Battlefield Ingenuity

Afghan Gun Locker: Battlefield Ingenuity, and a Weapon’s Longevity

By C.J. CHIVERS

Drew Schumann

This year, after Western journalists poured into Libya as the civilian population took up arms and lunged into war, a line of coverage on makeshift arms production and distribution found its way into many newspapers, magazines and Web sites. The New York Times was part of this, with coverage on the anti-Qaddafi forces’ hasty acquisition, production and fielding of all manner of repurposed arms and the vehicles to carry them. Often these weapons were poorly used. Sometimes they were fired just as indiscriminately as the weapons fired by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s troops that NATO, in its United Nations-approved bid to protect civilians, claimed to marshal international will to stop. Some of these weapons were also instrumental in the anti-Qaddafi militias’ eventual success, as was visible in Misurata. (For a fuller view of many of these themes, read this report on the hidden plant in Misurata, or these explainers on the dangerous repurposing of 57-mm air-to-ground rockets or 122-millimeter Grad rockets or, in this case, the knuckleheaded firing of plainly labeled inert rockets toward Qaddafi forces in Libya’s mountainous west.)
As the anti-Qaddafi forces celebrate Thursday the killing of Colonel Qaddafi, the Libyan war has as part of its legacy its status as a showcase of this sort of behavior. But Libyans were hardly the first to cobble together their tools of war.
Any number of guerrillas or terrorist organizations in any number of wars have relied on makeshift arms, or clumsily repaired arms or repurposed arms, to bring a fight to a materially superior adversary. Think of the grinding, day-in-and-day-out campaign of improvised explosives against Western and government troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. These campaigns draw lethal tools from similar sources and similar garage- or workshop-level labor, much of it resourceful, determined and, in a technical sense, talented. Or think of the Palestinian rockets long fired at Israel. Or consider again Afghanistan, where improvised arms have been used by all sides.
The Afghans (and their Pashtun brothers in Pakistan’s western frontier territory) could well serve as Exhibit A for arms-sustaining ingenuity in the past several decades. By mixing foreign handouts and government support with local scrounging, repairs and add-ons, Afghan and Pakistani gunmen of almost all loyalties and stripes have taken to the field with an extraordinarily varied array of ground-to-ground arms.
We’re at work now on a post that will examine the tactics and some of the equipment behind the 107-millimeter rockets that crews fire on American-Afghan outposts in Paktika Province.
As part of that work, I’ve been corresponding with Drew Schumann, a former United States Army intelligence officer now working as a researcher for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, who has been helping me to examine photographs of a pair of 107-millimeter tubes. And as we have been corresponding, Mr. Schumann sent me a set of images he made of a government-owned machine gun that someone had found a way to keep working well after most any other government would have either had it overhauled or retired.
Look closely at the weapon at the top of this post. It’s a familiar sight: a PKM machine gun, one of the staples of the Afghan war (and, for that matter, most any war; this week alone I have seen images of PK variants from Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen, and that’s in just a routine skim). The PK series was first fielded by the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and like many Eastern bloc arms, it quickly spread to Soviet satellites, allies and proxies, and became one of the more commonly seen weapons of modern war. In this particular case, the PKM in the photograph was in Afghan government service guarding the walls at the main prison in Herat. It’s an easy identification to make. But do you notice anything unusual?
Zoom in for a closer look.

Drew Schumann

It’s not just that the weapon has been held together with post-factory welds, and then repainted. Look more closely. Or, better yet, refer to this other image.

Drew Schumann

As Mr. Schumann wrote in a recent e-mail, “Someone, somewhere is wondering where in hell their bicycle went.”
Gunspotters everywhere will recognize that as a fine observation, and a good one-liner, too. (Was that refurbished stock really cut from a bike frame? Could be.) And it certainly all plays right into one of this blog’s consistent themes.
Once infantry arms are loose in the field, they can last and last and last. Think of it. Who would have predicted back in the mid- to late-Soviet period, when these machine guns were designed and assembled, that they would a soak up scrap and then adorn guard towers at prisons run by an American-supported government in Afghanistan?
Among those who follow weapons and wars, a sight like this is often grounds for a riff, because such sights are loaded with so much history, and so many themes. Where exactly did this PKM come from? Probably no one can say, at least not in any step-by-step way. Just as no one can say how long the Afghan security forces will survive once the United States draws down its forces, and what the latest Afghan war will leave behind. Elements of the Soviet Union’s Afghan proxies made it roughly five years, though they didn’t fully evaporate — they provided clay for militias, including some of the current American-backed formations. Maybe the latest effort at a national army, police force and intelligence service will outlast us all. Let’s leave that argument for the future. It’s one of the contentious lines of thought that we’ll all probably be talking about in the years ahead.
But whatever your take on the prospects of Afghan security force survivability over the next decade, no matter who you think will pay for it all, what it will cost and how much chance the project has of success, this weapon carries a reminder made of steel. It is this: Whatever becomes of the now sprawling Afghan forces the American taxpayers have underwritten and equipped, many of the hundreds of thousands of weapons the United States has provided them will stick around, and assume all sorts of new uses and unexpected shapes. We’d like to say: Bicycle owners, beware, and leave it there. History suggests that the weapons’ effects will go well beyond that. An army’s tools often long outlast an army’s creators, and can become instruments for forces those who handed out the weapons did not foresee.