U.S. buying Russian rifles for new Iraqi police, army

Associated Press ^ | 08-08-03

[Brian S]

The American occupation authority in Iraq will equip the country's new army and police forces with Russian-design AK-47 assault rifles, officials said Friday.

Bidding closed Friday for a contract to buy 34,000 of the rifles.

The purchased weapons will supplement thousands of AK-47s seized in raids and other operations since the war started in Iraq in March.

[Prodigal Son]

Member's of Lynch's convoy also experienced malfunctions on the M2 .50 Caliber Machine gun and the 7.62 Machine gun.

[Redleg Duke]

It takes really serious neglect to get an M-2 to malfunction!

[Dead Corpse]

I thought the army was going around destroying all those caches they found during the fighting? Now they are buying more of the same?

Insert military intelligence oxymoron here...

[Riley]

Makes sense to me. They already have lots of AKs, they probably have a lot of ammo and magazines for them, they know them, and they're good in that environment.

[kellynla]

More than thirty years have passed and the American G.I.'s are having the same problems with the "16" we had in Nam...and the sonofabitch use to jam at the most inopportune times! Give me an M-14 any day over the "16"... Semper Fi

[KriegerGeist]

They ought to give them that gold-plated stash of Ak-47's they seized from either Uday or Qusay's house...

[thoughtomator]

They are buying POLISH made AK-47s, not Russian made ones.

[Wolverine]

You should add: "..most likely do to poor training..."

[KriegerGeist]

IMHO, it seems to me that, unless these maintainance outfit used their weapons daily...all day long...like the combat troops, that that fine powder dust there (that was getting into everything, everywhere) would get dirty and gritty pretty quickly. And these people were running big, heavy equipment and there is probably a "priority-factor" here: what is the priority of maintainance? That soldier running that heavy-duty tow-truck said in the interview:

James Riley: "When we moved out that night, there was four, five, six lanes of traffic, headlights as far as you could see behind you and taillights as far as you could see in front of you. Trucks, tanks, you name it."

Speed was a big part of the battle plan. A big problem early on was the soft sands of the Iraqi desert.

Stone Phillips: "You had been on the move about 50 hours when a portion of the 507th, your portion, fell behind. What was happening?"

Joseph Hudson: "Vehicles were getting stuck. Everything gets bogged down. Soft sand, heavy trucks, it doesn't match.

Keeping other vehicles up and running was part of the 507th's job. At the wheel of the unit's biggest wrecker, Joe Hudson had his hands full."

Stone Phillips: "So you pull the trucks out when they get stuck."

Joseph Hudson: "Dang right. Eighteen recovery missions in one night."

Stone Phillips: "Eighteen in one night?"

Joseph Hudson: "One night. Everywhere you'd go there was a truck that was stuck."

Not much time to clean dust out of machine guns.

[taxcontrol]

Naw - improper headspace and timing will cause it to not operate. It was the #1 thing that troops had to be trained on. So, rather than neglect I suppect poorly trained troops.

[itzmygun]

The US should swallow some pride and buy some for our soldiers also. The AKs are machined to be "loose" - dirt and sand works its way in and works its way out. I have an AK and it is the only semi-auto rifle I have that has NEVER jammed - not once. And I've probably shot 4,000-5,000 rounds through it and cleaned it maybe three times!

[cinFLA]

More than thirty years have passed and the American G.I.'s are having the same problems with the "16" we had in Nam...and the sonofabitch use to jam at the most inopportune times! Give me an M-14 any day over the "16"... Semper Fi

Exactly how many firefights can you count (othter than this one) where the GI's complained about the "16" jamming??????

[kellynla]

My personal?

[RusIvan]

They are buying POLISH made AK-47s, not Russian made ones.==

Guess it is because Russia doen't manifacture AK-47. It is obsolete model.
Russia produces AK74M and AK-100 series now including AK-101 model for 5.56x41.
http://izhmash.udm.ru/arms/mili.html

[thoughtomator]

It's payback for the Polish contributions to the war. Thus the importance of the distinction of where the guns are manufactured, which is completely omitted in this article.

[Redleg Duke]

You are right, but that I never considered as "bad maintenance", just operator neglect.

[AMNZ]

Let's see we're seizing weapons all over Iraq. And now we're buying new ones to hand out to the Iraqis. Wouldn't it make more sense to take them away from the ones we don't want to have them, and givem to the ones we want to have them.

[org.whodat]

Let's see we're seizing weapons all over Iraq. And now we're buying new ones to hand out to the Iraqis. Wouldn't it make more sense to take them away from the ones we don't want to have them, and givem to the ones we want to have them.

Don't you just love the military, How many time do you see them running over ak's with tanks and burning them. When it's the poor old tax payer who care's.