Seasons Greetings Happy Holiday From Mingus Designs


FYI 
http://mingusart.com/ 
http://www.mingus.charlesmingus3art.com/yeahbutisitart-3F-_863.html

  Print it and put it on your fridge relax it's mostly yellow.                


 
 CM3-08-SeeingIsBelivingWarInHeaven2 Copyright © Charles Mingus 2008 
 
Some links :

1.
Seeing Is Beliving, War In Heaven
http://www.thepainting.net/

2.
Seeing Is Beliving War In Heaven
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&q=
Seeing+Is+Beliving+War+In+Heaven&btnG=Search+Images

3.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.whatheck.com/uploaded_images/diamonds-old-people799277-799383.jpg&imgrefurl=
http://www.whatheck.com/2008/06/diamonds-from-old-people.php&usg=__84i3b3vDRFonOea31IS6ZZH21SI=&h=800&w=546&sz=16


4.
 Did you ever use this self promotion
 http://www.artbreak.com/

5.

ROSENQUIST  "PRESIDENT ELECT" Rosenquist   http://www.jimrosenquist-artist.com/ http://www.jimrosenquist-artist.com/?q=node/131

http://www.studio-international.co.uk/default.asp                                        ROSENQUIST  "PRESIDENT ELECT" haberarts Art Reviews: James Rosenquist Art Reviews: James Rosenquist   In Rosenquist's mix of commercial realism and nightmare reality,  one could call him the last living Surrealist. Collage for President Elect  (collection of ... HTTP://www.haberarts.com/rosenq.htm -

http://www.haberarts.com/rosenq.htm

The Last Living Surrealist John Haber in New York City James Rosenquist Right at the start of James Rosenquist's retrospective, some truly awful sketches caught me by surprise. Not that the quality bothered me. Plenty of young artists imitate tired movements before inventing their own. At the Guggenheim, the inventions come quickly indeed. It needs more than three floors just to get from 1962 to 1964. No, I mean exactly what he imitated. I mean what turned him on to art. It may mark him as Pop Art's true traditionalist. For better or for worse, no one else so cherished images for their own sake. In Rosenquist's mix of commercial realism and nightmare reality, one could call him the last living Surrealist. Guess again Try guessing whom he admired. Rosenquist had been living off painting billboards, much as Andy Warhol and Wayne Thibaud had survived on commercial art—and learned from it. Warhol and Thibaud play with the self-contained frame and deadening repetition of magazine illustration. Rosenquist seems to have learned as well. He does not just take scraps from advertisements and images of desire as his subject matter. He also makes representation itself a billboard. Rosenquist's mature canvases crowd one out of the room. His single most famous work, F-111, has to circle a gallery's walls simply to fit. Perhaps, then, he first copied the scale and design of Jackson Pollock or Guernica. Well, no. Guess again. Then, too, Rosenquist's Pop Art has an aggressive mix of fire and ice, as somber when it comes to popular culture as Philip Guston. He has little use for Roy Lichtenstein's enthusiasm for Mickey Mouse or Warhol's near idolatry for Jackie. He cannot share Thibaud's nostalgia for dessert. When the face of his Collage for President Elect morphs into a slice of cake, the message is clear. Politicians serve as one more commodity. Let them eat cake. Rosenquist rips images in pieces and thrusts them in one's face. Painting after painting evokes a woman's eyes, lips, and bare legs, sometimes squeezed into shards of color like razor wire. Like a much younger artist, Matthew Brannon, he dares one to lust after advertising before he tears it apart. Perhaps, then, he first emulated Willem de Kooning or Pablo Picasso's lovers and whores. Nope, not that either. One last try. How about something nearer the present? Pop Art did not emerge out of nowhere. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, in his combines, appropriate images for mass consumption well before 1960. Also like Rauschenberg, Rosenquist admires John Cage's circle. He calls one work Merce Cunningham's Shoes. He might have turned to "combine paintings" in 1959—but no again. Maybe one should not ask. When the breakthrough comes, after all, it comes fast. Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rosenquist all showed at Leo Castelli in 1962. From that moment, surely any exercises in fine art has to look academic. Yet those early sketches risk it. They evoke the most lyrical, personal, and tormented of Abstract Expressionists, Arshile Gorky. Pop Art's illustrator I do not wish to make too much of ink stains that Rosenquist may just as soon forget. Obviously he outgrew watery abstraction—and a good thing, too. Still, the choice makes sense somehow. Gorky hit New York with a passion for Cubism and for drawing, and Rosenquist has made collage his life. Do Rauschenberg's Bed, Warhol's Brillo, and Lichtenstein's Ben Day dots appropriate familiar objects and trademark images? Rosenquist would rather slice them, dice them, reduce them to anonymity, and reproduce them in his own hand. His paintings stem from literal collage as well. These experiments on paper, also at the Guggenheim, cast actual clippings amid drawing and penciled notes. Even more, Gorky's fluid textures and images had taught young Abstract Expressionists about Surrealism. Do Warhol's car crashes and George Segal's humanity in white plaster worry reality to death? Rosenquist keeps it alive but defiantly surreal. One sees it in the work's emotional distance. Warhol's perpetual erasure still tempts me and frightens me. Rosenquist, in contrast, treats advertising and real life as one long, disturbing dream. One sees it in the sensual overload. Think of Salvador Dalí and Dalí's open, cluttered landscapes and films. Think of André Breton's fascination with madness and sexual attraction. Rosenquist's icons keep interrupting one another, and nothing looks more casual or dangerous than sex. Women have the pale allure of old fashion magazines. Lipstick tubes target the viewer like heavy artillery. Above all, one sees it in the very emphasis on images. Much art of the 1960s and 1970s—including abstraction and Minimalism as well as Pop—derides mere "illustration." Rosenquist has a nasty world to illustrate. Selling out All Pop Art engages the past. Lichtenstein's Brushstrokes and Mickey Mouse parody fine art and comic books, but with love for both. Claes Oldenburg's household objects take the shape of monumental sculpture. Warhol's silkscreens reimagine painting as faded, reproducible, and impossible to forget. In turn, they play mind games with the past. In their concern for materials, their new media, and their strategy of appropriation, they leave one aware of the art object in confrontation with oneself. Rosenquist's style does not as directly challenge the past, because it implies a perpetual present. He paints thinly, on flat surfaces of metal and canvas. After his President Elect, he prefers juxtaposed elements to melting transitions. Although he recycles motifs from painting to painting, no one work effects deadening repetition. He appropriates ads, but as cheap illusions, and he stays on the message. More often than not, that means a political message: stuff is bad for you. Better watch out, because someone is always trying to sell you something—maybe even art. President Kennedy is out to sell you chocolate cake, or maybe chocolate cake is out to sell you Kennedy. F-111 turns from the fighter plane, then in development for the Vietnam War, to a smiling little girl and tinned spaghetti. The girl sits under a salon hair dryer that suggests another warhead. In the pencil sketches, I could not always tell the future title, such as "I love you with my Ford," from the barbed notes to Rosenquist himself, such as "vanity." I still do not know which to call "death and taxes." I wonder if his peers' soft spot for popular culture dismayed him. Where Warhol has Jackie in mourning, the ultimate good girl, Rosenquist has Marilyn the suicidal temptress. Where Kennedy's idealism serves Rauschenberg as an emblem for his art, Rosenquist has Kennedy the manipulator and the product. Where Rauschenberg's space capsule defies gravity, Rosenquist shows the explosion of 1970 that killed three astronauts. Around the same time, he criticized the space program for taking money away from home. Even Segal, it can seem, treats a tired commuter or the Holocaust as less a political crisis than an existential one. For Rosenquist, art has to exist in the political and cultural present. Forget metaphysical puzzles and the crisis of the art object. Vision is all that matters, because seeing is too often believing. Fits and starts Then again, maybe Rosenquist understand Pop Art's ambivalence to mass culture. Maybe it stood for him as a temptation and a warning. If commerce absorbs everything, it can absorb painting. In fact, once Rosenquist becomes an old master, his attitudes change. In his late work, space flight takes on positive connotations, and the paintings increasingly look like outtakes from an Imax film, only chillier. Fortunately, Stanley Kubrick never optioned him. Scarier still, was the image's temptation there all along? Any strategy of repetition and appropriation gets deadening, even Rosenquist's. Perhaps that explains his uneven career. The Guggenheim's long retrospective goes by surprisingly quickly. It also contains some unexplained fits and starts. Those first years, the early 1960s, have his classics. Yet for all their deadly earnest, they belong now to an idyllic past. The images have the remoteness of early color printing. A few, like an advertisement floating over a suburban house, come off as way too obvious. By the mid-1960s, Rosenquist himself sees the problem. He introduced collage elements, such as paint-spattered objects in front of a canvas, but one can miss them entirely. He tries his hand briefly at sculpture. Circular saw blades pop out of his clear-plastic toaster in place of sliced bread. However, I mistook the image entirely—for a gift-wrapped box. A neon tube darting through a bush of barbed wire may evoke the Vietnam war, or maybe not. Then, for nearly ten years, the retrospective almost stops. As another politically aware individual, Joseph Heller, wrote around the same time, Something Happened. One barely spots that 1970 Apollo 13 explosion. It falls in a side gallery, out of sequence, as if not to interrupt the silence. Just as suddenly, in 1977, Rosenquist returns with new energy. Colors grow more artificial and more exciting, like a teenager late to the 1960s party. Images invade the viewer's space, like those lipsticks, not far from a different kind of heat, with a pail of molten metal bursting through a window. Pencils tumble out of a cylinder, as if art grew out of the barrel of a gun. The aggression adds up to some of his best and most allusive work. A dream of the present All too naturally, even this breakthrough cannot last. Increasingly, Rosenquist breaks up images into smaller chunks and scatters color more widely. It approaches abstraction. It also achieves total blandness. A simultaneous show down in Chelsea has four walls of vertical color panels awaiting a performance. They update the installation for F-111, but without the thrill. The curators still sense political urgency, but I do not. A series about the biosphere looks more like eye candy than like a planet at risk. Murals for a German bank may criticize global finance, but they could just as well celebrate it—or tune it out entirely. The museum's own scale reduces the impact. The Guggenheim recreates Castelli's four walls for F-111, but a big gallery can look oddly small in a big museum, and not long ago the Modern chose instead a long corridor for the same work. (A mock-up of Pollock's studio looked smaller than life, too, in his retrospective at the Modern.) The narrow ramp hardly helps. Does it remind you of a toilet bowl? The show looks like it is trying to squeeze billboards into the bathroom. In a sense, the old charge of "illustration" sticks. Rosenquist has made some of Pop Art's most memorable images, I think, but one of its least memorable careers. They stick in the mind, but they sit still. Warhol's images, in contrast, have a way of looking strange each time precisely because one never forgets them. In another sense, however, the charge has no relevance. Not even Rosenquist can defy the dance between image and object. Not even he can sort out past and present, appropriation and reality. His images of images have entered art's image bank. By falling prey to nostalgia despite themselves, they get a little extra. From across the ramp, sliced by the museum's own walls, his accumulated billboards may even become a challenge of their own. Besides, Rosenquist contributed something. I may prefer neo-Dada to neo-Surrealism. Surrealism has to bear with overtones of pretension and escapism. Still, no one else locates its dreams so clearly in the marketplace.

http://www.haberarts.com/rosenq.htm

rosenquist PRESIDENT ELECT  http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&q=rosenquist+PRESIDENT+ELECT ... Rosenquist’ President Elect ... 600 x 372 - 48k - jpg geeksofdoom.com James Rosenquist, peintre célèbre du ... 583 x 360 - 218k - jpg www.productionmyarts.com "President Elect" by James ... 583 x 360 - 111k - jpg www.thecityreview.com James Rosenquist - President Elect, ... 350 x 240 - 41k - jpg www.globalgallery.com [ More from www.globalgallery.com ] President Elect Framed Art Print by ... 400 x 283 - 27k - jpg www.allposters.com [ More from imagecache2.allposters.com ] President Elect Art Print by James ... 400 x 275 - 29k - jpg www.allposters.com President Elect, 1960 Poster 400 x 246 - 20k nl.easyart.com [ More from images.easyart.com ] Andy Warhol, 100 Cans, 1962 isleyartexhibit.wordpress.com James Rosenquist, President Elect, ... 794 x 691 - 157k - jpg isleyartexhibit.wordpress.com President Elect, 1961 400 x 353 - 41k - jpg aaw2dart.blogspot.com [ More fromblogger.com ] President Elect, 1961 400 x 244 - 33k - jpg aaw2dart.blogspot.com Collage for President Elect, ... 500 x 307 - 28k - jpg www.studio-international.co.uk President Elect 800 x 500 - 84k - jpg www.all-art.org Lámina President Elect de James ... 280 x 192 - 22k - jpg www.posterspoint.com President Elect, 1960 art print by ... 150 x 92 - 6k en.easyart.com President Elect Art Print by James ... 160 x 110 - 8k - jpg www.allposters.com Collage for President Elect ... 300 x 188 - 22k - jpg www.haberarts.com James Rosenquist, President Elect, ... 190 x 130 - 6k - jpg www.globalgallery.com 3 President Elect 1960 350 x 240 - 16k - jpg www.greatmodernpictures.com Collage for President Elect, ... 250 x 152 - 19k - jpg www.artfacts.net President Elect ... 109 x 97 - 4k - jpg www.guggenheim-bilbao.es [ More from www.guggenheim-bilbao.es ] Did you mean to search for: rosenquist PRESIDENT ELECT

Painting "President Elect" (1960-61) ... 600 x 372 - 33k - jpg creativegames.org.uk ชื่อภาพ President Elect 583 x 360 - 111k - jpg 203.158.253.5 James Rosenquist, peintre célèbre du ... 583 x 360 - 218k - jpg www.productionmyarts.com ... Rosenquist' President Elect ... 600 x 372 - 48k - jpg geeksofdoom.com James Rosenquist, President Elect, ... 444 x 279 - 109k - jpg www.artlies.org ... PRESIDENT ELECT (item ... 640 x 398 - 59k - jpg cgi.ebay.com.sg Robert James Rosenquist, President ... 600 x 372 - 46k - jpg www.centrepompidou.fr President Elect, 1961 400 x 353 - 41k - jpg aaw2dart.blogspot.com ... ROSENQUIST, “PRESIDENT ELECT” ... 646 x 508 - 98k - jpg www.newyorker.com James Rosenquist - President Elect, ... 350 x 240 - 41k - jpg www.globalgallery.com ... ROSENQUIST, “PRESIDENT ELECT” ... 465 x 364 - 169k - jpg www.newyorker.com Collage for President Elect, ... 500 x 307 - 28k - jpg www.studio-international.co.uk James Rosenquist, President Elect, ... 794 x 691 - 157k - jpg isleyartexhibit.wordpress.com President Elect 196. 160 x 115 - 8k www.art.com [ More from imagecache5.art.com ] President Elect. James Rosenquist 160 x 113 - 8k - jpg www.art.com ROSENQUIST "PRESIDENT ELECT" 574bg-a 560 x 320 - 140k - jpg mingusart.com President Elect, 1960–61/1964 200 x 124 - 10k - jpg artscurriculum.guggenheim.org Collage for President Elect ... 300 x 188 - 22k - jpg www.haberarts.com Humanities Art Exhibit   by, Spencer I.    http://isleyartexhibit.wordpress.com/

President Elect 400 x 283 - 27k - jpg kunst-net.nl James Rosenquist 600 x 333 - 95k - jpg www.spaightwoodgalleries.com [ More from spaightwoodgalleries.com ] James Rosenquist 600 x 336 - 101k - jpg www.spaightwoodgalleries.com President Elect Art Print ... 160 x 110 - 8k - jpg www.allposters.com President Elect 800 x 500 - 84k - jpg www.all-art.org James Rosenquist 130 x 160 - 13k - jpg www.art.com [ More from imagecache5 Rosenquist, James - Arte Pop 315 x 400 - 41k - jpg oseculoprodigioso.blogspot.com Rosenquist, James - Arte Pop 400 x 345 - 53k - jpg oseculoprodigioso.blogspot.com James Rosenquist: Painting is done ... 357 x 400 - 74k - jpg www.myartspace.com 3 President Elect 1960 350 x 240 - 16k - jpg www.greatmodernpictures.com James Rosenquist President Elect, ... 160 x 110 - 5k - jpg www.postercheckout.com James Rosenquist, one of the last ... 316 x 280 - 8k - jpg www.iconocast.com James Rosenquist President Elect, ... 100 x 69 - 3k - jpg www.artprints.com [ More from www.artprints.com ] President Elect ... 109 x 97 - 4k - jpg www.guggenheim-bilbao.es [ More from www.guggenheim-bilbao.es ] Photo of James Rosenquist in his ... 200 x 267 - 27k - jpg www.answers.com JAMES ROSENQUIST (1933 - ) 213 x 237 - 23k - gif www.e-fineart.com TOP: Collage for President Elect, ... 373 x 234 - 25k - jpg pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org ... Art Print by James Rosenquist 400 x 291 - 39k - jpg www.allposters.com.au [ More from

Pop Art titan James Rosenquist holds class at Miami Art Museum Pop Art heavyweight James Rosenquist, a frequent Art Basel VIP, taught 28 advanced students that there's no shortcut to artistry. Artist James Rosenquist talks about his art Artist James Rosenquist, one of the last surviving titans of the Pop Art Movement, talks about his art. Miami Herald Staff

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-shepard-fairey18-2009jan18,0,4824476.story

BOOK REVIEW 'Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey' With his Obama portrait, an outsider artist has found greater recognition from the mainstream -- but is that a good thing? January 18, 2009 When the National Portrait Gallery announced last week that it was acquiring Shepard Fairey's iconic image of Barack Obama, it marked a curious development for the Los Angeles-based artist, previously known for his ubiquitous Andre the Giant stickers, as well as high-style  agitprop poster art. Fairey's been around for a long time, but he's always operated below the mainstream radar; his work has adorned album covers and alternative weeklies, and it has been plastered on walls and billboards all over L.A. With the Obama portrait, however, he has moved  into the center of the culture, providing a graphic as instantly recognizable as the president-elect himself. What happens when an  underground artist suddenly comes to occupy such a position? Fairey is about to find out. For a sense of how he came to such a juncture, it's worth looking at "Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey"  (Gingko Press: 450 pp., $59.95), which covers the 20 years of Fairey's career. Originally published in 2006, the book has been newly reissued and expanded, taking us from his earliest creations through his recent, higher profile work. As the copious color reproductions here remind us, Fairey's art has always been political; his Andre the Giant stickers are  part of a campaign called "Obey Giant," which he describes as a "case study" of the way that, as an image becomes recognizable, its value shifts from the hands of "rebellious outsiders" who first embraced it and to "marketers wishing to  capitalize on the rebellious cachet of street art." The same, of course, could be said of his Obama portrait, which suggests how consistent Fairey's aesthetics have remained. -- David L. Ulin http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-shepard-fairey18-2009jan18,0,4824476.story

 

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/ good reporting http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/news.aspx?id=109659 ShareThis Printer-Friendly Version E-mail This Story designed to meet the challenges of America’s conflicts.... e.g. Heckler & Koch a German defense manufacturing company developed the XM25, a rifle capable of shooting around corners and into trenches....Heckler and Koch has been accused of shipping small arms to conflict regions such as Bosnia and Nepal, and has licensed its weapons for production by regimes with poor human rights records such as Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar. It as been argued that the company effectively evaded UK and EU export restrictions when these licensees sold H&K weapons on to conflict zones including Indonesia, Sri Lankaand Sierra Leone. British comedian Mark Thomas demonstrated the ease with which legal loopholes allow the evasion of arms embargoes by arranging a shipment of German-made H&K submachine guns to Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. Raytheon, a major military contractor, has developed a heat wave that induces a burning sensation in targets up to 250 yards away, a non-lethal weapon ideally suited for riot control operations. US Army/PEO Soldier The XM25 in action Wars drive technological changes by Adam Verwymeren Dec 09, 2008 WASHINGTON -- Few events drive technological changes as much as war, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been no exception. While many of the super high tech items the military purchases get a lot of attention -- such as the F-22 Raptor, a $150 million stealth fighter jet  -- much of the success in America’s current conflicts is being driven by less expensive mid-level technologies. While these technologies have proven to be successful, critics charge that the military still invests too much in the big-ticket items, “Most [of the services] are focused on conventional military operations scenarios,” said Robert Martinage, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis. However, he added, the current wars have driven the military to rethink its smaller scale technologies. “Clearly there [are things] going on in the irregular warfare area that are significant shifts.” The Defense Department has stepped up its acquisition of mid-level technologies, many of which were in the works well before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but have been developed faster and in greater numbers as a result of those two conflicts. The unavailability of MRAPs, or mine resistant ambush protected vehicles, gained a great deal of press attention when it became apparent that the military’s lightly armored Humvees were totally insufficient to deal with the increasing number of roadside bomb  attacks in Iraq. The military has ramped up production of the highly armored vehicles, which cost about $850,000 per unit and have proven effective keeping troops safe from mine attacks. The MRAP is fairly conventional compared to many of the technologies under development. Things such as slippery foam designed to deny access to vehicles in certain areas, translation devices and attack robots may all become part of a soldier’s arsenal as they come online in the next few years. Small Arms Not all the changes involve major shifts in equipment. Many are small shifts designed to meet the challenges of America’s conflicts. The fighting in Iraq has forced the Army to change from the long-barreled M16 as the main service weapon to the shorter M4 carbine, a rifle better suited for urban combat. Small-arms maker Heckler & Koch has developed the XM25, a rifle capable of shooting around corners and into trenches. The weapon, which will be in the field in about 2 1/2years, works by sensing the range and placement of a target. A  detonator in its .25 caliber bullet puts out an explosion capable of hitting targets not in view. The weapon costs about $30,000 while each round costs about $25, making it about 30 times the base cost of an M4, but still cheap enough to field in limited numbers. Weapons such as this have the potential to increase a soldier’s effectiveness while lowering the risk of collateral damage. “The individual soldier right now is that tip of the spear. He is seeing this counterinsurgency up close and personal,” said Richard Audette, deputy project manager for PEO Soldier Weapons, the Army’s small arms supplier. “Precision is becoming more important as we go out and talk to the individual soldiers.” Non-lethal technologies As the military attempts to make its lethal technologies more precise, the Pentagon is also developing a range of non-lethal technologies that can be used in a range of counterinsurgency operations, including crowd control and reconnaissance. Providing security while limiting collateral damage is crucial to winning a counterinsurgency, a situation where unnecessary deaths can spur civilians to take up arms against the troops on the ground. Many innovative non-lethal technologies have come on line in recent years to meet these challenges. “I think over the next 10 years there will be a proliferation of new non-lethal technologies,” Martinage said.   Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, can produce a wealth of real-time information crucial for waging war against a highly decentralized enemy that relies on its ability to melt back into the local population. “You can spot a guy with an RPG and instead of taking him out, you can follow him around for an entire day and see who he visits,” said Shawn Brimley, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Raytheon, a major military contractor, has developed a heat wave that induces a burning sensation in targets up to 250 yards away, a non-lethal weapon ideally suited for riot control operations. Providing security is only part of the job of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Troops are also being called upon to help build the institutions of government. Biometric scanners have become one of the most valuable pieces of equipment for troops on the ground. In a country without census data, biometric scanners allow troops to build a database of residents for purposes such as elections or policing. “One of the lessons from small wars in the past is that the ability to do a census is vital,” Brimley said. Tech can’t solve everything Though technology has played an important role in current conflicts, experts warn that the ability of technology to be a game changer is inherently limited. “When you talk about irregular warfare, so much of it is not about gadgets but about training,” Martinage said. The military also needs to be wise about what kind of technology it buys. Weapons systems need to serve the principles of counterinsurgency operations if they are to be used successfully. “It is not going to get you all the way there and the technology that you focus on has got to be the right kind of technology. It can’t be tech that is less discriminate and less proportionate,” said David Tretler, a professor at the National Defense University. Problems with procurement Though the military is making inroads when it comes to purchasing technology to meet the challenges of present conflicts, there is still no systemic way to handle  these types of acquisitions. Throughout the Cold War, the military set up procedures to develop and acquire big ticket items such as the F-22 stealth fighter jet, a project that has been in the works since the 1980s. However, no such framework exists for the smaller scale technologies used in counterinsurgency operations, and much of the development and procurement is being done on an ad hoc basis. “Too much of it happens on the margins,” Brimley said. Further, he said many of the big weapons systems that came out of the Cold War era are being spun as having applications for counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the smaller technologies, such as the MRAP are being funded through supplemental budget bills for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, these technologies don’t have a place in the permanent Department of Defense budget, and money for them may fall by the wayside when the wars wind down. That could be a problem if the U.S. ever ends up in another conflict similar to the ones it faces today, Brimley said. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_&_Koch Heckler & Koch GmbH (H&K) (pronounced IPA: [ˈhɛklɐʔʊntˈkɔx][2]) is a German defensecompany that produces various small arms, for example the MP5submachine gun, G3 automatic rifle and the more recent G36 assault rifle, the MP7personal defense weapon, USP series of handguns and the high-precision PSG1 sniper rifle. All firearms made by H&K are named by a prefix and the official designation, with suffixes used for variants. manufacturing Heckler & Koch has a history of innovation in firearms, such as the use of polymers in their weapon designs and polygonal rifling. Contrary to popular belief which holds that the Austrian company Glock was the first manufacturer to use advanced polymers in their pistols, it was in fact Heckler & Koch with the release of their VP70 burst pistol in 1970. Heckler & Koch also developed modern polygonal rifling, noted for its high accuracy, increased muzzle velocity and barrel life. Not all of its technologically ambitious designs have translated into commercially successful products (for instance, the advanced but now abandoned G11 assault rifle, which fired caseless high-velocity ammunition). H&K produces a whole range of small arms, from pistols to grenade launchers and machine guns. In its extensive product range, H&K has used most of the operating systems for small arms: blowback operation, short-recoil, roller-delayed blowback, gas-delayed blowback, and gas operation. All of their firearm models have achieved a reputation for excellent accuracy and reliability at prices that sometimes deter civilian purchases. Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Criticisms 3 Heckler & Koch abbreviations 4 See also 5 References 6 External links History H&K was founded by engineers Edmund Heckler, Theodor Koch, and Alex Seidel in 1949[1]Mauser company; the company was registered in 1950.[1] Initially the company manufactured machine tools, sewing machine parts,[1] gauges and other precision parts, but this changed in 1956 when the company proposed the G3 automatic rifle for the Bundeswehr (Federal German Army).[1] Since then H&K has designed and manufactured more than one hundred different types of firearms and devices for the world's military and law enforcement organizations. In 1991, in the wake of the cancellation of the G41 and G11 rifles, H&K was bought by British Aerospace's Royal Ordnance division.[1]SA80 series of rifles for the British Army, addressing a number of reliability issues, and the development of the lightweight carbon fiber–reinforced G36 polymer assault rifle, the current (2008) service rifle of the Bundeswehr[1] and numerous other military and police forces. In 2002 BAE Systems, as it was by now known, resold H&K to a German group (H&K Beteiligungs-GmbH) that was created for the purpose of this acquisition.[1] from the remnants of the Their major contribution to weaponry since then was the modification of the The company is located in Oberndorf in the state of Baden-Württemberg, but also has subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, France and the United States. The company motto is: "No Compromise"[1]. The slogan emphasizes that H&K aims to incorporate accuracy, reliability, and ergonomics into their designs without sacrificing one over the other. The company has become such a paradigm in all three areas that many regard H&K as the world's premiere firearms manufacturer. This idea is supported by the fact that Heckler & Koch provides firearms for many of the world's elite military and paramilitary units, like the Special Air Service, U.S. Navy SEALs, Delta Force, FBI HRT, the German KSK and GSG 9 and countless other counter-terrorist and hostage rescue teams.[3][4][5] H&K was contracted by the U.S. Army to produce the kinetic energy subsystem[6] (see: kinetic projectiles or kinetic energy penetrator) of the Objective Individual Combat Weapon, a planned replacement for the M16/M203 grenade launcher combination. The OICW was designed to fire 5.56 mm bullets and 25 mm grenades. The kinetic energy component was also developed separately as the XM8, though both the OICW and XM8 are now indefinitely suspended.[7] H&K is also contracted to refurbish the SA80 range of weapons for the British Army, mainly because at the time the contract was put out to tender H&K was part of BAE Systems.[8] Recently, H&K developed an improved version of the United States issued M4, called the HK416.[9] H&K replaced the direct gas impingement system used by the Stoner design on the original M16 platform with a piston operating system. At this date, there is no indication that the rifle will be adopted by the United States Armed Forces. However, the elite Delta Force and other special operations units have fielded the HK416 in combat,[10] and Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has called for a "free and open competition" to determine whether the army should buy the HK416 or continue to purchase more M4 carbines.[11]Secretary of the Army Pete Geren agreed in July 2007 to hold a "dust chamber" test, pitting the M4 against H&K's HK416 and XM8, as well as the rival Fabrique Nationale's SOF Combat Assault Rifle (SCAR) design. Coburn had threatened to stop Geren’s Senate confirmation if he did not agree to the test.[12] The XM8 and SCAR had the fewest failures in the test, closely followed by the HK416, while the M4 had by far the most.[13] The Norwegian Army has recently chosen the HK416 to be its new standard issue rifle.[14] Incoming H&K sells its pistols in the United States to both the civilian and law enforcement markets. In 2004, H&K was awarded a major handgun contract for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), worth a potential $26.2 million for up to 65,000 pistols.[15] This contract ranks as the single largest handgun procurement contract in US law enforcement history.[16] Many H&K civilian rifles that were briefly sold in the United States now command a high value on the secondary market. H&K firearms are often seen as a status symbol among American gun owners due to their quality, scarcity, and high price tag. Criticisms Heckler and Koch has been accused of shipping small arms to conflict regions such as Bosnia[17] and Nepal[18], and has licensed its weapons for production by regimes with poor human rights records such as Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar[19]. It as been argued that the company effectively evaded UK and EU export restrictions when these licensees sold H&K weapons on to conflict zones including Indonesia[20], Sri Lanka[21] and Sierra Leone[22]. British comedian Mark Thomas demonstrated the ease with which legal loopholes allow the evasion of arms embargoes by arranging a shipment of German-made H&K submachine guns to Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe.[23] Heckler & Koch abbreviations Format: Abbreviation = German Text ("English Text") A = Ausführung ("Version")[24] G = Gewehr ("Rifle")[25] K = Either Kurz ("Short") for pistols and submachine guns or Karabiner ("Carbine") for rifles and assault rifles.[26] AG = Either stands for Anbau-Gerät ("Attached Device") or Anbaugranatwerfer ("Attached Grenade Launcher") GMG = Granatmaschinengewehr (Grenade machine gun) [27] GMW = Granatmaschinenwerfer (Automatic Grenade Launcher)[28] MG = Maschinengewehr ("Machinegun") [27] MP = Maschinenpistole ("Submachinegun") or ("Machine Pistol")[29] PSG = Präzisions-Schützen-Gewehr ("Precision Marksman's Rifle")[30] SD = Schalldämpfer ("Sound dampened");[31] In the case of the MP5 having an integral suppressor, in the case of the USP, an extended threaded barrel for attaching a suppressor. SG = Schützen-Gewehr ("Marksman's Rifle") [32] UMP = Universal-Maschinenpistole ("Universal Machine Pistol") [33] UCP = Ultimate Combat Pistol USP = Universal-Selbstladepistole ("Universal Self-loading Pistol")[34] ZF = Zielfernrohr ("Telescopic Sight")[35] See also List of Heckler & Koch products List of modern armament manufacturers References ^ a b c d e f g h i www.heckler-koch.de ^ HKPro - How do you correctly pronounce "Koch?" ^ "UnOfficial SAS Website" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-08-28. ^ "Unofficial US Navy Seals Website" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-08-28. ^ "US Special Forces Unofficial website". Retrieved on 2008-08-28. ^ "The Gun Source - H&K" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-08-30. ^ "Deviant Art H&K page" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-09-03. ^ "British Army Website information page on the SA80 A2 rifle" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-08-28. ^ "Modern Firearms" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-08-30. ^ Cox, Matthew (March 1, 2007). "Better than M4, but you can't have one". Army Times. http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/02/atCarbine070219/. Retrieved on 15 March 2007.  ^ Lowe, Christian (April 30, 2007). "Senator Tells Army to Reconsider M4". Military.com. http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,133962,00.html. Retrieved on 16 June 2007.  ^ "M4 to face new rifles in dust-chamber test". ^ "Defence Technology Website" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-08-30. ^ Bentzrød, Sveinung Berg (April 13, 2007). "Arvtageren til AG-3". Aftenposten.no. http://www.Aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article1733557.ece. Retrieved on 16 June 2007.  ^ "findarticles.com" (HTML). Retrieved on 2008-08-30. ^ "H&K Australia website" (HTML). ^ Abel, Peter, Manufacturing Trends: Globalising the Source in Lumpe, Lora (ed.) (2000), Running Guns: The Global Black Market in Small Arms, London: Zed Books. ^ A Catalogue of Failures: G8 Arms Exports and Human Rights Violations (2003-05-19), Amnesty International. ^ Out of Control – The loopholes in UK controls on the arms trade (1998-12), Oxfam GB. ^ Wright, Steve (2001-01), A Legal Trade In Death, Le Monde Diplomatique. ^ Undermining Global Security: the European Union’s arms exports (2004-02-01), Amnesty International. ^ A Catalogue of Failures: G8 Arms Exports and Human Rights Violations (2003-05-19), Amnesty International. ^ Thomas, Mark (2006), As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela, London: Ebury Press ^ HKPro - definition of 'A' designation ^ Translation : gewehr ^ Translation : karabiner ^ a b Translation : maschinengewehr ^ Translation : werfer ^ Translation : maschinenpistole ^ Translation : präzisions-schützen-gewehr ^ Translation : schalldämpfer ^ Translation : schützen-Gewehr ^ Translation : universal-maschinenpistole ^ Translation : universal-selbstladepistole ^ Translation : Zielfernrohr External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Heckler & Koch Heckler & Koch, official homepage (international). Heckler & Koch USA, official homepage (U.S.). 2008 Heckler & Koch Military and LE brochure HK Pro, comprehensive fan page. Remtek, Heckler & Koch page of general firearms information site. Heckler & Koch Webshop, official webshop (international). Companies portal Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch" Categories: Heckler & Koch Defence companies of Germany Firearms manufacturers in Germany Companies established in 1949

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