“AK Guy” Brandon just dropped the fourth installment of his “Weird Guns Being Used in Ukraine Right Now” on YouTube, showing some of the funky, modified, and just plain ancient weapons be used in active combat there. The first installment is age limited and non-embeddable, but the other three are below.
Highlights:
Both sides are using he original Maxim belt-fed machine guns, a World War I mainstay “patented in 1883. Timeline-wise this weapon was designed closer to the beginning of the American revolution in 1776 than it was to the current Ukrainian conflict.”
PKM machine guns taken off armored vehicles and converted for individual use. Which is more difficult than it sounds, since the firing mechanism is triggered by an electric solenoid. “They had to rig up an entirely new firing system to rig up to these things, and quickly, and frankly I’m impressed. Ghetto gunsmith to ghetto gunsmith, crisp internet high five.”
Chechen soldiers (assuming there are any of them still around) are better equipped than Russian soldiers.
“You’re seeing all sorts of modern munitions, anti-armor stuff, aircraft drones. But then in the exact same confrontation, you’re also having guys that are carrying around weapons that are so old that their great grandfathers could have easily carried in the Great War to end all wars. And while the reality of war is obviously very tragic, the significance of some of the stuff being used in the field is extremely interesting.”
Highlights:
“Modified mortar RPG rounds…in guerrilla warfare, it’s always useful to have a couple of rednecks around.”
That ridiculous “six antipersonnel grenades attached to an RPG” thing.
“Some poor Ivan got handed a squirrel killer (a Chinese QB-57 single shot air rifle) and was thrown into the middle of 21st century combat with drones and tanks and was told good luck, have fun. It’s no wonder a lot of young Russian men are leaving the country rather than being conscripted…nothing says the government cares about your well-being quite like being tossed into fucking combat with a Red Ryder from A Christmas Story.”
Russia is also using World War II era DPM or DP-28 Degtyarev machine guns. “It’s basically like a PKM, if a PKM wasn’t belt fed and was instead fed by a pizza dish. It’s the closest thing to a full dinner plate most Soviets ever got to see.”
Other World War II era machine guns seeing combat: MP40s, Sturmgewehr (STG) 44s and MG 42s.
“There’s a lot of Russians now rolling around with
[American Thompson] .45 ACP submachine gun, AKA of course the Tommy Gun.” A legacy of Lend-Lease.
Plus: Anti-tank rifles! Including a PTRS-51 chamber in 14.5mm. “I guarantee you that shit will buttfuck the engine of any vehicle ever, as well as probably penetrate some of the light armor on some of the lightly armored armored personnel carriers.”
A suppressed Barrett M107, which is every bit as monstrously long (and no doubt heavy) as you would suspect.
Ukraine is also using everyone’s favorite space-alien looking FPS gun, the FN FS-2000.
Lots of ghetto gunsmithing.
A really funky glider with an RPG-7 on top. It actually looks slightly funkier than the flying yeet of death. Which comes next in the video.
Russians using old-fashioned sporting break action shotguns against drones.
More Maxims, including in duel, triple, and quad mounts. “We’re starting to get in the territory of like those mech things from Matrix Revolutions. [Now] we have something that is basically just a ghetto-rigged Minigun.”
If you’re interested in vintage, weird and improvised weapons, all the videos are worth taking a look at.
Biggest point that I see coming out of Ukraine as it pertains to small arms? Total abrogation of the whole premise behind NGSW.
That, and the essentially primitive use of machineguns. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are rarely seen to be using tripods and T&E mechanisms, which should be a total no-brainer when coupled with friggin’ drones.
There ought to be a 60mm mortar, a 7.62mm MG, and a direct-fire system like the Carl Gustav with two UAV birds airborne at all times looking for targets. You have that, and there’s really no damn way they’re getting infantry to close on your positions. I don’t understand why they’re not integrating the UAV with the MG element and using that instead of artillery when they don’t need to. Many of the Russian infantry elements I’ve seen them using drones on could better be addressed with MG fires, mortars, and direct-fire rounds from the Carl Gustav; no need to call for artillery at all.
What’s the craziest thing to see is just the apathetic way the Russians huddle in their trenches fatalistically waiting for the UAV to drop grenades on them. They don’t even try to surrender; they just lay there and wait. Which I think is the most frightening thing about all of that. Were I doing that, I think I’d have to compartmentalize the killing so rigidly that I wouldn’t be able to look at Russians as human any more, not when seen in uniform through the sights and the cameras of the UAV. This has got to be having a tremendous effect on Ukrainian attitudes towards the Russians; I suspect that we’re observing a historical cusp moment, where Ukraine will never, ever be able to look at Russia or Russians dispassionately or with even the slightest charity.
One thing I think a lot of people who haven’t actually done these things fail to understand is how the really major thing that causes problems for soldiers isn’t necessarily dying themselves; it’s the killing. You can forgive someone trying to kill you and failing; what you cannot forgive is them making you kill them, especially something like what is going on in Ukraine. The Ukrainian national identity is being forged in fire and hatred, right before us. The Russians are not going to come out of that with any chance for rapprochement, ever. This is going to solidify Ukrainian attitudes to the point where I suspect that the Finns are going to be looking at what they might do in the future and be saying “Uh… Man… That’s a little excessive, don’t you think…?”
Re the lack of com integration with the MG’s: arty guys always are always plugged into coms, it’s s.o.p. MG guys are more “free float” types, looking for cover, and already have too much stuff to hump around.
As to the russian grunts just staying there and taking it, in the words of Stalin “It takes a brave man not to be a hero in the red army”. I don’t think they even realize they could quit.
What I’m getting at is that the situation needs to change.
A squad needs its own drone the same way it needs its own indirect fire, its own direct fire light artillery, and the machine gun. That’s as simple as I can put it. You have to know what is out there, and have advance warning that it’s coming. As well, you need to be able to observe, in real time, the effects of your fires.
Not to mention, relaying your information to higher.
I think you are going to see squads get bigger, by sheer necessity. Probably at least the size of the old Marine 13-man squad; one team with a 7.62mm MG, one with a mortar, the third with the Carl Gustav or rocket launcher. The squad leader is going to need his own dedicated RTO and a UAV operator, with everyone able to talk to each other at the squad level. Fusion of observation equipment would help, because if the MG team is getting real-time observation downrange of what it is firing at, along with the effect? Things will be a lot more effective. Squad leaders are going to have to be doing things that today we only expect out of platoon leaders; platoon leaders are going to have to be doing the things company commanders did, and so on up the chain.
We’ve been here before. We just didn’t do it all that well. We need to do a better job, this time, and before we have our asses handed to us by some Third-world assless chaps types.
“ I don’t think they even realize they could quit.”
It’s not even quit – they don’t even _move_. It’s not like they are pinned in their trenches by mg fire and artillery while the engineer tanks bulldoze them under, just to name a hypothetical. They are in the trench, and sometimes they even look up, but there they stay, as the grenades get dropped on them.
There’s one recent vid where Ukraine sent a couple tanks in to deal with a position, and one of the tanks is basically maneuvering so it can fire right down the the trench line where all the Russians are hiding, and none of the Russians move, even to crawl along the trench line around the next bend – they just lie there.
The really weird thing is, there wasn’t even an attempt at surrender made by the guys in the trench. I don’t think we even saw that with the Iraqis; if they saw tanks coming up on them like that, they’d usually come out with their hands up.
And, I don’t think the Ukrainians are actively refusing to take prisoners, either. Which would be a possible explanation for the insanity of just sitting there waiting for the tank to fire on them.
The other weirdness is, where the hell are the commanders for these guys? They’re defending, yes? They’re dug in; that implies that the whole thing is a part of some organized defense, which means that there ought to be a commander somewhere out there who’s able to direct supporting fires and reinforcements, or order withdrawal. The whole idea that there are these little clots of Russian manpower out there operating on their own, with no backup, no plan, and no visible purpose? WTF is going on with this?
The Russian leadership should be charged with war crimes against their own soldiers. This whole war has seen Russian troops doing things straight out of the dark ages, in all aspects. What flippin’ point is there to those guys sitting there in that trench and waiting for the axe to fall in the form of a 125mm HE round fired directly at them, point-blank? You’re not even going to be able to identify the bodies, there…
compare Grierson’s raiders(civil war) to August 1914(Solzhenitsyn) and you see what Russian warfare is not good at.
Scouting the enemy has not been their strong suit since Peter was there.
OK, grains of salt, open source, fog of war, I wasn’t there, etc.: I have seen reporting that Russian “mobiks” are being issued phones with disabled comm capability which have loaded a mapping app that shows where they are now and where they are being ordered to go. I have also seen various reporting indicating Russian troops are being at least told there are anti-retreat units behind them that have orders to shoot anyone who retreats.
I guess in theory those phones could have some way to tell the “officer” in “command” that they took the trench, but now they were getting scrunched by a UA tank, so the wise and benevolent and well distant “officer” could (Hah!) tell them to fall back (Hah!) or more likely call in artillery on their current position.
And there has never been any such thing as the western concept of NCO in any Russian army ever. I’m sure somebody in that huddle was “in charge” but I am also certain that included little to no initiative allowed.
But I also don’t get why nobody waves a white hanky or something. All I saw was one guy throwing what looked like an antipersonnel grenade out into an empty area at nobody, and then lie back down in the huddle with the rest. As far as I know throwing a hand grenade is not an acknowledged recognizable request to surrender.
I wasn’t there, and all we have is the edited video, so there could be other stuff going on, but it certainly looked amazingly weird to my western eyes.
As a data point on Ukraine taking prisoners and keeping them healthy, there have been a very large number of reported prisoner exchanges which resulted in Ukraine Army folks being repatriated, even UA folks publicly condemned as actual Nazis and at least threatened with political show trials like the Azov Regiment troops captured in Mariupol, so Russian prisoners at minimum have a demonstrable fungible value as PW exchange tokens.
Perhaps that is why no one surrenders? Russians know they might get exchanged back to the Rodina and in that case fully expect one of their comrades will rat out anyone who suggested giving up?
What you have to watch out for when looking at anything Soviet or Russian is the opaque obscurity surrounding everything they do, which is reflexive. They even manage to fool themselves…
The Soviets made extensive use of recon troops in WWII; the Voennaa Razvedka were formed at every level, and both formally and informally within the units. I’ve spoken with Germans who fought on the Eastern Front, and they were quite clear about the risks of not countering the Soviet reconnaissance troops. The stories I heard from them, first person, were likely somewhat exaggerated, expanded in their memories, but… They were there.
The Soviets taught the Vietnamese, along with their sappers. This recon stuff has always been emphasized in idealized Soviet tactics and operational planning. How well they’ve executed? Varies widely.
It does exist.
@FM,
The Imperial Russian Army had a very strong NCO corps, with strong traditions. The thing was, those NCOs were key and essential participants in the early days of the Russian Revolution, and the Communists identified them as an inherent security risk. The problem was that they didn’t want men who had come up from below, at any level in any activity. You had to have certification and credentials to be able to go anywhere in Soviet society, which is why they’ve got so many issues with “from beneath” institutions like an NCO corps. Reflexively, the people running Russia, who are heirs to the former Communist Nomenklatura traditions, do not understand or trust anyone who isn’t reliably institutionalized. You have to grow an NCO and an NCO corps organically, from within… And, they don’t trust anyone who isn’t vetted by the “system”, which is bizarre. The implication is that they don’t actually trust the mass of their military structure, which baffles me. But, that’s why they don’t actually have a real NCO cadre; the mass of the troops aren’t worthy of trust.
The whole thing strikes me as really counter-intuitive, but there you are: The precise element in their forces that should be most invested and most trusted, in terms of having been brought up within those forces, simply isn’t trusted because they weren’t Communist Party cadre. And, promoted on merit, not connections. The decisions made by the Communists echo down the years, and here we are. I don’t think the Russians are going to rebuild an NCO cadre or the necessary traditions behind such a thing until they have to tear down their entire military structure and rebuild it from the ground up.
Which is not impossible, just unlikely. They would rather cede control of the barracks to the gangster elements than rebuild something that might not have the interests of the oligarchs as their first priority.
Because, in the end? The NCO cadre is loyal mostly to the unit; the men. The regime? Not so much, at all: That’s why you see so many coups and revolutions led by these men. The Communists did away with them because they didn’t want the risks they represented.
Interesting data point vis-a-vis Soviet/Russian military thought and history:
A long time ago, I identified what I’m pretty sure a lot of other people have missed, namely the continuity of Soviet attention to what we might term “rear area battle”. If you look at Soviet operations in the German rear on the Eastern Front, you can find a distinct continuous thread with that and what the North Koreans were doing to us in Korea (namely, trapping us on the roads and cutting up our supply lines…), Vietnam, and all the other so-called “colonial wars” in Africa.
If you look at what the Soviets were teaching the various parties in the Bush Wars of southern Africa, well… That all looks very much like what they were doing to the Germans on the Eastern Front. It’s a common thread through it all, that they try to deal with Western armies reliant on their elaborate supply lines by attacking those lines. Rear-area battle is an intrinsic part of their planning and doctrine, but… There are blind spots.
I was corresponding with a Russian military historian a few years back; I asked him about this, because you simply do not see anywhere in the literature of the West where these things were identified, let alone discussed.
Well, a couple of places, actually. But, not mainstream, by any means. But, what I found fascinating was that he pointed out to me that the Soviets had gotten caught by the same rear-area denial attack in Afghanistan, at the hands of their former students in the Arab block. The guys doing the main-line planning and operations were not read-in; they didn’t see it coming. The guys who taught and trained this stuff were all fringe GRU types that nobody paid attention to, so when they had this set of tactics and operational art applied against them, the poor bastards had no countermeasures really ready. They did about as well as we did, and even worse. The Soviets were doing the same sort of primitive-ass sh*t that the US was doing in Vietnam; route clearance consisted of putting a conscript with a mine-detector out in front of a truck driving down the road. No attempt at MRAP technology; no attempts at automated armored route clearance, the way the South Africans or Rhodesians did it.
Left hand quite literally didn’t know what the right hand was doing, and it bit them hard. Over the course of their efforts in Afghanistan, they never really came up with a good counter to these techniques. Yet, they were the ones who taught them around the world…
Biggest point that I see coming out of Ukraine as it pertains to small arms? Total abrogation of the whole premise behind NGSW.
That, and the essentially primitive use of machineguns. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are rarely seen to be using tripods and T&E mechanisms, which should be a total no-brainer when coupled with friggin’ drones.
There ought to be a 60mm mortar, a 7.62mm MG, and a direct-fire system like the Carl Gustav with two UAV birds airborne at all times looking for targets. You have that, and there’s really no damn way they’re getting infantry to close on your positions. I don’t understand why they’re not integrating the UAV with the MG element and using that instead of artillery when they don’t need to. Many of the Russian infantry elements I’ve seen them using drones on could better be addressed with MG fires, mortars, and direct-fire rounds from the Carl Gustav; no need to call for artillery at all.
What’s the craziest thing to see is just the apathetic way the Russians huddle in their trenches fatalistically waiting for the UAV to drop grenades on them. They don’t even try to surrender; they just lay there and wait. Which I think is the most frightening thing about all of that. Were I doing that, I think I’d have to compartmentalize the killing so rigidly that I wouldn’t be able to look at Russians as human any more, not when seen in uniform through the sights and the cameras of the UAV. This has got to be having a tremendous effect on Ukrainian attitudes towards the Russians; I suspect that we’re observing a historical cusp moment, where Ukraine will never, ever be able to look at Russia or Russians dispassionately or with even the slightest charity.
One thing I think a lot of people who haven’t actually done these things fail to understand is how the really major thing that causes problems for soldiers isn’t necessarily dying themselves; it’s the killing. You can forgive someone trying to kill you and failing; what you cannot forgive is them making you kill them, especially something like what is going on in Ukraine. The Ukrainian national identity is being forged in fire and hatred, right before us. The Russians are not going to come out of that with any chance for rapprochement, ever. This is going to solidify Ukrainian attitudes to the point where I suspect that the Finns are going to be looking at what they might do in the future and be saying “Uh… Man… That’s a little excessive, don’t you think…?”
Re the lack of com integration with the MG’s: arty guys always are always plugged into coms, it’s s.o.p. MG guys are more “free float” types, looking for cover, and already have too much stuff to hump around.
As to the russian grunts just staying there and taking it, in the words of Stalin “It takes a brave man not to be a hero in the red army”. I don’t think they even realize they could quit.
What I’m getting at is that the situation needs to change.
A squad needs its own drone the same way it needs its own indirect fire, its own direct fire light artillery, and the machine gun. That’s as simple as I can put it. You have to know what is out there, and have advance warning that it’s coming. As well, you need to be able to observe, in real time, the effects of your fires.
Not to mention, relaying your information to higher.
I think you are going to see squads get bigger, by sheer necessity. Probably at least the size of the old Marine 13-man squad; one team with a 7.62mm MG, one with a mortar, the third with the Carl Gustav or rocket launcher. The squad leader is going to need his own dedicated RTO and a UAV operator, with everyone able to talk to each other at the squad level. Fusion of observation equipment would help, because if the MG team is getting real-time observation downrange of what it is firing at, along with the effect? Things will be a lot more effective. Squad leaders are going to have to be doing things that today we only expect out of platoon leaders; platoon leaders are going to have to be doing the things company commanders did, and so on up the chain.
We’ve been here before. We just didn’t do it all that well. We need to do a better job, this time, and before we have our asses handed to us by some Third-world assless chaps types.
[…] REPEATS: Weird Guns Used in the Russo-Ukrainian War. “Both sides are using he original Maxim belt-fed machine guns, a World War I mainstay […]
“ I don’t think they even realize they could quit.”
It’s not even quit – they don’t even _move_. It’s not like they are pinned in their trenches by mg fire and artillery while the engineer tanks bulldoze them under, just to name a hypothetical. They are in the trench, and sometimes they even look up, but there they stay, as the grenades get dropped on them.
There’s one recent vid where Ukraine sent a couple tanks in to deal with a position, and one of the tanks is basically maneuvering so it can fire right down the the trench line where all the Russians are hiding, and none of the Russians move, even to crawl along the trench line around the next bend – they just lie there.
I think the single word that most aptly names this phenomena is vodka.
The really weird thing is, there wasn’t even an attempt at surrender made by the guys in the trench. I don’t think we even saw that with the Iraqis; if they saw tanks coming up on them like that, they’d usually come out with their hands up.
And, I don’t think the Ukrainians are actively refusing to take prisoners, either. Which would be a possible explanation for the insanity of just sitting there waiting for the tank to fire on them.
The other weirdness is, where the hell are the commanders for these guys? They’re defending, yes? They’re dug in; that implies that the whole thing is a part of some organized defense, which means that there ought to be a commander somewhere out there who’s able to direct supporting fires and reinforcements, or order withdrawal. The whole idea that there are these little clots of Russian manpower out there operating on their own, with no backup, no plan, and no visible purpose? WTF is going on with this?
The Russian leadership should be charged with war crimes against their own soldiers. This whole war has seen Russian troops doing things straight out of the dark ages, in all aspects. What flippin’ point is there to those guys sitting there in that trench and waiting for the axe to fall in the form of a 125mm HE round fired directly at them, point-blank? You’re not even going to be able to identify the bodies, there…
compare Grierson’s raiders(civil war) to August 1914(Solzhenitsyn) and you see what Russian warfare is not good at.
Scouting the enemy has not been their strong suit since Peter was there.
OK, grains of salt, open source, fog of war, I wasn’t there, etc.: I have seen reporting that Russian “mobiks” are being issued phones with disabled comm capability which have loaded a mapping app that shows where they are now and where they are being ordered to go. I have also seen various reporting indicating Russian troops are being at least told there are anti-retreat units behind them that have orders to shoot anyone who retreats.
I guess in theory those phones could have some way to tell the “officer” in “command” that they took the trench, but now they were getting scrunched by a UA tank, so the wise and benevolent and well distant “officer” could (Hah!) tell them to fall back (Hah!) or more likely call in artillery on their current position.
And there has never been any such thing as the western concept of NCO in any Russian army ever. I’m sure somebody in that huddle was “in charge” but I am also certain that included little to no initiative allowed.
But I also don’t get why nobody waves a white hanky or something. All I saw was one guy throwing what looked like an antipersonnel grenade out into an empty area at nobody, and then lie back down in the huddle with the rest. As far as I know throwing a hand grenade is not an acknowledged recognizable request to surrender.
I wasn’t there, and all we have is the edited video, so there could be other stuff going on, but it certainly looked amazingly weird to my western eyes.
As a data point on Ukraine taking prisoners and keeping them healthy, there have been a very large number of reported prisoner exchanges which resulted in Ukraine Army folks being repatriated, even UA folks publicly condemned as actual Nazis and at least threatened with political show trials like the Azov Regiment troops captured in Mariupol, so Russian prisoners at minimum have a demonstrable fungible value as PW exchange tokens.
Perhaps that is why no one surrenders? Russians know they might get exchanged back to the Rodina and in that case fully expect one of their comrades will rat out anyone who suggested giving up?
@Brian,
What you have to watch out for when looking at anything Soviet or Russian is the opaque obscurity surrounding everything they do, which is reflexive. They even manage to fool themselves…
The Soviets made extensive use of recon troops in WWII; the Voennaa Razvedka were formed at every level, and both formally and informally within the units. I’ve spoken with Germans who fought on the Eastern Front, and they were quite clear about the risks of not countering the Soviet reconnaissance troops. The stories I heard from them, first person, were likely somewhat exaggerated, expanded in their memories, but… They were there.
The Soviets taught the Vietnamese, along with their sappers. This recon stuff has always been emphasized in idealized Soviet tactics and operational planning. How well they’ve executed? Varies widely.
It does exist.
@FM,
The Imperial Russian Army had a very strong NCO corps, with strong traditions. The thing was, those NCOs were key and essential participants in the early days of the Russian Revolution, and the Communists identified them as an inherent security risk. The problem was that they didn’t want men who had come up from below, at any level in any activity. You had to have certification and credentials to be able to go anywhere in Soviet society, which is why they’ve got so many issues with “from beneath” institutions like an NCO corps. Reflexively, the people running Russia, who are heirs to the former Communist Nomenklatura traditions, do not understand or trust anyone who isn’t reliably institutionalized. You have to grow an NCO and an NCO corps organically, from within… And, they don’t trust anyone who isn’t vetted by the “system”, which is bizarre. The implication is that they don’t actually trust the mass of their military structure, which baffles me. But, that’s why they don’t actually have a real NCO cadre; the mass of the troops aren’t worthy of trust.
The whole thing strikes me as really counter-intuitive, but there you are: The precise element in their forces that should be most invested and most trusted, in terms of having been brought up within those forces, simply isn’t trusted because they weren’t Communist Party cadre. And, promoted on merit, not connections. The decisions made by the Communists echo down the years, and here we are. I don’t think the Russians are going to rebuild an NCO cadre or the necessary traditions behind such a thing until they have to tear down their entire military structure and rebuild it from the ground up.
Which is not impossible, just unlikely. They would rather cede control of the barracks to the gangster elements than rebuild something that might not have the interests of the oligarchs as their first priority.
Because, in the end? The NCO cadre is loyal mostly to the unit; the men. The regime? Not so much, at all: That’s why you see so many coups and revolutions led by these men. The Communists did away with them because they didn’t want the risks they represented.
Interesting data point vis-a-vis Soviet/Russian military thought and history:
A long time ago, I identified what I’m pretty sure a lot of other people have missed, namely the continuity of Soviet attention to what we might term “rear area battle”. If you look at Soviet operations in the German rear on the Eastern Front, you can find a distinct continuous thread with that and what the North Koreans were doing to us in Korea (namely, trapping us on the roads and cutting up our supply lines…), Vietnam, and all the other so-called “colonial wars” in Africa.
If you look at what the Soviets were teaching the various parties in the Bush Wars of southern Africa, well… That all looks very much like what they were doing to the Germans on the Eastern Front. It’s a common thread through it all, that they try to deal with Western armies reliant on their elaborate supply lines by attacking those lines. Rear-area battle is an intrinsic part of their planning and doctrine, but… There are blind spots.
I was corresponding with a Russian military historian a few years back; I asked him about this, because you simply do not see anywhere in the literature of the West where these things were identified, let alone discussed.
Well, a couple of places, actually. But, not mainstream, by any means. But, what I found fascinating was that he pointed out to me that the Soviets had gotten caught by the same rear-area denial attack in Afghanistan, at the hands of their former students in the Arab block. The guys doing the main-line planning and operations were not read-in; they didn’t see it coming. The guys who taught and trained this stuff were all fringe GRU types that nobody paid attention to, so when they had this set of tactics and operational art applied against them, the poor bastards had no countermeasures really ready. They did about as well as we did, and even worse. The Soviets were doing the same sort of primitive-ass sh*t that the US was doing in Vietnam; route clearance consisted of putting a conscript with a mine-detector out in front of a truck driving down the road. No attempt at MRAP technology; no attempts at automated armored route clearance, the way the South Africans or Rhodesians did it.
Left hand quite literally didn’t know what the right hand was doing, and it bit them hard. Over the course of their efforts in Afghanistan, they never really came up with a good counter to these techniques. Yet, they were the ones who taught them around the world…