Still busy here, hence the double delay in getting this done. Maybe when the project I’m working on at the office slows down? But then, I have several other ones lined up afterward, so maybe not. (I guess I’d rather be busy than the alternative.)

Hong Kong

• China forced an oppressive state security law through Hong Kong’s government, laying the groundwork to fully tear down the two-systems… system.
• UK offers British citizenship to three million Hong Kongers eligible for British National Overseas passports – We’ll take the ones who like guns, if Britain doesn’t want them.
• I saw it said on Twitter that one distinction we in the West should be careful about is this: the sentiment in Hong Kong is more in favor of autonomy (as part of China) than it is about independence (from China). … for now, at any rate. The seed that became the United States was an argument over representation. Look where we are now.

Defense

• King Stallion now flying from ships
• The Drive with a lecture on the F-111 and how it drove the design of the Tomcat
• Looking back at the A-7, the first digital jet – Along with the Saab Viggen, of which I have previously written, the other of the very early digital attack jets, the Corsair is a really cool piece of history.
• The military we need vs. the military we have – This essay comes down in favor of ‘build for the asymmetric warfare we’re encountering now’. I take an alternate position: the purpose of a military is to break the militaries of peer powers. Armed forces built with that goal in mind are handicapped in asymmetric police action Forever Wars. Armed forces built for asymmetric police action Forever Wars are useless against peer powers. It seems to me to be the same strain of thinking that people criticize in publicly-traded companies—”We aren’t encountering this problem today, and won’t for the next few quarters, so why bother preparing for it?”
• Wave-gliding vessel in the Florida Keys is probably an unmanned spook listening device
• Turkey the latest to realize that building high-performance aircraft turbines is hard – It took Russia a long time to get it right. China is still working on it. Turkey, I expect, has a bumpy road ahead.
• Speaking of Turkey, the US Senate has drafted a plan in which we buy Ankara’s S-400s in exchange for re-admission to the F-35 program
• South Korea to buy more AWACS, SIGINT planes – $2 billion worth.
• Big Army to get more jamming/SIGINT jobbers – Built on a Stryker chassis—the M113 for the 21st century.
• Big Army selects some anti-drone systems
• Big Army buying Infantry Squad Vehicles from GM Defense – They seem to have taken their design cues from Halo. Today’s 19-year-olds grew up in a post-Halo-launch world, steeped in the culture of that game, so I guess it makes sense to buy a Warthog clone as a way to draw attention.
• Big Army’s Stryker cannon project is still on track, Stryker chief assures us – Ooh, there’s a SHORAD version coming too.
• The ENVG-B is pretty cool – Pretty much science fiction goggles. They have a HUD and a thermal imaging mode, they integrate with weapon optics, and they zoom.
• House Armed Services Committee wants to stop year-end spending sprees – Operations and Maintenance money must be earmarked for spending by October 1 each year, or else any remaining amount is lost. HASC says, “Why not let them carry over 50% year to year, like every other department?” Seems like a simple enough fix to me.
• There’s a procurement battle brewing in F-15EX engines – GE vs. Pratt & Whitney.
• Navy to mothball first four LCSes if Congress will allow it – Especially with the much-more-capable FFG(X) looking like it’s going to see the light of day. Over in the Rule the Waves 2 Let’s Play I do find myself keeping little ships well past their best-by dates, but that’s mainly to use them as anti-submarine escorts.
• The ASALM, a Cold War anti-SAM/anti-AEW&C nuclear missile tragically killed by penny-pinchers and the demise of the Soviet Union
• An essay on ‘cognitive electronic warfare’ – Whatever that means. Parvusimperator’s link, and he can explain it more, if he wants—I saw a clunky passive-voice construction in the excerpted thesis at the top of the page and closed the tab.

Technology

• iPhone and iPad apps love snooping on the clipboard – To be fair, I’m sure underhanded Android apps do just the same thing.
• The rise and fall of Adobe Flash – Bitter, because Flash games were a big part of my youth. Sweet, because Flash websites were a pox upon the world. Also, the Flash-based video player was the Youtube default through 2015, which feels like the better part of a century ago.
• On the May 12 Slack outage
• There’s a SpaceX launch supposedly scheduled for tomorrow at around 11 a.m. Eastern – Originally planned for Wednesday, SpaceX scrubbed it because of weather concerns. This is the third time now that they’ll be launching a booster for the fifth time. It’s crazy how fast we went from ‘rockets don’t land’ to ‘rockets that don’t land are not competitive in the global launch marketplace’.

Guns

• John Jovino Gun Shop in NYC closes – The oldest gun store in the nation, it closed up for the last time after 109 years of continuous operation. Worth a read in full.
• TFB Reports: a new world record in 12-gauge speed shooting – 12 shots in 0.72 seconds, which comes out to the coincidentally-round figure of 1000 rounds per minute. With his finger! Out of a semi-auto shotgun!
• The same dude, I believe, tossed a stack of 14 clay targets into the air and hit them all before they touched down – It’s nice to see that the art of the trick shot is still alive.
• The second June match video – I’m getting better at this revolver thing, slowly. Dry fire helps. I think it’s entirely possible I’m the only person a) shooting USPSA revolver and b) posting videos.
• Remington is bankrupt again – Parvusimperator asked if we should scrape together spare change from our cars and under couch cushions and buy it. I said no, on the grounds that they seem to go bankrupt an awful lot.