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Pakistan is getting a new infantry rifle. In late November at the IDEAS-2016 Expo in Karachi, Pakistan’s state-run arsenal Pakistan Ordnance Factories signed a letter of understanding with the Czech small arms manufacturer Česká Zbrojovka. This suggests that Pakistan and C.Z. are about to begin negotiations for Pakistan to adopt, and eventually begin license-production of, C.Z.’s 806 BREN 2 rifle.

Between February and March 2016, Australian and French sailors in the Arabian Sea seized small ships — or dhows — smuggling weapons, most likely to militants in Somalia and Yemen. These caches aboard the dhows included examples of one particularly rare firearm, the North Korean Type 73 machine gun. In November 2016, independent monitoring group Conflict Armament Research released a report detailing the captured weapons and their likely points of origins and destinations. According to the analysis, the shipments showed links between Iran and armed groups Tehran supports in the Gulf of Aden region.

In the late 1980s, the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force decided to replace its aging 7.62-by-51-millimeter Howa Type 64 battle rifles. The JGSDF selected a lighter, modern assault rifle — the Howa Type 89 — in 1989. It’s a solid weapon, but one with a few weird features. Its biggest problem, however, is that there aren’t enough copies of it in existence.

In the mid-1970s, India began development on a totally new, advanced main battle tank that would satisfy the needs of the country’s Armored Corps. An impressive combination of firepower, armor protection and mobility, the tank was to be India’s first indigenously produced tank—and one of the best in the world. The service date for the tank, known as Arjun, was confidently set for 1985. Instead, the Arjun suffered a tortuously long development period spanning two centuries. The final result, introduced into the army twenty-six years later than originally planned, is a mess of a tank that not even the Indian...

The mammoth Lahti L-39 anti-tank rifle, designed by Aimo Lahti — Finland’s greatest gun-designer — served Finland well during the 1940s. The 20-millimeter, semi-automatic anti-tank rifle’s barrel alone was 51.2 inches long, and the overall weapon weighed a staggering 109 pounds. Through the 1930s, the Finnish military had debated the optimum caliber of weapon for use against armor. Officials suggested 12.7 millimeter, 13.2 millimeter and 20 millimeter — and planned to use the same caliber round in both anti-armor and anti-aircraft roles.

In 1946, two Swedes named Hugo Abramson and Harald Jentzen designed the Carl Gustaf, which at the time appeared to be just another recoilless rifle. Many of these weapons fell out of use in the following decades as anti-tank missiles took over. But the Carl Gustaf stuck around — and for a different role than Abramson and Jentzen had planned in the 1940s. For one, it’s now just as much an anti-infantry weapon owing to its range, low cost and types of ammunition.

Of the 31 states that have declared their opposition to taking in Syrian refugees, one state, Kentucky, has a specific reason to be wary of the background check process: previously two Iraqi refugees who settled in Bowling Green turned out to be al Qaeda-linked terrorists with the blood of American soldiers on their hands, an ABC News investigation found. In the wake of the Kentucky case, the U.S. halted the refugee program for Iraqis for six months, a fact the Obama administration did not disclose to Congress at the time, officials told ABC News in the 2013 investigation.

One of the more brutal weapons to see use on both sides of the war in Iraq is the KPV, a belt-fed heavy machine gun designed to take down aircraft — using a round dating back to tank-busting guns in World War II. The 14.5x114-millimeter KPV is not as pervasive as the smaller DShK, a rough equivalent to the U.S. M2 Browning. But the 108-pound KPV is nonetheless a big, unwieldy and extremely dangerous threat the Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga have encountered on their push toward Mosul. The Islamic State seized dozens of them in Syria and Iraq, bolting the guns...

Iraqi troops fighting for Mosul’s outskirts have brought along one of their most fearsome weapons — the 60-ton, Russian-made TOS-1A Buratino. A photograph and tweet from the Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman shows Iraqi troops posing with the rocket launcher near Bartella, a battle-scarred Assyrian Christian town less than 10 miles from Mosul. Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service troops took over the town on Oct. 20, one of dozens freed since the offensive began Oct. 16.

Russia has unveiled chilling pictures of its largest ever nuclear missile, capable of destroying an area the size of France. The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2 by Nato, has a top speed of 4.3 miles (7km) per second and has been designed to outfox anti-missile shield systems. The new Sarmat missile could deliver warheads of 40 megatons - 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to replace the country's older SS-18 Satan weapons with the new missiles.

The U.S. Army is testing new recoilless rifle technology designed give soldiers shoulder-fired rockets that are lighter and more ergonomic and in future, make them safe to fire in tight urban spaces. Testers at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland are evaluating upgrades to the M3 recoilless rifle, also known as the Multi-role Anti-armor Anti-personnel Weapon System, or MAAWS. The improvements will make it more ergonomic, six pounds lighter and shorter.

Clinton's secret arms dealing -- and how it led to disaster in Libya. Hillary Clinton led the charge in the Obama administration to go to war in Libya. Her objective was to overthrow the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Not one to be deterred by opponents in the Pentagon and Congress to her reckless interventionist plans, Hillary decided to end-run them. Her State Department helped facilitate what Andrew P. Napolitano in his scathing article has called “Hillary’s secret war.” When the secret war began to backfire, as arms ended up in the hands of anti-American jihadists, Hillary Clinton and other...

The voters who put Barack Obama in office expected some big changes. From the NSA's warrantless wiretapping to Guantanamo Bay to the Patriot Act, candidate Obama was a defender of civil liberties and privacy, promising a dramatically different approach from his predecessor. But six years into his administration, the Obama version of national security looks almost indistinguishable from the one he inherited. Guantanamo Bay remains open. The NSA has, if anything, become more aggressive in monitoring Americans. Drone strikes have escalated. Most recently it was reported that the same president who won a Nobel Prize in part for promoting nuclear...

The October 2016 edition of Maxim celebrates Beretta’s 500th year of firearm manufacturing. Known among twenty-first century hunters for its shotguns and among concealed carry permit holders for its compact, potent pistols like the PX4 Storm, the Italian gun maker has a rich heritage that includes “crafting guns for everyone from Napoleon and Winston Churchill to Ernest Hemingway and James Bond.”

The Department of Justice is dropping charges against an arms dealer who says he can expose Hillary Clinton's role in illegally arming terrorists in Libya. American Marc Turi had been charged with selling weapons to Libyan rebels at a time when it was illegal to do so. An associate of Turi claims that the DoJ was dropping the charges because the revelations about Clinton's Libya policies would sink her campaign.

Beretta had its version of a compact semi-automatic sniper rifle on display at Modern Day Marine 2016. The ARX200, chambered for 7.62mm NATO, is the rifle Beretta was designing for the U.S. Army’s Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper System competition awhile back.

Physically, North Korea’s Type 73 light machine gun resembles both the British Bren and the Russian PKM. The gas-operated, 7.62-by-54R-chambered Type 73 boats a cyclic rate of 600 to 700 rounds per minute and a quick-change barrel system. Weighing 10.6 kilograms unloaded, the Type 73 is heavier than the Russian PKM is.

The number of new federal criminal prosecutions have hit their lowest level in nearly a decade, helped by declines in white collar and immigration prosecutions. That’s according to Justice Department data recently analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. As TRAC details, the 9,118 federal criminal prosecutions the government undertook in July are the fewest since July 2007. The July 2016 tally represented a 15.5 percent decline from June and continued this fiscal year’s ongoing downward trend. ...more...

In March, Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan — Iran’s defense minister — claimed that a new, unseen Iranian tank called the Karrar “is one of the most advanced tanks in the world.” He further suggested that the “tank [is] 100 percent Iranian made and it can even be superior than [the] T-90 in some degrees.” Then in August, a tank with a close resemblance to the Russian-made T-90MS appeared on Iranian television. It flew a green, white and red Iranian flag from the turret … while spinning donuts.

The fight against the Islamic State may get the headlines. But it’s the military threats from Russia and China that most worry top Pentagon officials — and are driving a new arms race to deter these great-power rivals. This question of how to deal with Russian and Chinese military advances has gotten almost no attention in the 2016 presidential campaign. But it deserves a careful look. The programs begun in the waning days of the Obama administration could potentially change the face of warfare, in the United States’ favor, but they would require political support and new spending by the...