9 minute read
Defence - Darren Olivier
Darren Olivier
AFRICA ADOPTS SHARED STRATEGIC LIFT
Advertisement
For the twenty years since its founding in 2001, the
African Union (AU) has sought to develop a rapid
response African-led peacekeeping capability, the
African Standby Force (ASF), that would prevent
genocides, defeat nascent insurgencies and assist in
disaster response.
FROM the very beginning it was recognised that strategic airlift would be a critical enabler for deployments to occur in time, and that Africa’s relative lack of suitable aircraft would present a problem. The ASF’s approach to solving this, the Strategic Lift Capability (SLC), was recently declared operational, just in time to help with the continent’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This month’s column explores the background of this concept, and whether we can really consider the need to have been met.
It has long been understood that, once a crisis reaches the point where intervention is necessary to prevent large scale loss of life, that the speed of deployment of relief forces is the most crucial factor. A smaller force deployed and active within days will be more effective than a much larger force that takes many weeks or months to deploy and begin operations.
This is especially true for what the ASF’s founding policy framework terms ‘Scenario 6’ interventions, defined as a response to a time-critical situation such as a genocide. As such, the AU’s requirement for its Rapid Response Capability meant to perform Scenario 6 interventions specified that one of the ASF’s regional brigades should be able to deploy within no more than 14 days after receiving the order, and should be self-sustaining for at least 90 days thereafter.
This need for haste in responding to genocide or similar crises was most vividly illustrated by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which over 800,000 people were murdered in only 100 days. Many studies in the years since have argued that a large enough intervention by regional or
international military forces in the first two weeks would have prevented the vast majority of killings.
The problem is that deploying a battalion or brigade-sized force in just 14 days takes a huge amount of airlift, requiring dozens of C-130 sized, or larger aircraft, flying hundreds of sorties to airlift the personnel and their associated vehicles and other equipment.
A typical South African National Defence Force (SANDF) motorised infantry battalion for instance, consists of approximately 800 soldiers, 90-100 lightly armoured personnel carriers, and another 80-90 soft-skinned logistics vehicles. Even light battalions, such as paratrooper and air assault regiments, need support vehicles such as the 60+ air-droppable Gecko 8x8 light logistics vehicles assigned to 1 Parachute Regiment.
The US military has previously calculated that a typical US Army airborne infantry battalion of 730 troops and at least 70 vehicles requires a minimum of 64 C-130s for a single-sortie air drop or air land mission. This can obviously be substantially reduced at the cost of deployment time, but only down to a certain reasonable limit beyond which the number of sorties
on a small fleet of aircraft becomes unmanageable and takes too long.
Another example of the immense airlift requirements for moving an intervention force around and which should be a cautionary tale for the African Standby Force is the 2003 European Union-led deployment of an intervention force in Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dubbed Operation Artemis, the mission requirements were to deliver 1,200 troops, over 2,500 tons of equipment, and over 270 vehicles from airfields in western Europe to the austere airstrip at Bunia some 6,000 km away.
The first problem the Artemis planners faced was that Bunia’s airfield could not support large and heavy cargo aircraft without months of preparation work, making it only suitable for C-130-sized aircraft in the time allocated for the operation. This meant that the large aircraft allocated to the mission (2 C-135s, 2 C-17s, 2-3 chartered An-124s, and 2-3 A310s) had to fly first to Entebbe in Uganda and offload there, after which C-130s and C-160s would ferry troops and cargo to Bunia 300 km and 50 minutes comprising 50 An-124 sorties, 20 each for the A310s and C-17s, and 72 for the C-130/C-160s between Europe and Entebbe point. Even with the A400M’s remarkable capabilities their analysis determined that at least 10 A400Ms and 227 rotations would
and then over 260 C-130/C-160 rotations between Entebbe and Bunia. Up to eight C-130/C-160 rotations were required to unload each An-124.
Worse, the total deployment took nearly 40 days, far longer than the ASF’s selfimposed deadline of 14 days which it hoped to achieve despite having nowhere near the same number of available aircraft.
A few years ago Airbus Military be required, for a minimum deployment time of 23 days.
The USAF C-17s - seen here departing Entebbe - could not operate into Bunia in the DRC.
flight time away. The vehicles too large or heavy to fit inside C-130s and C-160s had to drive a 640 km, 16-hour journey on poor roads from Entebbe to Bunia.
It took a whopping 400 rotations to move this relatively small force to Bunia, presented an analysis of Operation Artemis as part of their A400M marketing effort, showing how the operation might have been conducted using A400Ms only, in order to fly directly into Bunia and avoid the use of Entebbe as an intermediate staging manage airlift contributed by member countries, short-term contracted airlift from the private sector, sealift and overland movement.
To be fair, the AU’s planners have recognised the inherent limitations the continent faces on airlift and have sought to ameliorate it somewhat with ideas to pre-position equipment in various regional logistics bases. It has also established the Continental Movement Coordination Centre (CMCC), intended to oversee and
The CMCC has received pledges from each AU regional grouping for airlift
A Nigerian Air Force C-130H was successfully used by the Eastern African Standby Force.
assets, but the numbers committed are low. Cameroon, Angola, Algeria, South Africa and Uganda have all offered effectively just one aircraft each with limited availability. There is simply no capacity to offer more. South Africa may have nine C-130s on paper, as an example, but under current funding can only keep two active and on the flight line at any given time. That’s not enough for its own needs, let alone spare capacity for AU missions. The rest of the continent is not much better.
To be clear there have been some successes. During Amani Africa II, the 2015 exercise hosted in South Africa to test the level of the ASF’s readiness, the CMCC successfully negotiated the use of a Nigerian Air Force C-130H to transport a company of troops from the Eastern African Standby Force. In the same exercise, Angola and Algeria self-deployed their forces using their own airlift. In the week that this column was written, the AU used a Cameroonian C-130H to move personnel from the African Centre for Disease Control to COVID-19 hotspots on the continent. These are all encouraging steps, but it’s questionable whether it’s enough to meet the rapid deployment requirements that the ASF has been created to meet.
For one, the CMCC’s current approach of looking to charter aircraft only when needed is cost-effective but will probably take too long in a crisis. There are also just too few air forces with available transport aircraft to be able to undertake an Operation Artemis scale airlift, let alone to do so within 14 days.
There are potential options to improve this situation without the need for a huge increase in funding. One approach could be to mimic what NATO and the EU have done with the Strategic Airlift International Solution (SALIS) which involves prepurchasing a set number of short-notice hours on a fleet of chartered An-124s. By pre-purchasing hours NATO and the EU are assured availability without having to wait for aircraft to become available. Obviously, the AU could not afford the same scale as NATO and the EU, but even 100 hours a year would make a substantial difference. It may also look at joining SALIS, to benefit from the economies of scale already present in that operation.
Another approach worth considering is the compensation of countries for the use of their air assets, similar to the way the Movement Coordination Centre Europe (MCCE) provides a pool of aircraft by purchasing space and flying hours from member nations. This not only improves availability but makes it more viable for countries to pledge those assets in the first place.
Finally, although continental integration might not be far enough along for this, the AU should give serious consideration to acquiring 4-6 A400M airlifters and operating them as a shared resource accessible by all partner nations according to assessed need or payment. This is similar to what NATO has done with its Strategic Airlift Capability (SAC), in which 12 partner nations committed to buying and operating 3 C-17 airlifters as a shared resource for 30 years. The SAC C-17s are based at Pápa Air Force Base in Hungary and carry Hungarian Air Force registration and markings, but Hungary has no special control over them. A similar approach with A400Ms based somewhere like Entebbe would provide a huge boost to the ASF’s airlift capabilities at a shared cost that would be affordable for the AU’s partner nations even as it’s too costly for any one of them.
If the continent is serious about giving the African Standby Force real rapid deployment capabilities, it needs more than just member pledges of single airlifters and a database of charter operators.
MAINTENANCE
