VIP membership is radio with benefits. Oh yeah. Your favorite music from around the world right at your fingertips. Exclusive content, unlimited commercial free access. Try it risk free. That's free for five days at Live365.com slash VIP. Live 365. The freedoms we secured for you we hoped you'd always keep. The tyrants labored endlessly while your parents were asleep. Your freedom's gone, your courage lost, you're no more than a slave. In this, the land of the free and home of the brave. You buy permits to travel and permits to own a gun. Permits to start a business or to build a place for one. On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent. Although you have no voice in saying how the money's spent. Your children must attend a school that doesn't educate. And your Christian values can't be taught. according to the state. You read about the current news in a regulated press and you pay a tax you do not owe to please the IRS. Your money is no longer made of silver nor of gold. You trade your wealth for paper so your life can be controlled. You pay for crimes that make our nation turn from God and shame. You've taken Satan's number and you've traded in your name. You've given government control to those who do you harm so they could burn down churches and seize the family farm and keep our country deep in debt. Put men of God in jail. Harash your fellow countrymen while corrupted courts prevail. Your public servants don't uphold the solemn oaths they've sworn. And your daughters visit doctors so their children won't be born. Your leaders send artillery and guns to foreign shores and send your sons to slaughter fighting other people's wars. Can you regain the freedoms for which we fought and died? Or don't you have the courage or the faith to stand with pride? And are there no more values for which you'll fight to save? Or do you wish your children to live in fear and be a slave? O sons of the Republic, arise, take a stand, defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the land, preserve our great Republic and each God given right, and pray to God to keep the torch of freedom burning bright. As I awoke, he'd vanished in the mist for whence he came. His words were true, we are not free, but we have ourselves to blame. For even now as tyrants trample each God given right we only watch in tremble too afraid to stand and fight If he stood by your bedside to dream while you were asleep and wondered what remains of the freedoms He'd fought to keep what would be your answer if he called out from the grave is this still the land of the free and home has passed and one hour closer to the end of 2014 bubba, bubba Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is the second hour of the afternoon intelligence report time, our kirky. One day closer to victory for all of our brothers and sisters, both on and behind the lines in occupied territories, west, southwest, east, and north. Ladies and gentlemen, you are listening to us on... Liberty Tree Radio dot 4 mg dot com indiana freedom talk radio dot com where i am an f m micro stations cb base stations and ultra net technologies both east and west of the mississippi along with alaska were in the hallmark network from the top of maine to the bottom of florida from the bottom of florida cuz the ark of the gulf of mexico headed to Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, big chunk of Nebraska, a whole bunch of Wyoming to include both the third, the fifth, and our friends, the 13 sisters on the left side of the state. Colorado, of course, the recall state, it had been pretty quiet since they did that initially because all the screaming, yapping leftists were of course attacking all the petition carriers. If we did that, it'd be in the news. When the skank communists do that, it's okay. But you've got to learn to grow a spine and keep focused and take pictures of all the people you'll be hunting later when things go to hell in a handcart. Because you'll know who to look for when they all come out of the woodwork like that. Start running the cameras. I don't care what they are. Secret police, communists, all the same as far as how they operate and what they do. Well, down the road, we'll all remember. Waving the left coast where we have the great state of Jefferson, we turn back to the east, sweep across the plains, leap over the burgeoning banks of the Mississippi. and land in the Smokies slash the Blue Ridge. With the restaurant crews, grandma teams, OK teams, and the Ma Bell Grammar Consortium, we're retired telecommunications workers. Bring us the Golden Spike. Many hands make for light work. A million petticoat junction operators, the ability to continue to function when everything else. Well, I'll tell you what, it is a dark but clear Wednesday. It is Weapons Wednesday, by the way. It's also the 31st of December. It is the 6th year of open Fabian Socialist and Soviet Socialist occupation of America with a K 2014 Old Earth Calendar. And this is the last day that I'll be doing this. for 2014. This will be the last absolute last afternoon Intel report for 2014 beyond the shadow of a doubt. We won't do this anymore, not till next year. Oops, that'll be two days from now. Just as a note, yes it is 2014. Older calendar of my and crazier town calendar. We will be again rebroadcasting tomorrow, New Year's Day into New Year's evening. We will be back on Friday. You can go to the Liberty Tree Radio page and when you donate you go to the donate key to get into the drawing for the signed t-shirt which by the way is in the scroll right there almost to the top of Henry's page. It's also on the front page of Liberty Tree Radio. That's the t-shirt that's in the drawing. Very well built to begin with, but you don't want to wear it other than for some special event because while it's signed by all of the members of the programming here, guys, it makes it a very unique and very much a Patriot history piece. Mount it on the wall and get it behind a little bit of a frame to keep it from getting dusty and then bring it out. out of the vault waiting for a special occasion to wear it out where everybody can see it but don't drink coffee around it. Well I guess the coffee stain would be part of its history too though. But very well done. Rebirth of the Patriot is the image that's on the t-shirt itself. Take the time, check it out and let people know if you want the t-shirt itself, if you want to buy one. You can go to www.FromTheTrenchesWorldReport.com. You'll see both the colors are available. I believe one is the Coyote Brown slash the tan. The other one is in OD Green. Both of them look really good, very clear, very clean, very precise. Everybody that's seen them say, hey, I like that. So guys, there you go. Take the time, plug it in, check it out, and if you want just a t-shirt, you can have to buy one from Henry. And the guy is there that support Henry. Or you can of course get into the drawing for the one that's signed. That'll be like none of the others you could purchase. And that's at www.libertytreeradio.4mg.com. www.libertytreeradio.4mg.com. When you get there and you go to the page, you've got to go to the donate key and then from there to donate any amount. It's a $10 donation to get into the drawing that will get your name in the hat five times. For every two additional dollars, your name is in the hat again. So you can donate 12, 14, 16, 18. Well, you can donate whatever you want. That's up to you. And in the process, again, you note that if you're going to be in the drawing, Go over to the note section, the message section, post the address you want the stuff sent to. If you are lucky enough to have your name attached to a gift, we will send you the gift in the mail to that address. Whatever it is. It is just that simple. That is where it is going to go. So take the time, make sure you got it right, confirm that it's an address where you can receive a box or a package because remember some of the stuff is big enough. If it's a hat, I don't fold it up and flatten it out guys, it's in a box. Because these are really nice hats. In fact, if you go back to the scroll, one of our friends posted a picture right there on from the trenchesworldreport.com and you might notice who it is that's wearing the hat. You'll note that it is a very fine hat. It's one of the new duckbill designs where it's got little duckbill arch on the front. Woodland camouflage and these are truly embroidered hats. They're very well built. Very nice headgear. Anyway, we are headed towards 2015, but we will have the drawing the end of the week which will be next year. Sometime next year we will have a drawing two days away. When we do have that, everybody, we have the hats, we have in addition to that soap. Forgive me, you guys all have your soaps in the mail. We have the t-shirt, we have the hide-a-holster bag. We have several knives, we have several gun items to include bullet bras for the rifle stock and pistol rugs. In addition to that, beyond the pistol rugs and everything else, we have other accoutrements to include rigging kit and several other items. To numerous dimensions, I have to wait until again Friday. We'll just keep drawing until we run out of things to draw for. We'll figure it out when we get there, but we do have a really nice set of tactical knives. Some of you guys have already gotten these. We got all that we could. There aren't any more for the drawing of that pattern. But I was looking at what we could get in place of it and cost almost three times as much, and it wasn't as nice a knife. We really got a very good deal on those folders. I wish they had more but we don't have any more so that's just all there is. We bought them out and they're all gone. So I'm looking for another knife that will be in the next set of drawings in 2015. That will be out at the end of next month, January. We'll look to see what Bud-K has and a few of the other companies that are out there because they usually have some nice little deals. I'm looking for something that truly is a working knife. There are some perdy knives. But pretty knives don't necessarily get the job done. They are cool. I mean, I've got a collection of all kinds of odd stuff I pick up here and there. But for a working knife, something you can throw into a kit or leave cache somewhere, you won't cry about it if you lose it, but it's a very good blade and it's working blade and it will, you know, hack, chop, fold, spindle and mutilate things when the time comes. Just what it's supposed to do. And it's Weapons Wednesday and we talk about things like that, especially at the end of the year and the new year coming up. We're going to be folding, spindling and mutilating a lot of stuff that is probably going to come out and try to attack our liberty and our freedom. Because of that, you need to organize, arm, equip, and train as militia. Fire, proper planning prevents piss poor performance, the P principles, so you need to get into an organizational cycle. Example, this weekend, 28th regimental combat team, Colonial Marines, will be at the Oghamah Ranges, and I believe that that means it will also overlap with Naga-Hitcham, you know, Camp Naga-Hitcham when the time comes. I don't know that they're going to have time for a class in both locations. They may just do a drive-through so everybody gets a chance to see what a Victor 3 armored reconnaissance vehicle looks like. The Victor 3 is our design. It's an M114 type frame slash body the way the armor is put together. Again, it's a rolling rectangle. It's basically in the tradition of the Bradley, the M113, Gavin, in this case the old M114 armored reconnaissance vehicle, but with a little more steroids as far as head space goes. The big thing with the Victor class vehicles is that they're variable geometry option systems. The roof package can be disassembled in modules so that you can pull one panel off and drop a turret configured weapon system in of whatever you got. It's a matter of having another roof panel that's modified. The engine packs are designed to change out to whatever engine necessary. It's a rail system for mounting, so that means that any engine we got can go inside these things. Right now we're running a diesel pack. However, we could quickly switch over to gasoline without any complications or hassle. And the objective was to pick motor packs that are common and inexpensive, most common off the shelf truck type. Just like they used to do. In fact, most people don't realize it, but the 327 engine that used to be out there is what was in the M114. That's why if you if any of you bought those m7 15 Jeep Wagoneer pickup truck four-wheel drive trucks a five quarter ton army Half of them that I bought had 327s of them guys Yeah, you heard me right a 327 engine and I bought the whole package for $60 the engine is worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars just for the core Well, we took the 327s out, mounted another Chevy engine in there to replace it. After all, it is a Jeep truck, guys. Pretty much any engine, just like on a CJ-5, can be put under the hood. And we took those engines and marketed them for their value as performance engines. Oh, yeah, I mean, we might have used our brains. Yeah, we got kidneys up there. We use our kidneys all the time. You know how it works. Anyway, common sense. Well, the Victor 3 is going to be up at the Victor 3 Squadron. One of them is going to be up there for demonstration and for tactical deployment training. This is a New Year's weekend, I know, but hell, New Year's is in the middle of the week. You're just looking at the first weekend of the month and the guys are taking it seriously. Also, Camp Emmerich will be active too this weekend. All the other facilities have people there, but both Emmerich and Camp Emmerich Forgive me, the O'Gram Aranges will be full. They're going to be completely active. And for all of you that get up there with the 28th RCT, you guys are going to have some fun. By the way, I've got to do this every time I mention them. Good choice here. These guys are actually using their kidneys also. The 28th are wrench twisters, guys. They've got a little mechanized combat engineer group that's made up because we have a construction company attached. The guys that run a construction company. All their vehicles are now either in the tactical earth brown ready to be cambered out the rest of the way or they are in OD green and woodland type pattern or an ambush pattern. The ambush pattern has more of the raindrop and fleck in it and they will probably switch the brownies over to the ambush pattern by the time we are done because it works in all seasons. It is actually a pretty good pattern. Well the 28 is also of course Because they are, well, wrench twisters. They're working with track, they're working with wheeled. And we kind of picked out a song that's become kind of like their unit motto song. Actually, they heard it and Hillary heard it before. It's been around for a little bit. But they heard it and they couldn't help but say, that song is ours because it really does kind of fit. By the way, welcome to hell. You're in mechanized infantry. Oh, you mean we get to fight? No, you get to fix. Because half the battle of driving something that weighs tons is if somebody has to work on it sometime and if you want to know who that is you go over into the bathroom and look in the mirror. But wait I just fight them I don't fix them. Remember Kelly's heroes with the tank commander? Well that ain't how it really works. Everybody gets up off their hind end and you all start towing the line because well if you don't get fixed fast you're a sitting target unless you get your act together in your arson gear. Get my drift. So, for everybody out there, again, it's the end of the year and besides, it's our network. We can do this. I think I can bring this up and have it in play for the guys. Also, the 28th has a number of tracked vehicles. We're actually kind of reshuffling some of the heavy equipment around to include a couple of combat engineer cranes that are going to be reassigned. There we go. I'll tell you what we're going to do. I got it to work the first time. I'm going to have to be fired for this. Give me just a second here. Hold on. Be patient. And Mark will get it right, I think. There we go. Brave Diggers! The 8th Regimental Combat Team Colonial Marine Mechanized and for the combat engineer group attached there to all you guys who are going to be out there this weekend. If you listen to that song... and you think about what it is that they're talking about their kids you might kind of think about your well i miss more than i could i could just i'm actually working on a video figuring out how we could do a video with this to kind of emulate what it really is like to be a mechanized infantry or into an armor unit guys but it's all those cool images with the tank leaping I always love this video they did this every year we've ever had a new tank it's leaping over a seven-foot embankment and flying in the air and it hits the ground and it bounces and the tank disappears off over the road you know down the road or over the horizon or around the trees well the reason it disappeared and they don't show you that same tank again is because when it made that seven or eight foot leap and it hit the ground you didn't they didn't show you and you didn't have the soundtrack running where you could hear the torsion bars breaking and the suspension rod snapping and oh but it looks so impressive hey the picture is designed for psycho babble purposes to pump up to people they want to get into the tin cans to get shot and also to supposedly terrify the enemy because we have flying tanks didn't you know that guys we have flying tanks I've seen them They did this with the Abrams. The Abrams is chugging along at 50 miles an hour. It's a turret. It's bouncing up and down and the turret's locked on a target and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that looks really great. It's just that, well, everybody, have you ever done maintenance on heavy equipment? Really? Have you ever done maintenance on heavy equipment? My favorite was years ago. I had an aggressor operation, an op for you. exercise one particular month and it was tied in with the armor units that were here. They had one M40-85. The M40-85 was for familiarization because they had the M40-85 of the armor program going on for the guard, the reserve, and elements of the Marine Corps. The M48A5 is a 48 package where they brought it in one end of a factory, disassembled it, cleaned it up from the inside out, took the hull, gutted everything, put all the nuts and bolts into bins, cleaned everything up, painted everything up, put it all back together, and basically turned the M48 into an M60A3. It had onboard laser rangefinders, fire control system modifications, all the night vision technology, but it was an M48 package. And it was the best program we ever came up with, which was a good transition to put more heavy, you know, heavy, well, medium tanks into the inventory and take advantage of stuff that was long paid for. Oh, heaven forbid we would do that because that would be economical. Now, it meant that our Abrams could be prioritized towards frontline units, and that's what they did. or towards ready up units, but we still had more tread heads with more time on comparable weapon systems. Well, in this one operation I had two M60A3s that were our element. In fact, we ended up, they shifted out, we ended up with the M48A5, two M60s, and I had an infantry screen to engage an armored company with. The good thing is the bridges in the area were poor, were old, and were not able to. They weren't rated for the tanks, so they would have to use tank fords to get across. They would have to find fording locations, and there were several that were designated. What I did is I put the infantry screen in front of, just beyond the water ford and at the ford, in which was a heavily wooded area. Tanks are not bulldozers. Even in a real life situation, the only thing they have the option to do is try to fire through the trees with heavy guns. Yeah, it would be a mess for everybody, but it would be more of a mess for them and make the area virtually unpassable. As it is, it was barely passable because they had to weave their way through that woods. That's where you hit them with the infantry. You fall back, fall back, fall back, then you bank off your troops left or right and create a firing line along a natural barrier, roll in the terrain or whatever. Then what I did is we placed our tanks. I put the tanks just beyond the infantry screen so the moment they thought they were into any kind of open country, the tanks could fire from tree line to tree line to tree line in a retreat. Then the infantry turned around and rolled right up the rear end. It was a field day situation. Well, the point is that on the road home, because like I said, some people do maintenance and other people don't, we're packed up and we've got our column heading back into the stall and our 60s are doing pretty good. The 48 is holding on. But at least half of, at least one platoon, actually a whole platoon of M60s, it looked like the stinking Sinai Peninsula. Every tank had thrown a track. Now they decided to go home late so to speak guys and it's about five, six miles back to the park where they'd be putting the beast. Guys, do you know how long it takes to retrack an M60? And most of these guys were doing road speed, probably around 35 miles an hour, maybe 40. And they threw a track and they had completely unspindled. In other words, there was a whole track line off of the bogies laying 30 feet behind the tank. That's if they were lucky because two or three of them, once they'd lost the track, the driver didn't have as much experience or time to realize what was happening. And two or three of them were nose first in the ditch. So that means first you got a radio in for the tank recovery vehicles and you get to come back and you know what you do? You hear that song? It's the worst day since yesterday. Well, I can just picture all the scenes that would be tied into, no, no, no, no, back her up. No, no, no, no, drag the track. Now there's a couple of tricks you can do that. Use the drive sprocket, use your recovery cable. You can pull that one ton plus or two tons of track. back over to you. That's a trick that works but you got to be really careful because steel cables are very unforgiving and you better make sure that you've got total control on that throttle when you try that little trick. The other one is to get a jeep or a deuce and a half to hook up to the track pad. Pull the track pad to the tank rather than try to move the tank and make a mistake with the other track pads which have too much torque on them. Little things to remember they're all part of the fun of being an armor! But wait Mark, I saw the videos and the tanks are flying through the air and they're wailing away with their main guns. Hey, by the way, do you guys like cleaning your guns? Here's a fun one for you. Is it a lot of work to clean your .45? Do you just do a cursory swab on it and let the rest of it rust? What about your .30-06? Do you guys clean up your semi-automatic rifles or your bolt guns? Your AR-15? You know you've got to clean that. When you pull the trigger on a .105 or a .120, Do you think you just go home and let it sit? Oh, that's right. It was a lot of fun to go wailing away with those main tank rounds. But then comes that part, you know, for every round you fire, you got to do so much maintenance on the gun tube. And also the evacuator, did they tell you that you have to take off the thermal shield and you have to clean out the bore evacuators and everything else? They didn't tell you about that. Hey, but tanks are fun to run. Yeah, it ain't the razor, it's the blades that'll get you kids. And then you had talked about tank motor maintenance, have I? Oh, there's a whole world with that all by itself. How many of you had to do blood tests on your tanks? On your motors? You know what that is, right? You do an oil spot, you send it into the lab, and they do an evaluation on the wear and tear on your engine. There's a whole science to tank motors. Oh yeah, see so it's like, well boy, I wish I had been in tanks. Well yeah, it is fun. It really is. When you've got a 50 ton piece of armor underneath you and it's driving like a Cadillac across the country, there's no feeling like it in the world. But then when you feel that rumble and you know that your tank weighs, let's say 48, 45, 52 tons and you feel it buckle up and you feel it roll a little bit and jerk, whatever it is, it's something critical. We can't do those oil tests on our trucks too much. Your trucks, exactly the same way. The idea was from the development for military support for actually doing that in the industry. Because the motor packs like for an M48, an M60 and an M1 Abrams, that's a whole self-contained module. You pull the whole thing out as one big box. It's kind of cool. Everything is self-contained so you can actually put it on a tester and it's an awfully god awful big tester. And you can run everything and walk around the engine pack and tweak things and adjust accordingly if need be. Now you try not to do that, but what you want to do is be ahead of any problems and when you're doing that oil check you're looking for all the different metals that are in all the different working parts. They can determine wear and tear by what metals show up in the oil or what carbons show up in the oil from burn. You save a lot of money by doing that, don't you? Oil filtration is a real big deal too. You can't just rely on the factory-mounted oil filter. You've got to put a whole other system on. These new systems they have now will clean out oil like it's brand new going back into the engine. Right. Well, that's another thing that could be done in the long run. There are additional or auxiliary filtering systems that you could add to your cars or trucks, much like you do for racing. A combination of both cooling and cleaning can be done. And that's something that we really need to be looking at in the long run with tactical vehicles because if you're playing road warrior like everybody thinks they're going to, Then you're going to have to maintain your POL products, petroleum oil and lubricant products, because there's no more cracking plants. If things went that bad, there's no more cracking plant to make any more refined oils. So what you got is all you got. And what you find is a treasure. Whatever you find down the road and whatever it is that's laying around is a progressively eroding treasure. That's how we need that's how we look at it with our mechanized operations guys with what we're building and what we're doing the idea is to make it The stuff that we presently have that we're buying that's been surplus back when we bought it cheap cheap Remember we paid 900 to about $2,000 for our ferrets How many of you remember if you want to knob Creek to the machine gun shoot we could buy ferrets down there for and those were actually a little pricey They were about $2,000 apiece. Well understand that when they were $2,000 at Knob Creek If you went to the source, which we did, you could buy a ferret armored car in the 90s for $950 to $960 cash. That was a rebuilt British military vehicle. It had just come out of their tactical reserve. Some were Mark 1's, Mark 1, Mark 2's as they call them, which have no turret. Those are open roof but they have a cover shield. Then there's the Mark II's which have the machine gun turret, the short one that's also on the Saracen. It's the same turret just mounted on the roof of the reconnaissance vehicle, the ferret reconnaissance armored car which is four wheeled. The Fox is the next step up. Basically they took the standard ferret Mark II modified and they took the little 30 caliber turret off and they put a bigger gun turret on board so it actually had some major teeth. Well, we could buy the Fox turrets complete for $500. Guys, we're talking steel armor, talking coaxial gun mounts, we're talking elevation and traverse, electronic motor mount, the whole nine yards, and it would drop right onto the ferrets that we had that were the Mark 1-2s that had no turrets. See, we didn't take the turrets off the ones that were already ready to go. What we did is we took the earlier Mark 1s, looked to see what we needed to make them Fox-configured ferrets, Then, the first thing we did is we took those turrets and put those on the vehicles for as long as we could get them. After that, we looked at what we needed in the way of space and we built bigger turrets. We've got welders in this country and we've got guys who have not handled steel. We didn't just use common steel because we have a couple of yards here. Remember I told you about this. We have treasure troves laying around in the back 40s in old fields. There was a couple of yards here that had several thousand armored vehicles. Progressively the guy was cutting them up. That's what he was supposed to do. Well, we have Stuart hulls that are a homogeneous armor plate, 3 to 5 inches thick. And that steel, they stripped everything else off of them. They've already been cut, so they've been cobbled to the point where they can't be fixed. So what we do is we cobble the armor off of that. and we made newer, heavier, more sophisticated turrets for the other vehicles that didn't have them. And we're talking two men, you know, we can mount a number of different guns, variable geometry gun stations, so that the way it works, we can mount a number of different weapons inside the turret manlet. That's the big thing guys, is designing your systems. If you're the government, they'll just build a new one and throw the old one away. If you're in a situation where you're actually thinking ahead and you've got engineers that are honest involved, you build the design so that it has variable geometry capabilities. I can switch out something without having to change the whole vehicle for millions of dollars or thousands of dollars. The idea is I can change a module, keep the old one and put it on something else, put the new module in place of it, and bolt it up in a matter of minutes. It doesn't take hours because you think modular, think like an erector set, think like Legos. That's the way you need to be thinking about your platforms. If you're building something new, everything should be so that anything we have could be adapted to replace most of the components. Oh, we ran out of this engine! Congratulations, variable engine mounts. All we have to do is come up with the brackets. A little bit of welding, and in fact in a critical situation we just weld another plate of steel, weld the brackets we have into place and make them work right, and we put another engine in. That's critical cutting with the liquid, the flame wrench. But otherwise, think variable, think ahead, think modular. plug one system out you don't have to replace the armor does not go obsolete armor does not go out of date this is something everybody needs to understand a World War two tanks armor will protect you just as well today as it did then if it protects against small arms fire when you have 30 out sixes in everybody's shoulders what do you think it does to defend you against small arms fire when everybody's using the popcorn fart 223 cartridge nobody thinks about that The 223 has little to no armor penetration whatsoever, guys. And the majority of the small arms fire you're going to experience is going to be what? 223 or 7.62x39 or 5.45x39. The wood chuck cartridges. Now when they used to joke about the half track, well armor doesn't stop anything. Well no, it wasn't designed to stop tank rounds. APCs don't do that. But if you took a steel half track and put it on a battlefield right now, As far as small arms fire goes, nothing the other side is carrying is going to hurt anybody that's inside. No, they can hit you with anti-tank round. Guess what? You're going to get hurt. But you know what? That would happen if you drove something newer. So older is this old thing. Well, it's old. The only thing about old is what I said before. It's a nightmare. Welcome to hell. Like it said in the song there, welcome to hell. I'm picturing the guy with a wrench in his hand with his head leaning up against the motor, just going, oh, God, shoot me. Because he just turned a wrench and found what he was looking for and realized this is a whole hell of a lot of work. It's the maintenance component that you have to look at. If you can bring the maintenance factor down, none of your older equipment is obsolete by any stretch of the imagination. And if it is, please explain to me why. Armor is armor. In fact, most countries can't afford to build World War II grade or Korea or Vietnam grade armor. They can't afford to do it. The world is in bankruptcy. So all of a sudden, all this stuff that's just laying around becomes awfully valuable when you have no ability to produce it at all. There comes a point where you're going to look at even stuff that's stripped. Like there's tank hulls, thousands of them in Africa. South Africa needed tanks. I want to plant this seed with all of you. South Africa needed tanks. Nobody would sell them tanks except for third party countries that didn't have very much. All of a sudden the communists in southwest Africa and in the eastern end of the Congo were being given T-54 battle tanks for their guerilla forces, which made them pretty much conventional armor forces. South Africa had light armored cars with panhard AMLs with 90mm guns on board. They had teeth, but if they got hit, you were done. Why? It was supposed to be a shoot and scoot vehicle, but it was a solution. It was a stopgap. Now the problem is the terrain. Look at Africa. Flat savannah. So, if you're out there and you, again, you've got to be, they have engineers that build up, you know, revetments in front of you or fortifications so that you have a certain amount of dirt to defend, you know, when you're in a light vehicle like that or you've got to keep moving and you've got to have cover terrain. Well, the South Africans realized that they needed to upgrade to tanks. So what they did is they went around and they bought all of the monument grade centurion tanks that were laying around. Now remember there's three grades to armor. There is a motor operational, there is used or heavily used operational grade B and there is grade C which is called monument grade. It is a tank that has been sitting for a while, stuff is locked up on it. Most of the time it takes a lot of work and so most people, laziest of the day as long, aren't going to be interested in it because it does cost money to get it back online or at least it costs elbow grease. Well, South Africa, they wouldn't let them buy anything new and they couldn't buy anything from any countries because of the embargo. So they went out and they bought all these grade three centurions. They took a big, long factory building that they made that was basically a big, long industrial steel building. They piled up all these centurions at one end and they kept collecting them. They bought all the spare parts they could find and all the extra goodies. Then they went to Taiwan. They went to Finland and they went to Yugoslavia and they bought brand new weapon systems to mount on the Centurion tank. And by the time the vehicle came through from being disassembled, completely reworked and came out the other end, it was then known as the Elephant. It was a Centurion tank, but it had a modern 105 gun tube, laser range finding, Total night vision capability and it could slug it out with any modern tank that was on the field because it had been upgraded to that point. Now they didn't do anything for the armor because they already had, you know, again modern homogeneous steel armor on board guys and it was a good medium tank. Well, you know what? It totally changed the dimensions of the battlefield when all of a sudden they could roll out even though it was a 20 and 30 year old tank. The first centurions appeared on the battlefield, the centurion mark 1s. A couple of squadrons of them appeared on the battlefield in the British Army in World War II right at the end of the war in 1945. After that, it became their main battle tank for quite some time as a medium battle tank. They went through the Mark 1's, 2's, 3's, 4's, 5's, 6's, 7's, 8's, 9's, 10's, etc. It mostly was upgrades in electronics, fire control, and certainly automotive response. In other words, power plant improvements. But the basic components all interchanged or could be interchanged to a degree from one tank to the next. That's the requirement of a tread head operation so that you never run out of parts. So anyway, to say it can't be done, we've got lots of examples. And they took monument grade vehicles and refurbished accordingly. They went right through the plant, cleaned everything up, repainted everything, rethreaded, restocked, took all the worn parts, scrapped them out where they had to. Parts that weren't as badly worn were saved for spares for emergency. Then they ran them out the other end and they ended up with battle tank squadrons that were fully functional and ready to roll. Now you can build much the same way. It's the Ford, when you think heavy machinery, you don't think the large sprawling plants, a direct Henry Ford straight production line operation is your best choice. You have offset routing points for supply or for bins. When you take everything off, you don't throw anything away. The bolts come off, you categorize them. The bolts that hold the mounting brackets or fixtures in place, they go off to the side. They get jiggled, they get cleaned, they get bead blasted if need be. They all get repainted and re-greased, they all get cleaned up. Because you're not talking quarter 20 bolts here. You're talking industrial steel case hardened components, guys. We're talking heavy. That's a big chunk of change when you go out to buy stuff like that. The more we go into the road warrior situation or the economic disaster and manufacturing failures all over the place because nobody's taking care of the industries and the big money are all screwing us, the more anything that's already manufactured becomes more valuable. I can't stress enough on the engines, Mark, and how you got to be real careful when you do overheads. When you clean those injectors, man, those are... I mean, I try and find an injector for a tank. You know what I'm saying? Well, the thing is that the injectors for those vehicles are much of what's in your diesel industry. See, that's the cool part. A lot of it, they did that intentionally. In fact, here's the thing, in many cases, although it depends on the era, a lot of what came into diesel was set by the military standards. In other words, it happened there first and because they had the industry in motion, they wanted to keep it rolling so they turned this over into the civilian industry. The other thing to remember is that the basic engine is still nothing more than the same diesel that you're driving right now in whatever configuration. You can adapt another engine, but you have to work it into the power plant package. because it's nested in its own frame. If you haven't done a tank motor for a modern tank, it comes out just like a... Well, you could take the whole engine pack out and drop it down and use it for a diesel generator. Everything is self-contained. It would run. I mean, all you have to do is add fuel tanks. The power supply is right there. I mean, battery racks are right there and everything. And it comes out as a module. Then you disassemble the module. and your motor sitting right there, your auxiliary power trains right there, your auxiliary power plants or other motors for lesser systems depending upon what it is you're running, it's all there. So you could take, for instance, if we had a boneyard of diesel trucks, except for maybe some of the newest, newest, bigger, longer engines, because it's also an issue of space. You'd have to, you may have to do some other plumbing because it's got to be able to be picked up Dropped in by the support crane by the wrecker and they you know It's worked into play everything locks in you bolt in you knock me lock down the cams You lock down all of your fixtures and you crank her over and make sure she's running right and then down the road you go The thing is remember with military the only difference between that and what you're doing with a big truck is that with military it needs to be modular for speed because I got to be able to turn the vehicles around fast Now that it has no it hasn't always been the case Do these tank engines have turbos and everything? Oh yeah, you can have turbo or not. Remember that, see, we've got a couple of M48s that are straight, M48s that are running, and we needed motors. Well, years ago, a lot of the guys that are in tank automotive command are our people in roundabout ways. And one of the drivers who had worked for them since World War II years ago, we kind of mentioned, hey, we've got a couple of 48s. He goes, really? You guys need engines for them? And we're like, oh, well, not yet, but we might. He goes, hey, I'll tell you what, I'm driving down south. There's fields of them you can have. Because originally the M48 took a gasoline engine. Most people don't realize that. So well, it's a gas engine. I said, I don't care. I really don't. We could always mount diesels later, but the idea is another motor pack? Oh hell yes. So we got the motor packs for the price. In fact, somebody else hauled them, so to speak, because one way or another that truck with the flatbed has got to roll. So we got the engines for free. Now, Juan, we did need to change the engine out. We didn't know that it had been sitting a little too long. I didn't want to ruin the pistons around the board. The guys decided what they had to do because we had guys who worked on .48s back when they were in the military. The 48th we pulled the one power plant and that gave them plenty of time to work on it without the armor of the tank being down. The original M48s carried a 90mm gun, we got all that squared away. The biggest thing is we modified the commander killer turret up above so that it could handle a smaller weapon internally rather than mounting a Browning 30 up on the roof like they did during Vietnam. Because the little cupola was on the roof of the M48 and the M60 were to accommodate a series of new, brand new design machine guns that never worked right. You could get them to work for a while, but eventually they'd muck up on you. Typically, what the Army did, or the Marines, is they made a bracket that they welded onto the wire, steel wire, steel rebar wire. They made a bracket that they would weld onto the cupola up above, and they'd have a Browning machine gun hanging in a flimsy hook upon the roof of the cupola. In front, the commander could open up the hatch and still get out there and dump some rounds down range with a Browning .30 caliber. But the 48 package was originally gasoline, but adapting another engine to the mount would not be a big deal. Now turbochargers, which is purely a matter of the era, all of the Abrams turbocharged. That's why you can't miss an Abrams at night. That makes them easy to shoot at because their motor is so unique. In fact, you ever have a Bradley drive by? Pay attention to the Bradley motor. You can tell depending on which year it is. You can even tell by the sound of the motor what year it was made. You know, it is like when you're in a motor pool there, a motor park with the trucks. You can tell by ear what diesel a guy is running, can't you sir? Yeah, there's a, yeah, Detroit diesel is a real, you can't miss that. Distinctive is the term. Yeah, yeah, the Detroit, you know, you get like a cat over at Detroit, you can tell that's a Detroit. It sounds like a real holder. The ones now, they're so bogged down that the older motors are are this really beautiful day. If you can get an older motor. The only way you can make plenty of Dallas is if you want to buy your own truck, you got to buy it. There's so many EPA rules now in so many states, so what you do is you buy the old equipment and you just fix it up. And you stay and you just work the east coast. So you think west of the Mississippi, you start having problems with the EPA. So a lot of guys are buying the older stuff. and reworking it and putting separate oil systems on them and making real good money. But if you have to go like in California, they make you have to buy an 0.50 new truck, like you do Mark, you know, $15,000 a cup and you're making $150,000 a year. That's one of the other things that has always gotten me are these little sleeper cabs. They're still laying around. You can buy a sleeper international for about $3,000. There's nothing really wrong with them, it's just that again they're tired. The fixtures around them, the units themselves, the engines usually have good time on them. But the cabs are tired and wearing out because they've been around for a while or they've been parked. That does wear and tear itself, just the weather. But as far as the motors go, if you're looking for engines, that's what we've watched for is like the international cab overs. We've got a bunch of mid-sized you know like the chafees the chafee chafee m24 could be switched over and we actually switched one over to diesel just to show everybody how to do it years ago and It the first thing everybody catches it's an old tread head from World War two or Korea is the sound Cuz they're like what what do you got into there? Oh, that's a diesel Oh, no way and so everybody usually we have to lift up the cover grates and everybody has to look at him and oh wow man if we had that during the war Because the gas engine, the only problem with gasoline is you get hit the right way, she burns kids like any other vehicle that's got gas. Diesel is hard to get burning but when she goes, she cooks the same way. So looking at being shot at and shooting at things, the idea is that stay under cover and make sure you put dirt between you and whatever you're shooting at whenever possible. That's the first rule about shooting and scooting if you're working mechanized. I don't care what it is. I don't care if you have tanks or if you've got armored trucks. The driver has to think terrain. That's what his job is. His job is not to man the guns. His job is to think terrain. And you have to work as a team. That's why you need to work on these things now. Guys, a fleet of armored trucks would be more valuable than a fleet of Abrams. Seriously, a fleet of armored trucks. would be more valuable than a fleet of Abrams. It doesn't mean I'd throw the Abrams out, but how much maintenance can you do on them? What can you do for them? How long are they going to operate? All of the support technology for that is beyond most industrial areas of the United States right now. Whereas, on the other hand, mechanized vehicles that are wheeled, that are automotive, can take advantage of the scavenge off local maintenance and because they have a variable geometry gun platform, they can mount equipment that can knock out tanks. concrete to truck. Yeah, exactly. Like the armored bulldozer, the cement bulldozer, the guy made out west, it's like I've said. Guys, you could do armor in so many different pieces of material. Remember, most of what you're going to be stopping is small arms. Look at what the other side is carrying. Go into the videos about the Ukraine war and look at the combat footage, especially now because you can tell if it's recent or older because there's snow on the ground. Take a look at some of these MEC units and these infantry units and how they're operating and what they're using. Now consider that we have more resources than they have. And yeah, you could take two quarter inch pieces of steel, you can load up the area between with ferrous cement, and that in and of itself would offer a tremendous amount of protection. Think about it. Even any cement, in fact you put more aggregate in there, you add a little more mid-p gravel. Why? Because that variance of material is what bogs down the bullet as it's trying to get through. Yes, a non-homogenous material. If you didn't have cement, you make steel boxes and you fill it with sand. The other thing that they're not doing now that we did in the past, and you know the only reason we're not doing it now is because they're chancing out. Here it goes, these M-Raps. These M-Raps are punk garbage, guys. In fact, it's a throwback. They're not a throw forward, they're a throwback. Now throwbacks are not bad. We're going to use all the old equipment we can, but what it is, if you'll notice, with the Russian stuff, if you look at the Russian stuff, they embrace the sloped armored concept. Now you've got to work a little more at building those. So the slab side stuff is simply cheap. But anybody knows that again you put a glacis to anything, you put a slope to the armor, remember that there's more metal because even if it's approaching in a flat horizontal impact, there's more metal it's got to go through just by the pitch of the armor. Plus, because of the nature of ballistic design, it may deflect the bullet and it will if it's a small caliber. I am half the Bren gun carrier. The one that we had here, it had a whole score of bullet strikes on the front gun station. I figured they were either 8mm or 303 British. You know what all it did? It scored the paint. But you could pick out right where there was a dimple point where it just attacked the metal. It looked like about 25 rounds randomly sprayed probably at medium range on that vehicle that was under fire. But other than that, it chipped the old lead based paint and that's about it. So think about that, it was with a .308 or .30-06 round or an 8mm Mauser round. Guys, the .223 bullets out there have not got that kind of potential. No way. Any armor that you use, let's say those monuments that are out there laying around the neighborhood, somebody might have a half track laying around, drag that son of a bugger in there and start working on it. Seriously. And even if it doesn't have the armored box on the back, build one and build it better than the original. Like you were talking about Fluffy, if you wanted to, you take and make an inner and outer wall about four inches apart, fill the inner and outer wall in between the quarter inch plate with cement. make the base plate quarter inch or 3 eighth inch steel, milder homogeneous and then bag the base, sandbag the floor. It's going to be a little mushy to walk around for a little bit but after a while she'll be impacted. It's basically a mobile sandbox but you know what, those sandbags will do a good job to slow down a big chunk of stuff coming in. And good job. Yeah, so it doesn't have to be the prettiest thing on the block but we can make them look pretty darn good. We can square them away. Again, overhead armor is critical, but it's not essential. The idea is that you're going to get away from the vehicle, spread out, and use your infantry as quickly as you can anyway. The armored vehicle becomes a gun platform. If the idea behind it is that as mech infantry you come into a situation, you dismount, you engage, and savagely attack the aggressor, and the vehicle becomes a weapons platform with the weapon that it can bring to bear, the heavier weapon it can pull along with the rest of you.