Reply #16: My experience with these missiles is to the contrary

[14thColony]

The Soviet- and now Russian-made MANPADS (SA-7/14/16 in particular) have shown an almost freakish ability to survive in environments and storage conditions that I imagine would even dumbfound the engineers that designed them.

A MANPADS of this type comes in a wooden or metal storage crate which normally contains two missiles in pre-sealed launch tubes, two battery-coolant units, which power up the missile and super-cool the seeker head (if applicable), and one gripstock, which is the actual firing mechanism. The crates are well-padded and pretty well sealed. The SA-7/14/16 (and clones thereof like Sakr-Eye, HQ-1, SM-1, etc.) have no critical maintenance requirements while in storage.

I've inspected hundreds of these missiles in various storage conditions in various places, and I would be confident that >90% of the Soviet/Russian systems (and their clones) would launch, track, guide and detonate as advertised.

As an extreme example I'm familiar with, in the wake one conflict some years ago dozens of MANPADS were recovered from the most horrible 'storage' conditions imaginable: tubes, gripstocks, BCUs removed from the storage crates, wrapped in raggedy tarps and BURIED IN THE GROUND for several months, if not longer (may have been a LOT longer, no one is sure). By the way these were Soviet-era weapons so they weren't exactly new when they went in the ground; mostly 1970s manufacture IIRC. These dozens were later instrumented and test-fired by a particularly expert R&D organization, without any attempt to maintain them (that was the whole point of the experiment). Full sequence success rate (that's lock-launch-track-guide-detonate) was close to 100%. Lesson I took away from this: unless the tube is smashed or bent, it's probably going to work just fine.

As for the IRA, I'm not sure what they acquired. I know they got a hold of the occasional Blowpipe, perhaps some Javelins. I'm not as expert on British MANPADS, and for all I know they may be very finicky about storage and maintenance. The fact they're all Semi-Active Command-to-Line of Sight systems means that unless our hopeful IRA man had very good training on how to guide it, he wasn't going to hit anything anyway. But as the ex-Libyan kit is all infra-red passive homing, they're much further towards the 'point-n-shoot' end of the spectrum (I oversimplify somewhat, but not much).