Unmanned Aerial Re-supply

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I think "Flying Over the Horizon" is an excellent article. I think using unmanned vehicles for resupply or logistics is long overdue in the counterinsurgency environment. The enemy's advantages in counterinsurgency include: wear no uniform to appear to be an ordinary citizen, no ethical limits on who you kill, the ability to put IEDs/EFPs on any road etc. However, in this asymmetric war, one of our advantages is complete air dominance. I would define air dominance in Iraq as the ability of a WWI biplane to fly anywhere with impunity as long as it stayed 5,000 feet AGL during the day and 1,000 feet AGL at night. In other words, we don't need an F-15 or C-17 to do every task. This has been shown by our current stable of slow flying UAVs. What the concept of carrying supplies by UAV does is take advantage of this asymmetric advantage.

The number one advantage of UAV resupply or UAL is that no Marine life is put at risk. The number one statistic that the American public looks at is the number of American dead. It is not cost. Just the TARP financial bailout was more than the cumulative costs of both the Iraq and Afghan wars. The stimulus package and other actions by the FED are triple the cumulative war costs. This should be borne in mind because carrying supplies by air is always going to be more expensive than by ground.

A good example of aerial resupply during a counterinsurgency was Air America's effort in Laos. America was supporting the Hmong. These hill people lived on hilltops while the Communists controlled the valleys. Rather than supply the Hmong by truck and be ambushed, Air America supplied them by air with STOL aircraft such as the Pilatus Porter. These aircraft were landed on rough 600 foot airstrips. Air America did the whole job with about 50 used aircraft of different types.

The Marines are first looking at using a UAV helicopter for resupply. This is great. It can go anywhere. I think once the concept of UAV resupply is demonstrated, its popularity will skyrocket just as with using UAVs for recon.

The next step should be to look at a STOL UAV for resupply. For example, you could just buy a used Pilatus Porter and configure it for UAV flight. I think it might be possible to put in supplies weighing between 2,000 to 3,000 lbs. I did some rough back of the envelope calculations that showed 3 Pilatus Porters making 11 short roundtrips at night could transport 100,000 lbs. Before you scoff at that number, let's just recall that in the Berlin Airlift of 1948, about 200 C-54s supplied a city of 2,000,000 people for a year. Air resupply can work.

Let me just switch back to Air America and describe one very clever thing they did. Sometimes they weren't able to land so they dropped their supplies out of their airplane. However, they didn't use parachutes. For example, they just dropped bags of rice from a height of a couple hundred feet AGL. Of course, they knew their 40 lb bag of rice was going to break when it hit the ground. So they cleverly put a second, larger bag around it. Sure enough, the inside bag of rice broke, but the rice was all contained in the larger bag. They did the same type of thing with water. The Marines might even think about testing that out with gasoline. Now the ground in Iraq/Afghanistan is a lot harder than Laos, but we have better material for bags today.

Again, I think UALs are overdue. I think this concept will be proven. A UAL is not going to replace a truck, but there will be a niche where it is the right logistical vehicle to use.

Bill Thayer
retired aerodynamic engineer and former private pilot