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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday April 28 2015, @09:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the mystery-cleared-up dept.

Many M-16s, the conventional wisdom goes, entered Syria after militants seized thousands of them from Iraq’s struggling security forces, which in turn had received the guns — along with armored vehicles, howitzers and warehouses’ worth of other equipment — from the Pentagon before American troops left the country in 2011. The militants’ abrupt possession of former American matériel was part of the battlefield turnabout last summer that led Julian E. Barnes, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, to tweet a proposed name for the Pentagon’s anti-militant bombing campaign: Operation Hey That’s My Humvee. And yet by this year, for all the attention the captured weapons had received, M-16s were seemingly uncommon in Syria. The expected large quantities had eluded researchers.

The investigator urged his host, a local security official, to rush after the Kurd and ask if he would allow the rifle to be photographed and its origins ascertained. Soon the investigator (who works for Conflict Armament Research, a private arms-tracking organization in Britain, and who asked that his name be withheld for safety reasons) found a surprise within his surprise. The rifle, which its current owner said had been captured from the Islamic State last year, was not an M-16. It was a Chinese CQ, an M-16 knockoff that resembles its predecessor but has a starkly different arms-trafficking history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/magazine/where-the-islamic-state-gets-its-weapons.html

 
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  • (Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:55AM

    by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:55AM (#176434) Journal

    (reply made here to keep the thread intact)

    My post about humans being smart and making precision parts in caves was made to highlight the fact that after a point it doesn't much matter how specific war materiel is de-militarized. Since the same part(s) are destroyed within a weapons system to prevent assembling complete weapons systems out of the intact parts on others, if there is enough materiel around to bother with, fabricating replacement parts from scratch quickly becomes feasible. Ten thousand M-16s de-milled by broken firing pins (and/or cut barrels) becomes ten thousand potential M-16s for the low cost of setting up production of only one (or two) parts.

    De-milling is fine if your threat timetable is short term, the threat does not possess basic maching capability, and/or the potential victims have comparable equipment to rely upon for defense. None of those situations apply in general in regards to the Islamic State.