USAF C-130s had to be used from Entebbe to Bunia for Operation Artemis.
Defence D arren O livier
AFRICA ADOPTS SHARED STRATEGIC LIFT For the twenty years since its founding in 2001, the African Union (AU) has sought to develop a rapidresponse African-led peacekeeping capability, the African Standby Force (ASF), that would prevent genocides, defeat nascent insurgencies and assist in disaster response.
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ROM 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
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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
