of misinformation.
As you know, information about firearms abounds on the Internet and while there are many very good websites with well-informed writers who do the gun community a great service, there are just as many who are not helpful at all. Whatever the reasons for myths about firearms starting and spreading, I hope to do my part to clear up some of that confusion even if just a little bit at a time. Today, I’m going to take a crack at some of the myths I’ve heard surrounding the use of a revolver. These aren’t the only myths, but they’re my top five.
1. Revolvers Never Jam
Well, using the word “never” might be the first clue that this statement is a myth. It would be more accurate to say revolvers rarely jam — as long as we are defining what is meant by “jam.” By design, a revolver’s operation is fairly simple, at least compared to an auto-loading, semi-automatic pistol. With a revolver, you squeeze the trigger, which rotates the cylinder, aligning a cartridge in front of the hammer and behind the barrel. And, just at the right time, bang. Usually, if a round doesn’t fire, you would just squeeze the trigger again, starting the whole operation over, in order to fire the next round. The typical “jam” that could happen with a revolver is that some sort of dirt or debris gets lodged between the cylinder and the frame, stopping the cylinder from rotating and therefore not allowing the trigger to go through its full cycle to fire. Again, no one should say this never happens. It has and it does. But it is very rare.
2. Revolvers Are Inaccurate
Usually, when people make this assertion, it is about a snub-nosed or shorter-barreled revolver. The logic goes like this: The shorter the barrel, the less accurate the gun. And while it is theoretically true that the more barrel you have interacting with a bullet, the more accurate you can be, it does not necessarily mean that a short-barreled gun is inaccurate. It might be less accurate than a longer barreled gun, but other factors that determine accuracy are at work, regardless of barrel length. The key to better accuracy is better muzzle control — keeping the muzzle pointed at your target while squeezing the trigger. If you want a good demonstration of this — following all the gun safety rules, please — put a laser aiming system on whatever gun you’re shooting and watch how much the laser jumps around your target as you’re pulling the trigger. Oh, and one more thing: Google “Jerry Miculek 200-yard snub-nosed revolver shot upside down.” Granted, he’s a pro, but shoot a revolver from a rest in order to eliminate as much muzzle movement as possible and you might be surprised at how accurate the gun actually is.
3. Revolvers Are Difficult to Shoot
Some revolvers, by design, require a bit more hand and finger strength in order to squeeze the trigger, which usually is a longer stroke than the one experienced on a semi-automatic pistol. That doesn’t mean revolvers are more difficult to shoot; in fact, after getting used to them, some say they’re easy to shoot. It just means that some guns, revolvers included, require hand strength and practice in order to master. Another factor that might contribute to revolvers seemingly being more difficult to shoot is that people might only experience small, lightweight revolvers shooting medium to big rounds. Here, basic physics works against them. Small guns shooting big rounds equals big recoil. And big recoil can be difficult and intimidating. And it can hurt. Again, practice and training are your friends. And, for the record, it is possible to train up to shooting .38 Special +p or .357 Magnum rounds out of a lightweight snub-nosed revolver and be able to do it well. And even enjoy it.
4. Revolvers Are Underpowered or Too Low-Capacity
The typical self-defense revolver is a snub-nosed .38 Special with a capacity of five rounds. Some people scoff at the caliber; .38 Special is “the bottom of the effective self-defense cartridges,” they say. Some people scoff at the capacity — “five to stay alive” just isn’t enough, especially when you can easily carry twice or three times that amount in one magazine of another kind of gun. But the most effective self-defense handgun is the one you shoot well and will actually carry. If that’s a five-shot revolver, even a five-shot revolver chambered in .22 LR, then so be it. Better to have five rounds of .22 LR you can shoot well than 15 rounds of 9mm you leave at home. Regardless of what you carry, make sure you carry a reload. For revolvers, this means carrying a speed strip, a speedloader or moon clips — anything that will speed up replacing the empty cartridges with fresh ones.
5. Revolvers Are Outdated or Ineffective
Revolvers might have an old-school stigma: They’re the guns of old-time detectives and Old West shootouts. But there are many manufacturers making revolvers today and we keep seeing new models released each year, and that’s because people want them and buy them for concealed carry. So, revolvers might be a long-standing, long-history kind of gun, but to say they’re outdated is completely inaccurate. And just because there are hundreds of very good semiautomatic pistols available today — guns that are smaller, lighter and offer higher capacities than revolvers — doesn’t mean revolvers are ineffective. The key with any gun is practice, practice, practice. And remember, the “best” gun is the gun you shoot well and actually carry with you. Some people don’t shoot revolvers well or don’t like the trigger. Some do! Different strokes for different folks!
What other revolver myths have you heard? Let us know in the comments below!
Shop for your new revolver on GunsAmerica.
Discover how you can join more than 200,000 responsibly armed Americans who already rely on the USCCA to protect their families, futures and freedoms: USCCA.com/gunsamerica.
All I know for a fact is that it’s very pretty & out of my price range!
Grumpy
Wilhelm Brenneke 98 Sporter 7x64mm caliber rifle. Rare pre-war commercial sporting rifle made in 1937. Case-colored receiver with light border engraving and scroll-engraved floorplate
So if it’s off to the Bachelor’s Officers Quarters my young F.N.G.*, As The New C.O. want his shit there ASAP!
Of course the saying of “If it looks stupid but it works, then it’s not stupid!” does comes to mind.
* Fucking New Guy – The worst Rank in any military unit