Posted on 06/30/2005 12:12:26 PM PDT by Ramonan
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif.(June 30, 2005) -- Even after discovering and processing mounds of enemy weapons caches during their recent deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom last fall, many Marines with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment had never pulled the trigger on an AK-47.
These Marines got the chance to gauge the effectiveness of the enemy's weapon of choice during a live-fire exercise with the AK-47 assault rifle here June 23.
"Learning a new weapons system is just like learning a new language. The more you practice it, the better off you will be in battle when your weapon system goes down or malfunctions, and you have to pick up an enemy's weapon and put it to use," said Cpl. Tim Egnoski, a squad leader with 3rd Bn., 1st Marines.
Before the Marines sent rounds downrange, they first learned the basics of the weapon by practicing loading and unloading it and learning how to activate the safety lever.
The AK-47 is quite different from the M-16A2 service rifle -- the weapon all Marines become intimately acquainted with from the day they enter the Marine Corps.
The weapon's full name is the Avtomat Kalashnikova, 1947. The automatic weapon was developed by the famed Kalashnikov gun works in 1947, at the dawn of the Cold War. The world knows it by its initials the AK-47.
Simple to use and deadly efficient, the AK-47 is one of the most influential guns of the 20th century.
"Almost all the enemy fighters I saw in Iraq were using the AK-47," said Lance Cpl. Daniel O'Brien, a machinegunner with the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. "We got to fire a few of them in Iraq, but we weren't able to actually spend some time to learn just how accurate it is compared to our weapons system. Having familiarity with different equipment makes Marines more useful on the battlefield. If you have to, you pick up another one and get back into the fight and that is what is important."
Wait, a GRUNT taking up for a Marine?
I'd just left the uniform, and some unit dropped two rounds not far from OP 8(?, gotta look at my map again since I'd scribbled on it) at Fort Drum.
I don't know which unit it was, but if I recall correctly, some people were hurt by that one.
The Ak's are perfect for Iraq. Unlike our rifles they don't jam as much in the sand. Loud. Very loud. I wouldn't suggest room clearing with a 47.
Thought y'all were jarheads...
Sure, as a group, jarheads, you bet! Grunts are infantrymen, though. They can take choppers or tracks or trucks to get to the fight, but the number one means of transport is a couple of legs. To be fair, the army does have a few of these dudes.
Heh, I got legs too, but mine are just for walking from one vehicle to the other, making sure they get where they're going. 88N In the US Army.
Never made Drum while I was in, and it doesn't bother me at all. This Southern boy did all the snow he wanted to do in Germany.
One of the coolest sights I ever saw was a nightime MLRS launch at Fort Hood. Talk about fireworks! The rockets arced toward the impact area not far from us. Fortunately, this time the impact area was off to the side from our position.
I love my WASR as well. Mine is the high cap version.. takes the standard 30 round mags and all. I have an AR but the AK is always fun to take to the range.
It was my first AK and I gotta say its accurate for what I had heard about AKs in general.
Been done for decades......US Army taught / teaches a multi service school called the foreign materials intelligence school at Aberdeen MD...... I attended many times . Just an outstanding class. Fisrt class training. Weapons of the world per se...Sino soviet, chicom , warsaw pact, NATO and 3rd world weird was taught with many a day on the live fire range.......
The key to the classes were that ya send some NCO's 'n Officers and they take the knowledge, captured weapons and lesson plans back to their units and spread the training and knowledge.
BTW the classes were not limited to just "weapons"...communications gear and vehicles to include light and heavy armor and light trucks etc ....
read this
Yes,Sir
The Air Force has the smartest enlisted personnel. We stayed at the base and sent our officers out to fight.
The Army used to have "Opfor detachments" that did this in the seventies and eighties. Somewhere I still have a yellowing military driver's license that qualifies me on the PT-76 amphibious tank. (I did that in passing by begging the NCOIC of the detachment at Ft Ord while I was at the Presidio of Monterey. I believe a bottle of whisky was involved).
They later closed the opfor detachments and instead did this at NTC. I became fascinated with Soviet and Chinese weapons and collected many of them during my early years in the Army. Of course, they were a large part of SF light weapons school at the time, and commanders usually knew who the guys were in the unit that could produce foreign weapons for a training exercise or recruiting display. Anyway, for whatever reason, I became a SME for Soviet weapons, among my other talents.
(Later, lots of Russian and Chinese weapons would be imported, making my painstakingly assembled collection from the days of scarcity lose much of its value).
The important thing to remember about the AK is that the tactical role it was designed to fill was not that of a rifle, really, except in being an individual weapon. In WWII when Mikhail Kalashnikov was designing the weapon (he started in 1943 when hospitalized with wounds), the Soviets had two pretty poor battle rifles, the Mosin-Nagant, which was an 1891 musket cut down to long rifle (91/08, 91/30) or carbine size (several variations), and the new and coming thing, the submachine gun. The most popular subgun was the PPSh-41 which borrowed some aspects of Finnish Suomi design and underwent industrial development for rapid assembly by unskilled labour with crude machinery. It worked, though... at rock-throwing range. It was a 100m and inside weapon -- beyond that it was suppressive fire only.
But.. that perfectly suited the Russians. They had lots of land and lots of men to draft, but not a lot of time to train them to be marksmen. So they didn't bother trying to send direct mail -- they just put a lot of "to occupant" lead into the air, and it worked for them.
They prized robustness, low cost, simplicity, reliability, and rapidity of controlled auto fire, and the AK is designed with this ethic affecting every design compromise and decision. The US took a battle rifle and grafted auto fire on to it, producing the neither-fish-nor-fowl M14; the Russians took a submachine gun concept and gave it a little marginal rifle capability. It suited their tactics better, and for longer ranges they had MGs and mortars after all.
The most interesting thing to me is that on every Western auto weapon, the first click is semi-auto, the second click is crowd control. German, Italian, American, Israeli (except the Galil which is an AK), English, French, it's universal. On the AK it's reversed. The first move of that man-sized safety/dust cover off of safe clicks into the auto notch (by the way, you can pinch the tab and lift it to do this silently. If you don't it makes a very distinctive noise -- as distinctive as the original M16 handguards contacting a stick or any other object). You then have to click another notch to get to semi-auto.
Russian soldiers did fire their weapons on semi-auto in basic training, but in unit training and exercises they are encouraged to fire on full-auto, from a pointing rather than aiming position, or from the hip, or even while running. They did a lot of live-fire obstacle courses, with nobody grading the fall of their shot, as long as it was in the range fan and not into their buddy.
In their world, infantry occupy territory, but it is dominated by artillery (bogy valky, God of War, in their language -- worked for them at Balaclava) and captured by tanks. It's a very different way of looking at things than the individualistic Western view, and it's fascinating to me how such national political characteristics play out in the design of military weapons.
It was Western militaries (Britain, Austria, now USA) that first gave common soldiers optical sights, a sensible idea that was held up nearly a century by pure dunderheaded military conservatism... the Russians are still sneering at it, for the moment. Culture influences weapons, and vice-versa. There's a doctoral thesis or three in that.
Back to AKs for a moment. In Afghanistan a couple years ago I saw many AK varieties I had only seen in museums or in books, including two examples of the very-first-stamped-version of 1947. With some forty million AKs produced last time I checked, there are probably 20,000 variants!
I wouldn't use it as a primary weapon, but I do like the AK, partly because it is stamped with one man's and one nation's character. My M4A1 works, but is a bit of a designed-by-committee kludge, and Eugene Stoner's soul is lost in it anymore. Personally, I still wish I could carry a Thompson, if I had a boy to tote it and a way to mount a PEQ-2 on it. But that's just me.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Heh, I have its brother. It was imported by Clayco in Kansas. I wonder how close our serial numbers are (it's in storage as my LTC expired while I was overseas, so I can't actually check).
I bought it at a gun show near Bragg. It has a folding stock, cheap plastic furniture, and came with three mags, a sling, a (non-wirecutter) bayonet, a tool kit, and some odds and ends, all neatly packed in a styro insert in a box.
I already had one of the 2,500 Steyr/Maadis brought in in the 1970s, and a couple of Valmets. The Valmets are the best quality AKs, period, but they're not Russian style.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
yup, claco, same/same. S/N 104xxx ordered from my dealer... full stock made of impgernated nylon no less!!!
still my favorite plinker
here's a good one, in 68 my brother brought home an SKS from Nam, S/N 8174xxx, in 1998 i bought a Brand NEW SKS made at the SAME FACTORY, ALL marking match with a S/N of 8192xxx...
over 8MILLION GUNS made and thirty years later and still only 18340 apart!!!
unreal...
Try the ballpeen hammer technique of typing it seems to work for a little while at least 8-)
A speed limit on rounds!? That's like owning a corvette in a corvette club and not being allowed to drive over 55 at the racetrack.
I was on active duty in the early 1980's and we were fam firing Soviet weaponry back then....this is nothing new in the Marine Corps.
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