STINGER IN AFGHANISTAN
______In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, propping up a Marxist state they had installed there. Soviet tanks, APCs, and soldiers siezed the few cities in the mountain country and key terrain. They then turned their attention towards the mujideen.
______In the 1980s the mujideen were freedom fighters, motivated by the communist government in Kabul and its attempts to get rid of Islam, not to mention its rather pathetic efforts to remake Afghanistan into some kind of carbon-copy version of the USSR.
______The Soviets ran into problems almost right away. Their army had trained mostly for a showdown with the West on the plains of central Europe... no one had thought much about fighting in mountains. The tanks and the armored personnel carriers couldn't travel far from the main roads, which gave the "bandits" a way to escape after an ambush or assault. Then the Soviets brought in their helicopters.
______Helicopters gave the Soviets the mobility they needed to get around rough terrain, as well as "flying artillery" in the form of gunships. Soviet ground forces gradually got better at air assault tactics, although they still depended heavily on firebases to provide support. The Mujideen found themselves in dire straits, despite their acquisition of a few antiaircraft machine guns.
______Man-portable air defense missiles seemed to be the solution, and the United States acquired a few Soviet SA-7 missiles to give to the Afghans, as part of a covert effort to help the freedom fighters. The SA-7, either by design or by sabotage, failed to work as promised. So the decision was made to equip the Afghans with American-made shoulder-fired Stinger missiles.
______Stingers proved to be lethal to the Soviet helicopters. With some rudimentary training, a Stinger gunner could cause heavy damage to a helicopter, enough to make it break off an attack and return to home base or even enough damage to force it down. Also, the Stinger was rarely fooled by flares, the most common defense against infra-red missiles.
______Stingers deprived the Soviets of the one area where they had unqualified supremacy. Even fixed-wing ground-attack aircraft were in danger from the Stinger, and military transports leaving Kabul routinely fired dozens of flares upon take-off, when they were most vulnerable. The Soviets lost at least 118 jets and 333 helicopters in Afghanistan and never did get used to the idea of fighting a "war of national liberation" in which the people fought AGAINST a Marxist regime.
______As for us, we're busy buying back our Stingers so they don't fall into the hands of the Mujideen who decided "freedom wasn't for everybody": the Taliban and al-Qaida.
WHAT WAS A Q-SHIP?
