Issue Brief 11: MANPADS Proliferation Reduction by Design – On Countermeasures and Kill Switches

Introduction In the 1980s the United States delivered several hundred missiles for Stinger Man-Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS) to Afghan resistance groups, some members of which later formed the Taliban. After Moscow’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the US government launched a buyback programme aimed at recovering the missiles. Despite offering rewards of USD 100,000 or more for each missile, only a few dozen were recovered (Fitchett, 2001). Since then, thousands of MANPADS worldwide have been lost, stolen, or diverted from government arsenals. In 2011, anti-government forces looted the Libyan government’s massive stocks of MANPADS. The US State Department official Andrew Shapiro noted that ‘Libya had accumulated the largest stockpile of MAN PADS of any non-MANPADS-producing country in the world’ (Shapiro, 2012, p. 7). Securing these and other weapons in Libya has been costly, as illustrated by US contributions to multilateral threatmitigation programmes concerning conventional weapons. In 2011, the then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed over USD 40 million to these programmes (US AFRICOM, 2011). More recently, armed groups in Syria and Ukraine have acquired dozens of MANPADS, including recent systems (Schroeder, 2014; Binnie, 2014). With mounting public opposition to human rights violations in Syria and other conflict zones, there is increasing pressure on governments to provide advanced weapons systems to armed Issue Brief