Learning on the Fly

The devil, as always, is in the details.

The Gripen were due to participate in their first mission over Libya on Thursday but this has now been delayed and test flights have been postponed.

According to the outline plan, the eight aircraft were all due to monitor the UN no-fly zone over the civil-war torn country from Thursday but on arrival at the base they discovered that no fuel was available.

The Sigonella base is designed as a naval air force base, lieutenant colonal Mats Brindsjö, head of the Swedish Air Operation Center, said.

"And US navy aircraft use somewhat different fuel to that which we use in our planes," he told the TT news agency.

The US fuel variety is known as JP5 while the Gripen normally fly using a civil fuel known as Jet A1.

"Certain additives and some equipment are needed to change JP5 to Jet A1 in a controlled manner. This equipment is not as yet in place down there and in the time being we are trying to buy the fuel from a place off the base."

"This really should have been investigated as soon as we arrived, but we didn't have time with all the other details," Mats Brindsjö said, adding that he expects the Gripen aircraft to be in the air on Friday.

This is part of the process of learning to work with other countries - and how each country is different. The Swedes do not forward deploy the Gripen very often, so they are learning a lot of lessons here. All in all it is better this is being worked out in low intensity operations like Libya rather than in a high intensity operation where the grounding of forward deployed Gripen aircraft could have cost lives. Previous experience would have been useful. This kind of event happens because Sweden is not a member of NATO, so the US and Sweden do not share practical experience in cooperative international operations where this type of problem would have been realized previously.

This oversight is not only a lesson learned for Sweden. It highlights the necessity for the US Navy to continue to think broadly about cooperative relationships in ways that extend beyond ships at sea. Examples like operational coordination between the US Navy and Swedish Air Force might also manifest itself in the future with the necessity for US Naval airpower to be able to communicate with other nations ground forces.

Indeed, for any future offshore strategic balance approach to work for the United States in low intensity "humanitarian" operations similar to Libya, the necessity to communicate Navy and Marine airpower with ground forces of another country might make the difference in success and failure. That is a really high bar, and one that only works through exercise, training, and experience.