The Quest for Relevant Air Power

304 │ Swedish Air Force
around the world, mostly for the International Committee of the
Red Cross and the UN. The first major relief operations were conducted
by the SwAF transport unit at the formal request of the
Red Cross in Ethiopia, when the country was struck by successive
famine disasters in 1985 and 1988. 135 The task of the SwAF transport
unit was to provide intratheatre airlift for delivering food and
aid packages from the ports to the more remote and mountainous
regions of the country. 136 The SwAF transport unit also supported
the UN Transition Assistance Group mission in Namibia in 1989.
Moreover, throughout the 1980s, Swedish Hercules aircraft resupplied
Swedish UN contingents in Cyprus and Lebanon. 137
The first significant troop and materiel deployment supported
by the air transport unit in the post–Cold War era occurred during
Desert Storm, when Swedish C-130s airlifted a Swedish field
hospital with 500 staff from Sweden over Cyprus to Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia. The operation lasted three weeks and pushed the organisation,
a total of eight aircraft and approximately 150 personnel, to
its limits. A major lesson learned was to keep enough spare parts
in storage. In 1993 the transport unit again transported a Swedish
field hospital to Mogadishu. 138
Soon after Desert Storm, the Swedish transport unit again became
involved in a major operation. In mid-1992, one Swedish
C-130 transport aircraft, based at Zagreb International Airport in
Croatia, was contributing to the UN air bridge to Sarajevo from
the very beginning of the operation. Yet when it became known
that the warring parties tracked transport planes with air defence
radars, and after the Swedish C-130 Hercules came under mortar
fire at the airport of Sarajevo, it was decided to withdraw the
Swedish contingent after less than two months of operations and
prior to the shootdown of an Italian aircraft on 3 September 1992.
After its C-130 Hercules fleet had been retrofitted with self-defence
systems, the SwAF rejoined the airlift effort in 1994, operating
from Ancona, Italy. Whereas in 1992 the SwAF detachment had to
rely upon Canadian intelligence, a Swedish intelligence officer actively
contributed to the intelligence gathering process in 1994.
Besides supply sorties, the Swedish unit also conducted medical
evacuation missions. 139
In the post–Cold War era, the Swedish air transport unit has
also facilitated Swedish power projection. In this task, the C-130