Air dropping aid in Syria - the case against it.

There was an article recently in the Daily Telegraph bemoaning the fact that the RAF isn’t dropping aid to starving civilians in Syria, and that as the besieged towns are only 80 seconds flying time from the border, the UK is simply not doing enough to help. Apparently the air defence threat is minimal and that its appalling that the UK wont take risk to help starving people. 

A quick scan of many military forums such as pprune highlights the strong reaction felt by serving military personnel against what they perceive to be as a slur on their service. It is really easy to write articles like this to get people outraged and think that nothing is being done, when it seems all to patently simple what the solution is. The problem though is that the answer is vastly more complicated than it seems. 

For starters, airdrops are not easy – they require a lot of planning to get right and ensure the right aid goes to the right people. What do you drop, what are peoples needs, what are the supplies that make the most difference? Even this basic level of information is lacking – to gather it, you need to put boots on the ground to do a recce mission to understand the challenge and how to fix it. 

Straight away you’ve gone from airdrops to people on the ground, which in turn means putting a fairly complex package together to insert, support, direct and extract the right people at the right time. That is nowhere nearly as easy as Hollywood makes it sound. It requires a lot of aircraft, people and force protection to put people on the ground, keep them safe and ensure they have communications that work. We then have to deal with reality that British troops are on the ground, engaged in opposition to the Syrian Armed Forces - the precise situation we wanted to avoid happening. 

Then you need to know where to drop the aid, and ensure that the supplies are dropped in the right location to be picked up by the right people. This means finding a safe spot where a slow steady run can go in (there are upper speed limits to ensure packages thrown out the back don’t destroy themselves on landing). You need to ensure that the food aid lands somewhere that it can be collected safely – nothing would be worse than people dying in artillery or sniper fire as they tried to collect food dropped for them.There are not likely to be many open spaces though for it to land, and those that exist would become a killing ground to be pummelled by enemy fire. 

 You also need a landing zone to ensure the packages can come down without landing on top of people and killing them – again, this isn’t easy and takes a lot of co-ordination to do properly. Crates falling from the sky can easily kill someone if they land in the wrong place or on top of people.  Finally you need to find a way of coordinating all this so the Syrian air defences don’t know you are coming, and shoot you down on the way in. 

Its easy to say airdrop aid, but much harder to do it safely in a manner that doesn’t kill people on landing, and ensures the contents land somewhere without being destroyed and which doesn’t land in the wrong part of town. Just look at Arnhem or the Normandy landings as an example of how difficult it is to airdrop supplies in to a location without an airstrip, and the confusion and chaos that generally follows. If you want to mount air relief, then you need an airstrip of some form –  the Berlin airlift worked because they could land on local strips to unload. Relying on airdropped cargo which cannot always land where you want is a hiding to nothing and unlikely to have any real impact. It can be done, but it is difficult to do in the long term and this is the open ended question. 

How long would the UK need to supply aid for – its not a case of doing one drop to make ourselves feel good, we’d only prolong the inevitable. Instead it’s about a long term commitment until food aid can come in by other means – this may take months or years and represent a very open ended commitment involving dozens of aircraft and people. 

One C130 cannot hold that much cargo, so several need to be used each time, and there is only a finite area to fly in in order to drop the aid. If you are an air defence commander, and you know that aid flights are coming in daily, and that they have limited airspace to operate in, then suddenly it becomes much easier to put together a really credible threat. Its not the same as trying to shoot down a fast jet strike coming in unexpectedly – shooting at cargo planes on very predictable flight paths, that must fly into certain airspace to deliver their cargo means over time losses would be inevitable. Air defence against a known threat is going to very straightforward – much like in WW2, where a bomber crew had a 4% chance of being shot down, if you do 25 missions then the odds of being shot down increase significantly. 

Its easy to look at historical records and suggest that the Israeli Air Force has never had an aircraft shot down in Syria – but there is a huge difference between small operations with high speed jets capable of deploying a wide range of countermeasures, coming in unexpectedly and with the element of surprise, and then comparing this to slow lumbering transport aircraft that will lack surprise, speed or the ability to easily defend themselves. 

Any such commitment of airdropping is going to take time, effort and likely to generate precious little results other than seeing aid dropped to our opponents, and good aircraft shot down with the likely loss of their crews. A one off mercy mission would salve our conscience, but not make any real difference to the people. Short of increased air strikes to take out Syrian air defences to clear a path – essentially declaring war on Syria to do this, there is no way that dropping aid can be done without putting planes at risk, and its highly unlikely that it would solve the problem either. It is never easy to say no, but at times like this inaction is likely saving more lives than action would. 

The events in Syria are truly awful, but blaming the RAF for not dropping aid is wrong – it is not something that can be done properly without great risk to Syrians, to the RAF and could cause long term consequences of a very serious nature indeed if things go wrong.