The Cobra and the Mongoose: the Legacy Of The Mi-24 and the Stinger Missile in The Soviet-Afghan War

The Cobra and the Mongoose: the Legacy Of The Mi-24 and the Stinger Missile in The Soviet-Afghan War

By Walter Kunkle

The Soviet Union’s decade-long incursion into Afghanistan has been compared to the American experience in Vietnam. Both wars bore some surface similarities to each other, though closer examination would reveal a multitude of differences behind the circumstances that brought them about, the relative commitment both great powers had to these conflicts, and the motivations for their involvement in the first place. But one striking similarity exists: both wars saw heavy use of the helicopter in an offensive role. The U.S. had taken notice of the successes the French had seen with these weapons of war in Algeria.[1] The Bell AH-1 Cobra that the United States came to rely on in Vietnam was the first dedicated helicopter gunship ever fielded, and proved similarly instrumental to the U.S. war effort.[2] Inspired by this design, the Soviets incorporated notable features from the AH-1 into their own flying gunship, the Mil Mi-24 helicopter, referred to by NATO observers as the “Hind.” Borrowing further characteristics from the contemporaneous UH-60 Black Hawk transport helicopter, the Hind would make its international debut in the early 70s and come to prominence in the Soviet-Afghan War.[3]

The Mi-24 attack helicopter is rightly remembered as a weapon the U.S.S.R. came to rely on in the conflict in Afghanistan, serving as a “pinch hitter” in a number of useful battlefield roles. By contrast, it was a much cheaper and comparatively simpler weapon, the U.S.-made Stinger anti-air missile, which became seen as a decisive, even tide-turning counter to the Soviet attack gunship in Afghanistan. But this historical narrative, popular in the United States, is based on limited information about Soviet thinking and oversimplifies the relationship between the famous helicopter and the weapon that purportedly brought it in check. The historical record shows that while the Stinger missile was an effective anti-aircraft weapon, it ultimately had little to no impact on the Soviet decision to withdraw from the country. The Stinger missile program implemented by the United States was hamstrung by intelligence and accountability failures, and the Soviets had far more pressing reasons to abandon their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.

To understand the Stinger and its mythologized legacy, we first need to take an in-depth look at the Hind helicopter. By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was in possession of the largest inventory of heavily armed military helicopters in the world.[4] Similar to the American position in Vietnam, the Soviets and their allied Afghan forces had a vast technological advantage over the mujahideen fighters they were warring against. The Mi-24 helicopter was perhaps more emblematic of this disparity than any other weapon the U.S.S.R. used throughout the war. It sported an impressive heraldry—a lineage of predecessor helicopters designed by renowned Russian aeronautics engineer Mikhail Mil—continuously improved upon through rigorous testing. The Mi-24 was based off Mil’s previous Mi-8 helicopter, a dedicated transport vehicle which had a crew of three and could carry up to twenty-four passengers.[5] The typical Hind was much more heavily armed than its predecessor, and it could ferry small contingents of up to eight troops. A new aircraft for the Soviets was no small investment, and expenditure on these machines dwarfed U.S. spending considerably. This cost differential was primarily due to very conservative maintenance norms for all Soviet aircraft, as well as the shorter service rotations of Soviet equipment.[6]  Because of the extraordinary investment of resources required to put out a new helicopter, it was decided very early on in the design process that the Mi-24 should double as a troop transport in addition to an attack helicopter, and thus fill a wider variety of roles than either of the two American machines that inspired it.[7]

The D/E variants of the Mi-24 helicopter were the ones the Soviets most widely-used in Afghanistan, with Hind-D making its initial appearance in 1976, and Hind-E appearing in the mid 1980s. A strict upgrade over Hind-A, both variants were heavily armed, with three weapon mounts under each wing and a 28mm machine gun turret at the front of the vehicle, under the gunnery cockpit.[8] Each wing mount contained thirty-two 57mm unguided rockets and four anti-tank guided missiles, and the winglets of the aircraft were fitted with either four AT-2 Swatter or Sagger missiles, or, in the case of the Hind-E variant, four AT-6 “Spiral” missiles.[9] Designed with preparations in mind for a potential nuclear war, Hind-D and all subsequent variants had a cabin depressurization system allowing the craft to operate in the face of adverse nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The glass across the entire craft was bulletproofed, as opposed to just the front-facing glass.[10]  Increased defensive measures, most notably titanium belly armor and infrared flares, further set Hind D/E apart from the earlier incarnations of the Mi-24. No longer a flying infantry fighting vehicle—the Mi-24 now more closely resembled a flying tank.

Fig 1: A Diagram of the MI-24 Attack Helicopter[11]

Early on in the war in Afghanistan, Soviet helicopters were the only combat units that performed efficiently.[12] The helicopters, which were all part of the Soviet Air Force, were put under the command of Army personnel to support ground sweeps.[13] Close air support was not widely-advocated in U.S.S.R. combat doctrine, but helicopters were the exception to this.[14] No other unit besides the helicopter cadres traded favorably with the enemy mujahideen during the first years of the Soviet-Afghan War. The armed forces of the U.S.S.R. initially leaned too much on their armored capability, and Soviet tanks were easier for enemy fighters to avoid than the regular gunship patrols over Afghan villages and resistance strongholds. The mujahideen learned to fear Soviet helicopters more than any other enemy asset early on.[15] The U.S.S.R. recognized this and increased the number of helicopters deployed to Afghanistan from 60 in the initial invasion to 300 by 1981.[16] By January 1983, there were between 500 and 600 Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan, at least 200 of which were Mi-24s.[17]

Contemporary Soviet military doctrine had a strong bias to offensive rather than defensive action.[18] This offensive bias created a favorable climate for the Mi-24 to thrive—it was perhaps the most offensively-oriented weapon the Soviets possessed. Early-war Soviet air strikes in Afghanistan followed a typical pattern: either a group of two to four aircraft, flying low, or a group of sixteen or more aircraft, flying together in a massed raid. Generally, around a third or more of this group would be fighter planes such as the MiG-23, and the rest would be comprised of Mi-24 helicopters.[19] By 1982, the Soviets were mounting numerous, increasingly ambitious offensives throughout the country. A definite pattern had emerged: the Soviets would pin militia units using intensive artillery and aerial strikes, sometimes for as long as an entire day. While this was underway, Mi-24s would transport troops behind enemy positions to cut off possible routes of retreat.[20] Up until 1985, Afghani government garrisons in the country’s mountainous eastern reaches were under near-constant siege by rebel forces, and required aerial resupply by wings of Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters.[21] Transport convoys frequently had six Hinds in a figure eight formation flying in advance of them, coordinated by a forward air controller (FAC) who was most often in a specialized Mi-24 of his own. As the war went on, it had disastrous effects on Afghani infrastructure, further necessitating the need for helicopters that could bypass the complications of ground transport entirely.[22]

Of course, no weapon is invincible, and as effective as the Mi-24 was in Afghanistan, there were inherent shortfalls that the machine and the men that crewed it routinely had to deal with. First, and perhaps most notable, was the fact that the Soviets’ “flying tank” was not particularly maneuverable; loaded down as it was with defensive measures and heavy weapons. This was particularly problematic for a craft that shouldered the brunt of the U.S.S.R. reconnaissance burden throughout the course of the war, frequently operating far in advance of the main force. To counter the sluggish movement of these gunships, Hinds were never deployed alone—each was paired with another Mi-24 to increase the likelihood of its own survivability on combat missions.[23] All helicopters, not just the Mi-24, needed exhaustive maintenance in order to work properly—between two and nine hours of maintenance for every hour of flight, which often created logistics bottlenecks when they were needed on short-notice.[24]

In addition to the native difficulties of helicopter war in Afghanistan, the mujahideen amassed an increasingly extensive arsenal of portable surface-to-air missile systems as the war went on—provided to them by Pakistan. Ironically, rebel fighters used Soviet-made SA-7 rockets to pose an initial threat to Mi-24s and other low-flying aircraft.[25] The Americans, watching the war with a curious eye, were initially hesitant to overtly assist the rebel militias fighting the Soviets, and the CIA decided to procure weapons for the mujahideen that could not directly be traced back to United States. This is how the SA-7 came into the war in large quantities—it was a weapon that afforded the U.S. a veneer of plausible deniability.[26]

As the war went on, the U.S. grew bolder in the weapons it was willing to supply. Recognizing that Soviet helicopters were the most decisive units on the battlefield, anti-air capability became a top priority. The obsolete U.S.-made Redeye heat-seeking missile was at one point considered, and American and British intelligence groups supplied the rebels with a substantial number of British-made Blowpipe missiles. The Blowpipes were manually-guided, not heat-seeking, which the Americans hoped would prove decisive against Soviet anti-missile capabilities. The Swiss-manufactured Oerlikon 20mm cannon was supplied in small amounts, although it was tremendously bulky and proved too cumbersome to carry through the mountains of Afghanistan.[27]

The Soviets developed defensive measures and tactics against all of these anti-air weapons. The SA-7 was initially problematic, but it and the Redeye both had a limited angle of attack. They were most effective when aiming at the backs of helicopters due to their exhaust ports emitting more heat from the rear.[28] The Mi-24 began to carry stocks of infrared decoy flares, which emitted a similar heat signature to the aircraft and would confuse heat-seeking missiles’ targeting systems. Some of the weapons the Pakistanis delivered to the mujahideen needed no countermeasures. The Blowpipe missile was deployed in 1986 to counteract decoy flares, or so the Americans had hoped. But as it turned out, the Blowpipe’s impact would prove to be almost entirely negligible. By 1987, as one source from Pakistani intelligence recounted, there was not one confirmed kill with a Blowpipe after it had seen an entire year in action.[29] The cumbersome Blowpipe was not man portable over any distance, and it was not a “fire and forget” weapon—it required constant line of sight to an enemy aircraft in order to hit its target, often leaving its firing team in exposed positions.

            All of these weapon systems were alternatives to sending the new American FIM-92 Stinger missile into the conflict, which both the CIA and the Pakistani government harbored concerns over. Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was initially opposed to the Stinger’s use, worried that such a cutting-edge weapon would be obviously traceable back to the Americans, and therefore, to Pakistan.[30] American intelligence groups likewise worried about the possibility that such a weapon could be traced back to them and were further concerned about leaking the specifications of their revolutionary missile to the Soviets. As a matter of fact, the U.S.S.R. by 1985 already had access to the Stinger’s design after the leak of a joint defense memorandum between Greece, Turkey, West Germany, and the United States.[31]
            Inconveniently for Zia and the CIA, the Stinger missile seemed to be the perfect weapon to overcome the shortfalls the mujahideen had encountered with other man-portable air defense systems. Development began on the Stinger—originally planned to be an iterative replacement for the Redeye missile system—in 1967. After a fourteen-year development process, the weapon was considered combat capable in 1981.[32] The Stinger consisted of a five-foot, slender missile and grip stock weighing approximately thirty-five pounds. A much more sophisticated heat-seeking system made the missile more accurate than its Redeye predecessor.[33] It sported several advantages over any of the other comparable weapons systems used by the mujahideen: it was truly portable and lightweight, it was faster and had longer range than other SAMs, it was a “fire and forget” weapon, and it could attack craft from any angle—not just the rear. Pivotally, its targeting system was sophisticated enough to not be duped by the infrared flares the Soviets had equipped on their Mi-24s. By the spring of 1985, the U.S.S.R. was at the height of their offensive push and seemed to be meeting with significant success.[34] After significant back and forth, advocates for the Stinger missile’s use against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan won out, and the weapon entered the conflict in late 1986.

Fig 2: A Diagram of the Stinger Missile and Launcher[35]

            The Stinger had an indisputable impact upon its introduction to the Soviet-Afghan War. During the first use of the weapon on September 25, 1986, we are told that five missiles were fired, destroying three Mi-24s.[36] By summer of 1987, half of Afghanistan’s airspace was free of Soviet aircraft.[37] With the decoy flares of the Hinds proven ineffective against the predatory Stinger, the missile had entered an era of battlefield superiority. The Americans had agreed to supply 250 grip stocks annually, coupled with about 1000-1200 missiles.[38] The CIA handled missile distribution entirely through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) network, and did not oversee weapons allocations directly, trusting that the Pakistanis would get them where they were needed most.

In truth, the Americans would have done well not to pass this critical responsibility off to ISI. Many of the guerillas began hoarding Stingers allocated to them by the Pakistanis, hoping to use them in a “settling of accounts” against the government of Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew.[39] Possession of the cutting-edge missile became a status symbol among the mujahideen. Training was another bottleneck that interfered with getting the Stingers out quickly. The weapon had never seen actual military use before. The U.S. insisted on a four-week training course in order to use the missile and fumed at Pakistan’s insistence that Americans not be sent to the region to oversee this training. Instead, Pakistani intelligence personnel went overseas to the U.S. to be trained with the Stinger, and they returned to train the Afghans. Stinger grip stocks were in such limited supply that the Pakistanis could only truly afford to train mujahideen in batches of twenty at a time. While they managed to shave the overall training time down to three weeks instead of the four recommended by the U.S., the lengthy training still hampered the adoption of the Stinger considerably.[40]

            Limited though they were in quantity, the Stinger anti-air missile presented a worrying enough threat to Soviet airpower that a change in tactics was necessary. Stingers threatened fighter planes, although they were most effective when targeting low-flying aircraft like helicopters. No longer could the imposing Mi-24 gunships of the U.S.S.R. operate with complete impunity. Observers noted helicopter pilots operating differently in the months after the missile’s introduction. Mi-24s became noticeably more reluctant to press attacks, as rebels would often bait pilots into ambushes—sometimes by deliberately and daringly exposing a vehicle or two, only for a hidden Stinger team to fire on any greedy helicopters as they approached.[41] The Stinger operated best when the aircraft it was targeting was positioned against a stark, blue sky. Knowing this, Soviet helicopter crews flew much lower, descended erratically and unpredictably, and ultimately scaled back the scope of their operations substantially.[42] Most helicopter missions deemed risky in nature were shunted off to the Afghan armed forces, who were none too eager to fly their Hinds into the jaws of the mujahideen. By contrast, Soviet fighter planes began flying much higher in the sky to stay out of the missile’s 10,000 foot range, keeping them safe but greatly decreasing the accuracy of their munitions. Russian troops began derisively referring to the high-flying fighter pilots as “kosmonauts.”[43] The U.S. perceived this tactical shift by the Soviets, and crowed in their intelligence cables, writing: “The Stinger missile has changed the course of the war because Soviet helicopter gunships and bombers no longer are able to operate as they once did.”[44]

            Technological countermeasures to the Stinger developed very quickly. The Soviets began equipping their Hind helicopters with LIB missile bearing and warning systems that could detect whenever a missile was inbound towards the vehicle.[45] The infrared flares that had been meant to counter the SA-7 had to be fired continuously at a very high rate, to have any chance of fooling a Stinger’s targeting system. But more sophisticated flares were soon fitted to Soviet helicopters, as well as other measures to foil the Stingers: infrared beacons, and exhaust bafflers that dispersed heat all over the helicopter.[46] These countermeasures made their way into the hands of the Afghan armed forces as well and were in wide use on their Mi-24 helicopter fleet by the time of Soviet withdrawal in 1989.[47]

The Stingers there performed their battlefield role well, but they were at their best during a limited time frame: September of 1986 through the summer of 1987. A Stinger missile had a roughly 20% chance to down an aircraft, as opposed to the 3% chance afforded by the SA-7 missile. By the summer of 1987, ISI estimated that the mujahideen were downing an average of 1.5 enemy aircraft of varying type every day.[48] The number of aircraft the Stingers brought down is contentious even today. By the time of Soviet withdrawal, they had lost, according to official Russian figures, 113 fixed-wing aircraft and 333 helicopters.[49] Other estimates put the number of helicopters lost at around 500.[50] Contemporaneous American estimates pegged the number of aircraft the Soviets lost in Afghanistan at much higher: around 1,400 by the year 1988, although these figures also account for aircraft destroyed during airfield attacks, which were common in the later years of the war.[51] Statistics from ISI probably provide the most accurate estimate, as they tracked each number of Stinger hits. From the first firing of the Stinger until August, 1987, according to the ISI, 187 Stingers had been fired in Afghanistan, and of these, 75 percent, or about 140 Stingers, hit aircraft.[52] This time frame also coincides with the period that the Stingers were at their most effective: before countermeasures to them were widely adopted by the Soviet and Afghan armies.

Considering the annual allowance of 1,000 missiles initially afforded to the ISI by the CIA, a use of around 187 of these missiles over a ten-month period does not speak to the efficiency of the Stinger’s adoption. For reasons discussed earlier, mujahideen groups had incentives to hoard the Stingers, and not necessarily use them. The CIA ignored this, and by 1987 they further loosened restrictions on how Stingers were handed out.[53] The number of Stingers in possession of the ISI becomes much murkier after 1986, but sources inside the CIA expressed concern that the weapons program was now miles away from any kind of reigning in or accountability. In a retrospective 1994 article in The Washington Post, a U.S. intelligence source claimed: “We were handing them out like lollipops.”[54] This was an ironic turn for an agency that initially had been very concerned about the prospect of the Stinger falling into enemy hands—so concerned, in fact, that they dragged their feet over introducing the missile into the conflict for six years.

            As it would turn out, these initial concerns were well-harbored. Very early in 1987, the Soviets got their hands on physical Stinger missiles for the first time, when a mujahideen advance force under the command of Mulla “the Butcher” Malang was ambushed by Spetznaz in the Kandahar region. It was a squadron of Mi-24 helicopters, ironically, that proved instrumental in this raid, and two grip stocks, as well as four Stingers, wound up in enemy hands. ISI blamed this incident on Malang flaunting the operational training they had given him. Pakistani intelligence officials were similarly quick to blame the mujahideen when a party carrying sixteen missiles and grip stocks inadvertently crossed into Iranian territory around the southwestern Nimruz province and were arrested by the border patrol.[55] The missiles, unsurprisingly, were never recovered. Iran flaunted several Stinger missiles during a military parade in September of 1987.[56] In the 1990s the CIA allocated $65 million towards a buyback program to reign in the supply of ambient Stinger missiles floating around the Middle East, worried about the threat they posed to civil aviation.[57] This program met with very little success, and as of the late 90s, an estimated 300-600 Stingers remained in the region, being traded on the black market.[58]

            The Stinger program, initiated cautiously, had gone off the rails. After the initial disbursement, the Americans had no reason to keep supplying the missiles in such large amounts. Soviet pilots could not distinguish between Stingers and SA-7s that were fired at them, meaning they were likely to treat every missile that showed up on their warning system as a Stinger, even if that was not the case. The proliferation of the weapon increased Soviet urgency to develop counter-technologies to protect their helicopters. All of this had a cumulative effect by the time the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. “By 1989,” French scholar Olivier Roy wrote, “the Stinger could no longer be considered a decisive anti-aircraft weapon.”[59] The missiles had inspired an initial panic, but Soviet countermeasures had reduced the risk to their helicopters to around the level it had been at before the Stingers had made their appearance.[60] At the close of 1988, the Soviets had lost less than less than fifty aircraft for the whole year.[61]

            The introduction of the Stinger had little to no effect on the ultimate Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Gorbachev came to power in 1986 and was in a mood to reexamine the war, and his eventual inclinations were toward a Soviet withdrawal from the country. He had even posed such a prospect to Afghan President Babrak Karmal in a Moscow summit that same year.[62] There were signs that even before Gorbachev, the Soviets were not exactly prosecuting the war in Afghanistan with enthusiasm. Soviet military spending on tactical air elements was actually declining year-over-year during the period from 1975-1984. In fact, across all military capabilities the U.S.S.R. possessed across this same time period, none experienced more than slow annual budgetary growth—hardly a sign that the Soviets were massively committed to the Afghan project.[63] In a Politburo meeting that took place in November of 1986—two months after the Stingers had been introduced to Afghanistan— Gorbachev set a two-year deadline for a complete withdrawal of Soviet forces from the country. Not one mention of the Stinger missile was made at this meeting.[64] The U.S.S.R. was willing to settle for a friendly or even neutral Afghanistan, but they were no longer willing to die for it. Contrary to what was being conveyed to Washington in alarmist American intelligence reports, the Soviets were losing the war before Stingers ever arrived.

            From the start, the U.S.S.R. was unwilling to escalate the Afghanistan conflict for political reasons. At the tactical level, despite superior weaponry in every regard, the Soviets were unable to strike decisive blows against the mujahideen. They were never willing to take heavy losses, which prevented them from inflicting potentially crippling blows on their enemy.[65] Soviet occupation forces did not speak the local language and suffered from poor morale throughout the duration of the conflict.[66] The Soviet invasion had also prompted a large protest movement back home.[67] This was not helped by sustained international media coverage of the war, which put the moral onus on the Soviets to withdraw.[68] Most importantly, the higher-ups in the U.S.S.R. were reckoning with a looming economic crisis, and reformers like Gorbachev recognized the need for the country to pivot to domestic restructuring.[69]

            Washington had limited insight into the opaque Soviet machine, and it is easy to see, from the American perspective, how the “Stinger myth” came about. The timeline, to American observers, was thus: the mujahideen were being pummeled, the Stingers were introduced, a good deal of Soviet helicopters were shot down, and the Russians withdrew. Observers from Pakistani intelligence were quick to advance this narrative, too, and touted the introduction of the Stinger as the turning point in the entire campaign.[70] Islamabad had an ulterior motive to keep the Stingers flowing in: it was later discovered that Pakistan’s ISI had skimmed as many as 200 Stingers meant to be distributed to the mujahideen.[71]

The narrative of the missile’s devastating impact not only made sense to Americans from a timeline perspective, but was also incredibly validating to them historically. Many in the U.S. defense and intelligence community were eager to see a “Soviet Vietnam” in Afghanistan. “There were 58,000 [U.S.] dead in Vietnam and we owe the Russians one,” Congressman Charles Wilson told The Daily Telegraph in 1985, saying: “I have a slight obsession with [arming the mujahideen] because of Vietnam. I thought the Soviets ought to get a dose of it.”[72] In fact, the U.S.S.R. was never as committed to the Soviet-Afghan War as the U.S. was to Vietnam. The Soviets had lost between 300 and 400 helicopters in Afghanistan, while the Americans lost over 5,000 in Vietnam the decade before.[73] With how effective Soviet-made weapons had been against U.S. troops in Vietnam, the Americans were all too ready to believe enthusiastic reports of the Stinger as a “war-winning weapon.”

            The Soviets’ omni-capable helicopter, the Mi-24, carried the entire weight of a major power’s almost decade-long war effort. Borne out of budgetary necessity, it combined withering firepower with a transport capacity that proved to be crucial in combat operations. The Soviets brought one of the most successful attack helicopters ever conceived into a helicopter war, but, in spite of its impressive performance and feared reputation, it proved incapable of securing victory.  The Mi-24 remains fielded today in dozens of countries, including most of the former Soviet Bloc, India, and many African and South American nations. The Stinger has proven similarly popular, though both weapons are no longer top-of-the-line. Neither weapon has seen sustained use against the other since the cessation of the Soviet-Afghan War, although the ongoing conflict in Ukraine may pit the aging helicopter against its American-made rival once again.

The Afghans, the Russians, and the Americans each took their own burden home from the Soviet-Afghan War. The cost saddled on the Afghans was the most obvious and the most tragic—a legacy of a continued civil war, destroyed villages and ruined infrastructure, and the largest refugee crisis since World War II. By 1983, over 50% of the country’s schools and 90% of its roads had been destroyed.[74] For the Soviets, the adventure in Afghanistan carried a $70 billion dollar price tag and left behind a trail of dead soldiers and destroyed materiel.[75] While coming nowhere close to the equivalent of a “Soviet Vietnam,” the U.S.S.R. still sustained between 5,000 and 10,000 military casualties. The United States left the war with an incomplete and erroneous historical narrative, one that centered the importance of themselves and their technology to Soviet strategic decision-making. The popularly accepted story of the Soviet gunships and the Stingers that brought them to heel simplifies the Afghanistan situation in the 1980s and papers over what was in fact an inefficient and largely unaccountable U.S. supply effort. In an era when the U.S. is once again supplying top of the line weapons systems to counter Russian military assets, the lessons of the American Stinger program in the Soviet-Afghan war are well-deserving of a clear-headed reappraisal.

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