The Frankengun of Wardak Province

[n2doc]

By C. J. CHIVERS


A mystery firearm recovered in Afghanistan’s Maidan Wardak Province.
Almost no matter the place or the year, whenever analysts and arms researchers scrutinize infantry weapons circulating through a conflict, they encounter predictable finds. Time and again, the same items turn up: AK assault rifles, PK machine guns, RPG-7 shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons, and, depending on the region, a smattering of M-16 variants, Fabrique Nationale and Heckler & Koch weapons, and bolt-action or lever-action rifles from yesteryear. There are oddities, including homemade jobs. Often there are also stray vestigial arms from previous wars in the same region or from particular arms transfers to a government on the same soil. But most of these are outliers. Usually a researcher can write up a list of likely candidates, then check them off while working the beat.

And then there are the surprises, like the weapon in the photograph above.

What are you looking at?

This weapon, formerly in local Afghan hands, is held by Task Force Bobcat, an infantry unit in the First Armored Division at Combat Outpost Sayed Abad in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province. A previous unit confiscated it some time ago, and it has been passed to successive American military tenants rotating through. It caught the eye of the task force’s assistant intelligence officer, First Lt. Corey Young, who e-mailed photographs of it to us this summer with a note indicating that this weapon is chambered for 7.62×39-millimeter cartridges – the standard ammunition of the Kalashnikov assault-rifle line. Lieutenant Young wanted to know what it is.

He knew one thing for sure: It’s not a Kalashnikov.

So what is it?

answer at link

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-locker-the-frankengun-of-wardak-province/

[GreenStormCloud]

1. It appears to be an AK variant.

In a war zone odd weapons do turn up from time to time. When I was in Vietnam, one day I was over at Technical Intelligence when some guy brought in a WWI Lewis machinegun. It had the horizonal drum magazine and a device to convert it from drum to belt feed. I saw another guy with a captured German sub-machine gun.

[DonP]

2. Amazing what turns up in the field

In RVN we routinely collected British Enfields, Mosin Nagants and even an occasional Sten Gun, but wow, a Lewis Gun!

My son (Afghanistan and Iraq) said they found British Enfield No. 2s and No. 4's in routine sweeps in the mountainous areas. But Afghanistan has had a reputation for "Do It Yourself" gun making for over a century, when they'd make copies of Martini-Henry rifles. Now they have skilled guys living in huts re-chambering WWI and WWII rifles for the available 7.62 x 39 with crude hand tools.

Patching together parts like this would be no problem for them.

[spin]

3. Which shows that firearms can be manufactured by local gunsmiths ....

with access to a machine shop.

From the article in the OP:

Firearms are like any other product of the industrial age. With the right machines, the right work force and the right raw materials, they can be manufactured locally. These days, most people imagine military small arms as the output of specialized factories and modern bureaucracies. That is certainly true – in most cases. But before the cold war divided the planet into a pair of militarized blocs, East and West, with small arms organized around standardized cartridges and standardized firearms to fire them, arms production often rested on the work of local gunsmiths and local gun works. Pick your nation of yesteryear, and this was often how it kitted out soldiers for war. The tradition has endured here and there, though its output is less recognized and less often remarked upon than the output of the sprawling gun works and the bureaucracies that support them, right down to the brochures. (There are many curious examples of the coexistence of these two very different manufacturing processes. Even East Germany, under Communist rule and Soviet occupation, allowed some of its formerly private gunsmiths to make components for standard arms made in the centralized factory in Wiesa.)
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/taliban-gun-locker-the-frankengun-of-wardak-province/

This is something that those who wish to ban all firearms need to consider.

[ileus]

4. Time to ban CNC equipment and people

that can count to 2, who may try and assemble a firearm.