The consensus among milbloggers and others who have served over there are that that story is absolute bullshit, both in the accusation and in details. (Platoons are almost never split up and sent, piecemeal, to several different areas, for one; the question of how unarmed soldiers are to capture weapons from armed enemies is another.)

The Pentagon was asked if the story was true. They said that it was highly unlikely, but without more specifics they couldn’t absolutely rule it out.

The crux of the story seems to be that some Special Forces guys did take and use and adapt some enemy weapons, but that is one of the many things they do — but not out of absolute necessity. They do it because it deprives the enemy of a weapon, it gives them added capability that they don’t have to carry to the battle zone, and adds to the enemy’s confusion (the sounds and other physical evidence of the weapon — i.e., empty ammo casings — tend to indicate that it was not US forces, but nominally “friendly” forces attacking, sowing distrust in the enemy).

There are regulations against regular units doing that. It causes more problems than it solves.

So we have Obama citing one campaign aide who said he heard it from an unnamed source, and two network reporters saying yup, they were told the same thing.

And when asked, the Pentagon says “that simply does not sound like anything we could imagine happening, but without specifics, we can’t say definitively that on such-and-such a date, the XXth Platoon did not take X AK-47 and XXX rounds of ammunition from the enemy and start using it in place of missing M-16s.”

Yup, sounds like some grand conspiracy. After all, Obama, with his vast military experience, would never misstate (inadvertently or not) a story he heard third-hand from halfway around the world.

J.