FIM-92 Stinger

Former Navy fighter pilot Matthew Wiz Buckley believes they're Avenger air defense systems.

He says each carries eight Stinger missiles.

These launchers can send missiles into the sky to stop a threat before it reaches President Trump.

And they can take down drones, they can take down missiles, and then they can also take down other aircraft.

We couldn't produce shells.

We couldn't produce Stinger missiles.

We couldn't.

We were reliant.

So I'm just going to go through this with you.

Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi to secretly retrieve U.S.-made Stinger missiles that the State Department under Hillary Clinton had supplied to Ansar al-Sharia in Libya without congressional approval.

Right.

So this is where Mike Flynn, who was the ODNI at the time under Barack Obama, was sent to testify to Congress.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had brokered the Libya deal through Ambassador Stevens and a private arms dealer named Mark Turi.

That name comes up from time to time.

But some of the shoulder-fired Stinger missiles ended up in Afghanistan.

They were and they were used against our own military.

So, you know, I was doing my half a pull-up, Sean.

No, we were at PT on the grinder at SEAL Team 8, and we found out, and we all kind of ran inside and just got glued to the TV, and, you know, we were... saying, do we grab Stinger missiles and protect the bases around? You know, there was a lot of like quick, like what's the base defense kind of plan? These are in the days there was no homeland defense kind of mindset because it just wasn't a thing.

And so we were just like, I remember I went to some like, bogus like one week stinger course at one point in my career and and uh so i was like then a stinger expert and they're like hey you know can you go lead a stinger unit and sit outside of naval base norfolk and make sure our ships don't hit get hit it didn't we didn't end up actually doing that but it was discussed and things like that were kicked around but as you know it It wasn't like some immediate, like, break glass and we all fly away kind of response.

You know, we just continued on our workup as we saw, you know, as we saw other forces go overseas.

There were fr- new pilots that hadn't been off a carrier deck over a foreign country before, and one of them was one of the first groups of female s- uh, F18 pilots we had.

I had passed down orders that night, or for the campaign, "Don't go below 20,000 feet unless you call in so we have time to move another z- asset over that can protect you from the Stinger missiles," that we had given the Mujahideen when they were fighting the Soviet Union, and now they rebrand themselves as Taliban, but they still had the Stingers to shoot you down.

"Before you went down below 20,000 to where they could hit you, call in.

We'll protect another means." Eight Special Forces were ambushed that night.

In January of 2024, the Pentagon's own inspector general reported that the Defense Department failed to properly track more than one billion dollars in sensitive equipment sent to Ukraine.

We're talking about Javelin and Stinger missiles.

We're talking about night vision devices, certain drones.

Roughly fifty-nine percent of the gear that required enhanced in-use monitoring, it was listed as delinquent.

But that is not a Havoc missile, people, is it? Absolutely nothing like a Havoc missile.

Um, it is a Stinger missile.

Um, so yeah.

It's a bit of a ...

No, it's definitely a Havoc missile.

Yeah, it's definitely a Havoc missile he's lugging.

It ain't a Stinger missile.

I guess it's, like, similar, but it's, it's not the same.

Right.

Hanks plays Charlie Wilson as a hot tub headnist, a completely flawed guy who is also, highly inconveniently, incredibly effective at moving Stinger missiles and billions of dollars through classified committees.

Exactly.

And how does Sorkin compress it? By turning complex geopolitical maneuvers into rapid-fire, witty dialogue exchanges in Capitol Hill hallways.