ran

Better get involved or else nothing will be done and the consequences of 10 more years of civil war have to be taken into account when it comes to regional stability. It would be all well if Somalia's troubles were only confined within the borders, but they aren't and look like they're going to expant westward if extremists set a foot down there.

This should escalate or at least go on that way as long as we, the western nations use it as a proxy against Islamic extremism in Western Africa. This country has seen enough misery you're right, but it's not going to stop anytime soon if the African Union supported by Europe doesn't take care of its business. On a side note they have the decency to kill their peers with bullets most of the time at least.

We can't decently let these people go on killing eachother but it's a damn tempting solution.

'carefull DracoPaladore, knowing the state of the canadian armed forces' finances, better look after your radio equipment as if it were your own eyes Good luck, stay safe, never be the first, never be the last and never volunteer and you should have fun if we believe that saying that is. And Gollum1, you will be leeeeeeeet with that fancy berret insignia (and the training that goes before it) same goes for you as for DP, and you better enjoy your time, I'm pretty sure you'll get to move around the planet (not too much nor for too long for your well-being I hope) May the force be with you guys hehehe

Captain André Pfister, Swiss Army, 1st armored brigade, possibly a sports instructor, what's written underneath is an address or at least a town's name with a postal code, Senarclens, from the Vaud canton. Soveillame is a nearby hamlet. edit : here you go for the component of the Brigade this captain served with http://www.armee.vbs.admin.ch/interne....tab

I always keep an eye on these forums Waiting quietly for armed assault so I can alone unleash the furia francese aboard an armed jeep once again like in the good ol' time hehehehehe.

Great article, made me discover Brigade E5 too. Does anybody know when it will be released in good old Europe ? that inventory and encumbrance system and the fact that it's a real time/turn based hybrid really got me interested.

Yep, gotta admit that I don't see myself cleaning a caseless gun. I'm sure the guys working on it will find something ... Afterall, did our ancestors back in the early 19th century ever imagine that one day that we'd belt feed our weapons with pointy metal alloy thingies stuck on the end of a brass casing filled with a propellant that's able to send that bullet up to several kilometers away and that we could do so 800 or more times in a minute

Which doesn't exist -yet- Alot of armed forces are looking into telescopic and caseless ammunitions for both small arms and vehicle mounted devices. What was attempted a couple of decades ago with the HK G11 may one day come true with the advances and sophistication in matter of gun internals, alloys, bullets, propellant compounds, and shell casings. What was just and expensive toy to test out cool-ass Sci-Fi concepts might come true one day. Human morphology won't change all that much in the coming 100 years, yet the evolution of warfare implies that more and more, the load has to be split between electronics (which are bound to become some ever more vital components of a trooper's gear), weapons, ammunition, non-combat life items and protective devices. It only makes sense to develop a lighter ammunition that would reduce the soldier's burden and make him more efficient. Also take into consideration that those fancy exo-skeletons still have a long way to go before being of any use on a battlefield and being as mobile as a more or less lightly kitted soldier. Add to that the fact that caseless ammo could offer more deniability when acting covert, make it harder for the enemy to track your movements and identify your weapons assets by looking at the grounds you occupied after an engagement; it would be a lot more environment friendly; it wouldn't add the supplementary thermal glow caused by the casings around a man that's shooting at night (which doesn't last all that long if the casings get cooled by the elements but which is characteristic through recent thermal sensors and sights), etc etc etc, the list goes on, but above all it's lighter and lighter means either more room for other mission specific gear for the same rifle lethality or just more room for ammo which easily runs out. Another detail is that it can be safer than some of the good old brass casing ammo and if the caseless ammo uses high ignition temperature compounds as propellant and body. That means less risks of cook-offs or at least more time to get the hell away. The MR-C is just a drawing board fantasy and a plastic mockup at the moment but the US Defense Technical Information Center published a couple of interesting .pdf files about caseless projects.

What he refers to as "Crye Gun" is the MR-C

And just to remember : if the barrel of the L55 fitted to spanish Leo 2E's and other recent production models looks shorter to you than the 140mm gun pictured above, that's due to the addon-armor which comes with the A5+ Leo series (that's why the L44 gun seems so stubby on tanks fitted with the additional armour). Leo 2A5 fitted with an L44 Leo 2A6 fitted with an L55 Earlier Leo 2 model fitted with the same L44 as the first one

This just in : the AMX-10RC is in use in light cavalry units around here. It's mainly used as an heavy armored recce asset and would be used as a fast armored asset in enemy lines breach exploits for harassment actions. Since the red bear disappeared and the iron curtain has been pulled we don't have the need for wheeled tanks to delay a massive armored advance on the western european territory or to provide stop-gap solutions to airborne armour raids on our soil. The 10RC nowdays is somewhat just a deterrent in asymmetric warfare and peacekeeping ops when it's deployed. Its 105 is enough to fulfill most of the infantry support needs and to slice through most of the things we may face actually. Don't ask it to destroy something to modern though. It would be useless on a modern battlefield as it is somewhat obsolete in the great scheme of things as long as it doesn't undergo extensive upgrades when it comes to its powerplant, armor, weaponry, electronics and optronics suites such as what's proposed by the GIAT. I'd say that the same goes for the Centauro (which got its own upgrade proposals). And I'm not even talking about the ERC-90 with its cigarette paper-thin armor and weak gun by today's standards. The reason why it's kept in french inventory is because of our comittments in Africa mostly : you can easily airlift it and it's more than enough to face the opposition it could encounter in those shitholes (the occasional 60's vintage BMP, the bashed toyotas and the hostile crowds with its good ol' cannister round). It was a replacement for the AML's in the lineage of the Outre Mer (over sea) armoured cars. I think the sprut is a logical move in today's world : what can the PT 76's gun do in today's world filled with reactive, composite armours ? Add to that the fact that the 2S25 uses the same caliber as the rest of the russian arsenal's MBTs. I doubt that the mobility benefit is that big though and I'd take a T90 fitted with armor over a Sprut anyday if what I want is AT infantry support. One argument in favour of the Sprut is that it can be airlifted but I think that's mostly aimed at possible foreign customers inspite of the russian military organisation. It's light amphib tank like its older brother the PT76 and that's just what it is. The future is already here hehehe. ATGM made huge progresses during the last 30 years be it in matter of guidance systems, range and warheads. Their vectors, be they helicopters, planes, light vehicles or simple infantrymen make them the definite tank killers. They're fast and become ever harder to dodge with double warheads (triple soon ?), counter-jamming and top attack routines. Call them as a whole whatever you want but then again a lot of the things and people carrying these toys don't serve the only purpose of breaking tanks. The time of tracked vehicles with large guns (that's my notion of a tank destroyer, some of my elders seved on free french TD M10, might explain why) serving the single purpose of destroying tanks is gone and gun-armed wheeled armoured vehicles now just serve as gap-fillers in situations where hauling a MBT to the theater of operations wouldn't be fast or cost-efficient enough.

I see it as some kind of natural evolution ... you could draw certain parallels between let's say Hugo's or Zola's depictions of historical bloodbaths in their novels and this. The first talked about the fall of an empire, bloody revolutions, the second about strikes that went nasty and that not long after the facts. Litterature and Arts in general offer quite a lot of similar occurances. Accounts of the Grande armée retreat from Russia were published shortly after the events took place, fictionnal works were written about the Terreur of the 1790's the following decades etc etc etc ... (just talking about what I know ... err, remember of) The problems start when money gets involved. It's just that now, this phenomenon seems driven by profit instead of art and deep socio-political or even philosophical statements and thesis. Our train of thoughts, our reflexion as the medias and communications get faster and faster can't follow. This creates a frightening gap in the collective mind that greedy people throw themselves in. They saw that by giving Joe Sixpack what he wants: simple preformated prepackaged thoughts and ideas (that can be consumed just like the pizza you ordered or the TV shows spewn by the TV), they can earn big bucks and go on their sociopathic ways to make even more money. As times go by, the human being seems to enjoy ever sharper contrasts. Joe wants a well defined black and white world around him so he doesn't have to go through the time consuming process of looking for his own reference marks. Shades of grey became less and less popular ever since color TV was invented (a bit before though, your world, if you were lower class was mostly brown in color ) ... hehe We don't have any time to ponder on what's happening around us anymore because it's all getting a bit too fast and the majority of us just don't make the effort to slow things down and prefer to go the easy way: go for the mainstream crap without any second thought. It's just that it's quite conforting not to have to think much for yourself and just focus on your own little world. You have to pay your taxes monthly, your fuel weekly, take your kids to school daily and earn a good living so you can buy them their mobile phone and pay for the broadband connection and the cable TV. So why give a toss about the rest ? Just weep when everybody is weeping, yell when everybody is yelling, moan when everybody is moaning, jump when everybody is jumping and hide when everybody is hiding. Makes your and the moneymakers' life a lot easier. /nonsense rambling

IIRC, one of the american Hinds is the result of a little french incursion in Lybian territory in 1987.

Jacques is getting old ... I love his glasses first time he appeared with those on an official presidential speech broadcast. Might be nostalgia though : The hearing aids and now this ... well, he''ll be 74 in November ...

It's official for me now so I can say it : Bonne et heureuse année 2006 ŕ tous et ŕ toutes Time to get really shitfaced now ...

Some Noir Désir lately. Check their album Tostaky, one of the best. Getting stuck on MarlÄne looping over and over again.

Almost smashed my screen.... No spoiler

... i just know that one PRAGA 2x30mm was 70m from my house ... and that they randomly change bullet colors, every fifth as soldier told me ... in pause we talk ... but within every maneuver they moved 100m in radius, we used to call those `popcorns` cose they realy sounded like that, mostly they fired onto missiles ... damn if i had camera also few times power plant (far but i can see it) was hit with strange missiles cose there were no explosion but it was very colorfull, mostly blue and green, and power was off, so half of Belgrade was in dark ... i read somewhere and heard those was called `graphite missiles` i never saw any heavier AA guns though. The lights you saw were most certainly the result of those graphite bombs and the electrical arks caused by the use of such devices. They create what some acquaintances and I used to call "Hugenormous motherf*cking short circuits from hell". The devices used in 1999 were mostly american small submunitions codenamed BLU-114 which spread several thin graphite coated metallic cables. The concentration of such conducting wires makes for an unavoidable short circuit when landing on electric installations such as aerial high voltage cables and transformers (is it the right word in english ?). They can be dispensed by quite a few different types of submunition containers. These things are the "less than lethal" stuff of the airforces as they leave the core infrastructures intact and pose less danger for the surrounding populations.

That's one of the most sensible things I've heard lately. Changes from the usual crap I hear most of my coworkers spouting ... But the media already caused the damages. Prefects (the men responsible for law and order in the different "counties") have been allowed to enforce partly law 55-385 concerning state of emergency. They're now allowed to put curfews in place if the feel the need for them. This should start tomorow after a meeting with the officials in question and the Minsters Council. From the mouth of the Prime Minister de Villepin, 1500 reservists (CRS mostly) have been mobilised rasing the total number of Policemen and Gendarmes deployed to 9500. The army won't get involved, yet.

In my opinion, Police is able to put an end to the violence or at least to make a good show of force cooling down the heated minds a bit... it's just a politician lacking guts. You have to understant that military action in such context of civil unrest has caused more harm than good in the past.

Military action on french soil against french citizens is a little bit problematic ...

I'm not allowed to say much on this matter. Let's say it's just a hoodies riot which doesn't feel like ending. Not all the pricks in the street are arab or even muslim for that matter. We've already have had similar occurences in the past but on a much smaller scale (New Year Eve in Strasbourg) where people would just burn and destroy for the sake of it. To me it's likely to be a political stunt to help somebody for the next presidential elections (Sarkozy .... hum, no, the little boy throwing oil on the fire won't do ... Le Pen ? De Villiers ?) . From what I've seen, the media coverage abroad has been slightly exaggerating the mess. The Police and Gendarmerie forces have the means to accomplish their mission, but they're somewhat not allowed to do their job with officials and media finding excuses like the "fact" that these people are well organised and that they act in small groups. The appearent inactivity of the police forces may also be the result of a new policy I won't go too much in depth with, let's say that some officials feel that if the inhabitants of those dorm suburbs get pissed enough, they may aswell take care of the job by themselves. What my coworkers and I fear the most is the contamination of suburbs in the rest of France by this "gangsta crowd" phenomenon. The only real motivation behind this violence outburst is frustration and the fact that some little assholes want to show their "tess"(suburb) off and want their "homies" to see their brand T-shirt and gangsta look in the evening news. It's obvious that the islamists will find a good occasion to recruit in this mess and that the non-muslims and the less extremists will dig themselves an even deeper hole. I'm not a social worker, and they have failed in their task in the past 25 years. The only answer I see right now is mass arrests, CRS charges and the muscular "wake up call" (5 or 6 .am raid on the individual's place) of the wannabe "meneurs" and the heads of the gangs. We can't let this go on as the population of complete dumbasses in France has reached a critical mass and if we don't put an end to this mess, soon it will become a trend for the youths to burn shit down. I'm neither Psychologist nor Sociologist so I won't write a thesis about their motives hidden or not ... let's jsut say these riots are the result of a failure : the failure of the Republic to integrate these sociopathic retards, but is it completely its fault ?

Thanks for the advice Bals ! And that's a huge collection tool the good thing with vinyl is that not many friends are going to steal them

Am looking forward to Navigator by Funker Vogt and Rosen Rot by Rammstein. I've recently bought the "blasphemy in holy land" live record by Hocico. I also got my hands on a live record of a friend of mine, Gary LF and bought Fin de cycle by a band called la Phaze after my niece made me listen to one of their songs (l'assault final). And I'm still listenning to punish yourself I've been thinking about getting the latest KMFDM album, but I don't know if it's worth it. I unfortunately don't have enough time to listen to really music these days