Word: antiaircraft
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Down south near the Namibian border is the other side of the war's legacy: a ^ state-of-the-art government air base bristling with the latest Soviet-built MiGs, tanks, radar, antiaircraft missiles and camouflaged bunkers. Angola is the tenth largest importer of arms in the world...
...overcome, Gorbachev would still be in Afghanistan, communizing? Gorbachev is withdrawing because he lost the war. Writes Afghan Expert Zalmay Khalilzad in the National Interest: "1986 was the turning point in the Afghan war." What happened? "The most crucial change in this period was the provision of U.S. Stinger ((antiaircraft)) missiles to the mujahedin." To put it bluntly, the Soviets are not leaving Afghanistan because they changed their minds. They are leaving because they lost their air cover. A change of minds followed...
...Soviets have had their share of blunders to rival the U.S.'s DIVAD, an antiaircraft weapon that was scrapped in 1985 after a $1.8 billion development outlay. Moscow pushed ahead with its ZSU-30-2, a DIVAD counterpart, but despite a decade of improvements, the weapon's radar guidance system still does not operate properly. Many experts even sneer at the Blackjack bomber, which suffered flight problems and engine setbacks that kept it in development for more than a decade...
...Pillsbury displayed the same penchant for pursuing a private agenda when he was in the Executive Branch. As Deputy Under Secretary for Defense, he was credited by some with initiating the effort to obtain Stinger antiaircraft missiles for the mujahedin. In April 1986, however, Pillsbury lost his job after he was suspected of leaking word to the Washington Post that the Administration had finally approved Stingers for rebels in Afghanistan and Angola. Although Pillsbury denies being the source of the leak, an Administration official familiar with the case says Pillsbury failed three lie-detector tests given by the Defense Investigative...
...Soviet Il-76 cargo plane lifted slowly into the bright morning air over Kabul International Airport last week. As it did, a string of incandescent flares dropped from the aircraft, a necessary defense against Stinger missiles, the U.S.-made, heat-seeking, antiaircraft weapons used by the mujahedin, Afghanistan's resistance. On the airport perimeter, sunburned Soviet soldiers stood around a formidable new stone-and-cement guard post topped by a hammer-and-sickle flag. Their thoughts were turning toward withdrawal from their flinty outpost. "Who wouldn't like to go home?" asked Victor Avershin, a blond, 19-year-old private...