Report faults Pentagon on accountability of Stinger exports
Updated: 11:00 a.m. ET June 04, 2004WASHINGTON - The United States will seek international help in tracking shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles that have increasingly fallen into terrorist hands and now represent a significant threat to commercial aircraft, a Department of Homeland Security official said Thursday.
The push to enlist foreign governments in a global effort to better secure and account for a worldwide inventory of the missiles, estimated to be between 500,000 to 750,000, comes on the same day that the Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, issued a report saying that the Pentagon is doing a poor job tracking the U.S. version of the shoulder-launched missile, called the “Stinger,” which it sells to a variety of foreign governments. The GAO report says the Pentagon’s shoddy accounting and tracking system makes it difficult to keep the weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
The new security challenges in Iraq have added to the global stockpile of MANPADS available on the black and gray markets, the GAO said. “According to intelligence sources, thousands of MANPADS may have been provided to Iraqi security forces or were stolen during hostilities in Iraq immediately following the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003,” notes the report.
The control and accountability of shoulder-launched missiles “should be a very aggressive subject of discussion with our international partners,” Asa Hutchinson, DHS undersecretary for border and transportation security, said Thursday while speaking at a Reuters Air and Defense Summit in Washington. “They have to be engaged in accounting for that and tracking the movement of those,” Hutchinson said. . ....Terrorists are attracted to the weapons as a way to bring down commercial airliners because the weapons are deadly, portable, easy to use, easy to hide and cost from less than $1,000 each to $100,000.
Last year, the State Department estimated that more than 40 aircraft had been struck over the years by MANPADS, causing at least 24 crashes and more than 600 deaths worldwide.
Not to mention prior to 2003. Think TWA 800, and flight 587, and who knows how many others that have been explained away otherwise.