In Jordan
Jordan acquired almost the entire British Challenger 1 tank fleet between 1999 and 2003 for £1 each, as they were due for replacement by the UK but had no net value to the British once replaced by Challenger 2. Renamed Al-Hussein, most of the Challenger fleet was successfully upgraded and improved; however, a few were set aside for a project by the KADDB King Abdullah II Design and Development Bureau (now JODDB) to develop crewless turrets with an all-in hull concept. This has been tested on a Centurion previously, and the design could also be fitted to the M60 or Chieftain tank. With a 120 mm Swiss smoothbore gun, eight rounds a minute, and a reduced profile, the turret was demonstrated but never sold. Today, the vehicle remains a curiosity in the excellent Royal Jordanian Tank Museum.
What do you think of the 214TN?
Are they too much for the Greek Navy to handle? Now we all know that the Greeks and Turks are NATO allies, so that question I asked should be moot, right? Except it isn’t to the Turks and Greeks. Nobody’s ever quite sure whose side the Turks are on. They have an itch to recreate the Ottoman Empire. Just ask their sultan if you don’t believe me.
The Greeks tend to take obsolete designs from foreign navies and slap a Hellenic Republican flag on them. Almost everything the Greeks do involves some element of financial corruption. I don’t hate the Greeks, but that’s been my long experience dealing with them.
On November 27, 2025, at Gölcük Naval Shipyard, Turkey formally received the Reis-class submarine TCG Hızırreis (S-331), the second of six Type 214TN boats built under the New Type Submarine Project (YTDP), in a handover attended by representatives of the Defence Industry Agency (SSB), the Turkish Navy, Gölcük Naval Shipyard, and TKMS. The transfer followed months of harbour and sea acceptance tests. Both Turkish media and TKMS announced that the delivery confirms the program is now progressing within the expected cost and schedule envelope. Coming just over a year after the commissioning of the lead boat TCG Piri Reis in August 2024, the entry into service of Hızırreis marks a new stage in Turkey’s long-running effort to renew its diesel-electric fleet and introduce air-independent propulsion (AIP) capabilities on a large scale. For Ankara and its partners, this handover is more than a technical milestone: it feeds directly into the balance of power in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, where underwater superiority is becoming a central element of regional deterrence.
TCG Hızırreis is a Reis-class (Type 214TN) diesel-electric submarine with AIP based on polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells and high-capacity batteries, enabling prolonged submerged operations without snorkeling. Built at Gölcük with an advertised local content of around 80 percent, the design combines German Type 214 technology with an extensive suite of Turkish-developed systems provided by companies such as STM, Aselsan, Havelsan, AYESAŞ, TÜBİTAK BİLGEM, and MilSOFT. The submarine is about 67–68 meters long, with a beam of 6.3 meters, displaces roughly 2,000 tons submerged, and can accommodate up to 40 personnel, including both the core crew and additional specialists, depending on the mission profile. A single-hull, one-compartment architecture optimised for a low acoustic signature is combined with a modern combat system and sonar suite derived from TKMS’s ISUS family, integrated with national subsystems, making Hızırreis a key node in Turkey’s undersea surveillance and strike network.
The boat’s armament is centred on eight 533 mm torpedo tubes housed in the forward Section 50 weapons module. In addition to legacy heavyweight torpedoes, the class is being associated with Roketsan’s Akya heavy torpedo and submarine-launched variants of the Atmaca anti-ship missile, often referred to in Turkish sources as “Sub-Atmaca” or AKATA. In the longer term, integration of the land-attack Gezgin cruise missile remains a stated ambition for the Reis class, which would add a deep-strike dimension against coastal and inland targets. Alongside this missile and torpedo load-out, the design retains the ability to lay naval mines, giving Hızırreis a wide spectrum of anti-ship, anti-submarine, area-denial, and potential land-attack options from a concealed underwater position.
From a tactical standpoint, Hızırreis substantially enhances the navy’s undersea capabilities. Its combination of fuel‑cell air‑independent propulsion (AIP) and large battery reserves enables the submarine to remain submerged for extended durations, ranging from several days to multiple weeks, without the need to raise a snorkel. This endurance significantly reduces vulnerability to satellite, radar, and electro‑optical surveillance, as well as to airborne and surface anti‑submarine warfare (ASW) assets. Open-source reporting in Turkey indicates that Piri Reis is engineered to operate at around 250 meters during routine missions, a depth range consistent with the Type 214 design. Although the Turkish Navy does not publish exact limits, widely cited estimates for the class place its maximum safe diving depth in the 300-400 meter band, depending on loadout and sea conditions. The submarine maintains a very low acoustic profile at these depths, using a quiet electric drive, fuel cell-based AIP, and a hydrodynamically refined hull that helps reduce flow noise during silent operations. These attributes make the vessel particularly effective for sustained intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in heavily monitored choke points such as the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, and for discreet shadowing of surface groups in the Aegean, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea.
Bullet Points:
** San Francisco authorities remind all of you to get your Christmas shoplifting done early this year. Of course, the problem in San Francisco is that, with all the stores either closed or with very low inventory, inner-city shoplifting will have to be done in the Bay Area. The BART remains open (but nobody knows for how long) to support your efforts.
** Liberals assert that if eliminating firearms only saves one life, it’s worth it. By that thinking, if we eliminate ALL illegal aliens and it saves one life, that should be worth it.
** One of the misapprehensions people suffer from is the idea that there’s a final promised land. Success integrates both the journey and the destination. (Peterson)
** On 29 Nov. 1968 – The Viet Cong High Command ordered an all-out attempt to smash the Phoenix program. Hanoi Radio broadcast a National Liberation Front directive calling for a new offensive to “utterly destroy” Allied forces. The broadcast added that the new operation was particularly concerned with eliminating the “Phoenix Organization.” The Phoenix program (or “Phuong Hoang” as it was called in Vietnamese) was a hamlet security initiative run by the Central Intelligence Agency that relied on centralized, computerized intelligence gathering aimed at identifying and eliminating the Viet Cong infrastructure–the upper echelon of the National Liberation Front political cadres and party members. The program became one of the most controversial operations undertaken by U.S. personnel in South Vietnam. Critics charged that American Special Forces-led South Vietnamese “hit teams” indiscriminately arrested and murdered many communist suspects on flimsy pretexts. Despite the criticism and media attention, the program was acknowledged by top-level U.S. government officials, as well as Viet Cong and North Vietnamese leaders after the war, to have been very effective in reducing the power of the local communist cadres in the South Vietnamese countryside.
** is must-read non-fiction from that time period. The events described here took place in Borneo during the Indonesian Confrontation in the latter half of 1964 and in the Republic of Vietnam during that country’s fight for its very existence throughout 1965-1968. Malaysia, with the assistance of its allies, prevailed in the Confrontation. Unfortunately, the Republic of Vietnam, after being abandoned by its allies, succumbed to a full-scale Communist armored and infantry invasion in April 1975.
This is the story of an Australian Army officer who was seconded to support the efforts of the Republic of Vietnam in their clandestine war against the National Liberation Front. The story is told precisely as events unfolded without efforts to minimize or maximize. It’s a story of a brutal civil war, of a proxy war, of love, death, and revenge in a wartorn setting. Both the government of the Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) engaged in systematic assassination as a matter of policy. Reading this book requires that you read it in the context of the people and events as they occurred.
** U.S. consular officials are warning travelers about the high risk of carjackings by cartel gunmen on the highways leading north to the Texas border.
This week, the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, issued a security alert highlighting the high number of robberies taking place along the highway connecting Monterrey with the Colombia port of entry, just west of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. According to the security alert, victims of robberies are pulled over by vehicles with flashing lights that at first glance appear to be law enforcement, but in fact are cartel gunmen.
** The Labor Department reported this past Wednesday that, despite all the news about layoffs and the bad economy, Americans filed 216,000 new applications for unemployment benefits last week — 6,000 fewer than the previous week, and the lowest number since mid-April. Economists had predicted that unemployment claims would rise to 225,000, not fall to 216,000. Sounds like some economists should be filing for unemployment.
Boating
I had a 19′ Chaparral open bow boat powered by a 5.0 Volvo Penta with a duoprop that I named Akula. Then I bought a 32′ Sea Ray, the Defiant, and slipped it behind a doctor’s house at Alamitos Bay (between Long Beach, CA, and Seal Beach, CA), and for a while, I was an admiral with two boats. Because it was one boat too many, I sold the two-year-old Chaparral to an FBI Special Agent I worked with. He wrecked it (totaled) at Lake Havasu while drunk on his first excursion. None of that has a lot to do with the account below.
(above) The original Soviet/Russian ‘Akula/Shark‘, and the one that Western intelligence (NATO) called the Akula. Are you confused yet?
The reason for this disparity is that the West did not know the original Russian name for a particular piece of equipment, or they did know but chose to assign a different English name for ease of communication and identification by their armed forces and intelligence agencies.
No other piece of Soviet equipment reflected this better than these two very different nuclear-powered submarines. One of them was the largest Ballistic Missile Submarine (SSBN) ever built and put into service, while the other is an Attack Submarine (SSN) considered one of the best Soviet designs from the 1980s. Its liquid sodium nuclear reactor sucked, but that was classified.
The Soviets themselves called the SSBN the Project 941 Akula, which means Shark in Russian. Western intelligence called it the Typhoon Class.
The SSN (docked across the quay) is called the Project 971 Shchuka-B, which is Russian for Pike-B. Curiously, there’s apparently no Shchuka-A/Pike-A variant. Western intelligence instead codenamed it the Akula Class.
Personally, I feel that the more predatory name, which evokes the image of a shark hunting its prey, better fits the attack submarine.
Identify the Ship
1
Here’s a New one for you to puzzle over.
2
3
Not a Monitor or ASPB
Identify the Armor
4
Identify the Small Arms
5 & 6
Parting Shot
It’s that time of year.
End
1 is USS New a Gearing-class destroyer.
Exactly.
(1) USS New, a Gearing class FRAM conversion.
(2) I think it’s a howitzer monitor.
(3) River Monitor.
(4) M42 Duster.
(5) Johnson Rifle and Carbine, made here in R.I.
Ah, you stated “not a monitor” for #3, so it’s probably a CCB.
– Kle.
It is.
I didn’t know Johnson was located in RI.
Cranston St, Cranston R.I.
We had a lot of disused mills when he was looking to set up manufacturing.
– Kle.
Although I think a lot of the larger scale production was contracted out.
– Kle.
1 – USN USS New Gearing-class destroyer
2 – USN River Howitzer Monitor
3 – USN Command and Communications Boat (CCB)
4 – USA M42 Duster
5 – Top – M1941 Johnson rifle
6 – Bottom – M1941 Johnson machine gun
You ran the table!
Considering their assignments from their Northern overlords during Tet ’68 were pretty much the military equivalent of blowing their own brainz out, perhaps the Viet Cong should have been hunting down and killing North Vietnamese as well as Phoenix program participants.
.
Now I want it very clearly understood that nothing I just said was meant in any way, form or fashion to take away anything in the least little bit from the effectiveness and heroics of anyone in particular or the Phoenix program in general or Michael Watson specifically, which were considerable. They made a difference in South Vietnam. Which the American Congress, some of whom were openly allied with the North Vietnamese, abandoned as L-L described. If “abandoned” is the right word, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t anywhere near strong enough. Them of you what have not purchased and read Hunting in the Shadows certainly need to do so.
last sentence x2, x3…
after you’ve finished reading it once, look it over again; there’s even more to it at second glance
Yep.
That would be the Democrat lead congress. Carl Albert of Oklahoma was speaker. Jane Fonda head cheerleader, along with a lot of California lefties.
They couldn’t have done it without some Rs who were skittish due to Watergate.
Watergate, the FBI setup of the man who won the prior election in the largest landslide ever.
👍
Unemployment: Numbers don’t lie (proper ones that is, not the made up ones the MSM want you to believe). Black Friday numbers are reportedly showing a 9% “increase in spending” over last year despite prices dropping and despite what the Propagandists say about our “lousy economy”. America-1…America Haters-0.
***
SanFran: Remove the stores because of theft and a 3rd world mentality created by the Idiots in Charge, with nothing left to steal the rats go elsewhere. Major cities are becoming hellholes…watched a movie last night showing Chicago at Christmas (yup, Hallmark…don’t judge)…people out and about, enjoying Christmastime. First thought: “Today that’s fantasy, and wouldn’t ever go there because some ‘just let out by a Lefty judge’ criminal with a stolen gun will shoot the place up.” What a thought, but true the Left has destrpyed all the vibrant cities. Sad truth.
***
Hunting in the Shadows: Incredible read. Total warrior. No mission equivocation as required at that time.
***
Need to think on the Peterson quote a little, a little thick for my engineer linear brain…don’t get what he’s saying (honest). Our Faith in the unseen yet promised is the critical aspect. Am I missing his point.
***
Parting Shot: Heh. Not going to view those ‘Cattle’ crossing signs along the main road the same with that in mind.
I believe Peterson is conflating (I think that’s the correct word) “success” with the “final promised land.”
In the first sentence I understand him to be saying that people shouldn’t believe that there’s a Heaven: in the second sentence he’s saying there is, but the route by which you get there is just as important.
I’m confused. I don’t understand what he’s saying either, but then again I haven’t seen the (entire?) context.
Exactly my point, same confusion as well. Peterson is brilliant, but still wrestles with The Faith as many intellectuals do (head v. heart), so you are likely correct.
I may be projecting, but I think that Peterson is saying that the process of our journey of learning and life should be as important to us as the end of the journey.
.
We all have our opinions based upon our journey (in all of its permutations) and as the Browning wrote in Andrea del Sarto, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what else is Heaven for?” People are fulfilled by striving for goals that are beyond their current capabilities to achieve personal growth and fulfillment. The quote suggests it is noble to aim high, even if the attempt is ultimately unsuccessful. The meaning of the quote: It’s about aspiration and the human desire to reach for something greater than oneself. The act of striving is what gives life purpose, and we should embrace challenges that push us to grow. The end of human life will come. The space between now and then should be used gloriously.
Well said. I had an elder, our landlord who retired. Then found himself busier than ever with projects and saying ” i don’t know how I got anything done when I was working.” Then quoted this proverb to himself in my presence.
–
” better enjoy the progress, you might not live to see the results.”
He went on to live a long life and enjoy the home / ranch improvements. But I’ve been changed by that m.o. to enjoy every step, every day of efforts toward goals. Not flawlessly, especially when a 1 hr mechanical repair takes me 3hrs!
I’m reminded of “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”
The quote is famously attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
With PaulM, I don’t agree when it comes to heaven.
It’s transcendentalism. Not Christianity.
Thanks for the thoughts on the subject…good to ponder over some wine and lasagna with garlic bread, my current culinary ‘heavenly destination’ where the journey is waiting on the oven.
I’m thinking Peterson was NOT talking about the afterlife. Hard to tell without additional context, but I think he was referring to people’s tendency to think that achieving some goal will “fix everything” or that “perfection will be achieved”.
* Once I put a ring on that girl’s finger she’ll stop having anonymous sex with random men in public bathrooms and become devoted to me and me only.
* As soon as we instantiate True Communism then the earth will become the Workers’ Paradise. (The problem with communism is that it’s never been implemented properly. The underlying theory is, of course, perfection.)
* After I make Deputy Associate Vice President for Sales then my colleagues will finally respect me as they ought to.
And so forth.
—
As to further meaning: what LL said.
TNX 4 reanalyzing “final promised land” most poignantly. There are a multitude of forks to take (even re-treading the original path) upon enlightenment, as well as a re/(new?) -definition of “success.”
“Heaven’ with a small ‘h’ then, as in ‘heaven on earth’. Interesting take. Never do I believe “only this will make me whole” (save for my Faith), especially “achievements” for the sake of status. That’s so…pedestrian. So h/t for that aspect Mike.
It’s all my fault, these sorts of questions (“man’s search for meaning” et al) are not something I spend a lot of time ruminating, hence my ‘hesitation’ to grasp Peterson’s meaning.
Sidebar: Your post – “WWM (an update)” – popped up in the lower header (an oxymoron but fits)…brought to mind reading the ‘cautionary tale’ book by Tracy Kidder, “House”…about building a custom home in Massachusetts in the ’80’s. Some things never change, henceforth to avoid much of it I’ll be GC’ing our new place (but paying for the heavy lifting parts), plus…God willing…wearing the toolbelt to make sure things get done in a correct and timely fashion (albeit this place is intentionally smaller overall than the last…house and garage…no barn and pens, riding arena, bunkhouse, tractor shed, shop, loafing shed, or wood fencing).
Your post also brought to mind Norm Abrams statement to Bob Villa when they discovered a rotted sill in an old house remodel that was not in the budget: “It’s only money Bob.”
* Liberals assert that if eliminating firearms only saves one life, it’s worth it. By that thinking, if we eliminate ALL illegal aliens and it saves one life, that should be worth it.
.
* Conservatives assert that if allowing all firearms only saves one life, it’s worth it.
X2…Yup. “The needs of many outweigh the one” can be viewed both ways depending on the situation.
Turks + Submarines
Is their economy strong enough to keep the subs operational?
They’ll pump what funds they have into the subs. Anything in the water is as high-maintenance as a prom queen.
That boat is an accident waiting to happen with a single-hull, one-compartment architecture. Nothing good is going to come of that. Just sayin…
I have always considered these German boats to be well engineered and almost a “disposable one-shot” submarine. Difficult to detect in coastal water if it’s creeping around, but once pinned, it’s likely not survivable.
Does that not , by definition, make the crew disposable?
Hunting in the Shadows… I’ve read it now twice and enjoyed it immensely. When i saw the cover in this blog i was hoping it was a part two possibly. Maybe?
X2!!!!!!!
Mike has not discussed a Part Two with me. Hunting in the Shadows took him to Borneo, then to Vietnam and finally home to Australia. The Part 2 of his life, as I know MikeW would be as interesting as Part 1, but different. A different world that he operated in than the one in Vietnam or Borneo for that matter. I’m speaking for MikeW here and he has his own voice – forgive me Mike, if I misspoke.
Larry my good friend. You definitely did not misspeak. Writing a Part II would, I am sorry to say, have a few problems particularly the operational years. One major problem would be related to when I worked undercover and also to quite a number of other operations. The undercover period, as far as I know, is still a no go area. Another major problem is that quite a few of the people I operated against are still very much alive and have long memories as well as a long reach. If they are not still alive, then they have first generational descendants who are. Given that many of the operations were conducted in the grey area, what was done in furtherance of them, and what happened during them, might raise more than a few eyebrows. Another no go area would definitely be when I was “borrowed” by the peole who “borrowed” me before. The last few years of my career were more sedate, and basically involved travelling to interesting places, meeting interesting people, and not doing any harm to them (that I know of. anyway, other than some of them having fairly decent hangovers at times).
“travelling to interesting places, meeting interesting people, and not doing any harm to them ”
In contrast to the faux recruiting poster: travel to interesting places, meet interesting people, and kill them.
Mike W…. I’d be more than happy to read about your travels to interesting places, meeting interesting people, and not doing any harm to them within the construct of course of long memories resulting in problems for you. I’d even like to hear more about your experiences with the monks as an example. Sometimes the parts of a person’s history that seem blah to them are actually quite fascinating to others.
“An Turk moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.”-=-
Yes, the Phoenix Program or, in Vietnamese, Chien dich Phung Hoang (sorry about the lack of diacritical marks – no Vietnamese-English dictionary on hand) usually shortened to Phung Hoang. A very very effective counterinsurgency programme, it was both hated and feared by the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese cadres, conducted by the CIA and the South Vietnamese. Its operational arms, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units comprised Vietnamese with a few Nungs (in IV Corps) and, depending where they were, Vietnamese, Montagnards, and Nungs (in II and III Corps) and were usually led by a US Special Forces or Australian advisor. What the set up was in I Corps I don’t know.
The programme was NOT, as is widely believed today, thanks to the Communists (USSR, PRC, North Vietnamese) propaganda and as pushed by local Communists (usually, but not restricted to, academics and trade unionists), supporters, fellow travellers, the usual assortment of useful idiots and, in recent years, the revisionist historians who have no idea what they are talking about but slant everything to their socialist agenda, an assassination programme.
It sought to arrest and interrogate known or suspected members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI). Note that the first aim was to arrest them and this is what happened to the vast majority. It is, and was, far better to arrest and interrogate to gain information than to simply kill people, thus losing any information they might have. Once arrested and interrogated you can also seek to turn them which oftentimes was successful. Most low level, and even some mid-level, Viet Cong were not necessarily Communists. Some were nationalists, who saw the Americans and the other allies as a new set of colonisers to be fought, some were driven by hatred, because their villages had been destroyed and their loved ones killed or maimed by indiscriminate shelling, bombing, and ill-conceived ground operations, while others were simply peasants who simply wished to be left alone to do their farming but who were coerced or co-opted. Most peasants though, in the rural villages, just went with the flow and impartially informed on both sides, what they divulged depending upon which side the group of armed men and women who happened to be in their village at the time was on.
That the programme was very successful can be seen by the extreme lengths the Communists went to discredit it. While quite a large number of suspects were killed, either by resisting arrest or trying to escape, and this is what the Communists and their various apologists and supporters stress, the vast majority were arrested unharmed, interrogated, and either released, incarcerated depending upon their level of involvement in the VCI, or turned and sent back to inform on their former comrades.
I could have gone much deeper, but this is the Phoenix programme in a nutshell. Please feel free to disagree if you are so inclined.
I read your book, and learned much from it.
Your comment is valuable to an understanding of the times.
I know so little about that pre 1968 conflict in SE Asia. Thanks for sharing more details.
By the way, your book was excellent. The little details you included, such as eating sweet cakes, the white mice, or the odors, sets your book apart from others.
Editorial note: As I am still traveling with holiday stuff, there is no blog today, 12/2 but one will post tomorrow.
Aghhhhh!!!!!! I’m jonesing here!
It will be okay. Do some winter boating in lake St. Clair Ed B. That’s if you’re hull can punch through the ice lol. Suffer patiently, patiently suffer.
-STA Lethal
😁
Tennessee 7th dodged a bullet! Van Epps won!
Regardless the MSM tried with their push-narrative attempt to sway voters. Another nutjob averted…for now.