About that Somali pirate assault rifle: The Gun...

Wednesday, January 25 2012

High-res $About that Somali pirate assault rifle: The Gun Locker is live. On the NYT’s At War blog. To accompany this, which followed this and that. (The short answer, btw, to those who asked about the mystery assault rifle, is this: it was a SAR-80, a former export of Singapore.) Back to the At War post: The Navy has not released details on how the Somali pirates the Seals killed overnight were equipped. Maybe they did not gather this kind of data. One hopes they did, as the details that can be gleaned from piles of confiscated weapons can tell something of how armed groups — pirates, terrorists, criminals, revolutionaries, smugglers, you name it – obtain the lethal kit they need to play their roles. In this case, we were left with much to think on. A naval task force with several billion dollars’ worth of ships and aircraft was used to undo a problem caused by a small group of men equipped with a pair of skiffs and outboard engines, a few cellphones and a pile of aging rifles. We see it over and again. Big-ticket weapons get more attention. But it’s the little items – fertilizer-based bombs, small arms and the like – that routinely cause problems demanding outsize resources to combat. You can pick up whiffs of old arms shipments to standing armies among criminals who today help hold their country back. The total cost of the pirate’s investment might have been less than $30,000, a fraction of which went into the firearms. That’s asymmetry, in bold face. ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH A Somali pirate being searched while taken into custody aboard the U.S.S. Kidd. Earlier this month. By the author. The Gulf of Oman.$

About that Somali pirate assault rifle: The Gun Locker is live. On the NYT’s At War blog. To accompany this, which followed this and that.

(The short answer, btw, to those who asked about the mystery assault rifle, is this: it was a SAR-80, a former export of Singapore.)

Back to the At War post:

The Navy has not released details on how the Somali pirates the Seals killed overnight were equipped. Maybe they did not gather this kind of data. One hopes they did, as the details that can be gleaned from piles of confiscated weapons can tell something of how armed groups — pirates, terrorists, criminals, revolutionaries, smugglers, you name it – obtain the lethal kit they need to play their roles.

In this case, we were left with much to think on. A naval task force with several billion dollars’ worth of ships and aircraft was used to undo a problem caused by a small group of men equipped with a pair of skiffs and outboard engines, a few cellphones and a pile of aging rifles. We see it over and again. Big-ticket weapons get more attention. But it’s the little items – fertilizer-based bombs, small arms and the like – that routinely cause problems demanding outsize resources to combat. You can pick up whiffs of old arms shipments to standing armies among criminals who today help hold their country back. The total cost of the pirate’s investment might have been less than $30,000, a fraction of which went into the firearms. That’s asymmetry, in bold face.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH

A Somali pirate being searched while taken into custody aboard the U.S.S. Kidd. Earlier this month. By the author. The Gulf of Oman.