Reading the Refuse: Counting Qaddafi’s Heat-Seeking Missiles, and Tracking Them Back to their Sources

One unwelcome consequence of the war in Libya has been the escape from Libyan state custody of untold numbers of portable antiaircraft missiles, which have been carried off from storage bunkers as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s military has ceded territory and military bases to opposition fighters. The missiles seen in the largest quantities have been the type visible in the photograph above, the SA-7, a Soviet-era weapon of the same class as the more widely known American-made Stinger.

These loose weapons pose both a security threat to civilian air traffic and present a set of questions for those who wish to contain the risk. How many missiles did the Qaddafi government have? Where did they come from? The answers are important for shaping efforts to prevent the missiles from reaching terrorist groups.

The Background

Called a Strela-2 in Russian or a Grail in the West, the SA-7 is an early generation heat-seeking missile. The perils it poses are a matter of perspective. No one disputes that an SA-7 is not the most up-to-date threat against Western military aircraft, which are typically equipped with flares and electronic countermeasures designed to confuse a missile’s heat-seeking homing system and thwart it from reaching its intended target. These flares and countermeasures are designed to react automatically, prompted by sensors that pick up the signature of a missile in flight. Well-drilled pilots also practice evasive maneuvers to elude missiles as they rush near. The various defenses — thermal, electronic, human — help ensure that while SA-7s can menace modern military air forces, they are not the gravest threat out there.

If fired at civilian aircraft, however, an SA-7 presents dangers of a much different order. Very few passenger jetliners are equipped with electronic countermeasures. And passenger jets are both relatively slow and not especially maneuverable at takeoff and landing, when they are well within an SA-7’s range. The vulnerability of passenger jets, combined with the portability of the missiles, have made concerns that terrorists with SA-7s could target civilian jetliners (as they did in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002, in a failed attack against an Israeli charter jet) an enduring worry in aviation and security circles.

Such fears have helped spur efforts to encourage military forces worldwide to account for and secure inventories of Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or Manpads, of which the SA-7 is one type, and to destroy stocks no longer deemed necessary for a nation’s defense. The State Department claims that since 2003 a mix of American government programs has resulted in the destruction of more than 32,500 of the missiles in more than 30 countries. The programs have varied from underwriting destruction directly to financing buyback programs to collect loose missiles. (The latter are programs that the government prefers not to discuss, but are known to have been used in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq — at least. The State Department has declined to comment on whether such programs have already begun in Libya. It would not be a surprise if they had.)

The Questions

All of this leads to questions about loose missiles in Libya, which has presented a scenario that those who follow the Manpads trade have seen before — a brittle nation with a large inventory that suddenly lost custody of much of its stock. Add a poor population, porous borders, a region with proximity both to terrorist groups and well-entrenched patterns of official corruption, and Libya is a potential large-scale source of illicit missiles for the black-market trade — perhaps the largest source since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. (The other contender would be Iraq. Given the scarcity of publicly accessible data, it is difficult to know which country deserves this distinction.)

The problems in Libya have been evident in recent weeks at Ga’a, a former Qaddafi ammunition storage center in western Libya that, after it was heavily bombed by NATO, was captured by rebels in late June. As Ga’a changed hands, the unchecked looting began, just as it had in depots in eastern Libya earlier in the year. Many more Manpads were soon loose. While criticism of the rebel leadership is merited in this case, it should be noted that the United States military, for all of its organization and training, did not manage to prevent the looting of Iraq’s depots either. Ga’a was, in its way, a familiar sight.

So how many portable antiaircraft missiles did the Qaddafi government possess, and where did they come from?

As it happened, Ga’a turned out to be more than a source of missiles for Libyans who rushed through the bunkers after the Qaddafi military withdrew. It became an accidental source of information, if only because the missile packaging left behind provided data needed to begin answering these questions.

So what of the number? The official estimate by the United States government is that Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya obtained about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles in all, the bulk of them SA-7s from the former Eastern bloc. This is an estimate only. Its degree of accuracy is impossible to verify with the records publicly available. This might change if the Qaddafi government’s arms-procurement documents or arms-inventory ledgers surface in any post-conflict Libya, or if the United States offers insight into how it came to its round figure. Meanwhile, we have to rely on the sources available in the field.

The Depot and Its Contents

So let’s read the missile-packaging refuse and see what it might say.

Have a look at this photo, below.

This was a typical scene that Bryan Denton and I encountered during three visits to the Ga’a depot in July: a gunman wandering the remaining intact munitions bunkers, taking what he pleased. This next picture shows another common sight: partially looted cases of munitions lying untended in the open.

The munitions or crates visible in these two frames are not related to Manpads. The depot contained many other munitions: aircraft bombs, sea mines, mortar rounds, air-to-ground rockets, fuses for napalm bombs and more. As we weaved between these two types of scenes, Bryan and I tried to document the overall situation as fully as we could, but simultaneously look for something visible in the photograph below.

In this picture, in the center, is a crate that formerly held two SA-7 missile tubes, along with a pair of the batteries required to operate a complete SA-7 system.

By way of background, the photograph below is of a missile and tube, photographed this year in eastern Libya.

And the image below shows a battery unit, recently photographed not far from the Ga’a depot, where a group of men had their own SA-7 stash.

How do we know what the crate held? Below is an example of the packing diagram from another of this same type of box.

Look at the lower left corner of the black metal plaque, which shows the original contents and quantities: 9M32M is a rocket itself, 9P54M is the launch tube that holds a missile until it is fired, and 9b17 is the battery unit. Each crate held two batteries and missiles. Each also held a pair of service logs, like this one, below.

What’s missing from the crate is the final component of the weapon, known as a grip stock, which was typically packaged and shipped separately. You can see the grip stock attached to the tube in the photograph at the very top of this post. There has been little solid information about how many grip stocks the Qaddafi military acquired, and the packaging at Ga’a did not provide more.

The Vanished Stock

Once the first SA-7 crate turned up, there was more work to do. Why? The crate served as a telltale sign that the huge collection of arms stored at Ga’a included Manpads, and that some of them had been removed. It was time to start counting.

How to count something that is not there? One characteristic of Manpads is that governments that manufactured them regarded them as sensitive weapons, and this led to basic accountability protocols. Decades ago, as SA-7s were coming off the assembly lines at secret Eastern bloc arms plants, each of the weapons was assigned its own serial number, which was marked on the weapons themselves and on their packing crates, too. And each bulk shipment of the weapons from the country of origin to purchasers tended to be recorded, including via stenciled information on the crates. The stenciling also often displayed the coded markings of the manufacturer beside information about the quantities in a given shipment. In Ga’a, some of those who carried away the Manpads left behind the crates, which carried this information.

Ready to decode? Let’s begin by zooming in on markings on the SA-7 crate shown above.

The black stenciling immediately revealed what appeared to be the point of manufacture: Warsaw Pact-era Bulgaria. This was given away by two scraps of information. The first was a symbol. The 11 inside the two circles has been a standard symbol on arms and munitions from Bulgarian plants in recent decades. The second is the month. The evident month of manufacture, August of 1985, put the crate in the late Communist period, when Bulgaria was one of the so-called people’s republics.

Another set of stenciled markings, visible below, told more.

What could be seen here was an important fact about this particular shipment – that it contained 175 crates. Thus, if all of the missiles were live missiles (as opposed to training missiles), the stencils would suggest that the shipment included 350 heat-seeking missiles and battery units in all. That’s not a huge number. But it’s not a small number either. A check of the United Nations’ open-source arms registry would show, for example, that this single shipment contained more missiles than the declared stock as of 2009 in Lithuania. (Depending on how the data is read, the single shipment might have been larger than the entire stock in Lithuania, Romania and Sweden combined.)

But the shipment of 175 crates of Bulgarian SA-7s hardly presented a full picture. On the three trips we made to Ga’a, Bryan and I found 46 SA-7 crates, and their markings indicated several shipments from at least two sources. One source was Bulgaria. The other was the Krusik munitions plant in Valjevo, Serbia. All of the missiles from both sources appeared to have been manufactured in the 1980s, late in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslav period.

Moreover, all 46 cases appeared to have come from eight separate shipments, as a sample of markings, below, shows.

The stenciled markings show shipment sizes of 76, 125, 175, 200, 306, 378, 513 and 862 crates, or a total of 2,635 boxes in all. And so this leads to one small contribution toward answering the question of how many SA-7s Libya acquired. If these crates all contained live missiles, then this sample came from shipments that brought Libya 5,270 SA-7s.

Keep in mind that the sample size here is small — only 46 crates from a single depot of one of the world’s busier arms purchasers. Bryan and I were not able to enter all of the remaining intact bunkers in Ga’a. The last trip I made to the depot was cut short when the second battle of Qawalish broke out and I had to leave the depot abruptly to go cover the fighting. And Ga’a is only one site. If data from cases at other depots were recorded, the number would almost certainly rise. Further searching might also turn up more modern Manpads, such as the more dangerous SA-24, which the Qaddafi military is said to have purchased, too. And more searching might yield packaging from other sellers. Manpads are made by several nations, including Russia and China, which have both sold vast quantities of arms to Libya in recent years. There’s no telling, really, how much more information might be established with methodical scouring. The markings on the 46 cases served to establish one thing: that Libya did indeed procure a very large number of Manpads, just as Western governments have claimed.

To put the numbers in perspective, I shared the shipment information taken from the crates with Matthew Schroeder, a researcher who follows the Manpads trade for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. Mr. Schroeder looked up the declared stocks for several other nations. As of Dec. 31, 2009, he found, Hungary claimed to have 228 missiles. In 2010, the British military claimed to have nearly 6,000, which is not quite a third of the United States government’s estimate of the Libyan stock. That is interesting, considering Britain’s population is roughly 12 times that of Libya’s.

Mr. Schroeder offered the following conclusion. “Qaddafi’s Manpads arsenals,” he wrote in an e-mail, “were excessive by any standard, particularly given that most of the systems appear to have been militarily obsolete and would have been of little value to the regime in the event of interstate conflict with even a moderately well-equipped foe.”

Being militarily obsolete and obsolete for use against civilian aircraft are two different things. But notions of obsolescence raise another question. If these missiles are nearly 30 years old, would they work at all? A key question is whether the battery units would be fresh enough to activate the system, and allow it to fire. Much would depend on storage conditions, and so far little is known about how these weapons were stored and maintained over the past decades. I looked at all of the factory-provided service logs for all of the cases. None of them had been used to record any maintenance or service checks. That does not mean that the weapons were not looked after. The logs had been published in Latin and Cyrillic characters. The Qaddafi military may have used other ledgers, in Arabic, to keep such records.

We do know this: During our second trip to Ga’a, someone just outside the depot’s perimeter fired a missile into the air. It roared off from the ground and climbed out of sight. Unfortunately, we could learn nothing more of this. There was a minefield between us and the shooter, and the Libyan driver working with us that day said he was afraid to approach whoever fired the weapon. But the shot showed that the battery had enough life for the system to function, and that the missile was at least partially operable.

In the end, even with that missed opportunity to learn more, the ruins of Ga’a were useful. They told of quantities. And the information about which nations had manufactured some of Libya’s SA-7s provided a lead for a next step for any interested arms-trade researcher. That step: press the successor governments to Communist-era Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to examine the archives of their export agencies and weapons plants, and to release the quantities and serial numbers of Manpads sold to Libya. This data could be exceptionally helpful for sketching out the scale of the Libya problem, for accounting for weapons that remain in arsenals and for tracing the origins of loose missiles that are likely to turn up later, either on markets or battlefields or at the scenes of future crimes.