No major purchases of equipment had been made in recent years largely due to the decline of the economy and military sanctions experienced throughout the 1990s.

Libya dispatched a contingent to the Arab Deterrent Force in Lebanon in 1976 as the Lebanese Civil War escalated.

The Libyan Army suffered great losses in these conflicts, especially that of the Toyota War of 1987, largely due to poor tactics and Western aid to Chad.

It is a fairly typical small navy with a few missile frigates, corvettes and patrol boats to defend the coastline, but with a very limited self-defence capability.

Initially the effective force was limited to smaller vessels, but this changed after the rise of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 1969.

Much of the Libyan Navy was rendered inoperable by NATO bombing in 2011,[16] and the exact number of surviving vessels is unknown.

[17] Composed of 3,000 men hand-picked from Gaddafi's tribal group in the Sirte region, the Guard was well armed, being provided with T-54 and T-62 tanks, APCs, MRLs, SA-8 and ZSU-23-4 SAMs taken from the army inventory.

They served as a parallel channel of control, a means of ideological indoctrination in the barracks, and an apparatus for monitoring suspicious behavior.

The Revolutionary Guards reportedly held the keys to ammunition stockpiles at the main military bases, doling it out in small quantities as needed by the regular forces.

Their influence increased after a coup attempt in May 1985, that was blocked mainly thanks to the action of the Revolutionary Guard that engaged regular army units in a series of street battles.

[23] In about 1980, Gaddafi introduced the Islamic Pan-African Legion, a body recruited primarily among dissidents from Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, Mali, and Chad.

[citation needed] According to the Military Balance published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the force was organized into one armored, one infantry, and one paratroop/commando brigade.

A number of smaller radical Arab groups from Lebanon, Tunisia, Sudan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf states, and Jordan were represented at the inaugural meeting.

The militia forces are not known to have faced any other test that would permit an appraisal of their performance in home defence or as auxiliaries to the regular army.

The Libyan troops were supposed to help defend the collapsing regime of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, an ally of Gaddafi, amid the Uganda–Tanzania War.

When the army and navy were formed, the uniforms adopted by each service reflected British military and naval tradition.

Modifications have occurred over the intervening years, however, and in early 1987 Libyan uniforms were similar to those worn by military personnel of a number of Middle-Eastern Arab countries.

[27] Originally the rank structure of all three services was similar to that of the British Armed Forces, but some modifications were introduced in light of the small size of the Libyan military establishment.