Security forces said Sunday that tens of thousands of forces have pushed into Sinai and its villages near Egypt's volatile border with Israel and the Gaza Strip, seizing vast stockpiles of weapons, including shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, known to the US intelligence community as MANPADS.MANPADS? What happened to Stingers? Seems MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems) is the new catch-all term for Russian and American hand carried, anti-aircraft missles. The FAS (Federation of American Scientists) has a page on the subject. The first 20% of this page gives a brief overview of the existing weapons, the threat they pose, and some blather about what can be done. The remaining 80% is a list of documents that also talk about the subject, which is kind of telling all by itself. Typical bureaucrats, one fact can generate a whole encyclopedia of discussion.
Talk about a Pandora's box. We give the infantry these weapons to counter the threat from enemy aircraft, but if you let even one slip out of your control, everyone who ever flies is at risk of being shot out of the sky by a crazy person, i.e. a Jihadist. And we were handing these things out to the Taliban back when they were fighting the Russians.
Even if we could corral all the loose anti-aircraft rockets, that isn't going to eliminate the threat. Terrorists are building their own rockets and bombs and it probably won't be too long before the technology trickles down to the point where amateurs could build these things in the garage.
Which makes me wonder: what makes a person so crazy that they would want to shoot down a civilian airliner?
5 comments:
A FIM-92 Stinger is a type of MANPADS.
(Also, we never handed out anything to the Taliban when they were fighting the Russians, because the Taliban barely existed when the Russians were in Afghanistan.
The Taliban was a frickin' debating society until the Pakistani ISI backed them during the post-Soviet civil war, and the only reason the ISI backed them is because Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's faction had already alienated most of the other factions.
A paranoid, backwards, and inward-turned Afghanistan being much in the interest of nervous Punjabi shopkeepers to the south, you see...)
Taliban, towel-head. You say tomahto, I say tomayto. I tried reading the Wikipedia article on Afghanistan, but I quickly got bogged down. Maybe they do need a tyrannical leader.
I recommend Robert Kaplan's "Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors In Afghanistan and Pakistan". Get the updated version that has his post 9/11 epilogue added.
Like all Kaplan, it's an entertaining read. As a bonus, I read it on an airliner and loved the dirty looks the cover drew from the lady across the aisle.
Thank you for starting my morning with a laugh. I watched a documentary about Al-Zawahiri yesterday, so maybe I can absorb some of this.
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