At 10:15 AM -0700 10/23/01, William R. Benson wrote:
>Dear Listers,
>
>Y'know, I've been watching the specials on Afganistan, and it seems like,
>wherever you turn, you bump into a piece of old Russain hardware. I've gotta
>wonder, from the standpoint of someone who takes old wrecks and puts them back
>together again, whether it would be feasible to offer to clean up these old
>wrecks once a reasonable government is established in Afghanistan...
A possibility, but you'd likely have to bring your own transport into
country for the hulks. Many are just that too, hulks. The locals tend
to use components off of these tanks, APCs and MICVs for what ever
they can. There is a small cottage industry there arranged around
making useful tools and machinery out of the parts stripped from
those abandoned vehicles. I saw one BBC news cast that showed how one
village had taken the tracks from a T55 and was using them as a
bolster to the roadbed on a hill near the village. I'd expect that
you could collect 10 hulls and still not have enough parts for an
operational vehicle.
As I mentioned, transport in Afganistan would also be a hard thing to
come by. Bringing in your own heavy recovery vehicle with a tractor
trailer to bring them all to a central location near Pakistan. Then
once there, you'd strip what was still useful and then aggregate them
into a workable vehicle. That way, you'd not be spending that much
money on shipping back something almost next to useless to the US or
the UK. Selling some of the remainder as scrap would likely help
defray some of the costs of the expedition too.
-- -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- - Ryan Montieth Gill ---------- SW1025 H - - Internet Technologies -- Data Center Manager (3N &10S) - - ryan.gill@turner.com rmgill@mindspring.com - - www.mindspring.com/~rmgill - - I speak not for CNN, nor they for me - ---------------------------------------------------------------- - C&R-FFL - \ Protect Freedom AND Security - - NRA \ http://www.indefenseoffreedom.org/ - ----------------------------------------------------------------
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