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US Rolls Out Playing Cards Meant to Help Ukrainian Troops Learn About NATO Weapons

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M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) - Sputnik International, 1920, 29.03.2023
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The playing cards bearing images of NATO-manufactured weaponry are reportedly expected to be printed out next year and made available to the US, NATO and Ukrainian troops.
As the United States and its allies continue to send vast quantities of weapons and military hardware to Ukraine worth billions of dollars, the Pentagon has come up with a new tool meant to help troops familiarize themselves with NATO gear.
Rather than issuing a “boring” manual of some kind, the US military made a deck of cards where each card bears a depiction and a description of some weapon or war machine fielded by the NATO members’ armies.
A spokesman for the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command said that these cards are supposed to help troops “identify enemy equipment and distinguish the equipment from friendly forces,” one US newspaper notes.
The media outlet also points out that the spokesman did not “specifically say” that these cards were meant to aid the forces of the Kiev regime, though he did reportedly mention that the deck is focused on “NATO equipment that has proliferated to non-NATO countries.”
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The cards feature images of a wide assortment of weapons, most of them US-made, such as the M1 Abrams main battle tank, the M113 armored personnel carrier and the M142 HIMARS multiple rocket launch system.
The newspaper also observed that some of the weapons depicted on the cards, such as the US-made UH-60 Black Hawk military helicopter, have not been officially supplied to Ukraine. The media outlet did add, however, that one such helicopter somehow ended up in the possession of Ukrainian military intelligence.
The cards are reportedly expected to be printed next month and are going to be provided to the US, NATO and Ukrainian personnel.
Commenting on this development, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described it as a “sad classic of conducting informational psychological wars.”

“The problem is that, at some point, the citizens of Ukraine allowed for such experiments to be conducted on them,” she said, adding that the Pentagon’s move is essentially a small part of the ongoing “psychological indoctrination” of the Ukrainian people by the US.

Zakharova also joked that, if Ukrainian soldiers are going to devote their time to card games, it may actually aid the Russian forces.
This is far from the first time that the US military has used cards to disseminate certain information among military personnel, either to help them distinguish between friendly and enemy hardware or to help identify persons of interest.
During the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, US troops were provided with playing cards depicting prominent Iraqi officials wanted by Washington, while during World War II US servicemen were handed playing cards featuring silhouettes of Allied and Axis aircraft.
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