Category: Military History

The following is an excerpt from retired Special Forces Warrant Officer Jim “Smokey” West’s upcoming memoir.  Learn more about Jim by checking out his website, American Extension Fighting.  The village consisted of an adobe, clay, and dirt shanties surrounding the town square. The square had some restaurants around it, all featuring five-star dirt floors. There was […]

Every national government, like every major corporation, has to make a concerted effort to control perceptions—both internally and externally. For a government, internal communications are often ripe with propaganda. Whether it’s encouraging you to support a war effort, steering you toward a specific political party, or trying to convince you that the people in power […]

Today in 1958 the T-2 Buckeye flew for the first time. If you were a US Navy or Marine Corps jet pilot or Naval Flight Officer (NFO) from the late 1950’s until 2004 you received training in the T-2 Buckeye. Affectionately called the ‘Fightin Buckeye’ or ‘Pregnant Guppie’ because of its fuselage shape the T-2 […]

The ground doesn’t lie. Short of teleporting or being a ghost, a human being will leave some evidence of its presence or movement. It is science; tracking is empirical and fact-driven. It is not an abstract, ancient art form. Those two basic tenants would be drilled into our brains during the week-long combat tracking course with the […]

Raid: a type of operation that captivates the mind and many people believe that it is the essence of what SOF units are about, hit hard and get out quickly, leaving only destruction in your wake. One such operation that I found fascinating as a young reader of military history was the Israeli raid on […]

Submitted by Anonymous, working with dogs in US Navy SEAL Teams. When U.S. President Barack Obama went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky earlier for a highly publicized, but very private meeting with the commando team that killed Osama bin Laden, only one of the 81 members of the super-secret SEAL DevGru unit was identified by name: […]

From Desmond Llewelyn to Ben Whishaw, we are used to seeing the tech wiz agent known as “Q” played by men in the James Bond movies. However, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service has revealed that the “real-life-Q” is actually a woman. Sir Alex Younger, the head of MI6, has made the revelation in […]

Throughout the Second World War, the Resistance in occupied countries played an important role in keeping the Germans off balance and tying up forces vital to the war effort. Nary had a day gone by without a bridge or a train being blown up somewhere in occupied Europe. To combat the problem, German forces carried […]

From “The X-Files” in 1993 to “Stranger Things” in 2016, popular culture has long been certain that the government’s been experimenting successfully with psychic powers, despite our phone calls to Miss Cleo never producing the winning lottery numbers we hoped for. The CIA’s efforts in the realm of psychic phenomena have been a matter of […]

During World War II, the Allies needed a way to make bombing more accurate. At the time, bomb accuracy was often measured in miles. Most bombs dropped by either side would miss their targets. Air armadas of hundreds—if not thousands—of bombers were necessary to ensure that just a handful of targets were struck. The higher-ups […]

The World of Tanks YouTube channel has a new segment out on one of the strangest tanks ever seen—the so-called “Tsar Tank“. The tank, which looked like a cross between a plow and a Martian war machine, stood an astonishing three stories tall. Tanks were invented in World War I, and before the design was […]

I was surprised to find out that before he was “Stormin’ Norman” leading coalition forces to a swift victory against Iraqi forces during the Gulf War, he was the newly promoted Brigadier General Norman Schwarzkopf of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division. There Schwarzkopf found himself in charge of ground forces in Grenada during Operation Urgent […]