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.