The U.S. military is disputing one of its own reports, contained in the trove of war accounts uploaded by WikiLeaks. The document -- from May 30, 2007 -- claims that insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter over Helmand Province with a surface-to-air missile, or SAM. But a spokesman for the NATO command in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Col. Wayne Shanks, tells Danger Room, "We have no reports of any aircraft being damaged by SAMs."
It's possible to find wiggle room in Shanks' statement: just because his headquarters doesn't have an account of the downing by a surface-to-air missile doesn't necessarily mean it didn't happen. But it's also possible that initial accounts of missile fire might have been incorrect. Still, a broader look through the documents finds lots of references to SAMs and their cousins, man-portable surface-to-air missiles, or MANPADs.
But the WikiLeaks documents finds that most insurgent usage reported by the military from 2004 to 2009 was unsuccessful. And that may be because the Taliban appear to still be using early generations of shoulder-mounted missiles, much like their dads used Stingers against the Soviets in the 1980s.
The report, highlighted by The New York Times and the Guardian, is definitive that a missile shot down the Chinook -- and that the missile fire was part of a pattern in the area. "The impact of the missile projected the aft end of the aircraft up as it burst into flames, followed immediately by a nose dive into the crash site with no survivors," it reads. "Witness statements from Chalk 3 suggest Flipper was struck by MANPAD and is consistent with MANPAD event described by Arrow 25." That's a reference to another report from the same day recounting how a different aerial mission over Helmand was "engaged by a probable first-generation MANPAD."
If insurgents are successfully using surface-to-air missiles, that would be significant. Easily fired by infantry or a guy on a flatbed truck, MANPADs are capable of locking on to the heat generated by an aircraft within distances of around 6 miles, meaning that helicopters and low-flying fixed-wing aircraft are vulnerable -- as are all aircraft at takeoff and landing.
When considering the U.S. military's reliance on helicopters to get around the uneven and often-unpaved Afghan terrain, the proliferation of MANPADs is a real concern. The Arms Control Association estimates that 80s-era MANPADs that the U.S. and its allies sold to the Afghan mujahideen -- like the iconic Stinger missiles -- took out 269 Soviet copters and planes.
But there are lots of caveats here. As Fred Kaplan notes, even The New York Times summary of the database clarifies that most insurgent experiments with missiles haven't amounted to anything. An August 2007 military document released by WikiLeaks says that a missile tried and failed to take out a C-130 flying out of Bagram, for instance.
And Danger Room pal Greg Grant reminds us that a three-star Air Force general candidly observed that Afghan insurgents possess and use shoulder-fired heat seeking missiles. The May 2007 copter downing -- presuming it's correctly attributed to a MANPAD attack -- appears to be the exception.
It shouldn't be that surprising the insurgents use those missiles. After all, an earlier generation of Afghan insurgents got lots of Stinger missiles to attack Russian copters, courtesy of their sponsors in the Pakistani, Saudi and U.S. intelligence services. It's a safe bet that lots of them are still out there.
And Arrow 25's May 30, 2007, report said the MANPAD that missed was probably "first-generation." If the insurgents are using throwback weapons from the 1980s, then it's less surprising that they miss.
That's not the only account of a first-gen SAM, either. In October 2007, a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Farah Province received a small cache of Chinese HN-5 missiles -- a very early MANPAD -- from an Afghan government official. "The seeker sections are in pristine condition," the report noted.
In January 2008, an Explosive Ordnance Division team in Kandahar unearthed and safely detonated two similarly well-maintained HN-5s that the Taliban buried outside a village.
A task force in Konar Province reported in July 2008 that insurgents unsuccessfully tried to take down an FA-18 Hornet with an early-generation MANPAD, causing confusion: "[I]t is unclear why insurgents would have chanced (at considerable cost) an uncertain MANPAD [small arms fire] shot, at night, against a high-performance aircraft," a post-operation assessment reads.
I counted 11 accounts of just the Chinese HN-5 surface-to-air missile referenced in the WikiLeaks documents, from 2004 to 2008. Other accounts in the document trove of surface-to-air missiles discovered in Afghanistan or used against U.S. forces refer to first- or second-generation SAMs like SA-7s.
Usually, SAMs discovered in missile caches or buried in fields near U.S. bases were in small groups -- ones or twos. And most instances of SAM launches were described as being easily thwarted by U.S. aircraft firing flares to throw off the heat seekers. I couldn't find any references to '90s-era MANPADs like the Chinese QW-1 turning up in WikiLeaks's cache.
There are a lot of surface-to-air missiles on the black market. And it's not like the insurgents lack for Pakistani intelligence patrons this time around. We haven't nearly finished digging through the WikiLeaks files, but so far it appears like the insurgents are still using their dads' and uncles' missile tech.
Credit: DoD
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