M16 versus AK: an assessment from Jane’s
Infantry Weapons
http://www.janes.com/defence/land_fo...1126_1_n.shtml
By Terry Gander, Editor, Jane’s Infantry Weapons
With the first few hundred of what may become a force of around
2,000 US Marines having flown in to an airport near Kandahar – now
the last key Taliban stronghold following the fall of Kunduz over the
weekend – it seems as though the closing phase of the Afghan
ground campaign may be at hand. As these ground operations
develop, they will inevitably once again emphasise many age-old
factors regarding infantry combat.
As always, the infantry will have to carry their own personal and
immediate fire support weapons with them and, once on the ground,
the old lessons of firepower will be re-emphasised. The Taliban,
Al-Qaeda forces and their veteran foreign allies will never have
forgotten how the mujahideen and their predecessors were able to
safely hold out in the mountains where invading armies could reach
them only with difficulty and at the cost of many casualties. Their
Coalition opponents will have at their disposal all the many
advantages that modern technology and communications can
bestow, but those advantages will have to be purchased by
establishing considerable supply facilities for everything from
batteries to helicopter fuel. By contrast, the Taliban and their allies
have repeatedly demonstrated how they can live off the land and
under the harshest conditions, seemingly with few demands other
than ammunition. The campaign will no doubt be long, arduous and
unpleasant, as campaigns in Afghanistan have always been.
Where clashes do occur between the US Marines and their
Taliban/Al-Qaeda adversaries, they will once again mainly involve the
design products of Eugene Stoner and Mikhail Kalashnikov. Despite
their relatively short effective combat ranges of a maximum 400m or
so, the M16 and AK-47/AKM will produce the bulk of the infantry's
firepower as efficiently as they always have done. Yet in the
mountains and the sparse open terrain that covers much of
Afghanistan, extended effective ranges are almost certain to be
demonstrated as more important than sheer volume of fire. Practical
selected marksman rifles will no doubt come to dominate
proceedings and anti-matériel rifles will come into their own. Rifle
calibre machine guns such as the Russian 7.62mm PK series will be
invaluable, especially when compared to their 5.56 and 5.45mm
calibre equivalents under local conditions. By the time the next
Jane's Infantry Weapons Foreword is published the veracity of
these forecasts can be reassessed, but in the meantime the
realisation that a full-blown war is in progress creates all the
uncertainties (and inevitable surprises) that wars always produce.
In truth, the current War against Terrorism has already been in
progress for a very long time, although societies have tended not to
appreciate the unwelcome fact. The ability of relatively small groups
or individuals with some form of political or religious message to
impose by force has been around for almost as long as organised
societies have been established. It is due to all the many
advantages of modern communications and weapon power that their
chosen activities have recently become much more dangerous to the
way we live. It will be a long struggle and a costly one, but now that
Terrorism has declared open war on organised societies that do not
agree with their opinions, the War against Terrorism has to become
an accepted fact of life. It is also a fact of life that much of the actual
combat to come will involve infantry weapons – not the complex
weapon systems upon which so many financial and development
resources were lavished to allow the old Cold War to be conducted.
The contents of this Yearbook are thus worthy of study, for it is with
these weapons that the War against Terrorism will be fought.
608 of 1968 words derived from the Foreword to Jane’s Infantry
Weapons 2002-2003