stand next to a FIM-92 Stinger portable missile launcher during the
Persian Gulf War. in April 2000.
Falklands War The Stinger's combat debut occurred during the
Falklands War () fought between the United Kingdom and Argentina. At the onset of the conflict soldiers of the
British Army's
Special Air Service (SAS) had been clandestinely equipped with six missiles, although they had received little instruction in their use. The sole SAS trooper who had received training on the system, and was due to train other troops, was killed in a helicopter crash on 19 May. Nonetheless, on 21 May 1982 an SAS soldier engaged and shot down an Argentine
Pucará ground attack aircraft with a Stinger. On 30 May, at about 11:00 a.m., an
Aérospatiale SA 330 Puma helicopter was brought down by another missile, also fired by the
SAS, in the vicinity of
Mount Kent. Six
Argentine National Gendarmerie Special Forces troops were killed and eight more wounded. The main MANPADS used by both sides during the Falklands War was the
Blowpipe missile.
Soviet War in Afghanistan In late 1985, several groups, such as
Free the Eagle, began arguing the
CIA was not doing enough to support the
Mujahideen in the
Soviet–Afghan War.
Michael Pillsbury,
Vincent Cannistraro, and others put enormous bureaucratic pressure on the CIA to provide the Stinger to the rebels. The idea was controversial because up to that point, the CIA had been operating with the pretense that the United States was not involved in the war directly, for various reasons. All weapons supplied up to that point were non-U.S. sourced weapons, including
Kalashnikov style assault rifles made in
China and
Egypt. Engineer Ghaffar, of
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's
Hezb-i-Islami, brought down the first
Hind gunship with a Stinger on 25 September 1986 near
Jalalabad. As part of
Operation Cyclone, the CIA eventually supplied nearly 500 Stingers (some sources claim 1,500–2,000) to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and 250 launchers. The impact of the Stinger on the outcome of the war is contested, particularly in the translation between the impact on the tactical battlefield to the strategic level withdrawal, and the influence the first had on the second. This opinion was shared by Yossef Bodansky. Soviet, and later, Russian, accounts give little significance to the Stinger for strategically ending the war. According to the 1993
U.S. Air Defense Artillery Yearbook, the Mujahideen gunners used the supplied Stingers to score approximately 269 total aircraft kills in about 340 engagements, a 79% kill probability. If this report is accurate, Stingers would be responsible for over half of
the 451 Soviet aircraft losses in Afghanistan. The
Pakistan Army fired 28 Stingers at enemy aircraft with no kill. According to Crile, who includes information from
Alexander Prokhanov, the Stinger was a "turning point". Another source (
Jonathan Steele) states that Stingers forced Soviet helicopters and ground attack planes to bomb from higher altitudes with less accuracy, but did not bring down many more aircraft than Chinese heavy machine guns and other less sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry. The last Stingers were supplied in 1988 after increasing reports of fighters selling them to Iran and thawing relations with Moscow. After the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S.
attempted to buy back the Stinger missiles, with a $55 million program launched in 1990 to buy back around 300 missiles (US$183,300 each). The U.S. government collected most of the Stingers it had delivered, but by 1996 around 600 were unaccounted for and some found their way into
Croatia,
Iran,
Sri Lanka,
Qatar, and
North Korea. According to the CIA, already in August 1988 the U.S. had demanded from Qatar the return of Stinger missiles. Wilson later told CBS he "lived in terror" that a civilian airliner would be shot down by a Stinger, but he did not have misgivings about having provided Stingers to defeat the Soviets. As in Afghanistan, efforts to recover missiles after the end of hostilities proved incomplete. The battery of a Stinger lasts for four or five years, so any battery supplied in the 1980s would now be inoperative but during the
Syrian Civil War, insurgents showed how easily they switched to different batteries, including common car batteries, as power sources for several MANPADS models.
Libyan invasion of Chad The French army used 15 firing positions and 30 missiles purchased in 1983 for operations in Chad. The
35th Parachute Artillery Regiment made an unsuccessful fire during a Libyan bombardment on 10 September 1987 and shot down a Hercules transport aircraft on 7 July 1988. The Chadian government received Stinger missiles from the United States, when
Libya invaded the northern part of the African country. On 8 October 1987, a
Libyan Su-22MK was shot down by a FIM-92A fired by Chadian forces. The pilot, Capt. Diya al-Din, ejected and was captured. He was later granted political asylum by the French government. During the recovery operation, a
Libyan MiG-23MS was shot down by a FIM-92A.
Tajik civil war Tajik Islamist opposition forces operating from Afghanistan during the
1992–97 Tajik civil war encountered a heavy air campaign launched by Russia and Uzbekistan to prop up the government in
Dushanbe that included border and cross-border raids. During one of these operations, a
Sukhoi Su-24M was shot down on 3 May 1993 with a Stinger fired by the opposition. Both Russian pilots were rescued.
Chechen War Russian officials claimed several times that the Chechen militia and insurgents possessed US-made Stinger missiles. They attributed a few of their aerial losses to the American MANPADS. The presence of such missiles was confirmed by photo evidence, and were said to originate from Afghan smuggling routes that passed through Georgia. It is believed one
Sukhoi Su-24 was shot down by a Stinger missile during the
Second Chechen War.
Sri Lankan civil war The
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam also managed to acquire one or several Stingers, possibly from former Mujahideen stocks, and used at least one to down a
Sri Lanka Air Force Mi-24 on 10 November 1997.
United States In 2000, the U.S. inventory contained 13,400 missiles. The total cost of the program is $7,281,000,000. It is rumored that the
United States Secret Service has Stinger missiles to defend the President, a notion that has never been dispelled; however, U.S. Secret Service plans favor moving the President to a safer place in the event of an attack rather than shooting down the plane, lest the missile (or the wreckage of the target aircraft) hit innocents. During the 1980s, the Stinger was used to support different US-aligned guerrilla forces, notably the Afghan Mujahidins, the Chad government against the Libyan invasion and the Angolan UNITA. The Nicaraguan contras were not provided with Stingers due to the lack of fixed wing aircraft of the Sandinista government, as such the previous generation
FIM-43 Redeye was considered adequate. On 27 February 2020, during the
northwestern offensive launched in December 2019 by the Syrian regime (backed by Russia,
Iran and
Hezbollah), Russian and Syrian aircraft (variously reportedly as Russian
Su-34s and Syrian
Su-22)
attacked a Turkish military convoy near Idlib, killing 36 Turkish soldiers. That day, video footage emerged of alleged Turkish soldiers (backing Syrian opposition fighters) firing what apparently looks like a
Roketsan-made Stinger against either Russian or Syrian aircraft (or possibly against both).
Russo-Ukrainian War Anti-Air Battalion with a FIM-92 Stinger during the
Russian invasion of Ukraine In February 2022, several countries announced that they were providing Stinger missiles to
Ukrainian forces defending against the
Russian invasion. Germany announced that it would provide 500 missiles. Denmark said that it will provide parts for 300 missiles, to be assembled in the United States. The Netherlands stated they would supply at least 200 units. Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, and the United States each stated that they would provide undisclosed amounts. By 7 March, the U.S. reported that it and its NATO allies had together sent more than 2,000 Stinger missiles to Ukraine. In late April 2022,
Raytheon Technologies CEO
Greg Hayes told investors that the company was experiencing supply chain issues and would not be able to ramp up production of Stinger missiles until 2023. This delay was in part due to the fact the Stinger was scheduled to be replaced in the 2020s and thus contained obsolete components, which have to be redesigned for modern procurement. As of 11 May 2022, the U.S. had sent a quarter of its aging Stinger missile stockpile to Ukraine. On 20 August 2022, Russia supplied a single Stinger to Iran, for them to attempt reverse engineering the modern version of it. ==Operators==