The Gun

American soldier would never take a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle in his hands. Oh how they lied! In Vietnam, the American soldiers threw away their capricious M-16s and took a Soviet AK-47 assault rifle from a killed Vietnamese, counting on captured ammunition. It all did happen, because the conditions in Vietnam were not as clean as conditions in the States where the M-16 works normally. Why am I talking about the past? You see it every day on TV. In Iraq, they openly show Americans with my machine guns, my assault rifles.”

15. The theoretical range gains were offset to a degree by the short distance between the front and rear sights of the AK-74. This reduced accuracy with iron sights is a simple matter of geometry, and one of the trade- offs associated with having a shorter barrel.

16. Hogg and Weeks, Military Small Arms, p. 271.

17. Similar processes were at work elsewhere. In the 1960s, the Israeli military carried the Fabrique Nationale FAL automatic rifle. The FAL was a European competitor against the M-14 during tests in the United States in the 1950s. Like the M-14, it fired the standard NATO cartridge. The Israeli soldiers found it unsatisfactory, due to its heavy weight, its powerful recoil, and its performance shortcomings in the dusty conditions of war in the Middle East. After the Six Day War, the Israelis set out to find a better weapon. They were intrigued by the Kalashnikov’s performance in the hands of their Arab enemies, and in the ensuing contest between arms two designers for Israeli Military Industries, Yisrael Galili and Yaacov Lior, submitted an assault rifle that knocked off elements of the AK-47 but chambered for the same American round fired by the M-16—the .223. The result—the Galil—was a fine example of convergence: the Soviet rifle design made to the American cartridge. It was fielded in the early 1970s. The rifle did not enjoy especially high popularity with Israeli soldiers, who at about the same time as the Galil became available were also issued American M-16s, which by then were largely debugged and were considerably lighter than the Galil.

18. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 431.

19. Author’s visit to Kurya, 2004.

20. Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed, (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. 28–29.

21. New York Times Magazine, September 24, 1967.

22. Ian Johnston, “Death of a Despot, Buffoon and Killer,” Scotsman, August 17, 2003.

23. Mustafa Mirzeler and Crawford Young, “Pastoral Politics in the Northeast Periphery in Uganda: AK-47 as Change Agent,” Journal of Modern African Studies 38, 2000, pp. 416–19.

24. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 17.

25. From “Programma Doprizyvnoi Podgotovki Yunoshei,” published by the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union.

26. “Protocol of Pre-Draft Youth Competitions of Pripyat School No. 1.” The handwritten ledger of student performance was found by the author in June 2005 in the gymnasium of the school. Translated by Nikolay Khalip.

27. Small Arms Weapons Systems, Part One: Main Text, published in May 1966 by the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command, Experimentation Command, Fort Ord, Table 4-1.

28. Similarly, a contest between two Russian soldiers at Mikhail Kalashnikov’s eighty-fifth birthday celebrations in Izhevsk in 2004 was won by a soldier who disassembled and reassembled his Kalashnikov in twenty-six seconds. Author’s observation.

29. Many sources describe the system that armed Afghan insurgents against the Soviet Union. This was condensed from Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, Afghanistan—The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower (Havertown, Pa.: Casemate, 1992).

30. Ibid., p. 109.

31. Lawrence J. Whelan, “Weapons of the FMLN—Part Three: Database Overview,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 3, Nos. 1 and 2, February 1992. Published by the Institute for Research on Small Arms in International Security, pp. 1–9.

32. Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, transl. Samuel B. Griffith II (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 83.

33. Lawrence J. Whelan, “Weapons of the FMLN—Part Two: The Logistics of an Insurgency,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 2, No. 3, May 1991. Published by the Institute for Research on Small Arms in International Security, p. 3. Also “Weapons of the FMLN,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1990, p. 3.

34. “Weapons of the FMLN,” Small Arms World Report, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1990, p. 3.

35. David Schiller, “Security Problems After Germany’s Reunification,” in News from the Institute for Research on Small Arms in International Security, Vol. 2, No. 2, February 1991, pp. 3–4.

36. Center for Peace and Disarmament Education/Saferworld, “Turning the Page: Small Arms and Light Weapons in Albania,” December 2005, p. 6.

37. Personal communication to author from an international arms dealer in Ukraine.

38. There are many accounts of Minin’s deals with Liberia. The facts here are condensed from the work of two international arms-transfer researchers, Brian Wood and Sergio Finardi, in Chapter 1 of Developing a Mechanism to Prevent Illict Brokering in Small Arms and Light Weapons—Scope and Implications, published by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2007, pp. 4–6.

39. Interview with Patrick Okwera.

40. Heike Behrend, Alice Lakwena & the Holy Sprits: War in Northern Uganda 1986– 97 (Oxford: James Currey Ltd., 1999), p. 47.

41. Ibid., pp. 59–60.

42. From “L.R.A. Religious Beliefs,” an unpublished twelve-page manuscript prepared primarily by Captain Ray Apire, a former LRA commander and spiritual leader who defected from the LRA, and Major Jackson Achama, a former LRA administrator and “technician.” Edited by Lieutenant Colonel R. W. Skow, a former defense and army attache at the U.S. embassy in Kampala.

43. Ibid. Interview with Captain Apire.

44. Author’s interviews with more than a dozen former LRA members and officers.

45. Interview with Lieutenant Colonel F. A. Alero.

46. Interview with Richard Opiyo, a child soldier in the LRA for six years.

47. Interview with Ray Apire, former LRA officer.

48. Interview with Dennis Okwonga, a child soldier in the LRA for slightly less than two and a half years.

49. Nearly two dozen students’ or instructors’ notebooks from several camps were collected in Afghanistan by the author and by David Rhode, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, in late 2001. See further, C. J. Chivers and David Rhode, “The Jihad Files: Al Qaeda’s Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing” and “The Jihad Files: Afghan Camps Turn Out Holy War Guerrillas and Terrorists,” New York Times, March 17–18, 2002. For a detailed description of one of the notebooks, a 190-page handwritten record made by a student in a camp run by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, see “A Dutiful Recruit’s Notebook: Lesson by Lesson Toward Jihad,” by the same authors, New York Times, March 18, 2002.

50. Kofi Annan, A. “Small Arms, Big Problems,” International Herald Tribune, July 10, 2001.

51. Author’s observation at gun show.

52. Mirzeler and Young, “Pastoral Politics,” p. 419.

53. Michael Bhatia and Mark Sedra, Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict. Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in Post-war Society (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 42. The historical trends in Kalashnikov prices are from this work, published in Chapter 2.

54. Author’s observations and interviews in Iraq in 2003.

55. Author’s interviews with Chechen insurgents in the Caucasus, 2005.

56. Author’s interview in Norway in 2008 with Sharpuddi Israilov, a Chechen who had a vehicle impounded in this way before fleeing Chechnya.