A few points:
- Lieutenants command platoons. Captains command companies.
- The U.S. Army would not, under any circumstance, split up a rifle platoon and ship half of them to Iraq and the other half to Afghanistan. They train to work as a team. This simply would not occur, ever.
- There has never been a shortage of weapons or ammunition for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. On occasion, American forces (especially Special Forces) have used Soviet weapon designs, but they have done so by choice, not necessity.
In the clip above, everything Barack Obama said was a lie… probably including the part where he said he spoke with an Army Captain (has anyone checked to seek if Deval Patrick spoke with Jesse McBeth?).
This leaves us with two possibilities.
Barack Obama is a liar. He (or someone he plagiarized) simply made the tale up out of the whole cloth.
Barack Obama is a rube. Anyone with any sense of how the military works at all would immediately sniff this out as a series of false stories. Perhaps Barack Obama, the man who would be Commander in Cheif, is so ignorant of all matters military that he could be easily fooled by a fraud.
Neither possibility says anything good about Obama.
Update: Over at ABC News Blog , Political Punch, Jake Tapper gets in touch with the officer in question and states that Obama’s claim was therefore true.
Uh, no.
Obama claimed:
“You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon,” he said. “Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.”
The captain confirmed that he was then a lieutenant when he took command of a rifle platoon of 39 men, and that 15 men that platoon were assigned to other units. While many of them ended up being deployed to Iraq as part of other units, that does not equate Obama’s assertion that the unit was divided.
We then find out that when this officer “didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees,” he was referring to practice ammunition for two kinds of heavy weapons while in Fort Drum, New York.
As for having to capture Taliban weapons he stated, “The purpose of going after the Taliban was not to get their weapons,” he said, but on occasion they used Taliban weapons. Sometimes AK-47s, and they also mounted a Soviet-model DShK (or “Dishka”) on one of their humvees instead of their 50 cal.”
Obama’s most crucial, explosive claim, that “: They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief” remains utterly and completely false.
And that part, it seems, he made up by himself