Lots of AK-47s – U.S. buying more

Is it just me, or is this insane?

Apparently we are purchasing brand-new AK-47 assault rifles to equip the new Iraqi army. Truth be told, the AK-47 is probably a better weapon for the Iraqis than the M16 that our guys use. There are several reasons for that:

1. They are much more robust in desert conditions, especially when they aren’t maintained properly as they surely won’t be
2. They are much cheaper to buy, maintain, and supply with ammuntion
3. The training required to operate an AK-47 is much less demanding
4. Everyone in the fucking country already has a couple

I just don’t understand the reasoning behind buying new weapons when we are confiscating hundreds every single day. There have been several instances where we uncovered huge stockpiles of unused weapons. There have been reports that we are warehousing them so they can be issued to the new army. So what’s up?

A spokesman for the Coalition Joint Task Force, which commands the military occupation in Iraq, was unaware of the request for bids and questioned it.

“That’s surprising,” said Army Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a task force spokesman in Baghdad. “It would seem to me odd that we’re out there looking to buy more weapons for a place where we’ve already captured and set aside so many of them. It would raise a red flag for me, that’s for sure.”

No kidding.

One of the given reasons is that the weapons confiscated in Iraq come from many different manufacturers, and that there are slight differences between them. I’ll buy that to an extent, but why not sort them out? It’s not like there’s a shortage of cheap labor in the region. The reason that the AK-47 has been in use by so many for so long is that it pretty much works all the time. I don’t recall hearing about the Viet Cong struggling to standardize model variants within their organization. I haven’t read about PLO difficulties with different suppliers.

CalPundit has some thoughts, and the comments section has more good stuff including

It’s a wonderful turn of events! We’re actually respecting Iraqi culture and recognizing that they have tradition in using AK-47s!

Too funny.

Thanks to The Command Post for referring me to Sean’s Blog. Niraj thinks this is the way to go.

And before anyone asks, nothing I’ve read anywhere indicates that Halliburton is involved. Some commenters think that Halliburton is going to charge to destroy the weapons, then turn around and sell the same weapons back. Although that may make a good joke, I’d like to see something bordering on actual evidence before anyone get up in arms. Supposedly the guns are going to be purchased from Poland, who was a supporter of the invasion, but I imagine that the money trail is a bit more twisted than that. It will be interesting to see where it leads when someone finally sniffs it out.

Update
This reminds me of Brian and his mother buying rocks for the stoning

Beard and stone seller: Stone, sir?

Mother: “No, they’ve got a lot there, lying around on the ground.”

Beard and stone seller: “Oh, not like these, sir. Look at this! Feel the quality of that, that’s craftmanship, sir.”

Mother: “Hmm…all right, we’ll have two with points and…a big flat one.”

Brian: “Could I have a flat one, mum?”

Mother: “Ssch!”

Brian: “Sorry! Dad!”

Mother: “Ehm…all right, two points, ahm…two flats and a packet of gravel.”

Beard and stone seller: “Packet of gravel. Should be a good one this afternoon.”

Why do I get the feeling that someone is running around in a fake beard buying things secretly? If life imitates Python, we’re all screwed.

Progress freighter arrives at space station

With the previous Progress vehicle loaded up with garbage and sent to burn up in earth’s atmosphere, the latest unmanned supply run to the International Space Station has arrived with food, CDs, and DVDs, along with a large amount of gear and equipment for the next ISS crew, which will launch in Ocotber.

Of special interest for Malenchenko and Lu is a satellite telephone and Global Positioning System equipment that the pair will return to Earth with in their Soyuz TMA-2 spacecraft.

That way, if they land on the wrong part of earth like the last Soyuz crew, they’ll be able to phone home.

According to Strategy Page

The New Zealand army is buying 105 LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles) from General Dynamics Land Systems. This wheeled armored vehicle is based on the Piranha III LAV long used by the U.S. Marines, and later adopted by the US Army as the Stryker. This vehicle was designed Mowag of Switzerland, a company now owned by General Dynamics. In some ways the New Zealand LAV is an improvement on the Stryker LAV, with many small, but important, improvements. All 105 of the New Zealand vehicles will have a turret with a 25mm automatic cannon and have room in the back for ten troops. Seven LAVs will be equipped for engineer work and three used as recovery vehicles. The 14 ton, 8×8 vehicle has a maximum road speed of 100 kilometers an hour.

New Zealand placed the order in January of 2001 to replace aging M113s. Predictably, the move has its critics. This story says that LAV stands for Lacks Army Value. An earlier story from the same source calls for canning just about anyone connected with the decision. In a Q&A with NZ Defence Minister Mark Burton, there is this:

Q: Why did vehicle trials not take place?

A: Vehicle trials would have been conducted if, after the due diligence process, they were considered necessary.
This was not the case for an “off the shelf” vehicle in service with another army.
Trials cost significant sums of money and are not necessarily any more effective than using the results of testing overseas.

While that seems to make a cerain amount of sense, I’m a little troubled by the fact that in New Zealand, just like in the US, there was resistance to in-depth testing and side-by-side trials against other potential vehicles.

I like the idea of the 25mm chain gun turret. None of the US configurations uses this weapon, and, especially with the delays in the 105mm gun-equipped Styker variant, it would maybe be nice to have a Stryker with a little more ‘punch.’ The LAV I that the US Marines currently use mounts the 25mm gun.

Also, although the Stategy Page story says the NZ LAVs have room in the back for ten troops, everything I’ve read indicates that seven troops will be able to ride along with the vehicle’s three-man crew. And the Strategy Page story says that the NZ LAVs weigh 14 tons. The only New Zealand source I’ve found says 17.9 tons. The General Dynamics Land Systems page says 19 tons, the same as the US Stryker.

As a last note, I noticed that nearly all the New Zealand pages referred to the LAV III as a Canadian vehicle rather than a US vehicle. Although the plant that actually produces the LAV is in Canada, GDLS is headquartered in Michigan. Maybe it’s more palatable to New Zealanders to buy from the Canadians.

UPDATE 26 Nov 2005: I see that this post is getting a lot of attention due to the recent accident in Afghanistan. For much more MO coverage, see Canadian LAV-3 rolls in Afghanistan

Iraq is for Iraqis

An Instapundit reader emailed Glenn Reynolds about some leaflets that US authorities are distributing offering rewards for turning in saboteurs.

Apparently, some Iraqis have added a sticker reading as follows (translated):

Iraq is for Iraqis

Arab national should leave Iraq

If they don’t they will bear the consequences

The Iraqi people won’t tolerate their remaining here.

Reynolds wonders is bombing mosques isn’t working out so well for anti-US groups. I think the same could be applied to electricity grid-bombing and relief convoy-bombing.

According to my referrer stats, the most popular search that brings readers to MO is “xm8″. Since I’ve only mentioned the XM8 once, I guess maybe a little more info is in order.

The XM8 (which will become M8 when it goes operational) is the planned replacement for the current assault weapons in the US military, the M16 and the M4.

For some time, the Army has been developing the Objective Individual Combat Weapon (OIWC). Designated the XM29, it was going to be a combination of a 5.56mm assault rifle and a 20mm “smart grenade” launcher. The grenade launcher fired air-bursting explosive rounds up to half a mile that could be used to attack enemy troops behind cover or around corners. Additionally, the sights on the XM29 were going to be high-tech video units with magnification, and thermal imager, laser range finder, electronic compass, and a ballistic computer used to program the grenades. Although it performed quite well in tests, developers were not able to get the weapon down to the weight requirements and there were concerns about its ruggedness. The XM29 program is currently on hold and in danger of being scrapped completely. (If they’d just watch Aliens they’d see just how valuable these might be.)

However, while the fate of the XM29 is being debated, two seperate but related programs, the XM8 assault rifle and the XM25 grenade launcher, are going ahead. In fact, the development of the XM8 has been accelerated and 200 samples for heavy testing are due this fall.

The Test and Evaluation Command will use two types of testing — developmental and operational — to ascertain the XM8s viability.

Developmental testing is similar to what Consumer Reports magazine would do, [project manager Lt. Col. Matthew] Clarke explained.

“We will super-cool the weapon. We will fire it to failure to see what breaks,” Clarke explained. “We’ll drop it, we’ll put chemicals on it to see how it reacts. That will provide the hard data to build a case for reliability, availability and maintainability, or not.”

At the same time, testers will bring soldiers into the loop for limited operational testing.

“We will get soldiers to use the weapons in harsh conditions and get their opinions,” Clarke continued.

The XM8 is based on the asault rifle half of the XM29 combo system. It will fire a standard NATO 5.56 round and is based on the very successful H-K G36 assault rifle.

The XM8 is a modular weapon, with three different barrel lengths available: a standard short barrel for normal use, a longer, heavier barrel for use as a light machinegun, and a very short barrel for use by commando-types and vehicle crews. Given recent reports out of Iraq, I think the tankers will be grateful. The standard barrel will give the weapon a size similar to the current M4 carbine, while shaving about 20% off the weight due to material advances developed by the OIWC program. This should be a welcome development to our troops, who are weighted down with all sorts of equipment and protective gear, and have been wanting a shorter weapon than the M16 for street fighting. In Baghdad, some US troops opted to use captured AK-47s.

There will also be a number of other options for the stock and attachments. This will allow units to equip on the fly for the environment that they expect to do battle in and (hopefully) have the right weapon for the job at hand. Also, the integrated sight will include a number of options currently available only by adding additional equipment to M4s and M16, saving weight, cost, and training requirements. There is discussion about eliminating the three-round burst mode currently used on the M16, as well. 3-round mode was added in the 1980s when it was discovered that most riflemen were not particularly effective when using full-auto. Recent analysis suggests that additional training in the use of full-auto will get the same results, and it will allow the governor that creates the 3-round burst to be left off the weapon, reducing cost, weight, and the number of things that can break.

There is a lot of debate over the 5.56mm round. Many troops question its stopping power, especially when fired from shorter barrels like the M4 or the proposed standard barrel of the XM8. While perhaps not as much of an issue in the narrow streets and alleys of Baghdad and Tikrit, it could become an major issue in a more open setting, like the hills and mountains of North Korea. In fact, a number of reports from Afghanistan indicate that special forces units using M4 carbines were unable to effectively engage forces at times due to the range and power limitations of the shorter barrels. Perhaps an option would be to include a fourth barrel length, longer than standard but not “machinegun weight”. Another option would be to just keep one or two men in each squad with M16s as “sharpshooters”. This would dilute the advantage of using a universal infantry weapon, however. Maybe some M8s could be modified to fire the 7.62mm round, as some M16s have been. This would increase the firepower of the weapon, but, again, it would negate the commonality that the XM8 hopes to bring to our ground forces. Here is a page that discusses in depth the concerns with the 5.56 round, shorter barrels, and the new assault rifles.

I’m concerned that a lot of work is going into a weapon that is only a slight improvement over our current systems. Instead of throwing out over 40 years of experience with the M16 for incremental improvements in an entirely new gun system, maybe we should work to make those improvements to our current guns. I’m certainly no expert, but it seems to me that we’re investing an awful lot of time and money into this and not getting a lot of bang for the buck. At the same time, I see good value in some of the ideas the XM8 brings to the table, and am quite interested to see how it performs in tests and with the troops.

On the other hand, the XM25 25mm grenade launcher, incorporating the “smart” features of the grenade launcher on the XM29, looks like it could be the revolutionary weapon that changes the battlefield for the foot soldier. Maybe we should accelerate that program instead.

We had it, and we threw it away.

One of the most frustrating things about the “reconstruction” of Iraq is the problems the Iraqi people are having getting basic services and utilities. I mean, it must be a little difficult to fully appreciate your new-found freedom when you don’t have electricity, running water, or telephone service.

Take the mobile phone network. The sensible solution would have been to pick the most able and cost-effective operator and let them get on with it. But instead, the decision was taken to go through a full competitive tendering process, which takes an inordinate amount of time. One day, however, people suddenly found their mobiles working; a network had decided, to immense acclaim, to ignore the process and, indeed, get on with it. They were swiftly shut down, encapsulating just why things have been moving so slowly in Iraq: beauraucracy ahead of common sense.

And what would happen if the State Department said, “This is an emergency situation. We have 24 hours to select the cell phone provider that can get up and running the quickest and most reliably.”? And what if they then picked a company that had some sort of connection to someone somewhere in the government? Especially a Republican or a member of the administration? Cries of “War profiteering!” and “Invading for Dollars!” and “Conflict of Interest!” would come from all corners. Including me, probably. So we’re stuck waiting.

I’ve argued that companies like Halliburton need to take extra care to not appear like they’re benefitting unfairly from the war, and that the Bush administration needs to do everything it can to make sure that there isn’t any perception of favortism toward current or former business partners. Maybe this cell phone situation has been caused by exactly those efforts. Just a thought.

Update
I’ve done a little more research on this and here’s what I’ve found.

A CNN/Money link entitled “Iraq Awaits Cell Phone Service” and dated 7/31 leads nowhere.

This story dated 7/28 was 404, but Google has a cache. A Grand Rapids, MI, company has set up three centers in Baghdad where people can make affordable telephone calls and send out uncensored e-mail. They planned to have 20 such centers up by the end of September.

Here’s a little story about the on-and-then-off service mentioned earlier. It includes a dead link to a Reuters story about opposition to US plans to issue permits.

Here’s an April story about how implementing Wi-Fi while rebuilding Iraq could speed the introduction of broadband to that country. Nice, but I’m not sure that it’s a priority. Still, maybe providing security for Wi-Fi access points would be easier than installing a guarding land lines.

Here’s an MSNBC article about the service working in Iraq.

Here’s a May story about WorldCom winning the contract to supply mobile phone service for military and aid workers in Iraq. It’s a seperate deal from the national service provider contract.

Here’s a map of cell phone coverage in Iraq. You have to look carefully. KurdTel is the only current provider. The page also has a story about how the US blocked French and German companies from bidding on the contract (which I think is just fine) by banning companies that are more than 5% owned by national governments.

Another interesting requirement is that any bidder must hold at least five cellular licenses. They could all be in the same country, and considering the fragmented license allocation in the USA, this ruling seems to favour the US based networks. Any other bidder would have to operate in at least five separate countries.

But will Iraqi cell phone service assist terrorists?

Affirmative action for dolls

Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping has a post about an inspection of the private preschool where his wife works.

Today she went shopping in preparation for an inspection coming up this week. It was for a doll. She told me that the state licensing agency requires that her school have three dolls of at least two different races.

Of course the school may have more than three dolls, but it may not violate the “two races per three dolls” ratio.

The school could be closed down if the ratio was not met. He asks if mandating affirmative action for dolls is a permissible power of government. I say ‘no,’ but that’s just me.

It occurs to me that if this teaches children anything, it’s probably that government quotas are an acceptable way to enforce racial harmony. It makes the kids take notice that the dolls are different because the color of their skin is different, and that the difference is significant enough that they had all better be careful that they pay special attention to skin colors.

That should help promote color-blindness and diversity.

Cars and trucks outnumber drivers

It’s too bad that John Galt isn’t around to invent a gadget that would simply power our 204 million vehicles (driven by 191 million drivers) by pulling stray power out of the air.

Since he isn’t, and since others have decided that gasoline is the best fuel for them, we are still dancing the “oil jig,” among other things.

I just cancelled my MSN account. I’ve been using MSN since 1999. I switched to them after three years of AOL. I’ve recently switched to SBCYahoo! DSL, and despite what I’ve read about poor service and slow hook-ups, I don’t have a single complaint. I get 1.5Mbs downstream and have never lost my connection. Good stuff.

I checked on the various MSN websites to find out what I needed to do to cancel my subscription. Nothing. A number of searches using the MSN search. Nothing. An extended foray into the MSN help system. Nothing.

So I googled. The second hit on “msn account” takes you right to an MSN support page. One of the “top solutions” at the top of the page is “How do I cancel my account?”

A phone call to an 800 number, a short wait on hold, and a pointless debate with support about why I need to call back to verify my cancellation later, and I’m done with it. Except that I need to call back to verify my cancellation. Silly.

A reader e-mailed me with this comment on my earlier post about Saudi’s challenge to our allegatoins that Saudi citizens (and others) are entering Iraq through Saudi Arabia to attack US forces.

Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to publicly call them out on where they stand? It doensn’t have to be agressive, just a “That’s funny, because we just picked up this guy from your country who says…” kind of thing. Or might the administration not be so into getting the whole truth out there?Are we still dancing the oil jig with them?

I agree COMPLETELY with the idea of calling them out. If we have proof, I think we should share it with the world. I’ve been saying all along that we are finally going to find out who our friends are, and this could be (a very big) part of that process. Of course, if we don’t have proof, we can’t do that. In that case, maybe we shouldn’t be making the not-so-subtle allegations.

A complicating factor, of course, is the “oil jig.” Of course we’re still dancing it with them, and of course we’re going to continue to do so. As long as we need that black gold, we will be dancing the dance.

This could also be the Saudis making public announcements like this to placate the terrorist sympathizers in their kingdom while they honestly work to address the situation.

No. I don’t think so either.