Simple arms pose biggest threat to U.S., some say

Assault rifles and other small arms abound around the world.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
The world may be focused on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, especially in Iraq. But a more widespread threat to U.S. security -- and to individual Americans -- may be the vast number of relatively simple and cheap conventional arms.
Lightweight shoulder-fired "MANPADS" (man-portable air defense systems) such as U.S.-made Stingers; Russian SA-7s; and Chinese, Egyptian and Pakistani equivalents are everywhere today. Not only have they been supplied to countries with terrorist elements, but their relative simplicity has made it easy to "reverse engineer" them and build new variants.
No defense
With the exception of Israel's national airline, El Al, and a few business jets, commercial air carriers have no defense against such attacks. And according to a General Accounting Office report last week, even the U.S. military has "serious reliability problems" with some of its systems meant to defend against missiles.
But beyond one-man anti-aircraft weapons (thousands of which exist around the world today), the proliferation of other light conventional weapons poses a mounting threat.
Estimates of small arms around the world now range from 500 million to 1 billion. These include assault rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, light mortars, land mines and explosives.
"In some areas of the world an AK-47 assault rifle can be bought for a bag of maize or $20-$30," reported the United Nations.
Human plus rifle
Michael Klare, an expert on defense policy and arms trade at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., warned that "the most deadly combat system of the current epoch is the adolescent human male equipped with a Kalashnikov assault rifle."
In Somalia, the 1993 U.S. debacle described in "Black Hawk Down" was caused by a couple of rifle-propelled grenades fired at U.S. helicopters, and it seemed as if everybody above the age of 12 in Mogadishu had his own AK-47.
Will the same be true in Baghdad?
"If I was a GI, I wouldn't be worried about weapons of mass destruction but about house-to-house fighting in Baghdad," said Klare. And even if the war against the Saddam Hussein regime is over quickly, that doesn't mean an end to the danger to U.S. forces from small arms. More threatening, said Klare, may be factional fighting -- "separating the Sunnis from the Shiites and the Kurds ... and getting caught in the middle of shooting matches."
Children armed
In Iraq, training camps for children give instruction in the proper use of small arms and light weapons. Most Kurdish men and boys are armed.
The steady increase in small arms and light weapons around the world, documented by the United Nations and other organizations, has several causes. Among them: a growing arms trade fueled by criminal activities involving drugs, diamonds, and other black-marketed goods; few international restrictions of the type governing chemical and biological weapons and land mines; the increase in terrorist groups; "failed states" marked by poverty and lawlessness, and countries newly independent but lacking a strong central government.
"In Albania, for example, there was massive looting of government arsenals," said Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst specializing in conventional arms at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "Those weapons made their way through the civilian population to other countries."
Others have noted that post-Soviet Russia's notoriously underpaid Army -- from privates to generals -- has been a major source of weapons sold to black marketeers.
Although figures on such weapons are sketchy at best, "Small Arms Survey 2002: Counting the Human Cost," published by the University of Geneva, puts the total at approximately 639 million worldwide. The survey also found that more than 1,000 companies in some 98 countries produce such weapons.