Flying Paper Tigers

Low ‘n’ slow prop planes can be more effective ground attack weapons
A bit of gallows humour about the fighting in Sri Lanka: As seen by an American War Nerd

Some un-peace-loving people of Sri Lanka have shown the world what you can do with a bit of imagination, a couple of old airplanes and rusty fishing boats, and plenty of that ol’ can-do, will-kill spirit.
The main Tamil insurgent group has been there In my first column I called the LTTE “Terrorists with an Air Force,” and this April the LTTE finally committed its entire AF to the attack! Yes, the skies over the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, darkened as swarms of rebel aircraft swooped in for the kill, hitting the city three times in a row. I love the comment made by one retired Sri Lankan general after the third attack: “One attack is understandable, but there is something wrong when the Air Force is not able to take them out after three attacks!”

Flying relics

What really irked the Sri Lankan armed forces was that the LTTE carried out these attacks using converted Czech prop planes, East Bloc Cessna-type subcompacts called the Zlin Z-143. Here’s something wired: Zlin’s advertising slogan for the Z-143 is that it’s the plane “...for pilots who want more than flying from Point A to Point B.” Such as, I guess, “dropping an incendiary bomb on Point C,” with Point C standing for “Colombo.”
The effectiveness of these cropduster CAS craft is one more nail in the coffin of pure-hardware/hi-tech war diehards. Over and over we keep seeing that these low ‘n’ slow prop planes can be more effective ground attack weapons than the shiny flying dragsters that Top Gun types like to fly.
Take America’s own A-10 Warthog. I remember back when it was in the procurement cycle, the USAF hated the A-10, bad-mouthed it at every chance they got. One fighter jock said, “it’s built to take a lot of hits and boy, is it going to take a lot of hits.” A lot of other pilots just said out loud, “It’s ugly.” The AF wanted to invest in another generation of flying Porsches, and the Army, naturally, tried to drag the money into up-armored choppers, resulting in the AH-64, the Y2K of attack aircraft - all hype, no kills. Little Orphan A-10, the Warthog nobody loved, ended up saving Christmas for everybody, becoming the best CAS aircraft in the world. And I really love the Sri Lankan AF’s explanation for not being able to knock down the rebel planes: They were “too slow” to be intercepted by the AF’s fast, expensive foreign-built fighters. Lord, I knew pilots were snobs, but that’s going a little far even for a fighter jock: “Nope! Those enemy planes are too slow! Not in my contract! And remember, no more brown M&Ms in the officers’ lounge!”

The General’s reaction

Well, you might say, what about all the heavily armed helicopters in the Sri Lankan inventory? They’re slow enough to take on the rebels’ sneaky slow pitch attackers, right? Wrong. The one time the Army scrambled an Mi-24 to intercept incoming LTTE planes, the chopper had to crash-land “due to mechanical failure.”
Are the Sri Lankan officers all Brit-trained, moustached, paunchy dudes who talk like snooty, hungover Monty Python characters? Maybe not? Just take the reaction of Gen. Fonseka, Sri Lankan Army Chief of Staff after an LTTE air strike: “It is a joke! You can drop a bomb from any flying thing! Even tossing a grenade while riding a swing is an ‘air attack’!”
Ah, that’s wonderful. You hear how angry Gen. Fonseka is at these upstarts daring to imitate the big-budget players by claiming an “air attack”? Back in Victorian times, having a Navy made you a ‘playa.’ Now, it’s having an Air Force. That’s what makes the General so mad. It just ain’t fair!
As for his grenade-on-a-swing idea, I wish he’d come up with that back when I was in third grade. That idea would’ve made me drool with joy - drool more than I already was drooling, that is. If only I’d known a swing was an air force! I’d have had my dirtclod cluster munitions sending death from above on the popular kids before homeroom! In a tech sense, he’s right. The LTTE air attacks didn’t do much direct damage. But if there’s one thing I keep trying to teach you metal-head hardware freaks, it’s that the tech sense is the least important aspect of war these days. Look at the bigger picture and you can see that these “militarily insignificant” rebel raids had a huge effect.
Even in terms of damage, the raids were true “force multipliers,” because they got the enemy - the Sri Lankan military - to magnify the damage. Take the third LTTE air attack on April 28, which set fire to an oil storage tank farm in the outskirts of Colombo. Consider the radiating waves of damage the raid caused.

Wasted cooking oil

Direct damage was very minor - a few hundred gallons of oil burned. But the island’s oil suppliers panicked, and as a result supplies of cooking oil stopped for hundreds of thousands of locals.
But the real thing about a wildcat air strike like this is that it sets off all the anti-aircraft batteries surrounding the capital, and THEY do the real damage. You see, unguided AA artillery is one of the worst weapons in the inventory. It dates back to pre-radar days, and it’s really just light art’y firing altitude-fused shells. Somebody hears enemy engines overhead and your battery gets a call to start throwing up flak - throwing it blind, because I’ll guarantee that the average Sri Lankan AA unit does NOT have a radar system capable of finding a low, slow-flying enemy aircraft.
Now, ever wonder what happens to all those thousands of shells the AA is sending up? If you’re lucky, they explode at the set altitude (which is probably thousands of feet above the enemy planes’ altitude if the enemy is using the low ‘n’ slow technique).

Doolittle-type raids

But it’s what happens when those shells don’t explode that really multiplies the effect of the raid. They come down, on the city they’re supposed to be protecting. And here again, you can be lucky or unlucky. If you’re lucky, they come down as duds, and unless you take one on the head they’re just souvenirs (until somebody bumps into one on his scooter next morning, and then it’s the Ultimate Speed Bump). But a lot of these cheap shells (and I’m guessing the Sri Lankan Army went to the bulk bins when they bought their AA shells) explode when they hit the ground. That’s the genius of the Doolittle-type raids: You get the enemy to contribute matching bombs at a rate of about 100:1! You throw down a couple of homemade gravity bombs, and the enemy kicks in thousands of his own! It’s a 3-D version of the old circular firing squad.
Quiz: Next to unguided AA, what’s the most self-destructive technique a city can adopt against air attack?
A: B lackouts. They don’t work the way they’re supposed to, because for God’s sake it’s 2007 and every car on the road has GPS - you really think the enemy pilots can’t tell when they’re over your city, even if it was as blacked-out as Pyongyang on a rainy Tuesday night? Apparently the Sri Lankan authorities haven’t heard about GPS, because they imposed a total blackout on Colombo after the LTTE air raids. Naturally, this had no effect at all on the attacking planes, which dropped their bombs on target anyway. The only effect, and it was a big one, was on every business in the city - total write-off for the duration of the blackout and business way down for days afterward. So here again, the authorities end up turning a tactically ineffective attack into a huge strategic victory. The biggest effect of this is: The fact that it caused huge dents on the line that the LTTE is being on its knees, about to surrender, etc. With a few prop planes and primitive gravity bombs, the LTTE managed to make that claim look a little ridiculous.

(http://www.lakbimanews.lk/lounge/lou4.htm)