Jungle ops always intrigues me. So do insurgencies. But a jungle insurgency ...? I mean, good luck countering that if you're averse to burning down the entire forest. It takes some fanatically dedicated fighters to put up with that kind of life and still maintain even a rudimentary level of combat effectiveness.
Hmm except that’s what the Colombian military has been doing for almost two decades.
At least 10 head commanders of FARC were killed through out the years, when the Colombian Military found their location and bombed their camps deep in the jungle.
What I find most fascinating about groups like the FARC and the IRA in Irland is that although on the face of it, they are categorized as being communist, in reality they are more "pragmatically "communist" due to circumstances that prevent alternatives and communism sounds like community, which is what we are about".
Reality is that these types of groups are really just people who want to be free to rule their own affairs from of the yoke of the ruling class tyranny, and thereby make them unequivocally a natural simile to the US Revolutionaries, far from actual enemies of the USA.
Things in the USA have devolved so much over the years, especially following the destruction of the real USA through the Civil War, that we now find ourselves in a situation where the US government is using the military assets of the state to fight people who are far far more like the American Revolutionaries were than not. The USA has essentially been co-opted over the decades, by the very systems that it fought against to gain its independence, which was essentially shattered to pieces by no later than the Civil War.
But please, make a counter argument for why I am wrong and people struggling against an oppressive continent spanning power structure with a simple dream of regulating their own affairs free of oppression and dictate is not in line with what the American Revolutionaries were doing.
Slightly related: the co-author of this piece, Juan Moreno, has discovered that his colleauge, an award-winning Spiegel author, instead of doing honest journalistic work, completely invented his stories (including the ones he got the awards for). He discovered the fraud, collected evidence, and called it out despite resistance from inside the newspaper organization (who wants to admit that they have been printing fradulent stories for years and not noticing it). Amazing guy! More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius
> He is very eager to have a Kalashnikov like Lorena's, a comrade having told him that there's no better rifle for the jungle. Unfortunately, those rifles are currently hard to find, so Carlos has to make do with an American M16.
US is very happy to sell arms left and right, so its either through cartels or just good old arms dealers.
Assuming most FARC arms are sourced in the U.S. and then shipped south, I could speculate as to the AK’s present scarceness.
New Chinese and Russian AKs are currently hard to find in the U.S. due to sanctions. China’s Norinco was sanctioned for trying to sell AKs (and heavy weapons) directly to L.A. street gangs. Russian state-owned arms manufacturers were sanctioned due to Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine. You can find new AKs for sale in the U.S., but they’re from a limited number of manufacturers and more expensive than the equivalent AR-style rifles.
In contrast, AR-style rifles are massively oversupplied right now, in the wake of both the Obama presidency and Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. Manufacturers built up large inventories in expectation of “panic buying” after Hillary’s election. When that didn’t happen and sales didn’t pick up accordingly, prices fell. In fact, Colt recently stopped making AR-15s for consumers, saying “The fact of the matter is that over the last few years, the market for modern sporting rifles has experienced significant excess manufacturing capacity.”
The problem is many in the government are right wingers hell bent on continuing the same war, same with many Colombians, just ask any of them, they don't support doing anything with the FARC.
Kind of a sad story if you ask me, seems like Colombians don't learn from their own mistakes even though the FARC have been operating on the same premise for more than 2 decades.... their Government doesn't take care of their own people and it's not hard for plenty of farmers to see.
Here is a web developer pretending to understand a multi generational gap of power. The complexities of this armed conflict cannot be possibly explained in a line as rude as `colombians don't learn from their own mistakes`. For those of us the grew up in the midst of it, everyone you'll ever talk to wants better and more often than not, working on it. It's not just 2 decades. It's closer to 60 years.
Way to take my comments out of context, I make these comments actually as a Colombian myself first except I don't live there, also I don't believe it's as simple as saying Colombians don't learn from their own mistakes, but obviously there seems to be a lot of political turmoil much of which people instantly want engage with in emotional reaction instead of thinking about the bigger picture for the entire country at whole and what it would take to unite it.
There can't be unity as long as the political leaders care only about their own small interests.
Like Álvaro Uribe. Good first mandate. Second mandate: it was all about making his sons richer, he stopped caring about the country. And now he only cares about staying out of jail.
> operating on the same premise for more than 2 decades.... their Government doesn't take care of their own people and it's not hard for plenty of farmers to see.
... and so we should have a marxist-leninist class revolution to install a dictatorship of the proletariat, by armed insurgency if necessary, and if so, funded by drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping.
^ it helps if you at least attempt to describe things fully.
and yes, I realize the contras don't have clean hands either and are guilty of many of the same things.
We didn't votate against amnesty, but against the full bunch of laws derivated from the process. Anyhow, after some discussions, the peace process was implemented and now over 95% of the guerilla members left the guns behind. There are a few remaining in narcotics business.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 36.8 ms ] threadJungle ops always intrigues me. So do insurgencies. But a jungle insurgency ...? I mean, good luck countering that if you're averse to burning down the entire forest. It takes some fanatically dedicated fighters to put up with that kind of life and still maintain even a rudimentary level of combat effectiveness.
At least 10 head commanders of FARC were killed through out the years, when the Colombian Military found their location and bombed their camps deep in the jungle.
The Colombian Military is probably the best military when it comes to fighting in this terrain.
Reality is that these types of groups are really just people who want to be free to rule their own affairs from of the yoke of the ruling class tyranny, and thereby make them unequivocally a natural simile to the US Revolutionaries, far from actual enemies of the USA.
Things in the USA have devolved so much over the years, especially following the destruction of the real USA through the Civil War, that we now find ourselves in a situation where the US government is using the military assets of the state to fight people who are far far more like the American Revolutionaries were than not. The USA has essentially been co-opted over the decades, by the very systems that it fought against to gain its independence, which was essentially shattered to pieces by no later than the Civil War.
But please, make a counter argument for why I am wrong and people struggling against an oppressive continent spanning power structure with a simple dream of regulating their own affairs free of oppression and dictate is not in line with what the American Revolutionaries were doing.
I would have thought the FARC would have historically held onto Russian / Chinese AK platforms due to their reliability in Jungle environments.
Unless they source most of their weapons from cartels?
> He is very eager to have a Kalashnikov like Lorena's, a comrade having told him that there's no better rifle for the jungle. Unfortunately, those rifles are currently hard to find, so Carlos has to make do with an American M16.
US is very happy to sell arms left and right, so its either through cartels or just good old arms dealers.
New Chinese and Russian AKs are currently hard to find in the U.S. due to sanctions. China’s Norinco was sanctioned for trying to sell AKs (and heavy weapons) directly to L.A. street gangs. Russian state-owned arms manufacturers were sanctioned due to Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine. You can find new AKs for sale in the U.S., but they’re from a limited number of manufacturers and more expensive than the equivalent AR-style rifles.
In contrast, AR-style rifles are massively oversupplied right now, in the wake of both the Obama presidency and Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. Manufacturers built up large inventories in expectation of “panic buying” after Hillary’s election. When that didn’t happen and sales didn’t pick up accordingly, prices fell. In fact, Colt recently stopped making AR-15s for consumers, saying “The fact of the matter is that over the last few years, the market for modern sporting rifles has experienced significant excess manufacturing capacity.”
Kind of a sad story if you ask me, seems like Colombians don't learn from their own mistakes even though the FARC have been operating on the same premise for more than 2 decades.... their Government doesn't take care of their own people and it's not hard for plenty of farmers to see.
Don't you know that computer science is the only degree program to make you an expert in math, physics, history, economics, and politics?
Like Álvaro Uribe. Good first mandate. Second mandate: it was all about making his sons richer, he stopped caring about the country. And now he only cares about staying out of jail.
... and so we should have a marxist-leninist class revolution to install a dictatorship of the proletariat, by armed insurgency if necessary, and if so, funded by drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping.
^ it helps if you at least attempt to describe things fully.
and yes, I realize the contras don't have clean hands either and are guilty of many of the same things.