‘You Wouldn’t Use It for a Purely Humanitarian Drop’

A US C-17 dropping food over Haiti (photo: James L. Harper Jr./USAF)

(photo: James L. Harper Jr./USAF)

David Swanson, of WarIsACrime.org and the group RootsAction, had a disturbing catch (American Herald Tribune, 3/19/16). Noting that there are reportedly areas of Syria where people are starving because UN air drops of food are missing their targets, so that food is damaged or lost, Swanson points to an interview with an unnamed US Air Force expert in the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine (3/9/16).

The expert explains that “for high-altitude, high-accuracy drops, the US military uses a technology known as the Joint Precision Airdrop System,” which includes “a sort of probe that’s dropped prior to the cargo to take readings of wind speed and direction.” That’s important, because something dropped from 20,000 feet takes five or six minutes to reach the ground, and is blown by the wind during that time.

Those systems “cost about $60,000 apiece, and usually must be recovered on the ground after a drop. ‘You wouldn’t use it for a purely humanitarian drop,’” the Air Force officer explains.

Think about that. The same US military that routinely assures us of the pinpoint accuracy of its cruise missiles, each of which cost $1.4 million, and whose 2017 budget request will include $71 billion for “military research,” says it simply can’t drop food within a mile of its target—not without spending more money than can be justified by merely saving human lives.

Of course, what’s most remarkable is that no one besides Swanson appears to have found this frank, illuminating admission about the relative value of saving and killing people all that remarkable.


Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the host of CounterSpin.

This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.