"It has a dinstictive sound when fired"...Gunny Highway
They should have done this 40 years ago........
I'm envious.
I really like my WASR-10, it's plenty accurate within a hundred yeards. A lot simpler that my LE/AR-15.
If they want I can show 'em how to bump fire the semi-auto AKM. ;-)
And the closest anyone's come to a "disposable" firearm.
Sounds as if the M-16A2 may have some of the fouling problems that plagued prior variants.
Kalashnikov.
Is that not the perfect name for the bad guys' weapon of choice? It has such a violent ring to it.
If you were writing a movie and trying to come up with a name for the bad guys' weapon, you couldn't do much better than Kalashnikov.
Ah, yes, the AK! Years ago at Fort Hood they trotted out the Soviet stuff and I got to send several magazines downrange, both full-auto and semi-auto. Fell in love with it and always wanted one. Finally got a Romanian WASR-10. At least that's what I think they call it. To me it will always be an AK. My buddy, who is really into them, has a Russian AK. Both, unfortunately, are semi-auto only. When are we going to get the NFA repealed? I want to have an AK and put it on auto-get-it!
BTW, everybody, I know it's all in fun (at least I hope it is), but please don't get carried away on the inter-service sniping. All the military services are great, even though you know which one is dearest to this old soldier's heart.
http://matrix.dumpshock.com/raygun/firearms/assault/
Problem with the story accompanying the German assault rifle is that Adolf was satisfied with their bolt-action rifle. Believe they had to tell him the MP 43 was a submachinegun. The Russians were as impressed with the German rifle as the Germans were with the Russians 9 mm submachine gun.
Rather than turn it in to the authorities an Englishman tried to destroy his AK by hammering it in the ground then firing it with a length of string, over and over without success. He finally sawed it up.
Sad part is that we took the full auto option off the M-16 and put in a 3 round burst instead. Now, the enemy can lay down suppressive fire from all their troops, because they all have full auto. We have to wait for the guy with the SAW or M4.
It's sort of strange they would put it that way. The AK-47 was named after it's inventor, Sergeant Mikail Kalashnikov.
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