South Korea's naval unit operating off the coast of Somalia has been placed on high alert over Somali pirates' possible attacks using U.S. surface-to-air guided missiles against its helicopter, according to intelligence and Navy sources Monday.Maybe I'm missing something, here, but even if the pirates had some Stingers left over from the First Afghan War in the 1980s, would they be any good? I am pretty sure that the missiles used a proprietary battery and that, after twenty years, the batteries would be flat, if not have sprung a leak.
Anyone know anything different?
Checking Wikipedia, yes they had proprietary batteries. But who's to say where these Stingers came from, as wiki also states Pakistan makes an improved copy. And we all know Pakistan keeps tight control on it's weapons...
ReplyDeleteI doubt they're the stuff we supplied 'em with in the '80s. Even if, by some miraculous occurrence the batteries were still good, I doubt any of the hardware or propellant would be worthwhile after being carted around from the Hindu Kush to the Horn of Africa over 30 years. We lost about 10% just transporting them from the States (personal experience) to the Paks.
ReplyDeleteI doubt they're using US-made gear at all. Much more likely is a version of the SA-7, which is widely available on the international arms market (it's been reverse-engineered by Egypt, Pakistan, crap, probably by the Somali pirates themselves, we ain't talkin' about the most high-tech weapon in the world).
ReplyDeleteThe good news is that the SA-7 is a piece of shit. It has to be fired from behind the aircraft in order to get a lock on the heat of the jet exhaust, is easily evaded just by diving quickly for a hot mountain or hot sand or something and then veering off to the side at which point it re-arranges the terrain rather than your ass, and goes for decoy flares like a duck on a june bug. We haven't lost a single aircraft to the SA-7 in Iraq, despite the fact that there's plenty of the damned things floating around there. But if you have a chopper not equipped with anti-SAM devices and you're not expecting to encounter SA-7's, it could definitely give you a bad day -- or a dirt nap.