Arms trafficking

The Coveted, Overpriced Missile at the Heart of Trump’s Ukraine Scandal

...Small arms may seem easier to traffic, but the uber-desirable Javelins end up in enemy hands, too. In 2003, a GAO report found that the U.S. Army had lost track of 36 Javelin launch units following the invasion of Iraq. While the Pentagon and State Department both denied sending any anti-tank weapons to regional forces fighting ISIS in Syria, The Washington Post in February 2016 identified a Javelin in the hands of Kurdish YPG forces at work in northern Syria. A year later, footage from television station Al-Mawsleya appeared to show a Javelin missile and launcher among a cache of weapons recovered from an ISIS weapons cache just outside the Iraqi city of Tal Afar; as recently as this July, The New York Times reported that the Libyan government had recovered a quartet of Javelin missiles, first sold to France, from an encampment belonging to rebels seeking to overthrow the UN-recognized central government. The Javelin isn’t a tool of democracy: It’s a highly portable, highly destructive weapon that serves no ideology in particular.