[Uncle Jaque]

RE:

"It's 'Dragunov'."

Thanks for the correction there, Mate;

My English spelling is sufficiently atrocious; Russian is a complete non-starter! {8^{D~

Thanks also for your insight from "up front".

Saw an article in Shotgun News recently that was an interview with a Russian Veteran of the Afghani Wars - discussed weapons, tactics, terrain etc..; very interesting.

His team was issued a couple of Dragunovs and special "Match" ammo for them, which they apparently used to good effect.

I would think that at least some of these rifles would have fallen into Hadji hands somewhere along the way.

This chap mentioned how they dreaded the .303 british Enfields, as they could frequently hit a guy a couple of hundred yards off with one, and it would defeat any of their body armor that would usually stop a 7.62 X 39. He said that if their patrol found so much as a single .303 shell casing in a village, the whole village was "doomed".

Not long ago there was a report on TV about how a US convoy returned fire on a bunch of rags holed up in apartment buildings, and that the locals (as well as the TV reporter, it seems) were whining that they had fired "indiscriminately".

This charge was of course denied by the Commander involved, who retorted that the US fire was "carefully aimed".

All the while they're showing the sides of these white stucco apartments just spattered with impact pockmarks from baseboard to ridgepole and everything in between... the lawn was all dug up and half the roof was blown off.

And I'm thinking; "Helluvva GROUP there, guys! Suppose we can tighten it up a little next time?"

Not to be critical; I think they would have been well within their rights to MOAB the whole stinkin' rat-hole.
It just didn't look terribly "professional" from a marksmanship standpoint, y'see.

[Criminal Number 18F]

I would think that at least some of these rifles would have fallen into Hadji hands somewhere along the way.

I'm sure they did... remember the Russians equipped an entire Afghan Army, which was captured more or less intact (or changed sides, sometimes several times).

[enfield] would defeat any of their body armor that would usually stop a 7.62 X 39.

Doesn't surprise me. In the war museum in Karshi, Uzbekistan, there is an "Afghan room" with pictures of Uzbeks who were heroes in the Soviet war there... and there's one young lieutenants diary, and his body armour, with the hole in it, and the bullet that penetrated it and killed him. It was a .30 calibre boat-tailed spitzer-point -- can't tell from the other side of the display what fired it, but it looked too long to be 7.62 x 39. But that is what they all have now -- AKMs.

He said that if their patrol found so much as a single .303 shell casing in a village, the whole village was "doomed".

Doesn't surprize me. I heard a lot of stories of Russian cruelty and extreme reaction.

Neither does your tale of lame-ass marksmanship surprize me, unfortunately. The US Army could definitely tighten up its marksmanship. My commanders would lynch me for saying this, but the Marines "get it" on rifle shooting -- which, my remarks above notwithstanding, is still a critically important basic soldier skill -- and the Army does not "get it" -- at least not as well as the USMC.

A lot of these guys getting in firefights in Baghdad and Samarra are engineers, MPs, artillery. The infantry guys are not that bad, but in modern war, everybody has to be ready to fight (which the Marines, again, have said for 100 years, it seems like). The ACOG is probably the most important tool we can use, that and better training, to get them to shoot better.

The importance of the scope is not magnification but that it puts the aim point and the target in the same focal plane. That's one of the things that complicates shooting with iron sights and it ought to be taken out of the picture, now that we have the technology to do so.

Finally, be careful drawing parallels to Russia and US in Afghanistan. Some parallels stand up but some don't. Our Army is a very different organisation than theirs, with very different people. Our Army in Vietnam (when we had a draft) was closer to what the Soviet Union fielded in Afghanistan, but even there, there are different cultural ways of looking at things.

The Afghans were always surprized (usally pleasantly) that we were not like the Soviet Army.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F