perfidy

My close personal friend "Geek Lethal," who was actually IN the army [update: during]* Gulf War I: First Blood, responds to yesterday's posts (here and here) about Kalashnikovs and M-16s.

In an earlier phase of life I found myself taking a short (40 hours) course on OPFOR ("Opposing Force"... an entirely unneccessary euphemism for "Russian", since we all knew who we were talking about) small arms.

I trained on the whole Kalishnakov product line: AK47, AKM, AK74, your S (ie folding stock) variant; crummy Egyptian AKMs that nearly fell apart when disassembled; VERY nice East German AK74S', as well as other stuff: your Makarov and Tokarev pistols; your SVD sniper rifle (awesome weapon); RPK machine gun; PK machine gun; the uber-macho DSHKM crew-served machine gun, and various and sundry other lethal Rooskie tchochkes. At the end of the week, range day was a hoot.

Yes, it is true: AKs can take a remarkable beating and still function. Which is great. Yes they are simple to operate and understand.... I taught a 6 year old girl, assisted by my rudimentary German, how to diassamble, reassemble, load, sight, and unload an AKM, with a level of proficiency that she could do it all herself, in under 10 minutes.

But simply functioning is not enough. They aren't alot of use beyond about 250m, which is not great if you're doing alot of fighting in the open, and they aren't terrifically accurate within those 250m. But yes, I can see how their ubiquity and ease of maintenance (ie, none at all) make them preferable to the Colt product they sort of compete with. Now, if you want to accurately shoot at bad guys past 300m, instead of spraying randomly and hoping for a good hit, I'd go with a '16. But that's me. Shit if I had a choice give everybody the good ol' M14. Or revamp the current infantry weapon to a more robust round. Sure a 5.56 will kill you just as dead as a 7.62 round will, but combining M16 accuracy with that beefier round might be a swell thing. Consider the Bundeswehr's G3, for example, as a modern example. Mmmm, maybe not...WAY too many pins and thingies to keep track of and/or lose.

OK rambling now...moving on....

I would also ask the larger question of why dismounted tank crews are running foot patrols in urban back alleys, as in this recent CSM article. Of course they pick up AKs, because there aren't enough M4/16 in the unit TO&E for every crew; they get 9mm pistols as an afterthought because THEY ARE TANK CREWS AND SHOULD BE FIGHTING FROM TANKS! Leave foot patrols to the infantry and MPs.

* n.b. Original post had Mr. Lethal in the sand, shooting at Iraqis. This is untrue. Mr. Lethal's Gulf-War duty was restricted to cavorting with buxom German lasses and dodging half-ton mountain warthogs during the long cold European winter.