C. J. Chivers
Small Arms, Big Problems
In late 2001, in the early days of the war in
More than nine years on, there is now a much clearer picture of which equipment from past wars endangers the region's long-term security and threatens both troops on the ground and civilians beyond the Afghan frontier. The largest threat comes not from missiles or mines but from excess stocks of surplus infantry rifles and machine guns. These familiar weapons -- durable, reusable, portable, inexpensive, and effective -- have claimed more lives than the weapons the West once feared most in
For a glimpse of how surplus military arms compromise security in
That was the plan. But even after two
GUNS, GRUNTS, AND STEEL
Part of the answer was clear from the first days of the campaign: the abundance of surplus infantry arms available on the ground. As the marines fought through ambushes and searched Afghan homes, they began to capture -- rifle by rifle and cartridge by cartridge -- some of the weapons used by their adversaries. These arms caches told something essential to understanding how many modern wars are fought and how relatively low-tech, low-budget irregular forces remain viable and effective. The rifles and machine guns seized by U.S. forces fit into two main categories: older bolt-action infantry arms (dominated by the Lee-
As the marines learned their new ground in Marja, they soon discovered that among the Afghans firing at them was a set of reasonably well-trained snipers, who would take disciplined, long-range shots from concealment on the other side of irrigation canals. Although not as effective as professional snipers of conventional armies, they were a menace. They pinned down patrols, and at times their bullets struck Afghan soldiers or U.S. marines.
Early on in the campaign,
In time, however, the world's militaries decided that the qualities of the Lee-
The Lee-Enfields were, however, only a small part of the arms story on the ground in Marja. The marines gathered many more rifles of a class more commonly associated with the U.S.-led war in
In Marja -- just as it has been across
The Afghan security forces carry Kalasnhnikovs, too. And because the Taliban's Kalashnikovs fire the same ammunition as the Afghan government's Kalashnikovs, the country's insurgents have access to a copious local supply of fresh U.S.-procured ammunition, which leaks through many channels from government custody to the Taliban's hands. Thus equipped, Kalashnikov-toting Taliban fighters have proved to be an intractable feature of the Afghan war -- guerrillas and sometimes terrorists armed with the discarded weapons of old governments and cartridges that have escaped the custody of the latest administration in
GUN-BARREL DIPLOMACY
What the marines were seeing in Marja were the artifacts and effects of a phenomenon known as the arms cascade. As a modern military force either accumulates far more small arms than it needs or updates and replaces its obsolete models, its government passes much of its old stock on to the global arms market.
The world's conventional militaries have upgraded their small arms several times in the past century. If there is any lesson about these cycles of replacement, it is this: as one class of weapon unseats another, displacing it from government arsenals, or as excess guns are deemed unnecessary for national security, the supposedly retired weapons often do not retire at all. They are recycled -- sold off or given to new owners -- and find new uses outside of state hands. Sometimes these new uses and users are largely harmless, such as when military rifles are sold to Western collectors.
It is one matter for many thousands of rifles to be legally exported from old arsenals by dealers who market them to lawful collectors, often after modifying the weapons to comply with relevant national laws. In
The workings of international arms transfers can be difficult to trace. Several international agreements have committed nations to monitoring the trade in military small arms and to requiring licenses -- essentially permits -- for the export of arms beyond their borders. But even with legal transfers, governments usually consider the details of their contracts with arms dealers and their reviews of license applications for transfers between third parties to be closed to public view. And illegal dealers use subterfuge -- offshore shell companies, faked end-user certificates, false customs declarations, and shady transport aviation firms -- to operate outside of official view. But the weapons themselves turn up, and sometimes, in particular cases, they can be traced back to their source, or at least to an intermediate handler.
The history of the vz. 58, a Czechoslovak-made assault rifle, provides some examples of how the trade -- both legal and illegal -- works in practice. In the mid-1950s, soon after the formation of the Warsaw Pact,
This decision would soon make the vz. 58 an important rifle for tracking how weapons move around the globe. Why? The vz. 58 was manufactured in only one country -- and, in fact, in only one particular factory in the town of Uherský Brod -- which makes it an ideal marker, much like a radioactive isotope in nuclear medicine, for observing how weapons move. The spread of the vz. 58 is largely explained by the shifting size of Czech forces in the twentieth century. During the Cold War, the Czechoslovak military and security agencies had more than 200,000 troops, many of them armed with vz. 58 rifles, with extra guns stored in reserve. After the Warsaw Pact dissolved and Czechoslovakia split in two, the state security apparatus contracted to a fraction of its Cold War size. The vz. 58s that filled armories quickly became surplus. A cascade began. How many rifles ultimately made their way out of state hands is not known. But this much is clear: they moved quickly. As a relatively unknown rifle with little reputation as a combat weapon, the vz. 58 entered the market at remarkably low prices. Some arms dealers say these rifles have been sold in bulk from
The image of a child soldier with a vz. 58 is especially evocative of the comprehensive effects of military small arms on conflict zones. This is because it is not what these weapons do to the militaries of powerful governments that causes the greatest and longest-lasting harm but rather their impact on the vulnerable and their role in making it possible for militias, militant groups, and criminal gangs to field well-equipped combatants. When readily available to irregular forces, surplus military small arms can make unstable regions more volatile and less economically sound, increase the expenses and dangers of military campaigns or aid and relief missions, enable crime and human rights abuses, dissuade governments from providing services, and increase human suffering. This is true whether the armed bands are in the
At least two full cycles of the arms cascade were evident in the weapons the marines found in Marja. Lee-Enfields became widely available to guerrillas after World War I, when militaries contracted from their wartime size, and then again midway through the Cold War, as Western militaries began using assault rifles instead of bolt-action rifles. Kalashnikovs are a more recent example of the cascade, although they have now been around long enough that rifles from more than one generation of production are found side by side on the battlefield. Some of the date stamps on the assault rifles recovered from the Taliban have shown them to have been made in the 1950s and early 1960s -- a generation of the Kalashnikov line that the Soviet army replaced in the mid-1970s with a new variant that fired a smaller, faster round. The early models continued to be manufactured for stockpile and sale throughout the Cold War years, and these weapons -- many of which were effectively surplus from the moment of their birth -- had also found their way to the Taliban (some of the Taliban's weapons in Marja bore date stamps from the 1970s).
The date stamps point to an essential means of understanding this aspect of the trade in military small arms and the trade's potential for unintended and lingering effects: the weapons' durability. The mainstream military rifles of the twentieth century -- whether Lee-Enfields manufactured in the Long Branch Arsenal in
A RIFLE'S SECOND LIFE
In the Cold War, arms transfers were often a way for the superpowers to buy loyalty and prop up proxy regimes or to arm those groups that opposed the proxies of their adversaries. Although the strategic competition of the Cold War era is past, no one should assume that arms cascades have stopped, or will stop anytime soon.
In the conventional narrative, the excess weapons of the Cold War have spread from former Warsaw Pact and Soviet arsenals to conflict zones worldwide through shadowy networks and opaque deals. This realm is dominated by outsized characters such as
This conception is, of course, all true. But it is only a partial view.
But official inattention and outright incompetence also play a role in small-arms proliferation. Since 2001, for example,
If this sounds complicated, it only gets more so. Because the Pentagon issued vz. 58s and older Kalashnikovs to Afghan forces without recording their serial numbers in a database -- and because of the widespread desertion of Afghan troops -- no one knows how many of these weapons remain in government custody. Thousands of vz. 58s have been taken out of service, and those not lost or stolen now are, at least officially, in the hands of the Afghan government -- a worrying state of affairs given the history of arms trafficking and corruption in the region. Had the Czechs not rushed to pass their surplus on to
The worldwide spread of excess arms has been furthered by a process that was, at least on paper, intended to lead to greater security and interdependence: the expansion of
FUELING THE FOREVER WAR
Neither the characteristics nor the distribution of automatic arms are the sources of modern war. If there were no military rifles -- or if they were only held by organized armies -- militants and rebels would still find ways to fight. But even if an abundance of highly effective, easy-to-use, and exceptionally durable infantry arms do not cause wars, they are the fuel that keeps wars hot. The mass distribution of modern military arms and the availability of surplus standardized ammunition have made many insurgencies harder to unravel and helped place whole swaths of many countries outside any government's control, at least not without great risk and expense.
The U.S. military and
In many ways, it is too late. The time when the Afghan countryside might be stable and secure is long off, and the day when surplus rifles and machine guns will be less of an influence on the country's social and security fabric is almost unimaginable. As the experience of the marines in Marja has shown, once long-lasting military weapons are loose in the field, they are extraordinarily difficult and expensive to collect. The questions of today, then, are really about the wars of tomorrow. Will policymakers and military planners, who together determine the ultimate fates of surplus arms, take steps to prevent further leakage, transfers, and sales from government armories? If not, many regions will likely remain as they are -- in a state of near-perennial conflict. And when wars erupt and the arms show up, the Marjas of tomorrow may be as intractable and bloody as Marja is today.
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011
C. J. CHIVERS is a Senior Writer for The New York Times and the author of The Gun
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