Bryan Denton for The New York Times

A Shortage of Front-Line Leadership

The capture last week by Libyan fighters opposed to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of the mountain village of Qawalish signaled a shift in the front lines in the rebels’ slow advance toward Tripoli, Libya’s capital. It also provided a fine-grained view of the western rebels at war, offering insights into their leadership, logistics, tactics and conduct on the battlefield.

Some of what emerged was grim, including the aggressive and sustained looting and arson of Qawalish that followed the rebels’ entry into the town. (The arson continued on Monday. Almost a week after the town fell, two homes and an auto-parts shop were freshly ablaze.) These were crimes. But other rebel actions spoke to different elements of the character of opposition fighting units in the mountains — including the mix of enthusiasm, inexperience and initiative that has in turns both endangered the rebels and at times made them safe. In Qawalish, all of this could be readily seen.

C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

Let’s begin with inexperience. Look at the photograph above, of a makeshift rocket launcher at the last rebel fighting position at the edge of town the day after Qawalish changed hands. Mounted on a stand, it pointed down the road toward the Qaddafi forces, which the rebels said were just a few kilometers to the east. If loyalist troops were to try to retake Qawalish, or send a patrol to test the rebel lines, this product of the mountain fighters’ workshops would be the rebels’ first line of defense.

You might look at that launcher and see signs of rebel pluck. You might also spot the mimicry of rebel ingenuity in eastern Libya or in Misurata. Here is what would seem to be a powerful weapon made of a captured piece of aviation ordnance, a few lengths of scrap iron and a section of metal pipe. With a motorcycle battery and electric wire for ignition, an air-to-ground rocket, recently lifted from the former government ammunition depot at El Ga’a, had become a jury-rigged ground-to-ground weapon that was complete and in position. And so, to passing eyes, this might be seen as a timely and menacing repurposing of government munitions by a rebel force that is gaining technical savvy as it moves toward Tripoli.

You might think that, at least, until you looked more closely. It’s not just that the weapon lacks sights, and therefore can only be pointed, and not aimed. The problems run deeper. Look closely. The warhead protruding from the pipe has been finished with a factory paint job in royal blue.

C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

That blue is not just any blue. It is exactly the shade often used by NATO forces to indicate practice or inert ammunition. What that means is that this warhead is nonexplosive — a rocket of the sort manufactured for training. Removing the item for a brief inspection would tell the rest. This front-line weapon was an inert French-made 68-millimeter SNEB rocket for aircraft rocket pods.

For those who follow the turns of Libyan history, or study the transfers of arms between nations, certainly there was an interesting story or two here. The practice rocket in the mountain fighters’ pipe had been acquired for use in the Mirage aircraft that Colonel Qaddafi had once spent his nation’s wealth to procure from France. Last month, years after the Mirage deals, the rebels had taken it from a bunker complex that served as Libyan Air Force storage at El Ga’a and rushed it to battle, a fresh weapon for a war urged to form with — follow the circle — the help of France.

That’s all interesting. But forget the past. Look at the rocket on this day, which is what mattered most to those involved. As used in Qawalish, what was this piece of ordnance’s utility as a lethal weapon for ground war? The blunt answer? About zilch. Its warhead is little more than a pointed piece of metal. Fired through the air, it would be the rough equivalent of a fast-flying fence post. Frightening, to be sure, but not much more. Have a look at an expended version of the same type of rocket after it had been fired, which had clanked to earth in Qawalish, and you’ll get the idea.

C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

Actually, about zilch is maybe too high an assessment. As a direct-fire weapon fired at the ranges under consideration here, these 68-millimeter inert rockets would probably have a negative value. Instead of menacing the Qaddafi soldiers, the back blast and long trail of smoke made by these weapons would lead the Qaddafi soldiers’ eyes directly toward those who fired them, giving away rebel positions and making clusters of rebel fighters easier to maneuver against and kill.

Rebel enthusiasm and courage can run very high. But coupled to weapons like this one, fighters’ lives can be squandered in a snap.

You might say, well, the rebels are new to this. To which the answer might be, actually, that they are not. They have successfully pushed back the Qaddafi forces, town by town, in a few months of bitter fighting. Their knowledge, like their soil, has been hard-won. And the use of this inert rocket at a forward rebel position was especially perplexing in light of what could be seen along the road a short distance back.

There, spread about the ground beside a few small shops that the rebels were busily looting, was the discarded packaging for the same class of rocket, but of the High Explosive Anti-Tank, or HEAT, variant. These HEAT rockets would be no more accurate than their inert cousins if fired through a pipe without sights. But the man who put himself at risk to fire them could at least expect them to explode. And if HEAT rockets managed to strike an armored vehicle, they would probably stop that vehicle in place.

C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

The rocket on the stand at Qawalish was not an isolated case. Almost five months into the war, the rebels in the west have been helping themselves to large quantities of inert rockets (both French 68-millimeter and Italian 81-millimeter air-to-ground ordnance, and others) from the depot at El Ga’a and fashioning makeshift ground-to-ground launchers to fire them. And all of them have the bright, royal blue tips. So why these munitions, when others are at hand? This brings you to the point. The rebels’ ordnance selection, set against the backdrop of looting and arson, underlined anew one of the most consistently observed problems among rebel forces in this war: a shortage of effective leadership.

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

The Free Libyan Forces, as the opposition fighters call themselves, insist that they have many defected officers from the Qaddafi military in their ranks. If that is true, either a large portion of these officers have limited experience in weapons and tactics or have skipped the front-line fighting and left the ugly details of desert combat to someone else. What can be readily seen, time and again on front lines in Libya’s east and west, is that notwithstanding exceptions otherwise — the occasional former Qaddafi soldier leading a small group, the gritty technical and tactical savvy of many of the fighters in Misurata — the rebels who take the risks and do the bleeding in this war receive little help or training from their leadership on the fundamental tools and rules of their fight.

A large fraction of the armed volunteers in this war — and they admit this — have had to figure out complicated things themselves, and in many ways are still stumped or have matters flatly wrong. Col. Juma Ibrahim, a former government MIG-25 pilot who defected from the Libyan Air Force and now works in the rebels’ operations center in Zintan, put it this way: “We have a kind of revolutionary, he is a civilian who does not understand weapons. And often to the front he is taking the wrong kinds.”

Why might this matter?

Consider the risks to the young fighters who have joined the uprising’s cause and staked their lives on its outcome. Several of them were assigned to watch over the most obvious route of attack by the Qaddafi forces into Qawalish. This would be about as dangerous a task as a man in Libya might draw last week. And when it came to the rocket launcher at their disposal for this job, it was as if the men on the line carried rifles equipped with corks. (And as matters followed their course, on this Wednesday the Qaddafi military did roll up that road, and swept aside that front-line position in a counterattack that gave them possession of Qawalish for several hours. The rebels did not briefly lose control of the town solely because of weapon selection. Other factors played large roles, including the small numerical size of the rebels’ holding force, but the small size of that force made their ordnance selection all the more important. On a day when many front-line fighters were killed, who would want to be the guy firing the inert rounds?)

On a broader level, the blue-tipped rocket — along with many other signs, including a shortage of rifles and machine guns in most of the fighting groups — was an indicator that expectations of a swift rebel advance out of the mountains toward Tripoli are unrealistic, barring a collapse from within of the Qaddafi forces blocking the way. The rebel military leadership has admitted this much, too. A force equipped as they are, they say, cannot expect to undertake an arduous open-desert march against a dug-in, conventional foe with armor, artillery, rockets, and more.

Is it all hopeless? Let’s toggle perspectives by considering the story below.

As Qawalish first changed hands last Wednesday, a rebel Land Cruiser driving through the contested area struck a Chinese antitank mine. It was instantly disabled. A second vehicle that approached to help the first then struck a mine, too. Three rebels were wounded in all. The vehicles, as it happened, had encountered a large minefield along the left flank of a Qaddafi blocking position on the main road into town.

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

The minefield hinted at a shift in the war. As Qaddafi forces have been growing weaker, more minefields have been reported, as pro-Qaddafi troops are using land mines to buttress their front-line positions, and leaving them behind as they withdraw. That’s something for people on the lines to keep in mind. But the minefield, for all its potential significance and danger, also provided a stage for promising rebel behavior. Soon after the blast, one group of fighters stood along the road and warned away everyone else. And then other rebels began to find and clear the mines.

The mines were arranged in an especially dangerous fashion. The Chinese mines require the weight of a vehicle to depress their fuse and explode. But the Brazilian mines explode under far less pressure, as little as roughly 35 pounds, less than the weight of an ordinary 4-year-old child. And whoever in the Qaddafi forces had emplaced this minefield had buried many of the heavier mines beneath three of the lighter mines, an arrangement known as the “poor man’s pressure plate.”

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

In this lethal maze several rebels began to work, probing the soil and removing the mines. They worked even as mortar rounds landed and exploded near the road. Over the course of the day they found and pulled from the soil roughly 300 mines. By nighttime, the disarmed weapons were back in Zintan, where Omar Daw, one of the men who circumstances had made a de-miner, said more work had yet to be done. “I think there are more than 100 still in the ground,” he said.

Mr. Daw is not a former soldier. “I had no practical experience in this before the war,” he said. Not everything about his group’s work was ideal, and the storage of the removed mines was outright dangerous. But his mix of initiative and quickly acquired skill, and that of his group, showed that notwithstanding their inexperience, when the rebels care to and the right people are involved, the Forces of Free Libya can accomplish much.

Looting, arson, blue-tipped rockets, minefields found and minefields cleared. The good and the bad in Qawalish pointed to the importance of front-line leadership in any war.

As it all unfolded in plain view, thoughts came to mind. If the leadership of the Forces of Free Libya was paying fuller attention to the forces’ battlefield behavior, it might instruct the rank and file in the difference between munitions that explode and munitions that do not, just as it might enforce readily understood rules about arson and looting in towns that fall into rebel possession. Barring that, it might find and promote as many fighters as it can like Mr. Daw. On days when rebels succeed and lives are spared, it is often because of men like him.