HESCO MIL

Apparently the military uses this product for barriers.  It consists of a welded-wire frame and a fabric to retain native soil.  Could be used for a shooting range's berm....

Link Dump, 2013.01.09

These have been sitting in my reader for a bit....

Roberts's Real Long Game?
The Permanent Militarization of America
The Power of Negative Thinking

And more recently:
Ten gun bills on Congress's first day

Full-Spectrum Operations in the Homeland

This is some sick shit.  First I got a link from a friend, then saw it in Sipsey St. a couple months back.  Must be the jerk-off fantasy of a twisted individual who thinks it might be fun to kill his countrymen.  Forgot to tuck the link away in case I need to refer to it again.

Military Hand Signals

The decoder ring for basic military hand signals (posted by American Specialty Ammo on Facebook):

Edit [2014.04.03]: The image link is busted, so here's another one.

Milsurp

Other than Bradley's Military Surplus and Coleman's Military Surplus, there's Military Logistics Manufacturing, Charley's Surplus, and Uncle Sam's Retail Outlet.

NSNs

I've seen NSNs on listings of military surplus (both used and new-old stock) for a while, and determined that only the items that actually had a NSN shown were the genuine article and not repro.  There's a site ArmyProperty.com that has a lookup of NSNs to goods, which is pretty handy.

As far as gas/water cans go, olive-drab.com has some detail on how they went from metal to plastic.

Shooting Jackets

Fred's is now out of the XL shooting jackets, and apparently the manufacturer has gone belly-up.  A search turned up a few other choices, such as Creedmore Sports and Champion's Choice.  CMP also sells one, but it's blue.  Military Logistics has cloth jackets for reasonably cheap; the details are scarce and the country of origin isn't indicated.

BDU Sizes

Today's Sipsey St. praxis has a chart indicating equivalents for BDU sizes.

USGI Web Gear

Sipsey Street has a post (actually, two) on USGI web gear that's quite informative and has several useful vectors.

Incidentally, "praxis" is application of theory, a term often used to preface Sipsey Street informational posts.