UPDATE: Curt at Flopping Aces, and Dr. Shackleford at the Jawa Report have a lot more on Obama’s claim from the debate the other night. Meanwhile, Senator John Warner (R — VA) has asked for details from Senator Obama so that an investigation can begin.  

The gents at Black Five — Uncle Jimbo and Deebow — have posted on Obama’s statement at last night’s debate already. It’s as I suspected… sort of. There’s a small bit of truth to the story, but it’s been spun and mutilated so badly that it doesn’t really resemble the truth anymore.

From Deebow’s post:

But I want to be clear to everyone on Senator Obama’s points:

There were no shortages of anything “American” that I needed to fight the battle. We did have some issues with supply in our own chain of command (I think they thought that we weren’t really “at war” and wanted justifications for everything) and in getting more crew served weapons, as many of those were headed to Iraq, and between repairs and replacements, extra heavy weapons were hard to come by. I knew all of the other units in the area and we got many of our supplies from Active Duty units that we might operate with or be co-located with. I never wanted for ammunition, food, fuel, explosives, American Mortar rounds (for the 120mm that I got from SF) or other classes of supply.

I did not have to “scavenge” a weapon off of any dead Taliban. Their captured or liberated equipment was something that was returned to the service of the Afghan government (if it could be made serviceable after I got done taking it from the Taliban) or destroyed. My M-4, and all of those guns inside that truck were of vastly better quality than anything the Taliban had. They worked as advertised.

 Although I was allowed to teach the NCOs how to teach their soldiers how to operate their weapons, I was prohibited by my command (all the way up the chain of command) from using these weapons on operations. It was a stupid rule, and I did carry an 82mm mortar and rounds in the back of my truck on a few operations to augment our firepower. That would be the extent of my use of any “foreign” weapons.

No unit that I ran into, regardless of their designation or acronym, carried anything other than what was issued by the US Government, at least that I could tell. In many cases, they had more than they needed and would give some of it to me without even asking.

I was issued my M-4 and M-9 Beretta in the US and carried them for the entire deployment and turned it all in when I got to Ft. Carson.

Every unit I conducted operations with, visited my firebase, assisted us in operations, or co-located with us had a good supply of whatever they needed to ensure the Taliban stayed dead.

So, No, Senator Obama, the situation you described at the debate never happened anywhere I went. That assertion by you is as full of crap as a Christmas Goose, and I think you know it.

A closed mouth gathers no foot Senator Obama. Better for you to stick with “Hope” and “Change.”

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