Schneier on Security

Roger • May 13, 2007 7:54 AM

This is an interesting article, but to put some perspective on it:

• Sri Lanka is a developing country which has a fairly capable air force for its size and wealth but certainly does NOT have a large “High-Tech” air force. They may have 100 planes, but only a dozen or so are combat jet aircraft, and most of those are optimised for ground attack, and more than 30 years old (which makes them older than the Zlin trainers used by LTTE!) If the entire combat jet force was dedicated to 24 hr CAP, they could just about cover one city. Most of their air force is a mix of helicopters and civilian and military transports, with the single largest supplier being China. Many of these aircraft are early 1960s vintage.

• Like nearly all countries outside those once expecting to fight World War 3 (Russia, Europe, USA), Sri Lanka probably does not have all or even most of its airspace monitored by military air defence radar. (Civilian air traffic control radar has very limited ability to detect small aircraft if they switch off their transponders.) Sri Lankan radar apparently did detect the intruders, but raised the alert too late for an effective response.

• In fact, there are reports that some military units detected the planes up to an hour before the attack, but ignored them because they didn’t realise the LTTE had any aircraft (this despite the confirmed existence of at least one LTTE helicopter.)

• The Zlin Z-142 (and later Z-143, which the LTTE is also believed to have) is not exactly a state of the art combat plane but it also isn’t all that “Low-Tech”. It is a military trainer originally designed to train Eastern Bloc air forces and still in use by at least 3 national air forces. Among other things it was used to teach night flying. Something the Sri Lankan’s might like to consider is that it is also considered to be a very effective glider tow-plane.

• There’s nothing particularly novel about using modified trainers as ground attack aircraft. Nearly everyone has done it including the USAF (which has also operated piston engined ground attack aircraft as recently as 1972, and received complaints when they retired them as they were allegedly more effective than the jets that replaced them.) In fact, since modern air forces seem strangely reluctant to spend much development money on dedicated ground attack aircraft designs, worldwide it looks like most ground attack aircraft are of this form (it may not actually be most, but certainly a very large share.)

• BTW, the phrase “Flying hundreds of kilometres from secret jungle airstrips” is a certain amount of dramatic licence and hyperbole. For one thing start, little of the part of Sri Lanka controlled by the LTTE is jungle covered. Most of it is in fact densely populated agricultural land, but the uncultiavted areas are mainly dry scrubland and even cactus forest. The ability to avoid having your airfields destroyed probably consists in not having any, but launching your planes from any suitably flat field. Interestingly, the LTTE tried to build an airstrip there about two years ago, but it was detected and destroyed. Also, the distance from Colombo to the remotest part of Sri Lanka is under three hundred kilometres, so it might be “hundreds of kilometres” but only just, which isn’t a particularly long flight for any powered aircraft. More to the point, the phrase implicitly makes the assumption that the aircraft are attacking from somewhere in Sri Lanka. In fact it is just as plausible that they flew from India. The Indian government officially supports the Sri Lankan government and regards LTTE as a terrorist organisation (especially after LTTE assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) but the true relationship is more complex than that, and India has actually intervened on the behalf of the Tamils in the past. In particular in the Tamil dominated region of India adjacent to Sri Lanka the LTTE enjoy widespread support. An ordinary civilian air strip in Tamil Nadu, India, would be the more logical place from which to launch an air attack of this nature.

• Finally, apart from propaganda value (which was enormous), these attacks were not really all that effective. The total effect so far has been nine deaths, a 1 hr blackout, and zero aircraft destroyed. This contrasts sharply with a genuine “Low Tech” attack on one of the same airfields in July 2001 when a commando raid destroyed 3 military jets, a helicopter gunship and nine other aircraft.