Update: 5 Nov 2010

Note:   The Hurricane hitting Haiti now will again leave hundreds of thousands without food or medical care in the tent cities that will be destroyed.   The standard  UN Relief trucks will not be able to deliver supplies in the mud for several weeks.     Again, the children and the weak  will die first  unless the U.S.  military  air drops food packages without parachutes to them, as we should have done last January.    Take a look at the YouTube video link below showing  what we did for millions in Afghanistan in 2001 and again,  this summer, in Pakistan.  You will see  tens of thousands of small  food packages being loaded into large cardboard boxes and dropped without parachutes from hiogh altitude.  The boxes burst open as they drop  and safely scatter the food packages all over any  area.     This  way,  all the people get some food,  not just the strong who hoard the food delivered too late by truck  --  while the children and  the  weak cry and die nearby.

These videos will make you sick if you have a heart and you watched the thousands of children in Haiti  dying in the streets last January. 

THOUSANDS OF REFUGEE CHILDREN  DIE NEEDLESSLY

By Dr. Bill Wattenburg

www.DrBill.us

20 Oct 2010

You can save thousands of children from dying a horrible death.    I can  tell you how  --  but I have to gore a sacred cow.    The UN Relief Agency allows thousands to die needlessly in every major disaster.  The proof is only a click away on the internet  (see links below).   Last January,  they allowed at least 40 thousand  children and the sick to die in the streets of Haiti.  Our warehouses were full with millions of small food packages that could have been air- dropped without parachutes all around those who were  starving  —every day.    Prominent  scientists and I pleaded over KGO Radio with the UN  and Washington officials to  use this  air-drop procedure that was  developed to feed and save  hundreds of thousands of trapped refugees in  Bosnia  (1993) and Afghanistan (2001-2002).    Why not our neighbors a stones throw away in Haiti? 

The air drop idea came to me  in 1991 when we were trying to feed the Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq after the Gulf War.  The refugees were being machine gunned when they rushed to the large pallets of food that we dropped by parachute.   Military  commanders would not believe that the impact velocity of  food packages hitting the ground is limited by air resistance --  no matter how high the planes are flying.   Later, at the  U.C. Livermore National Laboratory,  I dropped  food packages from 5000  feet over a field.   I  proved that you can  air drop most any small package of edible  food   wrapped in plastic that can be found in a supermarket  (my favorites were dried fruit and Granola bars).  These simple experiments were published in the major scientific journals and newspapers around the world. 

"Dropping food packages to refugees without  using parachutes,"Science, April 1993, page 27.   San Francisco Chronicle, 23 March 1993, front page.

In 1993, the Pentagon finally agreed to air drop standard military Meals Ready to Eat (MRE’s) packages over a  major city in Bosnia that was surrounded by the Serbs  (Quaker Oats contributed  100,000  Granola bars for the kids).    Who do you expect will win an Easter egg hunt?   The starving  kids got  as  much food as the generals.   And our planes flew safely above enemy fire at 10,000  feet.  The Pentagon quickly announced that this would be  the new “standard operating procedure” for delivering food to isolated refugees.  Indeed,  in 2001  our military developed “ethnically appropriate”  food bags for starving refugees  in Afghanistan.   Millions of these “food from heaven” lunch bags   were air-drop from high altitude without parachutes over the heads of  hungry families all winter.   The military perfected this operation and proudly named it  “TRIAD.”    Watch the  impressive YouTube  video of the TRIAD operation over Afghanistan at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxwprZekpM  and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlOanfQvrOE.  

This video will make you sick when you see what we did not do for the desperate and dying in Haiti. 

You can read the full history of this operation below

So,  tell me why our government  did  not use TRIAD in Haiti.   Dozens of military cargo planes were only an hour away.    You watched the kids with sad eyes and bloated bellies starving on the evening news.  It  was two weeks before bulk food arrived on  UN Relief  trucks.  Then the strong men hoarded all the 100 lb bags handed out while the weak cried and died nearby. 

I learned that the political advisors to the White House and Pentagon insisted that the UN Relief Agency had to be in charge in Haiti.  That way, the  administration could  not be criticized for less than perfect rescue efforts -- the way it happened to George Bush after the  Katina hurricane destroyed New Orleans.    I personally believe it was more basic than that.   The  people in Haiti were not politically important to the U.S.  They  are poor and black.  I wondered how the president could look at himself in the mirror when he learned what the Pentagon did not do for Haiti that they did for Afghanistan.  Make sure he sees these:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxwprZekpM  and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlOanfQvrOE. 

I have fought the “relief agency” establishment  since 1991.  Their well-paid executives will not air drop food packages to the starving.  The  TRIAD air drop procedure upsets their applecart.  Emergency food can be air dropped a day after a disaster anywhere.   Then the  TV crews have a hard time finding desperate victims.  And,  the  “relief agency”  workers are not the only heroes in town when their trucks finally arrive. 

Tell Washington:  no more of our  tax dollars to the  UN and  relief agencies until they air drop food  in the first few days of every disaster.  At least twenty percent of food they stock with our money should be air drop packages.   Oh, by the way,  did you notice  that the recent flood victims in Pakistan were getting food packages  air-dropped without parachutes  -- food supplied by U.S. military assistance.   Too bad for the Haitian people that they were not helping us fight a war somewhere.  

Bill Wattenburg

www.wattenburg.us

History of the  Operation

Dropping Food Packages to Refugees Without Parachutes (1991-93)

Science, 2 April 1993, page 27.   San Francisco Chronicle, 23 March 1993, front page.  

During the first months of the attack on Afghanistan in the fall of 2001,  there were daily news reports about how the U.S. was dropping millions of  food packages to the Afghan refugees who could not be safely reached by relief agencies on the ground.  Bill Wattenburg was the one who first did the experiments (1991) that proved that our military could and should drop food packages to refugees from high altitude without parachutes when the refugees are in hostile areas.    This is now standard operating procedure for the U.S. military.     

In 1991,  Bill Wattenburg was the first person to demonstrate that small food packages can be safely dropped by cargo planes at high altitude without parachutes, as is now being done to fed the refugees  in Afghanistan.  This  eliminates  the great expense of parachutes and the danger to our flight crews when they  must fly at low altitude to drop large food pallets by parachute over hostile areas.   But relief officials and the U.S.  military would not try his idea for several years -- until a fortunate sequence of events took place.  

Bill Wattenburg was asked by the U.S. Government in April 1991 to be the U.S.  scientific  advisor to the Kuwaiti Government and help them put out the 500 oil well fires in Kuwait.  In the course of this effort,  he received daily reports on the continuing conflict in northern Iraq and  saw films of the Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq being machine gunned by Iraqi soldiers when the refugees flocked to the large food pallets that U.S forces were dropping by parachute in remote areas.   

Wattenburg insisted that small food packages could be dropped from high altitude without the packages breaking up when they hit the ground.  (See San Francisco Chronicle article above.)   He proved that air resistance would limit  the dropping velocity to the same limiting velocity no matter how high the  altitude of the airplane.  Dropping individual packages from  high altitude would also scatter the food over larger areas so that refugees would not be easy targets for hostile soldiers who could target parachutes as they dropped.  Records show that he did his first experiments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in May 1991 by dropping supermarket  food packages from a small plane flying at 5000 ft. altitude (Granola Bars,  cereal boxes,  and plastic wrapped items of all sorts). 

Relief officials would not try his idea in northern Iraq.    But he pestered the Pentagon for the next two years.   In 1993,  our military began dropping food by parachute on large  pallets to refugees in  the war in Bosnia.   Again, our cargo planes had to fly dangerously low over hostile territory.  Hostile  forces were targeting the refugees on the ground when they flocked to the food pallets, or the hostile forces would simply take the food.   Bill Wattenburg told Dr. Jane Hull in the White House National Security Office about his experiments and how well they worked.   She immediately called the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Office in the Pentagon (see Science article above).

The Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the Air Force to try Wattenburg’s idea as soon as possible over Bosnia by dropping thousands of regular military “Meals Ready to Eat”  (MRE’s) packages from high altitude without parachutes by just kicking them out the back of a cargo plane flying at  5,000 feet.    Quaker Oats Company quickly contributed 100,000 sealed granola bars to go along with the MRE’s.   The procedure was an instant success for all.    As Bill predicted,  most of the packages dropped without parachutes were unbroken and the food was scattered over a wide area so that all refugees had an equal chance of picking up the food.   The kids in particular were most successful (as one would expect in any Easter Egg hunt).   

The Pentagon soon announced that this would be the new military standard operating procedure for dropping food to refugees over hostile areas.  (Of course, a Pentagon spokesperson soon  suggested to the press that the military  had been thinking about this idea  for many years.)   

Thousands  of starving refugees can be thankful that Bill Wattenburg took the time to test  one of his seemingly silly ideas one afternoon from a light plane at 5000 ft. over a farmer’s field near Livermore.  

See Also:

• USING THE AIR FORCE TO CONDUCT HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE IN A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT
• AIRDROP OF SUPPLIES AND EQUIPMENT: Humanitarian Airdrop