unleashed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022, has sparked interest in a type of weapon that most countries had already virtually forgotten about. It’s about the machine guns, Some were even used in World War II.as the manufacturer FN Browning has assured the media .
Henry de Harenne, head of communications at FN Browning and a member of its executive committee, said global demand and production for machine guns is expected to double this year than in 2022, when the Russian war began. “Most countries simply weren’t interested 10 years ago. Now, we have contracts“he assured.
The company, wholly owned by the Belgian government, does not sell directly to Ukraine, but its customers include allies of kyiv. The United States, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium are some of them. Geopolitical tensions with Russia have driven new political will for defense spending in Europe, which plans to devote some $930 billion to rearmament its armies by 2030.
But interest in machine guns, “both old and new”, has increased dramaticallysaid De Harenne, who gave as an example a recent shipment by the French army of old M2s abandoned by American forces in World War II. “We bring them here, we improve them and we give them a guarantee as if they were new,” he said. And he added that so far they have modernized 2,000 of these weapons for France.
Although it has been repeatedly updated and improved, the M2 has been around for more than 100 years. This is a common infantry weapon that shoots mounted on a tripod, as clarified by the same medium. In this way, from a fixed position, it can subject enemy troops and light vehicles to intense .50 caliber fire—which amounts to about 600 shots per minute. On the battlefield, Ukrainian soldiers have experimented with ground robots carrying this type of machine gun.
