Reply #90: Reading the Refuse: Counting Col. Qaddafi’s Heat-Seeking Missiles, and Tracking Them Back...

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Reading the Refuse: Counting Col. Qaddafi’s Heat-Seeking Missiles, and Tracking Them Back to their Sources
July 26, 2011, 3:16 pm
By C.J. CHIVERS

One unwelcome consequence of the war in Libya has been the escape from Libyan state custody of untold numbers of portable antiaircraft missiles, which have been carried off from storage bunkers as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s military has ceded territory and military bases to opposition fighters. The missiles seen in the largest quantities have been the type visible in the photograph above, the SA-7, a Soviet-era weapon of the same class as the more widely known American-made Stinger.

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Such fears have helped spur efforts to encourage military forces worldwide to account for and secure inventories of Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or Manpads, of which the SA-7 is one type, and to destroy stocks no longer deemed necessary for a nation’s defense. The State Department claims that since 2003 a mix of American government programs has resulted in the destruction of more than 32,500 of the missiles in more than 30 countries. The programs have varied from underwriting destruction directly to financing buyback programs to collect loose missiles. (The latter are programs that the government prefers not to discuss, but are known to have been used in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq — at least. The State Department has declined to comment on whether such programs have already begun in Libya. It would not be a surprise if they had.)

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Being militarily obsolete and obsolete for use against civilian aircraft are two different things. But notions of obsolescence raise another question. If these missiles are nearly 30 years old, would they work at all? A key question is whether the battery units would be fresh enough to activate the system, and allow it to fire. Much would depend on storage conditions, and so far little is known about how these weapons were stored and maintained over the past decades. I looked at all of the factory-provided service logs for all of the cases. None of them had been used to record any maintenance or service checks. That does not mean that the weapons were not looked after. The logs had been published in Latin and Cyrillic characters. The Qaddafi military may have used other ledgers, in Arabic, to keep such records.

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In the end, even with that missed opportunity to learn more, the ruins of Ga’a were useful. They told of quantities. And the information about which nations had manufactured some of Libya’s SA-7s provided a lead for a next step for any interested arms-trade researcher. That step: press the successor governments to Communist-era Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to examine the archives of their export agencies and weapons plants, and to release the quantities and serial numbers of Manpads sold to Libya. This data could be exceptionally helpful for sketching out the scale of the Libya problem, for accounting for weapons that remain in arsenals and for tracing the origins of loose missiles that are likely to turn up later, either on markets or battlefields or at the scenes of future crimes.

more... http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/reading-the-refuse-counting-col-qaddafis-heat-seeking-missiles-and-tracking-them-back-to-their-sources/?src=tptw