Thank you Paul!
I appreciate the information and understand that it will not be easy for electricians who will be working and inspecting in IRAQ who are familiar with only with US color coding schemes.
Joe, I don't want to get specific due to security concerns, but I do have some familiarity with our forward deployed systems. One thing you will find a lot of are built-up european-style boxes a lot like what you see in this photo. I say built-up because they're a box with breakers mounted in it, with no bus-bar; all the wires jumper from breaker to breaker. Breaker lugs are used as splice points with many many wires terminated in each lug. Some are daisy-chained one-to-the-next off the inputs with one cable rated for 100A feeding 3 or 4 100A breakers, etc. Few panels have dead-fronts. Hurts my good american NEC-minded sensibilities, but it's not feasible to upgrade the entire middle east to NEC 2008 and panels like this are simply not a high-priority compared to all the other risks out there. These wires are in open air, though, although overloaded, are not likely to burst into flames even in the worst case scenario, and even if they did, the fire would be contained in the box and unlikely to kill anyone. I've replaced a few, but left others alone. Pick your battles carefully, the lives of our service members are counting on it. I'd probably leave the panel in this photo alone.
Also, remember, if it's 50Hz, NEC doesn't apply
Green/yellow striped is always ground. No bare copper in europe, it's going to be green/yellow. I don't even try to keep up with the 3-phase color scheme anymore as if differs from country to country and has been revised several times. ("Holy crap, look at the current on the neutral!! ... oh wait, white is a phase conductor here? doh!") I just try to stay consistant with that's there
And don't be surprised to see ground wires run separately; it's common practice to run the ground wire outside of the main cableway, and to jumper/bond equipment completely independantly of the main raceway. So if you think a circuit is missing a ground, look elsewhere, it may be simply be coming in from the opposite direction. Or, it may be missing completely- safety all to frequently seems to fall secondary to "making it work".
