War by other means

In Libya, garage tinkerers modified weapons-- and won

The rebel forces that deposed Libya's dictator Muammar Qaddafi in august were supported by some on the most advanced militaries on earth. But they managed to win most of their battles by themselves using small arms fashioned in makeshift workshops. Insurgent armies, drug cartels, terrorists and other stateless combatants have long used home-brewed weaponry to harass more-powerful forces. Armed groups in Iraq; for instance, figured out how to fire 240-millimeter rockets into U.S military bases using car jacks, and engineers for Srilank's Tamil Tiger converted a Zlin-143 four-seat passenger plane into a bomber. but in Libya, the fighters were waging a conventional war, and battles were fought to seize territory and vanquish their enemies, not simply harass them.

The greatest concentration of small-weapons workshops was in Misrata, on Libya's coast. When I visited the city in September, several dozen shops had coalesced into a single, larger operation run out of the city's institute for technical training. The engineers in Misrata were now undertaking weapons modifications to supply rebels in other cities where Qaddafi loyalists remained in control. Ali Mohamed, the assistant manager of operations at the institute, showed me DEFA cannon that the rebels had removed from a French-made Mirage jet.