Sen. Barack Obama had this interesting anecdote in last night's debate:

OBAMA: 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. Now, that's a consequence of bad judgment.

Here's the video:

This sounded fishy to me. As Curt over at Flopping Aces noted:

Íf they are so underequipped how in the hell are they able to capture all these weapons in the first place? Just going up and asking the Taliban for em?

Jake Tapper over at ABC News has talked with this Army captain and says the story is true. Of course, it was true in summer 2003 to spring 2004. The Army officer told Tapper:

As for the weapons and humvees, there are two distinct periods in this, as he explains -- before deployment, and afterwards.

At Fort Drum, in training, "we didn't have access to heavy weapons or the ammunition for the weapons, or humvees to train before we deployed."

What ammunition?

40 mm automatic grenade launcher ammunition for the MK-19, and ammunition for the .50 caliber M-2 machine gun ("50 cal.")

"We weren't able to train in the way we needed to train," he says. When the platoon got to Afghanistan they had three days to learn.

They also didn't have the humvees they were supposed to have both before deployment and once they were in Afghanistan, the Captain says.

"We should have had 4 up-armored humvees," he said. "We were supposed to. But at most we had three operable humvees, and it was usually just two."

I hate to be the one to point this out. But in the period of time we're talking about, Afghanistan was relatively quiet -- Iraq was a mess. Can you imagine the screams from the left and the press if we were sending up-armored Humvees to Afghanistan first when all of the terrorist attacks were happening in Iraq? Let's also note that this was probably the time that the Armed Forces were stretched most -- I'm sure there are lots of other stories similar to this one.

The way Obama told the story last night made it sound like this happened recently -- instead it was five years ago.

I don't doubt that this happened. But, I also don't think it proves what Obama wants it to prove -- Bush's incompetence, especially in the wake of the carefree '90s and the Bush 41/Clinton peace dividend which left our military far too small for the age of terrorism.

UPDATE

Courtesy of QandO comes this highlighted comment from the ABC News comment thread:

So he wasn't a Captain, who didn't run out of ammunition in theater so he wasn't forced to use captured weapons, whose platoon may have been understrength because of normal turnover but certainly wasn't because platoons are 'split' against Army policy, so... even though the circumstances were misrepresented, and even though the anecdote was not representative of any actual circumstances reported by any other units... yeah... it "checks out".

So, both Obama and Tapper don't know how the military works.