Rigged
Well don't this say it all . . .
Not to take a thing away from this Afghan soldier, but get a load of his taped together gun mount. A perfect metaphor for the shabby, pell mell nature of these conflicts.
Not to take a thing away from this Afghan soldier, but get a load of his taped together gun mount. A perfect metaphor for the shabby, pell mell nature of these conflicts.
Labels: pell mell wot, phony war on terror, PWOT, taped gun mount
posted by rangeragainstwar at 10:50 AM
7 Comments:
hell ranger, i've been known to improvise shooting sticks from bamboo.
one less thing to hump.
most stuff like mounts wouldn't last that long anyway. still, point taken, and it's valid.
the fundamental thing we are not understanding about afghanistan is the same thing that was misunderstood by everybody since cyrus the great, through alexander, through the mongols, rajahs, brits, turks, brits again, russians and now us is that the only thing an afghani hates more than the folks from the next over plateau, valley, ridge or village is everybody else in the whole damned world.
MB, yes we all improvise BUT this is the bipod that is supposed to be firmly affixed to the weapon. also note the linked ammo is in the dirt. both weapons pictured are old generation soviet.
A ruck sack makes a good firing platform. jim
i'd be interested in your take on SERE
as you can see i wasn't all that impressed with those cocksuckers.
MB,
Already done it. Good post.
I'm with Lisa on this: I'm fine with jacking 100-mph tape around everything moving. But the rounds trailing in the dirt? That's bullshit.
Plus, look at how this poor schmuck is "pulling security". Not down behind the weapon, no cover, nothing. Just squatting on his ragged ass in the dirt like some Korean peasant looking to Class I download some kimchi.
This has been griping me for a long time. Hell, it took a fake Prussian count a couple of winters to take a bunch of sad-sack farmers and counter-jumpers and turn out the goddam Continental Line. What the hell is wrong with our wogs that we can't turn a bunch of some the most savage fighters in Central Asia into something approaching the Guides or Skinner's Horse?
Could it be that the decent local bad boys don't want anything to do with our proxies?
Hmmmm...
FDChief,
It's the same old song and dance. The south VN didn't stand up when we stood down b/c as we used to quip, if you weren't red you were yellow (a reference to the national colors of RVN.)
You failed to mention the big SUV in the background that he is obviously guarding. They've got great new SUV's but the ammo's in the dirt and the weapons are taped.
Per your observation on why we can't develop operational armies: (1) We lack legitimacy, (2) the best fighters don't fight for money, and that's all we can offer them. Look at the corruption in the Karzai family, the people we support.
100 mph tape is fine (we used our share in the Airborne), but you can't hold an army together with it.
jim
And the reason he's got taped-together old Soviet-era shit is because the Busheviks paid a 22-year-old Israeli to provide weapons to the Afghan Army, and said Israeli then looted the Albanian armory of all its 40-year-old weapons and ammo to provide to the Afghan Army and did ... err... what? with the rest of the money?
But that's a metaphor for the whole Bushevik regime. Loot and pillage, pillage and loot, and the poor bastard at the pointy end of the stick gets stuck with the shit that falls down from the top level of the outhouse.
As for the professionalism of this soldier, the words "ARVN" definitely came to mind when I was looking at the picture. Same deal there too. The ARVN was rationing bullets at the same time that the big shots in Saigon were siphoning millions of dollars of looted funds into overseas banks in preparation for fleeing when the whole shit parade collapsed. So it goes. We study history only to repeat it, when we study history at all.
-Badtux the History Penguin
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