Month: July 2018

I suppose that when NBC News commissioned its latest poll on President Trump’s popularity in the wake of Helsinki, they were not expecting it to rise to the highest level ever of his presidency. After all, the nearly unanimous media and “expert” reaction, including many Republicans, was that something unspeakable happened in the press conference, following the meeting with Putin. That was gospel.

But the American people failed to react as their media masters would have them do. MSNBC host Kasie Hunt complained, “We are living in a different space-time continuum, where even gravity works differently.”

Well, it is certainly true that gravitas no longer works as well as it used to as a means of diminishing the President. Donald Trump violates the media-enforced norms of presidential behavior for sport. He has discovered that most Americans no longer trust the elites that have run government, media, education, and the cultural commanding heights.  

I suppose of Shakespeare were as familiar as Star Trek to her, she might have echoed Hamlet,

The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!

But of course, she would lose her MSNBC viewers that way, even though it is clear that most of the media, especially NBC’s outlets, regard themselves as “born to set it (Trump’s presidency) right.

Watch and enjoy Kasie and the panelists attempting to explain what should never have happened, according to establishment orthodoxy.

I suppose that when NBC News commissioned its latest poll on President Trump’s popularity in the wake of Helsinki, they were not expecting it to rise to the highest level ever of his presidency. After all, the nearly unanimous media and “expert” reaction, including many Republicans, was that something unspeakable happened in the press conference, following the meeting with Putin. That was gospel.

But the American people failed to react as their media masters would have them do. MSNBC host Kasie Hunt complained, “We are living in a different space-time continuum, where even gravity works differently.”

Well, it is certainly true that gravitas no longer works as well as it used to as a means of diminishing the President. Donald Trump violates the media-enforced norms of presidential behavior for sport. He has discovered that most Americans no longer trust the elites that have run government, media, education, and the cultural commanding heights.  

I suppose of Shakespeare were as familiar as Star Trek to her, she might have echoed Hamlet,

The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!

But of course, she would lose her MSNBC viewers that way, even though it is clear that most of the media, especially NBC’s outlets, regard themselves as “born to set it (Trump’s presidency) right.

Watch and enjoy Kasie and the panelists attempting to explain what should never have happened, according to establishment orthodoxy.

Desperate Trump-haters, searching for something  — anything! – to show that the Trump administration is in bed with Vladimir Putin, seized on the news a week ago that a young Russian names Maria Butina had been indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), or, in the words of the DOJ, for “ conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.”

Here at last was a face – and a red-headed female one, to boot – to attach to the charges of treason being thrown around by the likes of John Brennan.

So intense was the fever that their dream had come true that, as Bre Payton reported in The Federalist,

In the wake of Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, members of the media mistook a Trump administration staffer for a Russian spy.

Emily Singer, a senior political reporter for Mic, tweeted out a photo from inside the White House and claimed that Maria Butina, who was charged Monday for conspiring against the U.S. as a secret Russian agent, was among a gaggle of staffers inside the Oval Office. She later realized her mistake and deleted the tweet, but only after it went viral.

White House photo, as modified by The Federalist

It was an ephemeral Christmas-in-July moment. Poor Ms. Singer was so certain that The Narrative just had to be true that she didn’t bother to check if maybe there might be a red-headed female on the White House staff.

 

This photo is going around: That is not alleged Russian spy Maria Butina in the Oval Office With Trump. It’s an NSC staffer, a NSC source tells BuzzFeed News. pic.twitter.com/k1pDeIBZiK

— Tom Namako (@TomNamako) July 17, 2018

 

Still, she did manage to ingratiate herself to the NRA and others supportive of Trump by posing as a “gun rights advocate” in Russia. So, maybe she could be pinned on conservatives.

But alas, it turned out that she was an opportunist who would meet with Obama officials, if given the chance. And she did.  The Blaze reports:

Alleged Russian agent Maria Butina met with officials from the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve in 2015, according to a new report. (snip)

Reuters reported that Butina and Alexander Torshin, the former Russian Central Bank deputy governor, met with Stanley Fischer, then-vice chair of the Fed, and Nathan Sheets, then-Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, in separate meetings in 2015.

The purpose of the meetings was to discuss U.S. economic sanctions placed on Russia during the Obama administration. The U.S. placed sanctions on Russia multiple times during the Obama years over Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, its annexation of Crimea, and the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

According to Reuters, the meetings “reveal a wider circle of high-powered connections that Butina sought to cultivate with American political leaders and special interest groups.”

And John Solomon told Lou Dobbs last week that at that time, in 2015, he alerted the FBI to her. Via Gateway Pundit:

I’ll tell you a little story I’ve never told before. In March of 2015 I observed her at several events and really cozying up to conservatives and making what I thought was a weak-handed case that she was this courageous gun rights activist going up against Putin and there would one day be a Second Amendment in Russia. There’s never going to be a Second Amendment in Russia. I became very perplexed by her behavior and her efforts of going up to presidential candidates and congressional candidates. So I started to do some reporting and I called FBI and US intelligence sources and very quickly I learned, “Yeah, we know that she’s somebody here as an agent of influence. She’s connecte to this guy Tortian(sp?) and we know what she’s trying to do.” And I thought, that’s really interesting. Are they going to tell the people she’s meeting with and it doesn’t appear they ever did. I thought the role of FBI counter-intelligence was to prevent contacts from occurring that are not in the interest of the United States. It sounds like they sat around and watched this for three or four years until it was convenient to create a headline.

A set-up by the FBI? Let’s see, who was in charge of counter-terrorism there? That’s right: Peter Stzrok, the man who expert imitation of a man demonically possessed impressed so many observers.

Am I the only person who remembers another Russian red-head deep cover spy named Anna Chapman? She was uncovered during the Obama administration, in 2011, and was said to have used her good looks to entice various male officials into her bed and into security lapses. And am I the only person who thought it reeked of a cover-up that she and her colleagues were rapidly traded for US people arrested in Russia – without even an attempt to get her to spill the beans on whom she seduced for what intelligence?

Ms. Chapman has found work in Mother Russia:

Another dream shatters for Trump-haters

Desperate Trump-haters, searching for something  — anything! – to show that the Trump administration is in bed with Vladimir Putin, seized on the news a week ago that a young Russian names Maria Butina had been indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), or, in the words of the DOJ, for “ conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.”

Here at last was a face – and a red-headed female one, to boot – to attach to the charges of treason being thrown around by the likes of John Brennan.

So intense was the fever that their dream had come true that, as Bre Payton reported in The Federalist,

In the wake of Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, members of the media mistook a Trump administration staffer for a Russian spy.

Emily Singer, a senior political reporter for Mic, tweeted out a photo from inside the White House and claimed that Maria Butina, who was charged Monday for conspiring against the U.S. as a secret Russian agent, was among a gaggle of staffers inside the Oval Office. She later realized her mistake and deleted the tweet, but only after it went viral.

White House photo, as modified by The Federalist

It was an ephemeral Christmas-in-July moment. Poor Ms. Singer was so certain that The Narrative just had to be true that she didn’t bother to check if maybe there might be a red-headed female on the White House staff.

 

This photo is going around: That is not alleged Russian spy Maria Butina in the Oval Office With Trump. It’s an NSC staffer, a NSC source tells BuzzFeed News. pic.twitter.com/k1pDeIBZiK

— Tom Namako (@TomNamako) July 17, 2018

 

Still, she did manage to ingratiate herself to the NRA and others supportive of Trump by posing as a “gun rights advocate” in Russia. So, maybe she could be pinned on conservatives.

But alas, it turned out that she was an opportunist who would meet with Obama officials, if given the chance. And she did.  The Blaze reports:

Alleged Russian agent Maria Butina met with officials from the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve in 2015, according to a new report. (snip)

Reuters reported that Butina and Alexander Torshin, the former Russian Central Bank deputy governor, met with Stanley Fischer, then-vice chair of the Fed, and Nathan Sheets, then-Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, in separate meetings in 2015.

The purpose of the meetings was to discuss U.S. economic sanctions placed on Russia during the Obama administration. The U.S. placed sanctions on Russia multiple times during the Obama years over Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, its annexation of Crimea, and the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

According to Reuters, the meetings “reveal a wider circle of high-powered connections that Butina sought to cultivate with American political leaders and special interest groups.”

And John Solomon told Lou Dobbs last week that at that time, in 2015, he alerted the FBI to her. Via Gateway Pundit:

I’ll tell you a little story I’ve never told before. In March of 2015 I observed her at several events and really cozying up to conservatives and making what I thought was a weak-handed case that she was this courageous gun rights activist going up against Putin and there would one day be a Second Amendment in Russia. There’s never going to be a Second Amendment in Russia. I became very perplexed by her behavior and her efforts of going up to presidential candidates and congressional candidates. So I started to do some reporting and I called FBI and US intelligence sources and very quickly I learned, “Yeah, we know that she’s somebody here as an agent of influence. She’s connecte to this guy Tortian(sp?) and we know what she’s trying to do.” And I thought, that’s really interesting. Are they going to tell the people she’s meeting with and it doesn’t appear they ever did. I thought the role of FBI counter-intelligence was to prevent contacts from occurring that are not in the interest of the United States. It sounds like they sat around and watched this for three or four years until it was convenient to create a headline.

A set-up by the FBI? Let’s see, who was in charge of counter-terrorism there? That’s right: Peter Stzrok, the man who expert imitation of a man demonically possessed impressed so many observers.

Am I the only person who remembers another Russian red-head deep cover spy named Anna Chapman? She was uncovered during the Obama administration, in 2011, and was said to have used her good looks to entice various male officials into her bed and into security lapses. And am I the only person who thought it reeked of a cover-up that she and her colleagues were rapidly traded for US people arrested in Russia – without even an attempt to get her to spill the beans on whom she seduced for what intelligence?

Ms. Chapman has found work in Mother Russia:

Another dream shatters for Trump-haters

Say, could this qualify as … diplomatic engagement? After Hassan Rouhani tweeted out that the US should be aware that “war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” Donald Trump directly responded on Twitter in kind. And in all caps:

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

How did the Iranians react to that? Er …

Iran’s state-owned Islamic Republic News Agency replied within hours, dismissing Trump’s tweet and describing it as a “passive reaction” to Rouhani’s remarks. …

Gen. Gholam Hossein Gheibparvar, head of the Revolutionary Guard’s paramilitary Basij force, said the United States “won’t dare” take military action against Iran, whose missiles can hit most of the Middle East. Iran also controls part of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway for all of the Persian Gulf oil tanker traffic.

That mattered a lot more before the Iran deal opened their access to oil markets again. The Strait of Hormuz made a good potential Iranian target at that point, strategically speaking, as it would allow them to shut down much of the Arabian Peninsula’s output while having little impact on their sanctioned oil production. Now, however, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would all but end their own oil sales, hammering their economy at a time when popular unrest is already boiling over because of economic woes. Plus, now that the US has vastly increased its own production, it might end up boosting our own fortunes.

Besides, we have our navy in the region, and a battle at sea there would almost certainly end very badly for the Iranians. They are currently supporting Houthis in Yemen, for which they need that passage to remain open, and they also need access to the Indian Ocean for their own import needs. The US would respond to an attempt at shutting down the strait by blockading Iran between Oman and Pakistan. It would be akin to cutting off one’s nose, eyes, and mouth to spite what’s left of the face.

The exchange came shortly after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo compared the Iranian mullahcracy to the Mafia:

“The level of corruption and wealth among regime leaders shows that Iran is run by something that resembles the Mafia more than a government,” he said in speech made to a largely Iranian American audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Pompeo was introduced by Fred Ryan, publisher of The Washington Post and chairman of the Ronald Reagan Foundation.

Pompeo said the administration has concluded that Tehran has no statesmen willing to moderate its policies, a sharp break from the Obama administration, which negotiated the nuclear deal hoping an improving economy would give relative pragmatists like Rouhani a boost.

But Pompeo said Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are “merely polished frontmen for the Ayatollah’s international con artistry. Their nuclear deal didn’t make them moderates, it made them wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

It’s been clear that the Trump administration wanted to take a hardline approach to Iran since Day 1. Rex Tillerson ended up on the outs because he wanted to keep the JCPOA in place, a not-unreasonable position since the US gave up all its concessions up front in the deal and our former partners in the P5+1 talks didn’t want to reopen the deal. It’s also not unreasonable to take the position that the JCPOA doesn’t actually guarantee anything, not even verifiable delays in nuclear-weapons productions, and therefore isn’t worth keeping.

The hardline approach, as we saw with North Korea (about which more in another article), is to reflect their rhetoric right back at them. That worked to some extent with Kim Jong-un and China, both of whom worried about a potential war brewing on the Korean Peninsula. Will responses in kind get the message to Tehran that the US has grown tired of “Death to America” messaging and rattling sabers works in both directions? It might at least get the message to Iran’s trading partners in Europe and especially private investors there, who might suddenly become skittish at putting their capital into Iran. North Korea didn’t have that particular vulnerability, and it will be interesting to see whether the capital-starved mullahs rethink their rhetorical strategy.

How will it go over at home, though? Lots of media outlets are expressing anxiety over a potential war breaking out, but Sean Spicer might have a better grasp on how people outside the bubble will see this. We’ve been hearing nothing but threats of war and Great Satan noise from Iran’s top leaders for almost forty years. This was nothing more than a response in kind.

.@seanspicer: “President Trump made it very clear that this country, under this leadership, is not going to stand for that kind of threatening language.” https://t.co/vtPq7EaBFu pic.twitter.com/eZhrWkWvpz

— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 23, 2018

Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, this week may not have been the president’s finest moment, but one suspected that the absolute meltdown the media had over it was based more on their feelings about the president than what he did. If, one suspects, he had said the exact same thing that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did regarding Russia, the result would have been the same.

Well, we don’t have access to anyone in the establishment media to test this theory. We do have, however, protesters out on the National Mall who were interviewed by The Daily Caller — and it more or less proves this theory. What The Caller did was give people a quote they said was from Donald Trump but had actually come from Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

The first part came from the infamous 2012 video where then-President Obama was caught on an open mic telling then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev — a Putin puppet in every sense of the word — that he needed “space” on missile defense.

“This is my last election … After my election I have more flexibility,” Obama can be heard saying, while Medvedev says he’ll transmit the message to Vladimir Putin — who was, at the time, about to retake the Russian presidency.

WATCH: Barack Obama tells Russian diplomat he has more flexibility after his last election.

Can you imagine what the left would be doing if this was President Trump?#TreasonSummit pic.twitter.com/TUCFYtnxU9

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) July 16, 2018

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So, what did people on the mall think about Trump “saying this?” You perchance can predict this part:

“I feel that is probably the most dangerous thing that you can say because he’s basically offering carte blanche to anything that could potentially happen after 2020,” one man said. “I think all of us as Americans and really voters need to recognize that and be very serious with our vote.”

At least one guy noticed that it “sounds familiar to what happened to the last president.” Well, at least some people have longer memories than others.

When it came to flexibility, at least one person was honest, saying that it was “why I’m biased-speaking, I mean, I think he should have had more flexibility.”

“I do know that, actually, but I think it’s all about context as well,” a different man said.

When Hillary’s reset button was brought up, meanwhile, one woman said it was different because “there was more transparency.” There are plenty of words one might use to describe the Clinton family, but their arrant opacity doesn’t allow “transparency” to be one of them.

This is a small sample size, but it’s an interesting experiment. There are people designed to hate whatever the president says, no matter the content of it. Take the lesser-known portions of the Gettysburg Address, read them off to millennials wandering the National Mall and pass them off as a speech President Trump gave at a Civil War monument and I can practically guarantee at least 30 percent of respondents will identify them as indicators of white supremacy and as showing support for the display of the Confederate flag.

Perhaps this is what bugs me about the establishment media coverage regarding Helsinki. I don’t think even Trump’s supporters would acknowledge it was one of the finest moments of his presidency unless they were trying to be provocatively contrarian. But to call the press conference treasonous with a straight face as John Brennan did — a crime which can carry the death penalty, mind you — is either patently absurd or defining down what criminal activity by a president entails because of the man occupying the presidency.

RELATED: Trump Digs Up ‘Classic’ Video of Hillary Talking About Russia to Make a Point About ‘Fake News’

Or you could be like the MSNBC commentator who compared the press conference to Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht. (I, unfortunately, am being serious.) Or you could be like Hillary Clinton, who used the occasion to accuse her 2016 adversary of being on Russia’s side with a smug tweet.

Yet, as we proved here, if Trump used the words of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, he’d still be savaged. Probably by Hillary, as well. The knives are out, and if liberals can’t find provocation to use them, they’ll simply make it up.

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Since the 2016 election, it seems as though Facebook has pretty much done everything in its power to silence legitimate conservative thought short of outright barring its airing. In fact, this led to some of the more contentious parts of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress not too long ago.

So, at least in Menlo Park, California, conservatism is something that should be looked upon with all due suspicion. Holocaust denial? That’s cool, though.

That’s at least the message from an interview Zuckerberg did for the Recode Decode podcast, which was (depending on your preconceptions of the Facebook CEO) somewhere on the spectrum between “problematic” and “absolutely cringe-worthy.”

The whole thing began with Recode asking Zuckerberg to make a case for taking Infowars — Alex Jones’ controversial conspiracy theory platform — off of Facebook.

“I think if you were trying to argue on the side of basically the core principle of keeping the community safe, I think you would try to argue that the content is somehow attacking people or is creating an unsafe environment,” Zuckerberg said. “Let me give you an example of where we would take it down. In Myanmar or Sri Lanka, where there’s a history of sectarian violence, similar to the tradition in the U.S. where you can’t go into a movie theater and yell ‘Fire!’ because that creates an imminent harm.”

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It’s interesting that the head of a social media platform known to tinker severely with what people can or cannot see is apparently citing Schenck v. United States as the summum bonum of speech restrictions. I trust that Mr. Zuckerberg is a well-read man, but I’d encourage him to go back and read the full decision, not just the line that’s received the most play.

But I digress. The conversation then veered into how Zuckerberg was dealing with fake news and what the bar was.

“We are moving towards the policy of misinformation that is aimed at or going to induce violence,” he said. “The principles that we have on what we remove from the service are, if it’s going to result in real harm, real physical harm, or if you’re attacking individuals, then that content shouldn’t be on the platform. There’s a lot of categories of that that we can get into, but then there’s broad debate.”

The host then pointed out that there isn’t exactly serious debate over Jones’ contention that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. However, Zuckerberg said that unless Jones or someone who believed the same thing he does was actually harassing Sandy Hook victims, they wouldn’t do anything about it.

“But overall, let’s take this whole closer to home,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened … I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think–“

“In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead,” the host interjected.

“It’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent,” Zuckerberg responded. “I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, ‘We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.’”

Zuckerberg has since “clarified” his remarks, saying that “I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn’t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.” Which, duh. I’m kind of at a loss how Holocaust denial — something that absolutely no reasonable person in the public sphere actually believes — isn’t going to be censored while conservative news outlets and pundits are.

This censorship, like so many things in this story, also isn’t up for debate. You can cite anecdotal cases associated with conservative or patriotic values (like Facebook’s decision to bar a post that included an excerpt of the Declaration of Independence), concrete ones (like with pro-Trump personalities Diamond and Silk,  where Facebook “came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community”) or the hard numbers (like our study that Facebook’s algorithm changes had demonstrably affected traffic to conservative news channels much more significantly than it had for liberal outlets, numbers that couldn’t be explained without intent).

RELATED: Despite Censoring Conservatives, Zuckerburg Allegedly Had Special Message for Trump After 2016 Win

Now, Holocaust deniers don’t exactly get the kind of numbers that publishers like us do, and thank God they don’t. But they are a pernicious part of Facebook’s underbelly, particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the globe. While bigotry against Jews isn’t quite on the level of the state-sponsored terror imposed by the government of Myanmar or the sectarian violence in Sri Lanka cited by Zuckerberg, it’s still a pressing issue of the day.

Deniers also aren’t exactly comparable to Infowars. Alex Jones, crank though you may well believe him to be, doesn’t represent a physical danger to people, nor does he openly espouse pernicious bigotry designed to foment hatred against a religious or ethnic group. For Zuckerberg to move from Alex Jones to Holocaust deniers isn’t the most inappropriate thing about this mephitic verbal hiccup by a long shot, but it bears noting as a window into Zuckerberg’s soul.

To stand by Holocaust denial as non-violent speech that’s part of a reasonable debate, especially when you’re at the helm of a social media platform where invisible hands pull the strings of political opinion, is simply preposterous. You are certainly free to react in your own way to Zuckerberg’s remarks and what kind of rot it reveals inside the walls at Menlo Park. As someone who works for a publisher that’s borne the brunt of Facebook’s policies on political speech, count me on the “absolutely cringe-worthy” side of the scale.

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Tanks are pretty much the ultimate platform for heavy artillery, but they’re not very much on mobility. You can’t get an M1A1 to climb up a narrow mountain pass or lie motionless in a field, patiently waiting for the enemy without being seen. As the infomercials declaim, there’s got to be a better way!

Well, now there is, thanks to a new U.S. Army weapon that puts something equivalent to the power of the M1 Abrams right into the hands of a soldier out in the field.

The Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle is set to replace about 80,000 M249 squad automatic weapons as the army’s light machine gun. While it may look like a regular machine gun, the NGSAR will have quite a bit of power behind it.

“Armed with the NGSARs, soldiers will have the confidence of knowing the new weapon can be relied on for stopping power against sophisticated adversaries who arrive to fight in advanced body armor,” Fox News reported. “The goal is for the weapon’s chamber pressure to achieve similar levels to battle tanks. Recent conflicts have shown that currently issued weapons have not been sufficient when tackling the challenge of forces with defense innovation and access to modern equipment.”

At a range of 2,000 feet, the NGSAR should be able to penetrate body armor.

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“The aim is for the NGSARs to fire bullets at pressure levels similar to those achieved by tanks when they fire,” Fox News reported. “Rounds will smash through advanced adversary body armor even at a distance, allowing soldiers to accurately shoot while maintaining a safe distance from the threat whenever possible.”

“The Army would like the new weapon chamber pressure to be between 60 and 80 KSI (kilopound per square inch). To put that into context, the Army’s M1 Abrams main battle tank fires at that chamber pressure. Assault rifles tend to be around 45 KSI, so this will definitely be higher.”

Military.com reported earlier this week that the new weapon should be ready to fielding the NGSAR as early as 2022 or 2023. One of the challenges that will have to be overcome will be making a type of ammunition that’s lighter than the brass-cased M855A1 5.56mm Enhanced Performance round yet provides the kind of performance and lethality being specified.

Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski said that the NGSAR is “not for every soldier,” meaning that the venerable M249 will still be in the army’s arsenal for many years to come.

However, he noted that the Army was aware “that the 5.56mm is not going to be the round of the future because we have issues associated with adversaries’ body armor.”

Even given that, he said that the “5.56mm is going to be in our inventory for a long time.”

As for how to reduce the weight of the rounds, Ostrowski said that there could be a variety of approaches, most of them substituting polymers for part or all of the brass casing.

“Some will probably come with a polymer case that looks just like a current 5.56mm round except there won’t be as much brass; some will come with a polymer case that is of the non-traditional form … We don’t know. We are allowing (companies) to make that decision,” Ostrowski said.

“We have given them our priorities and said ‘innovate,’ and these companies are doing it.”

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Textron, the article notes, has been working on polymer-cased ammunition for over a decade. However, other companies working on the problem have discovered that “standard cartridge designs made completely from polymer are not strong enough and are prone to damage during the extraction process.” Part of the solution could involve brass at the base of the casing with polymer for the rest.

As for who’s going to end up building the NGSAR, there were five candidates named in a notice posted this past week, according to the Army Times: Textron, FN America, General Dynamics, PCP Tactical and Sig Sauer.

So, yes, there is a better way — albeit one that’s in the process of being found. It won’t be here for a little while, and high-technology military platforms are obviously subject to frequent delays.

However, once it’s here, the NGSAR is going to be an unstoppable force — one that could put something with a power equivalent to tanks in the hands of our troops.

Facebook has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers’ newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share to your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you.