Stinger missile (in the Afghan war)

The weapon and the supply route

The Stinger is an infrared-homing man-portable air-defense system developed by General Dynamics to replace the 1967 FIM-43 Redeye. Unlike the Redeye it could acquire a target head-on, giving more time to engage, and a single operator could fire it from the shoulder. It entered service in 1981 and was used by the United States and a number of other countries.

Supplies to the Afghan anti-government forces began in autumn 1986 as part of Operation Cyclone, the CIA's covert program; the weapons and funds were passed through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The decision to release the missiles turned on the approval of Pakistan's President Zia-ul-Haq, and the CIA itself contained opponents who worried about confrontation with Moscow and about diversion of the weapon. Operators were trained at Camp Ojhri in Rawalpindi on a fifteen-to-twenty-one-day course run by Pakistani instructors who had been trained in the United States in June 1985. The CIA and ISI had an agreement for up to 250 launchers and 1,000 to 1,200 missiles a year.

First combat use and the score

The most widely cited first combat use is 25 September 1986. After approaching high ground about 1.5 kilometres north-east of the Jalalabad airfield runway, Engineer Ghaffar's unit of Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami fired five Stingers and hit three targets. The action was filmed and shown to US President Reagan, and the first launch tube was handed to CIA representatives. The Russian-language article recounts the same 25 September 1986 first engagement as the shooting down of three Mi-24 Hinds by Hekmatyar's forces, while the English-language article states that Engineer Ghaffar brought down the first Hind gunship near Jalalabad that day.

The score itself is disputed. The 1993 US Air Defense Artillery Yearbook reported roughly 269 aircraft kills in about 340 engagements, a 79 per cent kill probability, but this rests on mujahideen self-reporting of unknown reliability. Selig Harrison rejects such figures and quotes a Russian general who said the United States greatly exaggerated Soviet and Afghan aircraft losses. Soviet figures record only 35 aircraft and 63 helicopters destroyed by all causes in 1987-1988.

The Soviet response

The Soviet Air Force responded to the Stinger with flares, beacons and exhaust baffles, and with night flying and terrain-hugging tactics. The altitude rule also changed: according to the Russian-language account, a rule barring descent below 3,500 metres in an attack came into force in 1986, and the floor was later raised to 4,500 metres as a precaution. The ISI plan for the weapon began at Jalalabad and Kabul-Bagram, extended to Mazar-i-Sharif, Fayzabad, Kunduz and Maymana, and ended with deployments near Kandahar and Lashkar Gah.

The argument over its effect

Military observers hold that the Stinger's effect lay less in the number of aircraft brought down than in the change it forced in Soviet air tactics. Once low-level helicopter close air support became impossible, the gunships could no longer strafe the caravans bringing weapons and ammunition to the mujahideen, and helicopter effectiveness fell sharply. Robert F. Baumann of the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth called its impact on Soviet tactical operations unmistakable, and Yossef Bodansky agreed. Soviet and later Russian accounts give it little significance in ending the war strategically.

Alan J. Kuperman argues that within a few months Soviet technical and tactical countermeasures had largely nullified the Stinger, and that the mujahideen had all but stopped firing them by 1988 despite receiving hundreds more from the CIA. Milton Bearden counters that Kuperman's assessment of the countermeasures is contradicted by overwhelming evidence from US, Soviet and Afghan sources, and that the only reliable Soviet countermeasures were flying above 12,000 feet or at night, both of which negated the tactical value of Soviet air power. The exchange ran in the pages of Foreign Affairs in 2002.

Capture, proliferation and the aftermath

On 5 January 1987, a GRU reconnaissance group of the 186th Separate Special Purpose Detachment seized one Stinger in the Meltanai gorge of Kandahar province, and a search group took two more. The trophies were displayed at an emergency press conference of the Afghan foreign ministry as proof of US involvement. In its report on terrorist tactics, the US State Department recorded that anti-Soviet and anti-government armed formations brought down three passenger airliners with Stingers, killing 125 passengers and crew.

Supplies ended in 1988 after thawing relations with Moscow and increasing reports of missiles being sold to Iran; about 4,000 Stingers were supplied over the war. After the Soviet withdrawal, the United States launched a $55 million buy-back program in 1990 and recovered around 300 missiles, but by 1996 around 600 were unaccounted for, some reportedly reaching Croatia, Iran, Sri Lanka, Qatar and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.