Pentagon takes issue with Obama (Merged)
Jake Tapper was Salon.com's political reporter for five years, and has a point of view. His archive is on their website.
That aside, I got the impression the weapons were saved as war booty, much as my father kept pieces of Japanese Zeros which crashed into ships at Okinawa. What's the current rule on that?
Jim, the days when individual soldiers could bring back weapons as war prizes are long gone.
By regulation, those weapons have to be turned in though supply channels for disposal.
The regulations also take a very, very dim view of using any captured weapons in any manner whatsoever. They may have been booby trapped or otherwise sabotaged by the enemy. Given the lethality of modern weapons, the policy is that you don't use them unless you have absolutely nothing else. Even then, an order has to be issued allowing it and a colonel or higher has to sign it.
Sure, individual soldiers still try to sneak captured weapons through, but if they get caught, they're facing time in Levenworth.
A caputured weapon presented as a war trophy to an officer or commnder is a bit different, but it still has to pass through the supply chain. It gets decommissioned, rendered inoperable, cataloged and reissued with a stack of documentation proving that it was issued by the Army to the commander or person recieving it as a trophy.
Normally, these trophies are issued to the unit and the commander accepts them as the symbolic representative of the unit.