So yesterday Gadhafi's forces fired a scud missile that missed its likely target, the city of Brega, by about 50 miles. How'd this happen? Not the miss, the Soviet-designed Scud's have been around since the 50s and aren't exactly prescision-guided weapons. No, how does Gadhafi still have stockpiles of them? I know they're mounted on mobile launchers and that we had a hell of a time finding Saddam Hussein's real ones during the '91 Gulf War (he used dummy missiles to confuse coalition pilots and targeteers) but still, NATO has owned the skies over Libya for months now. We've got drones and a bunch of other recce aircraft scouring the nation for targets. A Scud and it's launcher are pretty big objects and you'd think we'd have the intel on were they were marshalled and the locations of their possible dispersal and launch sites. This could have simply been one of a few missiles that has miraculously survived NATO's air campaign (the alliance specifically targeted Gadhafi's Scud storage facilities early in the campaign in an attempt to neutralize them as a threat). If this is just the first of many launches it could show just how tough it is to wipe out a military that has become smart in the art of dispersing its heavy weapons. My guess is that it was just a last ditch effort to lash out at the rebels and that we won't see many more launches like this.
