One thing that needs to be remembered is that service equipment only has a certain service life. That’s part of their design, to meet so many service hours without rebuild or overhaul. Depending upon support available, equipment left behind has a limited remaining service life. Not to mention an excess of equipment was built to cover worst case projection wartime losses replacement needs and was in stock in depots around the world. Why not leave them to “friendly” nations? They were not projected to be needed for US usage.
Afghanistan is a mystery. Why couldn’t they immobilize much of the equipment? Anyway can they read the instructions? Or maintain them?
Just to be fair, a lot of the equipment that the Taliban now have is what we gave the Afghan army, not what we left. Just like what happened in Vietnam. We did leave too much though.
One question though, from where do they get all those Toyota pickups?
Off topic, love your Caterpillar build.
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That could have been done… long ago, we were taught to disable an abandoned vehicle with a thermite grenade over the engine block. I’m sure that similar training is still given. Now the “optics” of scores of burning vehicles during the evacuation is more than likely why such actions did not occur.
I just wonder how much can be cobbled together from the “disabled” vehicles left behind to make something that works. Maybe not as designed, with all the high tech bells & whistles, but something that runs and works for local needs. Never underestimate what people can come up with.
My guess is that Afghanistan was more of a political withdrawal than a military withdrawal. Sooner or later spare parts will all be gone. If the military had there way then a lot more of the assets would have been disabled. After all at that stage they knew the Afghan military had melted away. The Chinese will venture into Afghanistan and next thing you know there will be knock off Hummers on the market.
ahem, cough, cough
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I did see a news article where the Taliban was apparently mad that something happened to some equipment they seemed to be expecting to use later. At least a few had some sense. I think the optics of burning vehicles would have been helpful give all that happened with that cluster🤬.
I would personally have gotten a good laugh out of boobytrapped vehicles left behind but since the final evacuation was still ongoing with Taliban forces around the airport it was probably a good thing that cooler minds prevailed and avoided stirring up a fight with the Taliban.
Don’t worry, any usable aircraft and vehicles still under US control at HKIA were “mechanically demilitarized”, ie. disabled/destroyed so they couldn’t be used again. The Taliban got mainly stuff given to the Afghan Govt. forces.
Footage showed a lot of disabled stuff. But they sure looked like the could be stripped for spare parts to use on stuff captured intact from the ANA.
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I did read about how the North Vietnamese captured a lot of American made equipment from the South Vietnamese when they won the war. Problem: it was already largely worn out and few spare parts.
Let’s be realistic: Afghans are a very ingenious, adaptive people.
We used to worry that Stingers left there could be used against us, and were told the batteries did not have a very long service life, hence by 2002 they were no threat to us. Yet I remember one of my team’s first missions was intercepting the sale of one not five klicks from Bagram. It still worked.
Remember that there are craftsmen there who can fabricate an exact copy of a Martini Henry rifle given nothing but barrel stock, Except for some weird reason they stamped some of the characters incorrectly, The gun itself was a pretty good copy.
There are other craftsmen who I could give a broken Soviet AK front sight adjuster to, in a mud walled shop, and come back two days later to have a dozen new ones of better quality than the Soviet one.
Okay, Soviet Quality is one of the biggest oxymorons I can think of, but you get the point.
I visited a motorcycle shop once, just to see what was going on. Since there were no dealerships there (every single motorcycle in the country was either stolen or purchased from mainly Pakistan) they had to make their own spare parts. One dude had an aluminum forge, which really aren’t that hard to make. I even bought a stool from them made from a flywheel. Cool story behind it.
The newly founded country of Israel (a true industrial giant in 1948 I’m sure) managed to put demilitarized Shermans back into service.
The point is, every time we become complacent about our enemies and their capabilities, we get bitten in the ass.
Avionics, chips, and all that other wizardry they can’t replace - I’m sure their neighbors in China would be willing to help them out for access to oh… rare earth minerals? Beside, most of us know that vehicles as well as aircraft can function without most of that crap. At 100%? Of course not. But a Black Hawk that will at least fly, that’s not something to be taken lightly. Nor is the new situation the world fins itself in.
Thirty replies and no one has managed to answer the original question:
Also I assume they were repainted French light green when enough of that was available?
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Looking at the Osprey book about the Algerian War, I could not help but notice that practically every motor vehicle shown in pictures were American ones.
I think a AC130 was hit by a stinger in Afghanistan in 2001ish?
Keep in mind when the ‘hi tech’ Germans first ventured east they met crappy old stuff. It didn’t take long for Russia to turn the tables on equipment.
We see so often how history repeats itself. But do we learn the lessons?
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But the Soviets already had some good newer stuff, and more importantly, the capacity to manufacture it-as well as the motive that the Germans would provide them with no good future.
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Mr Tom’s threads tend to meander away pretty quickly from their original point/question. 
On a related tangent, I wonder how much stock of OD paint was left behind in France. Why change colors if there is a large stock of original paint already on hand? I suppose equipment closer to Paris used for Bastille Day parades would be repainted more frequently than stuff in outlying regions. And would be far more likely to be repainted than the equipment in colonies in Indochina or Africa, which pretty much looked original OD, or with camo paint added to better suit local conditions.
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My understanding is that OD was made by mixing lamp black with yellow ochre, which probably accounts for all of the different shades of OD.
As I said at the top of the thread, post war French OD tended toward brown at least for a time. Whether this is a result of how they mixed it, it was a result of aging, or whether they came up with their own color, I don’t know. But Heller does make a French Artillery Olive I used for a '50’s era 155 SPG that IIRC was on he lighter side.
Humbrol used to make that color in their old line. Great for use as a highlight over basic OD, or for the WWII GI enlisted man wool uniform shirt worn under field jackets and such.
Yes that Humbrol color was great - I used to dry brush with it, sometimes lightened.