Seems to be a fairly accurate representation of how most troops feel about the weapons over there. We all hate the M-16/M-4. That thing is a royal POS in the desert. It rarely fires more than a few rounds without jamming and putting it on burst fire is a sure way to have you fetching your multitool to dig out jammed rounds in the chamber. It needs to be way too clean to operate effectively, something that is pretty hard to do in a dust environment. Even the Afghans know its a POS. I remember a time when we pointed it at some people to get them to move and they literally wagged their finger at us and said don't do that it's mean lol... The SAW is the same way. Needs to be kept way too clean to work properly and it's pretty annoying to be the guy stuck with carrying that thing around on patrol. 9mm is good, never had to use one and thankfully so. We always said that if you ever have to pull your 9mm out then something has gone horribly wrong. M240B is a great, didn't really bring it out on regular patrols it was mainly used to setting up machine gun nests. Sucks to be the guys lugging that thing around and it sucks to be the assistant gunner lugging all the ammo for it. But great weapon. 12ga was good too, always worked when we needed it to and it scares the crap out of the Afghans. The M203 grenade launcher was cool, just heavy and it sucked having to carry extra grenades along with all the rest of the stuff you had to carry around. But it worked well when we needed to use it. MK19 turret mounted grenade launcher was good in theory but it tended to hate the dust and jam often as well. We never used it, it was considered overkill. Crew served .50 cal was also great. Nothing gets your point across quite like a .50 cal machine gun. Pretty good article, seems to sum up everything nicely and gives the public an honest view of the way things are over there. Good read.
Trust me man him posting a letter should be the least of your concerns. You can go on youtube and find out pretty much anything you ever wanted to know about any of our hardware and tactics. You'd be surprised at how accurate Battlefield and Call of Duty actually are in some aspects... I remember many years ago my father took me to his job to hang out with the fighter pilots. They were cool enough to let me play in the F-16 simulator. I proceeded to start the thing up from cold start, go through all the checks, and taxi onto the runway. The Capt. looked at me and asked me how in the hell I knew how to start up the F-16 and actually do all of that? I played a video game called Falcon 4.0 for years on my computer. Even I was shocked that the way you operate the plane in the video game is exactly how it works in real life...I was just doing what I did in the game, I didn't know the real thing actually worked like that. So...yeah lol
The letter is a fake. In 2005 the same letter was about Iraq: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=6595
The letter itself may be fake but whoever wrote it knows a thing or two about whats going on over there. I didn't find anything that wasn't pretty accurate.
Not really. This letter was not even about Afghanistan, but Iraq. This is simply another one of those unsourced chain letters that has been circulating for years. And in reading it, it is full of crap. 11) The new body armor: Thumbs up. Relatively light at approx. 6 lbs. and can reliably be expected to soak up small shrapnel and even will stop an AK-47 round. Really? That is roughly the weight of the old PAGSAT armor, of the 1990's. At the time this was written, we had moved to the IBA, and was only barely capable of stopping an AK round, and was 25 pounds. The newer IOTV is much more capable of stopping AK rounds, but weighs in at over 30 pounds. IEDs in abandoned cars. More BS. IEDs come basically in 2 varieties by the time this was claimed to have been written. First, you have the roadside IEDs. Almost never placed in "Abandoned Cars", because these had already all been taken care of by 2005 (let alone 2013). By 2005 most were placed under the road or in the burm alongside the road. Most vehicle bombs are now driven up to the location and detonated in place bu not-so-smart-bombs, or abandoned moments before detonation. Whoever wrote that is basing their information on 2003 data, not any kind of current data. Hezbollah and Iran? Sorry, that once again was Iraq, not Afghanistan. Hezbollah has little to no connection to Afghanistan at all. Sloppy editing with little to no knowledge of the players in the theatre. Finally, read the moral very carefully, and it becomes obvious this is not written about Afghanistan at all, but Iraq. Sorry, this is badly written and inaccurate trash even in the original form. Just dismiss it, it is nothing.
Oh I didn't even read all of that, I just read the part about the weapons and stopped. Thats what I get for half assing an article lol Question about the armor though. How is the IOTV any better at stopping AK rounds than the IBA? They both use the same plates one is just bigger than the other. Thats why we used plate carriers and were allowed to use our own personally purchased aftermarket plate carriers as long as they could fit the plates in them. IOTV is better at stopping shrapnel because its larger and covers more of your body with kevlar but the area that the plates cover stays the same.
The F-16 uses a JFS (jet fuel starter) designed to drive a jet engine to its self-accelerating RPM, as opposed to supplying bleed air to a starter motor in the manner of an APU. Therefore the startup procedure is easier. While admittedly very realistic, there's a big difference between mastering a flight sim you buy in a store compared with proficiency in real flying. Could you competently startup an F-16, taxi to an active runway, take off and fly a pattern doing touch and go landings. Just a basic procedure, that might be mastered in a store bought flight simulator is not the same as an actual flight training simulator used in conjunction with real flying.
Don't have to convince me brother I'm a pilot myself. I can't fly simulators to save my life, especially because being a whirlybird driver is a hell of a lot harder than flying fixed wing and you literally need to "feel" what you are doing. Take away that key sense and you're screwed. That's why we train our guys in simulators to learn avionics AFTER we teach them how to fly it first in real life. If you've mastered flying something like a Cessna or a piper warrior on microsoft flight simulator then you could probably get in one and be alright. May not be able to land too well but you probably would be able to take off and get back on the ground. Master flying a helicopter in a flight simulator and get in one in real life and you will literally die. But yeah I was just saying that we do a pretty crappy job at keeping secrets in the US. It doesn't take much effort at all to see exactly how the US military operates. You can literally download pretty much any field or technical manual you want to online by just typing it in google. Want to know how the infanty moves? Download the infantry manual or the ranger handbook. It's pretty unnerving.
I rented a dual instruction hour in a vintage Bell 47G, that was extremely difficult to keep under basic control with level flight. I believe it is counter-intuitive to fixed wing flight, and requires a level of coordination far beyond mortal man. The collective, cyclic and rotor pedals must work in unison at all times...while in a fixed wing aircraft under proper trim, control can be maintained with 2 fingers and slight pressure adjustments to the controls.
Yeah I remember those days, whirlybirds are some crazy things to fly. For the first few hours you will swear that it is absolutely impossible to even fly that thing let alone try to hover it. But like all things if you do it enough it pretty much becomes part of you and you will somehow someway figure out how to not only fly it but actually hover it with one hand while eating a sandwich lol. Once you learn that then you'll eventually learn how to hover with one hand, analyze data with your right eye, read screens and knee board crap and scan around outside with your other eye, hold a conversation with the other pilot, hold a conversation with another aircraft, and eat a sandwich Yeah theres no trimming out a helo and letting it go. Take your hands off the controls and that thing will literally roll inverted and kill you unless it has force trim which doesn't work half the time.
The body armor itself is about equal. However the IOTV has much more complete coverage then the older IBA, it hangs much better on the body so it is easier to wear for long periods of time, and has a quick release so it will literally "fall apart" if you need to get rid of it fast. The plates are also a lot better and can withstand harder hitting ammo, as well as more hits without shattering and loosing effectiveness. IBA basically has front and rear plates, while complete IOTV has larger plates, as well as side plates. I have worn both, and even though the IOTV is heavier, it is a lot more comfortable. But at the time the original article was written, we were still using PASGT, with no plates and almost worthless against AK fire. Although to counter that they had the ISAPO vest, which was worn over the PASGT vest. So not even "better", simply a fix that originally added more layers of KEVLAR, then finally ceramic plates as they were being phased out. But knowing what equipment we were using and when (as well as what it weighed), I can easily point out that the anonymous author really did not know what they were talking about. I have worn the old M-69 "Flak Jacket", the PASGT, IBA and IOTV, I have experienced all of them in field conditions. M-69: Piece of crap, only good for keeping you warm when it is cold outside. PASGT: Light, room to move around inside and cool off, carries the old H-harness easily so putting on your equipment is fast. IBA: Great front and rear coverage, crap on the side. Had to learn a new way to fire, front facing enemy instead of sideways to minimize profile. Plates made it harder to move then PASGT. IOTV: Much better side coverage, quick removal if needed, fit more snugly so carries the weight a lot better then IBA. Still hard to get up though because of the plates. And knowing that the original dates to at least 2005, that makes it PASGT+ISAPO era (old armor with a 2X weight addition), or first generation IBA (4 times the weight claimed), with almost no side protection at all. No way this is real with those glaring problems. I bet was some silly civilian who wrote that, mostly with what they learned from playing video games and reading SOF or SWAT magazine.
To bad it is all a fantasy, kind of like Die Hard 2. You know, the one where the C-130 got an ejector seat added. [video=youtube;tntqvR9Rl4c]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tntqvR9Rl4c[/video] Now I may be wrong, since my only experience with aircraft was either riding in them, or training to shoot them down. But I guess we can ask Herkdriver if Die Hard 2 is right, and they really did have ejector seats in them.
The IOTV has larger plates? I never really noticed they were any bigger than the IBA plates I just thought the setup was bigger. I remember getting upgraded plates a few months after we transitioned to the IOTV but I didn't notice any difference in size. But yeah it does hang better that the IBA, the IBA was a POS I hated that thing. The plate carrier is what I liked, I didn't enjoy feeling like a turtle in the IOTV, we used to strip all of the stuff off of the IOTV to try to make it smaller. The upgrade to ceramic plates is what gave it the better stopping power, had nothing to do with the added kevlar of the IOTV. That helped with shrapnel. We chose comfort over shrapnal protection and chose to go with the plate carrier instead which pretty much just provides enough room to put the plates in it and nothing else.
I believe the aircraft used in that particular scene is a modified C-123K Provider...a hybrid aircraft that only exists in Hollywood. None of the C-123 or C-130 variants have ever had crew ejection seats.
I should have said thicker. Both are accurate words, but thicker would have been more descriptive in how they were larger (depth and not surface area). I think the plates we use now are about ½" thicker then the first gen plates were. The old ones are now used for "training" stateside. And while they have the same surface area, the newer ones are noticeably thicker and heavier. Yea, that I knew... but it was mocked up to make it look like a C-130 with the addition of 2 additional engines. One of the reasons I rarely watch "war movies" is because most of them get it (the military) so horribly wrong I find them annoying and not entertaining. And all to often they give people a misbelief that what they are showing is "reality", and people who really know then have to almost fight to correct those misimpressions. Funny how at least a couple of people in here have been noticing that this was all crap, yet others are still trying to say it is "accurate", even though it has been proven to be crap fantasy. Just proves how gullible some people in here are.
I am not the gear guru as some of the others...I was issued what I always referred to as a ballistic "flak" vest in certain situations. I could not differentiate between one type from another, other than as I recall this particular model brand was Ace Advantage with a threat level rating of IIIA, and it had a non-molle cover.
haha, Yeah watching BS war movies is always fun. Whats worse is the damn COD craze in recent years. I swear I literally had 2 new privates a few years ago ask me if they got to pick what type of equipment they put on their M-4. This kid literally asked me where the hearbeat sensor was. I told him to go ask the armorer for it we must have forgot to put it on. One of my drivers asked me where his triggers were to fire the tank gun. You don't fire the damn tank gun from the drivers seat this isn't (*)(*)(*)(*)ing James Bond. Damn video games, heartbeat sensor...really?
I have to disagree. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are different. The mail is obviously a copy/paste with a few changes in it. That is not good for credibility.
