Stinger Missile ENG
The Silver Bullet
During the Soviet occupation
the CIA armed the mujahideen. They had a rule that no weapon
in Afghanistan could be traced back to the west, so they
supplied Soviet designed equipment from Egypt and China. In
the mid-eighties the Soviets threatened to shut down the
insurgency with aggressive and highly trained spetnaz
commandos and the Hind helicopter.
The CIA responded by arming the mujahideen with the SA-7, a
shoulder fired surface-to-air-missile built by the Soviets
and once used by the Vietcong. An imitation of the American
Redeye, The SA-7 was a heat-seeker small enough to be carried
on mule-back. Unfortunately the Soviet technology was
inferior and the supply limited. The SA-7 didn't cut
it.
The British-built Blowpipe followed. Sold on the open market,
it was possible to claim it was not CIA supplied. But the
blowpipe relied on line of sight guidance. Only a well
trained operator could connect a truck-sized airship and a
tiny missile in the absolutely huge sky. After the Falklands
the British had to admit even well trained operators
couldn't score hits reliably. Strike two.
One option remained, the American Stinger. The Stinger was an
upgrade of the user-friendly and reliable Redeye. The Redeye
searched the sky for something hot, slid up behind it faster
than sound, thrust itself in the exhaust-pipe and pow! The
Stinger upgrade was twice as fast and could hit targets
face-on; a nice quality since one might be dead before seeing
the back of a Hind. But as the Stinger was not sold on the
market, any found on mujahideen had to have come from the
United States. The CIA decided to risk an open war with the
Soviets by arming the mujahideen with the Stinger. After a
few were shot down, the Hinds took to flying higher and
faster, losing much of their punch.
When the war ended the CIA panicked a little. They needed the
unused Stingers back before one downed a commercial jet in a
terror attack. The CIA bought Stingers back for $150,000
each, accounting for most of them. There were fears in 2001
that the Taliban still had a few left, and that we might lose
aircraft to our own weapons. Osama is supposed to have
Stingers posted in his convoy, although I suspect they are
all bought back or used up by now.
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