The Dshka is the Russian equivalent of the .50 caliber machine gun and is a quite effective weapon.  The title quote comes from a superb article in this month’s Special Operations Technology by Congressman Jim Marshall, Democrat from Georgia’s 8^th District.  Congressman Marshall, son and grandson of Army Generals, served in Vietnam as an Airborne Ranger Reconnaissance platoon sergeant.  He serves on the House Armed Services Committee and has been to Iraq and Afghanistan ten times.  

If you are interested in Afghanistan and our involvement in that part of the world, I highly recommend you read his article here, written much like embedded writers Michael Totten or Michael Yon. Congressman Marshall weaves history with current events and discussions with a Special Forces A-Team with his Vietnam experience as a backdrop. The title of this post relates to a photo he took of an Afghan soldier sipping tea on his bed, inside a remote border outpost, with the Russian machine gun nearby. An A-Team SF guy said: “A bed, a bunker, and a dishka, what more can a man want?”

Here are two extracts from the article:

•  As we talked, I couldn’t help but reflect on why our conventional military forces face such long odds in Iraq. We are not the Romans in Gaul. We are not the armies of Alexander the Great, the only military force to ever prevail in the tribal mountains of western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Both of these conquerors ruthlessly slaughtered their way to victory. America currently has the power to do so as well, but we quite rightly play by moral standards that make it difficult or impossible for our conventional military force to calm an insurgency hidden within or supported by a hostile alien population. To defeat an insurgency without the competent help of indigenous forces, alien conventional forces constrained by our rules need an extraordinarily high ratio of combat troops to the size of the population, particularly in mobile, urban settings. 

And the end…..

• We need indigenous security forces and tribes throughout the world as force multipliers. This takes effective diplomacy, partnering and building partner capacity. Special Forces-type combat troops, Peace Corps with a punch, have a major role to play. They leverage our resources through collaboration with indigenous peoples. Along with other resources we can provide them, both military and humanitarian, they can keep the Gun Doctors and tribal leaders on our side. With time and the right collaborative strategies, these mountains that challenged the armies of Alexander the Great and most recently spawned the London bombings will not pose a threat to the west, to America. But they do now. We abandon them at our risk.