Comments on: Language Lesson

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:36:14 +0000

Always happy to have new readers.

By: Arab Women

Arab Women — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 03:01:49 +0000

the arabic alphabet…

I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and i have to say thanks. nice read….

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:57:28 +0000

An interesting site, Doug. I notice they mark the mortar round “TNT” not “HE”, and as you say they include more information that than was on the display round. I know the US, UK, and Vietnamese all have 81MM mortars, while the Soviets have an 82MM, so the information about what the rounds works in, is more important than when it was made.

Mike, on the link Doug provided for the Iranian defense industry they display the date as year, month, day, which makes more sense to a computer programmer or math major. In the “dark ages” when I was in we wrote “month, day, year”, but we weren’t as computerized as the military is today, so that format helped with manual paper filing.

I don’t remember seeing a date beyond month and year used on ammo. The batch number was based on the actual batch of chemicals used to fill rounds. An ammo factory mixes the powder and fills as many shells as that batch will produce, then one ups the counter when a new batch is mixed.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:34:45 +0000

I looked at the markings again and saw “Lot: 5-31-2006″ and it took me a bit to realize that the Pakistanis, like the Brits and most Europeans use day-month-year when writing dates in numbers. The US is rather unique in the world in using month-day-year. Interestingly, the US military uses day-month-year (as most of the rest of the planet does); service personnel don't think in month-day-year terms. So if it is a US fake, it was probably done by a civilian.

By: Dave Bell

Dave Bell — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:25:25 +0000

Apparently, the Iraqi munitions factories do sell mortar bombs stencilled with markings in western script.It is rather important that the customers can read the label.

And “reading the label” is a bigger reason why that mortar bomb looks bogus to me. Things like lot number and filling date are important, which is why they’re marked on the bomb, but they’re not so important when you;re picking it up and dropping it down the mortar tube.

There are a lot of more-or-less compatible 81mm mortars, and if you drop a bomb made for an M1 into and M29 mortar, it might work but it isn’t going to land where you’re aiming. So you mark it with something like “M37A1”

Like this picture from the Iranian sales catalogues.

And because it has that ordnance number, you know it’s a round for the WW2-vintage M1 mortar (which will fire from the M29 mortar). But somebody has painted month and year in that place, and not day of month, nicely centred, in letters that look a bit large.

Which, for me, is what makes it look bogus. This has been made to impress journalists.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:37:03 +0000

It would, if they were American weapons, but the RPG is a Russian weapon, or, more likely, a Chinese copy of a Russian weapon, and the Iranians mark their other weapons in Farsi to remove the taint of the “Great Satan.” If you were to label an RPG in English it would be HAG [Hand-held Anti-tank Grenade]. It doesn’t make much sense to cut dies to produce the Latin alphabet, and then calculate the date on the Gregorian calendar, when there are existing dies in Farsi and the Iranian calendar on the wall. It would be especially hard to have people reverse the order in which they write.

Under the Shah, the Iranians assembled some US weapons systems, but they didn’t manufacture the pieces, so they aren’t just using the American dies and molds, they had to create their own.

By: Gag Halfrunt

Gag Halfrunt — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:59:02 +0000

The Iranian army was trained and equiped by the US during the reign of the last Shah. Iran has lots of old American hardware, and their dress uniforms are still based on US designs. When Iran started making its own munitions it would have made sense to label them in the same format as on the American-made ones they already had.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:05:37 +0000

This is pretty damn blatant and insulting, Scorpio. It’s like they didn’t even bother to produce real Iranian evidence.

By: Scorpio

Scorpio — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:59:10 +0000

Anyone who would believe “evidence” produced by this administration is asking to be duped. They lie as naturally as they breathe, and have no clue what “truth” means.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:06:04 +0000

I hope you’re right, Jams, and trust your government will not get involved in this mess.

Karen, I think this was the reason it was American reporters in Baghdad cut off from any expertise. I knew something was wrong, but it took a while to remember what it was.

Pierre does some nice work and finds people I don’t know about, Leo. It’s hard to believe he works for a Florida newspaper.

I can hope, Steve, that the MSM are embarrassed enough by what has been revealed at the Libby trial not to wet themselves and rollover like the run-up to Iraq.