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The Global War on Terror has been protracted, seeing its reach stretch to every major part of the world. As this global conflict has progressed, so too have tactics and technology, culminating in a new and frightening blend of technology and tactics never before witnessed. Regardless of the advancements, warfare comes down to taking and holding territory and denying it to the enemy. This necessitates troops on the ground, and a soldier requires a rifle. Advancements in day and night combat have led to a variety of accessories needed to take and maintain the advantage. The use of multiple optics, lasers, lights, and other technology has integrated itself into the rifle. These additional requirements have equated to weapon platforms that can facilitate their use, but also support long-term use in the worst conditions.

A week or so ago at DVD 2026, a UK defense expo, we spoke to Edgar Brothers about the socket bayonet for the Knight’s Armament KS-1. Edgar Brothers are KAC’s UK distribution partner and have been displaying the eye-catching bayonet at defense shows for a couple of years!

A few points at first. While you decide what works for you, let’s point out that whether we’re hunting upland birds (pheasants, grouse, woodcock) or waterfowl (geese and ducks, mostly), it doesn’t make much difference in what action you decide on. There are lots of great upland shotguns in both semi-auto and pump-action configurations. The same goes for waterfowl. However, it is worth pointing out that waterfowlers often slug it out against the elements in much worse conditions than upland hunters, which raises our first question:

Welcome back to Front Line Friday. This week is an editorial, and the topic is the promotion process that turns good officers into untrained supervisors overnight, and the specific skill gaps that follow them onto the shift. Front Line Friday is brought to you by Dead Air Silencers, whose support keeps this column going every week.

Langdon Tactical Technology already has shotgun work in its lineup, but the LTT Mossberg 590 marks the company's first move into pump-action shotguns specifically. Rather than changing what the 590 is, LTT is positioning this as a refinement of a platform that was already proven, focusing on the parts of the gun that shape how it actually runs and shoots.

Back in June FN launched their new ARKA platform, their next generation replacement for the SCAR. Earlier this week, at the UK’s DVD 2026 defense expo at Millbrook, TFB got a chance to take a closer look at FN’s new ARKA.

Magnum Research has a new Desert Eagle, and you won't lose this one in the safe. The NRA Blue Desert Eagle is a .50 AE pistol made exclusively for Chattanooga Shooting Supplies. It carries the model number DE50NB and an MSRP of $2,186. Blue Cerakote covers the frame and slide, while the six-inch barrel stays brushed stainless steel and the controls are matte black. Subtle it isn't, but subtle was never part of the Desert Eagle sales pitch.

A few months back, I was invited down to the Cross Bell Ranch in Oklahoma for a Zeiss media event introducing their new V3 lineup. We spent a couple of solid days behind pre-production samples of these scopes, running everything from rimfire out to 150 yards up to 6.5 Creedmoor stretching past 700 and even a lucky 1,000-yard hit with the lower-powered models. I came away impressed with how Zeiss was trying to hit that sweet spot for the majority of hunters who don’t need (or want to pay for) top-shelf glass. You can read the full first-impressions write-up from that trip [here]. Fast forward to now, and I’ve had a production V3 3.5-10x42 on a couple of rifles with a couple hundred rounds through it.

Genesis Arms and Credova joined forces to mark America's 250th birthday with a shotgun that certainly goes way beyond what most people think a shotgun would look like. The Gen-12 PDS in America's 250th Limited Edition wraps performance and patriotism into a single platform that demands a second look, regardless of whether you’re at the range or in front of your display case.

Welcome back to another edition of Concealed Carry Corner. Last week, we took a look at how bag guns are losing their popularity and why that's the case. If you happened to miss that article, be sure to click the link here to check that article. This week, I think it's important to look at some of the common traps I see people fall into that can actually make them less motivated to carry a concealed firearm.

Colt Canada, part of the Colt CZ Group, unveiled the new C25 rifle at DVD 2026, the UK's biennial defense industry exhibition. This is the first time the new C25 has been displayed outside of North America, following its announced adoption by the Canadian Armed Forces. Colt Canada are positioning the C25 as their entry into the British Army’s Project Grayburn, the program to replace the current SA80/L85 bullpup rifles in service.

SIG Sauer's Custom Works division isn't shy about color, and the P211-GTO NIGHTSHIFT proves it. This is the newest addition to the P211-GTO family, and it leans hard into the kind of finish work that used to be reserved for one-off show guns. TFB got a brief look at it during SHOT Show 2026, and the production version tracks closely with what SIG showed on the floor. I love blue and PVD, so I am all into this kind of look.

Denmark's Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organisation, known domestically as Forsvarsministeriets Materiel- og Indkøbsstyrelse (FMI), has purchased a new Grenade Launcher Sight Mount (GLSM) from Swedish manufacturer Spuhr for use across the Danish Army's grenade launcher inventory. According to FMI, the acquisition is intended to raise hit probability across multiple launcher and ammunition types currently in service.

This week on TFB's Behind the Gun Podcast, I'm joined by a long-time friend and supporter of TFB, Martin from FALCO Holsters. Most of you here already know that FALCO Holsters is the Slovakian leather shop that's been putting American concealed carriers into some of the best-fitted leather holsters on the market. Today we get into the company’s origin story in falconry gloves, sewn by founder Ivan Kovac for forestry school students. Martin also walks us through how that turned into a full holster line built in the Štiavnica Mountains, and the company’s role in the unique gun culture in Slovakia, which has more in common with ours than you'd expect. Please give Martin a warm welcome to the program!

Really Right Stuff is known for its high-end tripods, which are the best that money can buy. Their most recent product, the Benchmark series of tripods, keeps that same quality while hitting a price point that more shooters can afford. I had the chance to run one of these tripods in an NRL Hunter match to see how it stacks up.

Kel-Tec at work again, and I am not sure if this is an art project or the marketing project they actually ran on social media. If James Bond had a daypack, this would definitely be in it, but it seems a Transformer got to it first. The Kel-Tec SUB-SDP collapses to just 10 inches and is braced for whenever precision fire is needed. This looks like the sort of firearm that gets deployed when conventional carbines are too loud and too large, and I just love suppressed 9mm firearms.

The breakaway Confederate forces had a big problem at the start of the American Civil War—they needed guns. Many of the South’s top soldiers came out of the federal military and would spend the next years fighting their former comrades, now in the Union forces. The Confederates also seized some federal arms and ammunition that fell within their territories, but they needed a lot more war material—and they didn’t have the factory capacity that the North did. They needed guns, and they needed factories to build those guns.

The decision does not erase every provision. The court rejected the Second Amendment challenge to commercial-distribution restrictions. It also rejected the plaintiffs' First Amendment claim involving digital instructions for 3D printing because their record did not establish whether the code was expressive or merely functional.

Helmet-mounted thermal monoculars have become a common tool for hunters and tactical users who need to keep their hands free while moving between vehicle, field, and target area. A compact unit that can shift from scanning a treeline to tracking movement at close range, without swapping devices, cuts down on the gear a user has to carry and manage in the dark. This is the niche the Nocpix MINI2 H25 is built for - let’s take a closer look at what it does and how.

Bosnian company AC-Unity became known in the United States for its AK magazines - cheap and pretty reliable; they became popular with those who wanted newer Russian AK magazines without paying collector’s prices.

New LPVOs are always welcome, and Element Optics shows up here with their Helix HD 1-8x24. This is a new low-power variable optic built for hunting and tactical use at close to intermediate ranges. The scope joins the existing Helix HD family, which up to this point has centered on higher magnification hunting scopes like the 2-16x50 and the 2-12x42 Compact.

As warfare evolves, the machine gun will always be needed. The technology surrounding it may change, but the basic requirement remains the same. One area where Russia has taken a noticeably different path from many Western countries is machine gun belts. Russian PK and PKM belts can be a headache for many Western users, and you can trace much of that design back to the Second World War and the Soviet SG-43. During its development, Soviet designers studied what the Finns were doing with their Maxim guns, as well as the German approach to feeding the MG34 and MG42 with metallic links. Had Soviet observers paid closer attention to developments in the United States during the war, they might have recognized that factory-loaded, in all flavors, and disintegrating belts seen with .50 linked ammunition during the war were becoming increasingly common in the West.

The cadre presence company of Austria's Panzergrenadierbataillon 13 tackled a scenario straight out of modern hybrid warfare doctrine: an enemy force seizes critical infrastructure and must be expelled without destroying it. For two weeks in August, 130 soldiers drilled this complex balancing act at the decommissioned Riedersbach power plant in Upper Austria, a facility shut down in 2016 that offered what no purpose-built training range could match: industrial complexity on a realistic scale. In this POTD, the green Sturmgewehr 77 A1 MOD "Nightfighter" edition is the focus point.

Earlier this month, the Bosnian defense industry came together for the first time at the Balkan Shield exhibition in Sarajevo. And if you look closer at the participants of the event, there will be two distinct categories of companies there.

Let’s take a look at a military rifle that you can actually buy, and also afford to shoot repeatedly. Tippmann Arms has announced that its M4-22 Elite semi-automatic .22 LR rifle has been selected by the Royal Thai Army Territorial Defense Command for use in the Territorial Defense Student Program in Thailand. The rifle replaces the legacy Armi Jager .22 platform, which has been in service with the program's reserve training units for more than 40 years.

A craze that has been sweeping across many local shotgun clubs is nighttime trap and clay pigeon shooting. This typically entails glow-in-the-dark clay pigeons, but without wads or target loads that you can also see, you may not know how or why you’re missing. All this being said, Federal knows what’s up! They’ve announced some new Cosmic 12 Gauge target loads to light up any local nighttime clays course and add more fun to your shoot.

Wiley X's new Limited Edition Camo Collection is getting a new Kryptek facelift. The Founder and Ovation models (both carry a Z87.1+ ballistic rating), representing Wiley X’s ballistic-rated eyewear line, will be the first to get this new hydro-dipping treatment. In total, there will be seven new SKUs, and all are live now, priced from $215 to $270. Wiley X has each frame hydro-dipped individually, so no two come out identical, and they should blend in with the rest of your existing Kryptek camo setup perfectly.

Trijicon has introduced enhanced RTR (Rapid Target Reticle) options for its ACOG Compact line, adding .223 and 9mm PCC-specific configurations to the 1.5x16 and 2x20 models. The reticles were developed through its Voice of the Customer process, which incorporates direct feedback from users in the field.

The G95 is manufactured by Heckler & Koch and it is a Bundeswehr-specific variant of the HK416, meaning it is built on the AR-15 pattern that is widely used across NATO, a design lineage shared with the G27 and G28, which are based on the AR-10 pattern. It’s pretty obvious that this shared operating logic will simplify cross-training between the different rifles already in service.

I’m writing this from my remote cabin, connected via Starlink, eagerly anticipating the UPS truck that is now on its fourth day of delays in delivering my Black Trident package. Not sure if you can feel my pain, but luckily I found some images to make me think of something else while I wait. The firearm is only half the mission, if even that. BT’s recent special forces holster contract validated that quite a lot.