Dangerous Magazine

By Philip Dwyer This past Sunday, March 18, al Qaida militants gunned down a Pennsylvania-born development worker in Yemen.  Al Qaida claimed that Joel Shrum, who was teaching English at a language institute, was “proselytizing under the cover of teaching.”   In January of this year U.S. Special Forces parachuted into Somalia and rescued aid workers Jessie Buchanan and her Danish colleague from armed gunmen. In October 2011, British aid worker Linda Norgrove was killed in Afghanistan during a similar rescue...

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By Will Grant The Afghan Public Protection Force is proud to announce that on Thursday of this week it signed its first contracts for work. Just in time for the springtime violence that comes to Afghanistan every year. The contracts give the APPF responsibility of security operations for three companies doing reconstruction work in Afghanistan. Their signing represents one more step toward what President Hamid Karzai has wanted for years: Afghans providing security in Afghanistan. In fact, Karzai has mandated—though...

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By Will Grant Sometimes, you can learn as much from fiction as nonfiction. For any one who has not been a part of the Army’s elite combat detachment Delta Force or done low-profile recon work in Pakistan, that’ll be the case with Dalton Fury’s new book, Black Site. For those people, the book will be an educational tour de force through the terra incognita of our military’s—and private security companies’—presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its pertinence to the current state...

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The longest sniper shots on record are amazing feats of marksmanship. The men who made the shots got about as much performance out of their weapons systems as possible. But not everyone’s convinced those shots happened. So we ran the ballistics, talked to a few experts, and had look for ourselves. By Will Grant A McMillan TAC-50 rifle A British sniper currently holds the publicly known record for a confirmed kill shot. As a Corporal of Horse in the British...

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By Jake Allen These days determining where to invest in training can be a tough decision.  In the decade since 9/11 the training industry for law enforcement, security and overseas contractors has seen exponential growth.  Schools and academies have popped up all over the world offering specific tactical courses such as firearms, defensive driving, and close protection, or anti-piracy.  In addition to these tactical curriculums you also have a wide range of planning, preparedness and response courses.  Many universities and...

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by Will Grant   Five years ago, Blackwater had a very bad week. On January 23, 2007, one of the company’s MD 530F Little Bird helicopters was shot down in Baghdad while providing aerial support for an attacked convoy. That incident cost the lives of five contractors. A week later, Blackwater lost a Bell 412 helicopter north of Baghdad when a 7.62 round pierced the aircraft’s its gearbox. The helicopter and crew landed safely but the US Army destroyed the...

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