AppId is over the quota
An article in The New York Times last week discussed an American proposal to buy heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from the many armed groups and people in Libya who are holding them. Even the older variants of these missiles, known in nonproliferation circles as Manpads, are a threat to civilian aviation; the American proposal is intended to take as many of the weapons as possible out of circulation, with hopes of trimming the number available on black markets.
All of the Manpads identified to date in Libya have been variants of the SA-7, an early Soviet-designed variant of a class of weapon that would eventually evolve to the American-made Stinger and other similarly frightening but lesser known models made in several nations. The story noted that the West’s working estimate for the number of missiles imported by the Libyan military during Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s long rule runs to 20,000. But that is a rough guess at the quantity imported — not the quantity on the loose after the war.
…the number now missing is a fraction of that. Precise estimates are impossible, officials say, because no one is sure how many the military still possessed at the outset of the uprising or later after months of fighting.
Some of the missiles were fired in training and in war. Others were disassembled by rebels, who used their tubes as makeshift launchers for other looted ordnance. Many of the missing missiles were looted, either by rebels or would-be profiteers. Many more were destroyed in bunkers that were hit in airstrikes.
One line in there — about rebels using tubes as makeshift launchers — provides the background you will need to interpret the short video below. In it, Kevin Dawes, an unusual battlefield wanderer from the United States, has made a record of the phenomenon of Manpads being repurposed for ground-to-ground war.
As an aside, it is worth noting that Mr. Dawes is a controversial figure and his behavior in Libya and elsewhere has been the subject of considerable online critique. Some of his wanderings with Manpads were the subject of a separate post on my own blog, here. This post will steer wide of the larger discussion about who Mr. Dawes is, and what he was doing in Libya, to examine some of the video record he has been posting from his travels. If nothing else, his video record provides a useful window on Libyan rebel behaviors, and in places is valuable for that alone.
The video is short. Watch it.
Note the start. By the tenth second, what you see, notwithstanding Mr. Dawes’ description of an Igla, is an anti-Qaddafi fighter heading toward a firefight with an SA-7 tube. But at a glance you might notice that this is not an ordinary SA-7 tube, at least not an ordinary SA-7 tube that is ready to fire an SA-7. It is missing its battery unit, and it has no gripstock.
Moreover, someone has outfitted the tube with a wooden dowel as a foregrip, and what looks to be a wooden shoulder rest, too. If you look more closely, you’ll also see something — but not an SA-7 missile — protruding from its aft end. The activities of the many other rebels in the video should provide a hint at what is happening in the video. This fighter is obviously not preparing to fire at an aircraft. He is heading toward a group of cornered Qaddafi fighters — not a tactical situation that demands heat-seeking, ground-to-air fire.
What you are seeing is yet another improvised launcher for the 57-millimeter air-to-ground rockets. Libya’s rebels proved adept at working with what they could scrounge to carry on their war. In this case, by removing the heat-seeking missile from the SA-7 tube and replacing it with a captured 57-millimeter rocket, the rebel had become equipped with a lightweight launcher for firing a single high-explosive rocket at a ground target.
We’ve covered at some length the early Mad Max-style 57-millimeter rocket launchers that rebels put together by taking rocket pods designed for aircraft and fitting them to pickup trucks. The weapons were dangerous, and often used badly. Libya’s rebels may have seen in them a sign of their uprising’s resolve and grit. But they had little means of employing their truck-mounted systems discriminately or accurately. Rather, the way the rebels often fired them served to undermine their standing, showing that their battlefield conduct could resemble that of the Qaddafi forces they loathed.
The system on the video, documented by Mr. Dawes, was the man-portable version of the same rocket, and it summons a somewhat different reaction. The nature of shoulder-fired arms stands to make them potentially more discriminate. And in this case, though the weapon may be dangerous to the man who fires it and to his colleagues standing nearby, this particular makeshift weapon contains, in its own odd way, a good sign.
Libyans and the officials and contractors now trying to assess the risks of the former Qaddafi Manpad stocks have noted that some of the SA-7s were disassembled for this kind of use. Every SA-7 that has been dismantled for conversion to a makeshift 57-millimeter rocket launcher is an SA-7 that will never be fired at a Boeing, a Tupolev or an Airbus.
And so Mr. Dawes has given us a curious little record of the Libyan war. You won’t find many people who would endorse this kind of weapon. But you will find, here and there, a few nonproliferation heads nodding with grudging approval. Why? Because this is one heat-seeking missile that need not be tracked down, bought and destroyed. In the annals of makeshift arms, this is the law of unintended consequences, turned kind.
Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.
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