AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (2 page)

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Authors: Larry Kahaner

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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Yet as the Apaches settled into position, something unexpected happened. The lights on the outskirts of Baghdad shut off, as if hit by a blackout. Then, just as mysteriously, they came back on two minutes later.
 
The U.S. Army pilots did not realize the lights were a signal to attack.
 
What happened next shocked even the most seasoned combat veterans. The Apache helicopters were attacked from all directions by the world’s most prolific and effective combat weapon, a device so cheap and simple that it can be bought in many countries for less than the cost of a live chicken. This weapon, depicted on the flag and currency of several countries, waved defiantly by guerrillas and rebels around the world, has changed the geopolitical landscape of the post-cold war era. It has been responsible for more than a quarter million deaths every year. It is the undisputed firearm of choice for at least fifty legitimate standing armies, along with untold numbers of disenfranchised fighting forces ranging from international insurgents and terrorists to domestic drug dealers and street gangs.
 
It is the AK-47 assault rifle.
 
As the Apaches hovered in position, they took thousands of rounds of gunfire from Iraqi ground troops. Thirty-one of the thirty-two helicopters sustained damage; all had to abort their mission. One was downed and two pilots captured. Pentagon officials do not know if the chopper was shot down or suffered mechanical problems. A pilot who made it back safely said, “It was coming from all directions. I got shot front, back, left, and right.” Springfield, Massachusetts, pilot Bob Duffney, who flew combat helicopters in the 1991 Gulf War, added, “In Desert Storm, we didn’t have a firefight like this.”
 
For all of the billions of dollars spent by the United States military on space-age weapons and technology, the AK still remains the most devastating weapon on the planet. Its banana-shaped magazine gives this gun a familiar silhouette that makes it a symbol of third world rebellion and power. Unlike the scourge of land mines in the world, the eighty to one hundred million AKs manufactured and distributed since the rifle’s invention in 1947 pose a more dangerous threat because they can be easily transported, repaired, and used by roving bands of assailants. The AK has made possible coups in Africa, terrorist raids in the Middle East, and bank robberies in Los Angeles. It has become a cultural icon, its signature shape defining in our consciousness what a deadly rifle is supposed to look like.
 
Why has the AK earned such a legendary reputation? The gun has few moving parts so it hardly ever jams. It is resistant to heat, cold, rain, and sand. It doesn’t always shoot straight, but in close combat its awesome firepower (600 rounds a minute) and reliability give it a nod over more sophisticated weapon designs, such as the M-16. American GIs in Vietnam reported that AKs buried in rice paddies for six months or more, unearthed filthy and rusted shut, fired perfectly after kicking the action bolt with the heel of a boot.
 
In scenarios played throughout the world’s hot spots like Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and the Gaza Strip, low-tech AKs are besting superior military training and weaponry. In Iraq, for example, insurgents recently have inflicted demoralizing casualties on U.S. troops mainly with simple tactics such as bombings, kidnapping, and massive small-arms fire with AKs. American troops are hamstrung, forced to fight street to street where the AK allows an everyday citizen to be just as deadly as a professionally trained, well-armored, and physically fit U.S. soldier. Because explosions kill enough people to make newspaper headlines, most Americans think that’s how Iraqis and U.S. troops are killing and dying. In fact, small arms still kill more people in Iraq than the touted improvised explosive device.
 
Why the U.S. military as a whole has been so slow to recognize this “new” face of war remains a mystery, because individual soldiers, those on the ground, understand it. “It’s somewhat frustrating,” Colonel Bill Wolf, former commander of the army’s 11th Aviation Regiment, said. Referring to long-standing U.S. policies about civilian casualties, he added, “We can’t take out a street block because of the way we go to war.”
 
This “way we go to war” doesn’t work anymore, and some would argue it never did once the Russian assault rifle spread throughout the world and became as ubiquitous as the common cold. Today’s wars are small, hot conflicts in urban areas, where sophisticated and expensive weapons are no match for AK-carrying rebels who need little training and know the local terrain better. This sentiment was expressed by Major General William J. Livsey Jr., the commandant of Fort Benning, the infantry headquarters and school, in the early 1980s. The military was going through a monumental change at the time because computer chips were being integrated into the first generation of smart weapons. The army was enamored of the complexity and promise of these smart weapons. “Despite all the sophisticated weapons we or the Soviets come up with, you still have to get that one lone infantryman, with his rifle, off his piece of land. It’s the damn hardest thing in the world to do.”
 
The AK has shifted the balance of power in warfare by allowing small factions, not armies, to overthrow entire governments. Charles Taylor, a Liberian-born, U.S.-educated preacher, proved this in 1989 when he and a ragtag cadre of a hundred men armed with AKs, stormed the presidential palace in Liberia and controlled the country for the next six years. By issuing AKs to anyone who swore allegiance to the new regime, Taylor stayed in power with bands of thug soldiers, all of whom were allowed to pillage their defeated enemies as payment for their loyalty.
 
On the other side of the continent, Mozambique’s flag and coins display an AK as homage to the weapon that brought this nation its freedom. Ironically, the United Nations estimates that the country is awash in millions of undocumented AKs left behind from civil war. As long as the AKs remain, the seeds of instability stay rooted in Mozambique’s land.
 
War has changed; it no longer
has
to be about border disagreements, ideology, or political differences. Through the power of AK assault rifles, factions can roam through a country, terrorize its citizenry, and grab the spoils.
 
They can even keep a superpower at bay.
 
Consider the U.S. Rangers in Mogadishu during the now famous “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993 (later made into a Hollywood film by the same name). Eighteen American soldiers were killed and many more wounded during several days of bitter street fighting that eventually led to the resignation of the secretary of defense and a total U.S. troop withdrawal from Somalia. Yusuf Hassan of the BBC’s Somali service, who covered the action, said during one of his broadcasts, “It [the film] was sort of portraying the Americans as heroes, when in fact they had
all
the technology. It was a high-tech war against people who only had AK-47 rifles.” (To be fair, they also had rocket-propelled grenades and a variety of machine guns.)
 
Despite this thrashing in Somalia, the message never seems to reach decision makers: superpowers with superweapons are no match for a determined warrior with an assault rifle. Afghani general Mohammad Yahya Nawroz and U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Lester W. Grau wrote for the Foreign Military Studies Office a case study entitled “The Soviet War in Afghanistan: History and Harbinger of Future War?” in which they posited that well-equipped nations do not want to wage war with the United States, because U.S. weapons are technically superior. Oddly, less capable nations have a stronger position. “At present, the countries that have a large supply of high-tech weaponry are few and unlikely to go to war with the United States in the near future. Now, the only effective way for a technologically less-advanced country to fight a technologically-advanced country is through guerrilla war. Guerrilla war, a test of national will and the ability to endure, negates many of the advantages of technology.” Written in 1996, their report apparently fell on deaf ears, as the United States has now become bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
In a stroke of irony, the world’s most advanced and destructive weapon, the atomic bomb, led the way for the low-tech AK. Because of the A-bomb’s guarantee of mass global destruction, the two cold war superpowers declined to wage direct war. Instead, they invented the “proxy war” that employed third-world countries with poorly trained combatants to carry the superpowers’ ideologies. These countries used fighters who possessed little or no training but were armed with cheap, durable, and easy-to-obtain AKs. Hot little wars started quicker and lasted longer, fueled by these indestructible weapons that anyone—trained or untrained—could fire immediately and become as deadly as a highly trained soldier. When a specific war ended, the AKs were gathered up and sold by arms brokers to fighters in the next hot spot. This scenario has occurred over and over, especially in Africa and the Middle East. Just as the A-bomb changed the face of modern warfare, so did the AK.
 
On a cultural level, the AK is a symbol of anti-Western ideology, seen daily on the front pages of our newspapers. AKs built by the Soviet Union were offered to countries that shared the dream of worldwide Communist domination. Although they were supposed to be sold, the Soviet Union ended up giving millions away free to Soviet bloc nations and allowing others to manufacture the gun on their own soil. Nowadays, in destabilized areas, owning an AK is a sign of manhood, a rite of passage. Child soldiers in Congo, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and dozens of other countries proudly display their AKs for all to see. Stock video footage of a white-robed Osama bin Laden shows him firing an AK, a message to the world that he is the true antiestablishment fighter. Saddam Hussein was captured with two AKs beside him in his hidey-hole in the ground. He too was so enamored with the weapons that he built a Baghdad mosque sporting minarets in the unique shape of AK barrels. His son Uday commissioned gold-plated AKs.
 
And what of its designer? During World War II, young tank soldier Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov, the son of peasants, was convalescing from a gunshot wound inflicted by Nazis pushing east. In his hospital bed, he sketched the simplest automatic weapon possible and later was given the opportunity to build it. His goal was to help the Soviet army defeat the Germans and quickly end the war.
 
Now eighty-five, tiny, feeble, nearly deaf, losing control of his right hand because of tremors, Kalashnikov thinks about the terrible gift he has given the world and it often haunts him. “I wish I had invented a lawnmower.” At other times, this financially poor man, who receives no royalties for his invention, is defiant and aloof, blaming others for his progeny’s misuse. “I invented it for protection of the motherland. I have no regrets and bear no responsibility for how politicians have used it.”
 
The utilitarian AK-47, which stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947, the year it was adopted, came along too late to end World War II, but its creation was perfectly timed to spread death and destruction throughout the world, and it will continue to do so well into this century.
 
1
 
PROTECTING THE MOTHERLAND
 
IN BOOKS ABOUT THE SECOND WORLD WAR, the battle of
 
Bryansk is a minor conflict, barely deserving of a footnote. But this battle, so inconsequential that most historians skim over it without a second thought, has another place in history. It was here that a then unknown tank commander named Mikhail Kalashnikov decided that his Russian comrades would never again be defeated by a foreign army. In the years following the Great Patriotic War, as Soviet propagandists dubbed it, he was to conceive and fabricate a weapon so simple and yet so revolutionary, it would change the way wars were fought and won.
 
When the German army invaded the Soviet Union, it employed a new and frightening style of warfare. Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” was a fast and open doctrine of assault that relied on pounding the enemy with massive air bombardments and long-range artillery attacks. Concentrated legions of tanks and infantrymen followed. They fired at almost point-blank range, leaving the enemy stunned, terrified, and unable to respond.
 
Blitzkrieg’s success hinged on concentrating forces at a single point in an enemy’s defensive line, breaking a hole in that line, then thrusting deep into enemy territory, catching the opposition off guard and subjecting them to wave after wave of well-organized and brutally efficient invaders. It would all happen so quickly and on such a massive scale that armies were decisively beaten almost before they knew what hit them. The effects were psychologically devastating.
 
The Nazi regime employed blitzkrieg brilliantly in its swift and fierce defeat of Poland in September 1939. The tactic served Germany the following year when it invaded the so-called Low Countries—the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg—each victory allowing the Germans to build momentum and confidence. Soon after, Germany invaded France. In one instance, small and determined groups of Panzer tanks broke through French lines and reached the coast before a counterattack could even be launched.
 
In many ways, blitzkrieg was a logical reaction to the way war had previously been waged. During most of World War I, armies hunkered down in trenches, sometimes for months at time. Nations spread defensive lines thinly along national borders and around crucial cities. Troops armed with stationary machine guns in bunkers could repel enemy advances. Snipers poked their heads above trench tops in the hopes of picking off an opposing soldier barely visible in the distance. It was largely static warfare.

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