  We study the impact of kinks on the cosmic microwave background (CMB)
anisotropies generated by cosmic string networks. To do so, we extend the
Unconnected Segment Model to describe the stress-energy tensor of a network of
cosmic strings with kinks and implement this extension in CMBACT to compute the
CMB anisotropies generated by these wiggly string networks. Our results show
that the inclusion of kinks leads, in general, to an enhancement of the
temperature and polarization angular power spectra, when compared to those
generated by cosmic string networks without small-scale structure with the same
energy density, on scales corresponding to the distance between kinks. This
enhancement, that is more prominent in the case of the temperature
anisotropies, is essentially caused by a significant increase of the
vector-mode anisotropies, since kinks, due to their shape, generate vortical
motions of matter -- a phenomenon that is not taken into account when resorting
to an effective description of wiggly cosmic strings.
