After producing the Ero, a nearly exact copy of the Israeli Uzi, the Croatia firm Arma started making some design changes. With the Mini-Ero, they picked a size in between that of the Mini-Uzi and Micro-Uzi, and also used a stock taken from the vz.61 Skorpion (Model 84 in Croatian service).
A big thanks to the Croatian Police Museum (Muzej Policije) in Zagreb for giving me access to film this rare piece for you! Check them out at: https://muzej-policije.gov.hr
At the beginning of Croatia’s Homeland War, a severe need for small arms led to a whole plethora of simple submachine gun designs. Some were made in proper factories with professional tooling, and some were […]
The HS Produkt company, best known for making the XD pistols sold in the US by Springfield, was originally called IM Metal, and was a general fabrication company in Croatia. When the Croatian Homeland War […]
Yesterday we took a look at the inner workings of the VHS-2, and today we are going to put some rounds through it. I am trying out both a short-barreled VHS-K2 that was limited to […]
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I still have my doubts about these PDW-class weapons. The mini- and micro-UZI always struck me as being like the MAC series of SMGs… Gimmicks of questionable utility, and really not suited for actual combat. The use-case seems more geared towards Miami Vice-style cosplay than anything else.
Fun range toys? Sure… Something you want to take into combat? Against real soldiers armed with real soldier-scale weapons? Nope. The bigger SMG weapons like the UZI and the Sterling are a different thing, artifacts of the era before effective assault rifles.
Still, fun range toys I’d like to own, just for the hell of it. Controlling one on full-auto has always seemed like it might be a bit of a challenge, however.
It’s worth noting, in regard to your comment, that these seem to have been issued to police and not soldiers. So perhaps they were in fact thinking of Miami Vice!
In my experience, things like this tend to end up on UC or stakeout duty. Where you probably won’t need a weapon, but in the one case out of a hundred that you do, you’re going to need to lay down as big a “wall of lead” as you can, just to save your own ass.
Handguns can’t generally do that, except for weirdies like the Glock 18. Shotguns have too low a rate of fire due to slow reloading. And like patrol rifles (M1 or M4), they’re too bulky.
Most of all, you need a weapon that doesn’t scream COP! if a perp accidentally gets a glimpse of it. Ideally, you need one you can hide under a magazine (Playboy, not Magpul), or under your butt even (in a car seat- BTDT).
Graph all this on an X-Y-Z axes chart, and the converging point is pretty much an antique Mauser 712 or Astra 903 machine pistol, an Ingram MAC 10 9mm or .45 SMG, or a Mini-Uzi. Or, something like a Mini-Uzi, like this.
In my case, it was the McQ method; a .45 ACP MAC 10 with suppressor in a gym bag. Back then (late 1970s/early 1980s) lots of “dudes” carried gym bags like girls carried purses. (Remember?)
A MAC 10 and two or three spare 30-round magazines fit just right in a $20 gym bag from KMart or Costco.
The thing you had to remember was that the guy on the other side of a buy probably had one, too. And this was years before “Miami Vice”.
clear ether
eon
I’ve no expertise to offer in terms of what police might need and use, so YMMV…
Militarily speaking? Other than maybe protecting a high-value target like Schwartzkopf in a meeting with locals, I can’t see the juice being worth the squeeze.
With regards to the entire PDW concept for the military, the problem is that they conceived them based on a fallacy, that of “We have our Real Combat Troops(TM), who do Real Combat Things(TM) in specific places and times where we can count on them being, and then there are the rest of the yoicks who are second- and third-class sorts that don’t need to worry about coming up against enemy Real Combat Troops(TM)…”
This is utter folly, in several regards. One, because you’re essentially writing off a bunch of your force to be slaughtered carrying useless objects like the various flavors of Teeny-Tiny SMGs or the purpose-built uselessnesses that the MP7 and P-90 represent. They’ll be outranged and out-accuracy-ed (to coin a term…), along with mowed down by actual LMG support weapons and mortars that they can’t effectively answer because “Range”. Two, the operational/strategic factor is that if you are in a situation like we were in Iraq, or the German rear-area troops were in on the Eastern Front, the fact that your support troops are not using every opportunity to pin down and engage the enemy to its destruction when they are attacked basically means that you’re really running a training and confidence-building operation for the enemy…
If they’re in uniform, they need to be able to meet the basic standard of light infantry, whenever and wherever the enemy decides to engage them. Period. That means the same equipment, same weapons, and same training. Combat troops first, support troops second.
Make me “the guy in charge”, and I’d turn training and personnel on its ‘effing head: The only path into a technical skill lies through completion of a tour in one of the direct combat arms, in order to learn your trade and prove your worth as a soldier, and only then, once successfully demonstrating that you are capable of being an effective soldier, do we spend the money to make you a Whotsit Repair specialist.
Frankly, if the enemy doesn’t fear engaging your rear-echelon elements rather more than they do your front-line combat troops, you’re probably doing war wrong in this day and age.
So what you equip your rear-area troops with that would give them enough fire power to survive, yet not be bulky and interfere with their duties?
Their duties are to engage with and destroy the enemy. Nothing else. Period.
You want to know why Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on for so long? It’s because we allowed it to, and even encouraged it. The guerrillas engaged our support troops, who merely defended themselves. Meanwhile, they evaded all of the efforts made by our combat troops, who wore themselves out on “dry hole” after “dry hole”. Some 80-90% of the contacts with enemy combatants were made by our rear-area guys, who effectively weren’t “rear area”; they were front-line soldiers refusing to fight. In a lot of cases, they went so far as to refuse to have actual combat troops along for their encounters because “…it would slow us down…” and “…we don’t want to anger the enemy…” Those were two literal responses we got when the staffing went around to suggest integrating combat troops into the logistics movements so as to actually get some damn contacts with the enemy so we could kill them.
The mindset of “rear area” vs. “front line” is an artifact of an era that really died about 1939. You wake up of a morning and discover you’ve got a Panzer or Airborne regiment on your doorstep, it doesn’t matter a damn bit that you’re a Quartermaster unit; what does matter is that you’re there, they’re there, and you’d better be able to at least keep them there until someone can deal with them and put that unit down.
One of the critical bits that Allied forces missed during WWII with the Germans was that at least one of the reasons why they were able to put together all these ad-hoc little improvised units that put paid to our breakthroughs and airborne assaults was that they handed out front-line weapons and training to a lot of their logistic units, and expected them to fall in on whoever took charge of things and counter-attacked. Those were lessons the Germans brought back from the Eastern Front, and they spread them throughout their forces. The principles still stand… If you’re there, and the enemy is there? You’re a front-line soldier; act like one. To do that, you need the weapons, the accessory equipment, and the training of a front-line soldier just as much as they need it. Maybe even more.
One of the things the Germans learned the hard way in WWII was that you did not expect to attack any US Army Engineer outfits, regardless of what mission they were assigned, and expect to come away at all intact. Lieutenant David Pergrin and the 291st Engineer Battalion taught them that lesson around Malmedy; they’re credited with basically stopping Joachim Peiper’s tanks in their tracks. Prior to the Battle of the Bulge, the 291st was in a corps support role, running sawmills and lumbering operations in order to provide winterization materials to the Allied forces. They were emphatically not a front-line combat outfit, but they damn sure punched at that weight, when needed.
Every “rear-echelon” unit ought to be capable of the same sort of action as they were, and possess the same sort of “get some” mentality. Without it, you simply don’t have a real chance in modern war, because today’s front-line trace is probably tomorrow’s quiet zone.
OK, I’m going to try this again, hopefully not using any words that get me blocked.
The U.S. experience of this goes back clear to the Civil War. In the Hundred Years’ War, it was called “chevauxchee” or “changing horses”, meaning cavalry raiding. In the Civil War, it was called “Grierson’s raid” from TN to LA; here in SE OH, it was called “Here come Mosby and his boys again”. (And again…and again…)
In the Philippines a few decades later, we found out you don’t need cavalry to do it; just motivation. And nobody was more motivated than the Moros, who didn’t like anybody else anyway.
The Germans experienced it in the Balkans, too, to the point that pretty much anybody with a radio or a field phone could call for CAS and get it without going through higher. (Besides, they had to find some use for all those Stukas….)
The French Resistance has been over-romanticised, but they did manage to make going to a restaurant in Paris more hazardous than chasing the “Maquis” (really more road agents than anything else) through the Midi, if you happened to be a German officer.
The French got it in their turn a decade later, in Indochina and Algeria. They even made a movie about the latter; see The Battle of Algiers (1966).
My uncles experienced it in the ETO, and PTO, and Korea. And NB; it didn’t necessarily end with VE Day or VJ Day. Sometimes just the cast of characters changed (Greece, for instance).
Vietnam? A friend of mine, Marine, arrived to begin his first tour just in time for Tet ’68. Instead of a firebase on the Cambodian border, he got his first experience of what it was all about for two weeks in Saigon. That went with my one cousin’s experience as an MP there for two tours.
Every war we’ve fought has been this way. You’d think by now our planners would have figured it out.
clear ether
eon
eon, I think the sad truth is that the sort of mind that winds up in the upper levels of any hierarchical organization is rarely the sort of mind that ought to be there. The characteristics that make you successful in the hierarchy are rarely those that make you successful at actually performing the function that hierarchy is supposed to perform.
Somehow, we keep selecting and elevating the exact wrong set of people to these positions where they make the decisions about what the organization is going to be doing. They’re usually the sort of people who make the choices to just keep doing the same-old same-old, regardless of changing circumstances. They can’t extrapolate or forecast what they need to do in order to adapt to the changing circumstances that they are unable to perceive.
People were telling the Army as long ago as the late 1980s and early 1990s that we needed mine-protected vehicles and armored route-clearance specialized vehicles. The Army, in its vast wisdom, assured us that they’d never get into a war that would require such things, and we didn’t have a mission for that, anyway. The reason they didn’t have that stuff was that the Engineer Branch refused to take up the mission, and the other branches refused to help pay for it… It was in a budgetary blind spot, and a vacancy in responsibilities. So, nobody did anything, although lots of people said “Someone ought to…”
Result? We went into Iraq and Afghanistan entirely unprepared for that sort of war, and paid the price in blood and treasure. Not to mention, by presenting that “unprotected flank”, we enabled and energized an enemy that might not have gotten that successful without us effectively allowing them to succeed.
Organization: We’re doing this wrong.
https://x.com/JaysonGeroux/status/1842562700645462351
Pay particular attention to points 16, 17, and 18. I ain’t blowing smoke up anyone’s ass; this is the reality of modern warfare.
Bart, there is no simple answer to your question. The problem is level III and IV body amor which is resistant to 5.56X45mm rounds. Which make it obvious that FN 5.7×28mm or HK 4.6×30mm is not going to meet the grade. The short term solution will be to use M4 carbine. But this will also not be optimal.
Seems like some innovation is needed here to create a firearm that does not yet exist. Something that can comfortably fire a powerful enough round to defeat the current state of body armor, yet not be cumbersome to lug around when doing support work. I don’t think it would need a real long barrel. Any rear-area action would like be at shorter range. Maybe use the pistol brace type of architecture, rather than a traditional shoulder stock. No iron sights, just a basic red dot. No extra bulky accessories, like an M-lock compatible fore grip. Make the magazine well robust enough to get a firm grip.
I may be off in the weeds here, but something stripped down and basic seems to be needed.
Put yourself in the shoes of that finance clerk being ordered to go out and do what’s necessary there in the fine city of Mogadishu: Do you want to be going out there into the night and fog of battle with “something stripped down and basic”, or do you want to be as well-equipped to sell your life dearly as the Ranger on your flank? Do you think that “stripped down and basic” is fair to either that finance clerk, or the Ranger who now has to rely on him to perform the job exactly as another Ranger would? Do you feel like you’d like to explain to either of their moms and dads, wives and children, just why you chose to equip them that way? Why you chose not to train the finance clerk properly, so that he could fill in for those other, already dead Rangers?
The disaster of the 507th Maintenance Company happened precisely because of the mentality you’re espousing. I think that mentality is criminal, uncaring, and totally wrong tactically, operationally, and strategically. When the moment comes, unless you want to lose everything, then your finance clerks and cooks need to be able to pick up their weapons and fight at least as effectively as any other basic light infantryman. That’s what the exigencies of service these days demand, and if you play fantasy-land games about being able to get away with arming them any differently than you are your light infantry, you’re morally wrong. They need the training, they need the arms, and they need the personal equipment on the same scale you give your basic infantry units. You can’t provide that? Then, they should be non-combatants.
Won’t do them the least bit of good, when it comes to surviving once the Final Protective Fires have failed, and the enemy is coming over the wire, but at least you won’t have given them any false expectations.
This is anecdotal but it is seemingly relevant.
My coworker was a mechanic in the USMC from 2018 to the summer of 2024. In the two units that he was attached to over his career issued either a M4A1 or a M16A4. In the case of the M4A1 this was exactly the same as the rifle the rest of the unit was issued and when he was issued an M16A4 he said that he would have been issued an M4A1 like the rest of the unit had they actually deployed.
I didn’t ask much more than that of him as I was mostly interested in the firearms he was issued but it seemed as if he underwent as much or nearly as much combat training as the rest of the guys in either unit.
Aside from the 20″ M16A4 it seemed having a rifle wasn’t a particular burden to him.
The Marines generally do a better job of living the ideal of “Every man a rifleman”, but then again, they also slough off a lot of combat service support roles/jobs onto naval personnel who get little to no training for combat, then get passed off to the Marines for use in theater. Not sure how good a job they do of making those poor bastards rifleman, or what they give them, but I’ve heard a few complaints that the Navy guys got hardly any real prep for Iraq, when someone decided that they wanted them to “go green”.
Again, the sad fact here is that all I’m doing is recognizing and calling out a reality; you have to be able to fight and take the fight to the enemy when and where he appears. Can’t do that? You’re going to die, and your side is going to lose.
The real problem here is that the folks making the decisions are too married to the idea of the linear battlefield, with its carefully delineated zones of combat activity. Ain’t no such animal, and you’re going to see that in coming years. My guess is that the battlefield is going to wind up extending over a lot of the supposed “safe zones” here in the continental US, should we ever get in a serious war. As we speak, I’m convinced there are probably a bunch of folks already gearing up for it, and targeting military bases and facilities. Any “key and essential” military personnel living off-base ought to have carefully scrubbed social media for anything showing where they live, and made plans for evacuation to an actual safe area, as well as self-defense. You’d only really need to go to a relatively tiny amount of effort to totally disrupt things like the drone command centers at Nellis; once word got out about one or two families of the operators getting hit, then the whole base would go nuts trying to secure itself and the important people.
Been warning about this for years, but they’re still basing people in key jobs out of Nellis, next door to Las Vegas, which is possibly one of, if not the most common destination for foreign tourism here in the US. The stuff like drones should have been based out of like Mountain Home, Idaho, where the local community is so small and insular that any foreign hit teams would stand out like sore thumbs…
They’re gonna learn, but I wish they wouldn’t insist on doing it all the hard way.
“(…)can comfortably fire a powerful enough round to defeat the current state of body armor, yet not be cumbersome to lug around when doing support work(…)”
Then use AO-46 https://modernfirearms.net/en/assault-rifles/russia-assault-rifles/tkachov-ao-46/ combined with 7H39 cartridge.
This is what I was thinking of. But there are idea that everybody should have a full feature “battle rifle” is also worth considering.