How do Coalition ground forces keep the enemy on the run in Afghanistan's mountainous terrain where roads are extremely limited (or simply don't exist) and still manage to get much needed supplies?
Airdrop! Airdrop! Airdrop!
I kinda like the snappy style from an official military spokesman.
For six days, from Oct. 25 to Nov. 1, the U.S. Air Force achieved more than a 99% recovery rate for airdropped supplies in Afghanistan. This equates to more than 400,000 pounds of supplies being delivered to Coalition forces.
The high success rate is a combination of factors:
* The Joint Precision Airdrop System and the Improved Container Delivery System, or I-CDS (first used in combat over Iraq on Feb. 16, 2007, delivering six 1,200-pound bundles.)
* Air Force Weather Agency weather models which crunch data from a four-dimensional wind model which is downloaded to a laptop to compute the aircraft's most accurate release point in the air
* Aerial-port Airmen who know the appropriate parachutes to use with different types of airdropped supplies
* Aircrew members who know the impact on the mission of the terrain, the drop zone size, weather and winds, and the threat levels for the area. |