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Should the US Air Force Bomb Forest Fires? (popularmechanics.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Earlier this summer, the Swedish Air Force dropped a laser-guided bomb on a forest fire to help suppress the flames. Now there's a proposal for the United States to do the same, using the might of the U.S. Air Force to fight America's raging forest fires via bombs and sonic booms. F-15 Strike Eagle Weapon System Officer Mike Benitez, writing in War on the Rocks, proposes using B-1 bombers stuffed to the gills with bombs to battle wildfires on the American homefront. The idea here is to snuff out fires the way you'd blow out birthday candles at the base. In Sweden, the shockwave from a single bomb snuffed out flames within a 100-yard radius of the impact point. So, Benitez reasons, why not load up a heavy strategic bomber with up to 84 bombs and do some serious firefighting?
Benitez chose the B-1 for his hypothetical scenario not only because of its bomb-carrying capability, but for the same reason the heavy bomber became a close air support platform of choice in Afghanistan: its long range translated into persistence over the battlefield, enabling the big bomber to hang around above friendly forces and bomb the Taliban for hours. The B-1 could do donuts in the skies over a wildfire as firefighters on the ground work out the best way to tackle it. The B-1 wouldn't carry just any bomb, either, but ordinance that was designed for firefighting. Most bombs use a steel casing that fragments into deadly shrapnel, but this would be unnecessary (and dangerous) when fighting fires. A firefighting bomb would use a combustible casing that would disintegrate on impact. Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
Benitez chose the B-1 for his hypothetical scenario not only because of its bomb-carrying capability, but for the same reason the heavy bomber became a close air support platform of choice in Afghanistan: its long range translated into persistence over the battlefield, enabling the big bomber to hang around above friendly forces and bomb the Taliban for hours. The B-1 could do donuts in the skies over a wildfire as firefighters on the ground work out the best way to tackle it. The B-1 wouldn't carry just any bomb, either, but ordinance that was designed for firefighting. Most bombs use a steel casing that fragments into deadly shrapnel, but this would be unnecessary (and dangerous) when fighting fires. A firefighting bomb would use a combustible casing that would disintegrate on impact. Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
This is how they turned out some of the oil fires in Kuwait after Gulf War One. They packed barrels full of C4 and suffocated the fires out by displacing the oil as fuel with explosives to choke off the fire.
Forest fires have much more spread, so you would need something like a MOAB (Massive Ordinance Air Blast) or several of them strategically aimed and timed to detonate at the same time around the fire to quench it.
I thought a better solution would be to basically bulldoze the hills that are on fire with mountain-mover equipment. The large bucket in front of a huge tracked vehicle would smash the combustibles under the ground and stop the fire.
Wikipedia is illegitimate. "History" isn't required, but even there you are wrong. These fires have a probability of occurring in a given area (based on observed past, i.e. history), and that probability has been elevated due to climate change and that change has been verified by observed increased frequency in wildfires in disparates areas with the same climate. You know, statistical analysis? Time series analysis? Do you know what these words mean?
I was under the impression that forest fires are natural in a healthy forest, and in fact some trees need forest fires to germinate properly (the cones are heavy with resin, the heat of the fire causes the cone to fully mature and then go to seed after the fire has passed.)
Also, by preventing fires the deadwood that would normally be burned accumulates, to the point where when a fire inevitably starts you get a torrentially large fire instead of the typical small fire (of a healthy forest).
And so one way to prevent large forest fires is to frequently start smaller fires, to clear out the accumulating deadwood.
I'm not a forestry expert, so I'm asking the question: has that explanation (and rationale) been disproven?
If it hasn't, is there some reason why smaller "management" fires aren't periodically set?
Is this a California thing?
I think people don't quite understand the magnitude of some of these fires. A few years ago I was on the ride out team for a charitable organization that operates a camp in the wilderness. On the day of our fire evacuation, the fire for into an old burn and proceeded to consume some 5000 acres in under 2 hours. The fire sent a plume some 50,000 feet into the air. We were about 6 miles away and the best way I have to describe this is watching a nuclear bomb going off in slow motion. It was the most awe inspiring spectacle I have ever seen.
Anyhow, the only thing that the Airforce could really help with in these situations would be for the Air Mobility Command to turn some of their transport fleet into VLATs (Very Large Air Tankers) to help protect structures and people, and guide the fire. Directly attacking it is futile.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The fire would go out but only for a while. It might work if there were firefighters ready to place water on what remains after a bomb is dropped. But with all the built up heat and partially burned wood, a normal forest fire would just re-ignite after a short period of time. After it re-ignites, it would quickly grow to be the same size it was before the bomb.
This sounds too dangerous and not nearly effective enough to warrant doing. The one possible exception is is there was critical infrastructure about to be burned that had to be saved. Some bombs with a lot of firefighters could be a good combination. But realistically, the firefighters could also do it without the bombs.
Fires are natural part of the ecological cycle. Developed countries putting them out early for nearly 100 years is what's causing more fires to occur - the buildup of vegetation (dead and live) means more fuel for new fires. The ecosystem needs fires every now and then to clear out dead brush (release the elements and chemical compounds they contain back into the ecosystem), and clear room for new plant growth (which supports different species than old growth). If you're not gonna let loggers thin out those trees, then you gotta let fires thin them every now and then.
Forest fires happened for hundreds of millions of years before man arrived on the scene, and they never burned the entire Earth to a cinder. Leave them alone to do their thing. If they're threatening buildings, that's a sign that you need to build a bigger firebreak around those buildings. Not a reason to put the fire out.
No.... ignorance, stupidity, tribal mentality, and worthless fucking liars...made the orange asshat president.
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Also, the Swedes didn't bomb the fire because it was the best way to deal with fire. They did it because there might have been undetonated shells in the area, making it dangerous to fight the fire with traditional means.
The main reason I can see to use this method in the US is not because it is a practical or efficient method but because it is harder to get the budget for regular firefighters.
You can probably bomb all the fires in California at the cost of a rounding error in the F-35-program. (Wikipedia shows 4 significant digits which means that you can sneak in a couple of hundred million dollar worth of bombing without anyone noticing.)
The plane the Swedes used is designed to have cheap maintenance and has an operating cost that's about a fifth of the F-35 so you can get four of those and have them running missions 24/7 over California all year without making a dent in the F-35 budget.
Concussion bombs could be a fast way of containing a wildfire, but are any currently available military bombs suitable for this application? The MOAB is an effective large airburst weapon, but they cost $16 million each and the USAF has a total of about twenty in inventory. We may be better off developing a special low-cost airburst device specifically for the job. These could be stored on military bases near fire-prone areas.