A U.S. Air Force C-130 recently dropped supplies to several hundred Mali soldiers and civilians besieged in the town of Tessalit, near the Algerian border. Tessalit has been under siege by Tuareg rebels for several weeks, and a relief force of Mali troops was recently rebuffed before it could reach the town.
The Strategypage post describes our use of GPS-guided parachutes, assuming that is what we used.
I wondered if we could do this in Syria. Still, Tuareg rebels lack anything that could hit a C-130 flying high enough. Over Syria we'd need to drop much farther away from the drop zone to avoid Syrian air defense missiles.
But the morale effect of getting resupplied from America with such an amazing procedure has to be pretty positive.
