By Jill Laster - Military Times Staff writer
Mobility airmen dropped a record amount of cargo last year in Afghanistan, delivering about 80 million pounds of supplies across the west Asian country.
The annual record marks an increase of about 33 percent over 2010, when mobility airmen dropped about 60 million pounds of cargo to Afghanistan.
"To put that in some historical perspective, in the Korean War we only dropped a little over 30 million pounds total," said Maj. Tom Lankford, Air Mobility Command Combat Tactics Branch chief and director of operations. "We nearly doubled that in 2010, and [this year] we dropped nearly 80 million pounds."
Counterinsurgency plan
Lankford credits the dramatic rise in airdrops since 2005 - the first year Air Mobility Command measured airdrop totals in Afghanistan - to the counterinsurgency strategy and the terrain in Afghanistan.
The decentralized forces called for by the counterinsurgency strategy put troops in locations that are often difficult to reach by convoy.
That - combined with the often-difficult terrain in Afghanistan - has made the ability to conduct airdrops critical, Lankford said.
In fact, he said, about 40 forward-operating bases were supplied by airdrop alone last year.
"As operations have increased, the need for supplies has increased as well," Lankford said. "And when you've got that many FOBs that need to be resupplied by airdrop, it's pretty easy to see why airdrop is such a booming business right now."
Lankford said that he sees the airdrop mission as continuing to increase over the next few years, citing former Defense Secretary Robert Gates' comments that combat forces will be the last to leave the country.
'They're there anyway'
But, he added, the ramped-up airdrop mission hasn't caused any sort of personnel or equipment strain in Afghanistan.
"The aircraft are designed to do it and they're there anyway, so it's not an additional strain," Lankford said.
Airmen dropped about 6.7 million pounds of cargo every month in 2011 - the equivalent weight of about 2,100 Toyota Camrys. The cargo included some sent via the Joint Precision Airdrop System, or JPADS, and the traditional Container Delivery System, or CDS.
JPADS uses parachutes steered by GPS and an onboard computer to land loads in a drop zone.