We're the Military and Airpower Guys of Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online + a stray we found wandering around looking lost. All original material JHD, BHD, JR, WT, and KA 2003-2010 http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/02/der_kommissar_a.html Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:43:30 Z Movable Type 4.12 en Copyright 2012 http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Steve asked the question here. So did Grim. This is all the answer I can provide with the references I have available to me on the road. Many, many nations produce variants of the RPG 7 round. There are differences, some subtle, some not, in manufacture and fuzing that are clues to origin (at least of the machinery - but machinery can move. An example is in SKS's - there are SKS's produced by East European countries which were made on Chinese machinery - there are differences in machining that indicate the origin of the machinery, but are not conclusive... http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/02/der_kommissar_a.html http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/02/der_kommissar_a.html Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:52:16 -0600 I looked at the pictures and a few things I noticed: 1. The Iranians aparently said they must be American because they have US date format. That is not a date on the side; it's a lot number. It was lot 5-31 of year 2006. Anyway, the US military uses the same date format as the rest of the world; it's only our civilian population that are different. 2. Most of the RPGs I saw in Iraq had Cyrilic writing, but not all. Most all ordnance that was exported "legally" to the ME had English/Western script. Except for a few PKCs and AK-47s which had arabic and chinese respecively, I never saw any other script but western and cyrilic on ordnance. Even items we knew that the old Iraqi regime produced had western script for nomenclature and lot number. 3. Unless the CIA has an Arms factory I don't know about (which is highly possible) the US doesn't make RPGs. All I've ever seen along those lines in American use were the old LAWS rocket and the new AT-6 which look nothing like an RPG, but more like a modern bazooka. http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/02/der_kommissar_a.html#comment-56716 http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/2007/02/der_kommissar_a.html#comment-56716 Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:17:52 -0600