| two words:
cold war.
everywhere the AK is present was a past battlefield of global politics. africa, SE asia, the middle east. every conflict where one side was backed by the USSR and the other by the US.
the AK was designed (like other soviet era weapons) to be simple, robust and easy to use by a conscript army. what better weapon for some of the worlds biggest hellholes?
where US weapons tend to be more sophisticated, you can hardly bury an M-16 and come back two years later and expect it to work straight away. also because the USSR and the many countries who made AK's under licence manufactured the in huge quantities, the economics make them as cheap as chips. |