Are US troops “scrounging” for weapons from the Taliban to use in Afghanistan?

Senator Barack Obama made the following assertion in last night’s debate that has sparked a firestorm of debate in the blogosphere:

You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon–supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq.

And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough Humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

Suffice it to say that parts of the story are more, shall we say, nuanced than the inexperienced junior Senator from Illinois who wants us to cut and run from Iraq even at the risk of genocide made it out to be, and that his claim about US soldiers scrounging weapons was flat out false. There are tons of responses to this argument at milblogs and other blogs, and you can read them all here. This response is among the best of them.

Related reading: Ed Morrissey on BO and his association with Weather Undergrounders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn: ” If Obama can’t stand up to two discredited American terrorists in Chicago … well, you get the drift. What does it say about Obama’s politics that Ayers and Dohrn approved of him, and what does it say about Obama that he felt he needed their blessing?”