War Stories

Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. Right? In the third episode of the series, Adin and Staffer discuss the incorporation of logistics into professional militaries and how, in some ways, logistics helped bring about an international trading system.

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What's the quality that defines a sniper? Is it the pulling of the trigger? The skilled stalking of their target in the hours or days prior to making a shot? The mathematical and physics-based knowledge that prevents them from making an error?

In our season finale, we look at the future of the sniper and whether the mythos they've cultivated over the centuries can withstand scopes that aim for them, guns that can fire thousands of yards, and robots that do what they do, only better.

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For something so central to our lives, the role of blood wasn't something we could explain for much of our history. We knew it was important, and when someone was bleeding out on the battlefield, you needed to fix them, but just how you would go about doing that was a source of constant trial and error. In the second Loose Rounds discussion, Adin and Angry Staff Officer look at how blood transfusions came into being on the battlefield and how it changed how wars were fought.

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In the Vietnam War, snipers returned to some of their earliest environmental roots while simultaneously reaching the pinnacle of their development: taking part in long missions, independently, where high value targets were taken out. Carlos Hathcock, a Marine from Arkansas, would grow to become one of the best of them.

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In our first episode of Loose Rounds, a mini-series produced in partnership with Nammo, we discuss the humble mortar. You know, the tubes that fire grenade-looking munitions into the air? It turns out they have a far deeper and wider history than you might've expected. We trace that path and all the ingenious things people have done with them in the meantime.

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On War Stories, we often focus on what's happening at the proverbial tip of the spear: the latest and greatest, at least for the time, weapons platforms, how militaries shifted their fighting styles to accommodate these technologies, and what it felt like to use these on the frontlines of the battlefield. After all, those weapons are what gets top billing when we talk about the most interesting parts of warfare. What we sometimes miss are all the bits and pieces that make those weapons effective: camouflage patterns in clothing that allow soldiers to hide in their environments, infrared glint tape that helps designate friend from foe to aircraft up above a battlefield, shipping containers that changed the way militaries could move, to only name a few. In each episode of Loose Rounds, the War Stories team takes a look at one of these underrated technologies and traces its importance throughout history.

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By the time Lyudmila Pavlichenko joined the rest of her peers at the International Student Assembly at American University in Washington, DC, much of the country knew her name. As well as the Nazis who despised her for the deadly aim she took with her rifle.

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When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in late 1939—the action that kicked off the Winter War—they expected an easy fight, if there was one at all. Instead, they found a military with an intimate knowledge of Finland's terrain, and one that was willing to fight. Among them was a man who very nearly became one with the freezing environment in an effort to take a stand against the invading nation.

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We know World War I for a number of things: trenches, poison gas, the ever-present thrum of artillery. But it also served as the birthplace of the sniper. And one of the best couldn't be found on the Western, or even Eastern Front. Instead, Billy Sing fought on the shores of Gallipoli.

On a scraggly hill in Pennsylvania, a unit of sharpshooters took part in some of the most fierce, if not frequently discussed, fighting of Gettysburg. Many only know them from the accessories riding atop their heads: bucktails.

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