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The Military Salute Project honors American veterans with multimedia presentations made available at no charge to non-profit groups conducting events or unit reunions. They have also released Welcome Home, a 43-minute Microsoft PowerPoint tribute to those who served honorably in the United States Armed Forces or in support of our Military during the Vietnam War years.

There is a very positive story today via the Associated Press about a Marine marksman named Galen Wilson. If your news didn’t have it, you can find it at this link. (Hat tip to Power Line Blog for suggesting this.)

It is interesting that a search with Google News for keywords in the Marine’s story yields only a small handful of results — the press generally ignored this story. Other stories today, about Mel Gibson’s apology for example, have over 100 results.

This link will get you a copy of an article from the DARPA Tactical Technology Office titled “Searching for The Next 60 Day Wonder.”

The article describes several programs in the DARPA Rapid Reaction Initiative, a welcome change in Pentagon thinking. DARPA was able to meet various challenges of the fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, delivering new equipment within a timeline of a few months. This is a return to the “can do” attitude of World War II when the partnership between American industry and the War Department developed the Army jeep and other marvels from concept to mass production in less time than it takes today to hire all the lawyers you need for government contracting.

This paper highlights Boomerang (gunshot detection and direction finding), Gun Truck and Hard Wire (IED protection for vehicle and troops), and other successful programs.

Impact Player Partners is a very worthy charitable organization that helps severely wounded and disabled War on Terror veterans. They have been added to the Olive-Drab.com page of information about Veterans Affairs and Organizations.

There is a new technology in R&D that uses stacked munitions to achieve tremendous rates of fire. Here is the website of the company developing it:

Metal Storm Ltd.

Be sure to check out their videos found in their menu on the right side of the page.

The recent news has been dominated by the fighting between the IDF and the Hezbollah terrorists. The IDF websites are:

• Hebrew
• English

One of the most frequent images has been heavy artillery of the IDF in the form of the 155mm M-109 Self-Propelled Howitzer. This workhorse of the modern field artillery has been part of the US arsenal since 1962 and is used by many allied armies including the IDF. As usual with the IDF they have made unique modifications and have assisted the US military with R&D on the M-109.

The Olive-Drab.com page on the M-109 155mm Self-propelled Howitzer (Paladin) is located here with photos so you will see what I am talking about.

This is the first post for the new Olive-Drab.com blog, dedicated to improved communication with the community of Olive-Drab.com visitors and users.

The old Forum was only lightly used and was too vulnerable to spam. With this WordPress based blog, I hope to do better.

My thanks to the thousands of loyal Olive-Drab.com visitors who continue to come to the site and use its many pages. Please accept my invitation to participate in this blog by adding comments and sending in suggestions (see Suggest page).

Chuck Chriss
Editor
Olive-Drab.com