2.13: Not So New Math
After the Turkish incursion settled down into another stalemate, the coalition had to reset their Syrian footprint. We’d left Manbij entirely as well as most of the western portion of Northeast Syria. Camps we’d been relying on for the last few years were formally back in Syrian regime territory instead of under the administration of the SDF.1 As we relooked security and logistics in the region, one thing had an outsized impact on the future operations in Syria: our MEDEVAC coverage.2
For those unfamiliar, MEDEVAC coverage is how far the helicopters can fly, pick up a patient, and make it back to their airfield. It’s a bit less than how far they can fly on half-a-tank of gas. This is because if the helicopter uses all its gas getting to you, it stops being your savior and starts being your problem. Similarly, if they run out of gas halfway back, they’ve just complicated your medical issues, potentially terminally.
When we finished the shuffle in Northeast Syria, the loss of two of the largest camps and their fuel depots created significant challenges to the MEDEVAC coverage for the ones we’d retained. If you can’t medically support a camp, it’s not long for this world. Without some changes we would need to shutter them, which could cost even more of our footprint.
The aviation brigade tracks all this data, but, like too many organizations across the army, that data gets flattened out to fit onto a PowerPoint slide. You’ll see slides depicting camps with perfect circles ringing them to show the limit of flight. It’s no longer geo-rectified data, but instead just some staff officer’s swag; just good enough to present in a meeting. These slides do more than just strip the math and data away. They lead to people thinking MEDEVAC coverage only comes in circles.
Except circles aren’t the only shape you can draw on the map. You can also draw an ellipse around two camps. An ellipse has the same area as its corresponding circle, and thus the same flight coverage. Only now it’s squished out along one axis a bit, eking you out more distance. You take off at one camp and land at another.
To stave off shuttering more camps, my air officer and I sat down and started working out the math for ellipses in Syria. Step one was refreshing on geometry I hadn’t used since high school. I had to relearn what foci and locus and eccentricity meant; but after a day of work, we had an excel tool that would produce a geo-rectified KMZ of the possible ellipses for every camp in Syria. Just punch in the grids and let it do the math for you. It’d also generate its own KMZ overlay for Google Earth that showed the coverage, this time geo-rectified.
We sent the KMZ to the aviation brigade headquarters, who reported back that our coverage maps were wrong. Since I almost failed out of Michigan State because of math, I was quick to offer up that I might have made a mistake somewhere. We sent them all our data and formulas and offered to fix anything they found wrong. A day later they replied we were, in fact, correct. The math checked out.
It’s a tired reprieve at this point, but PowerPoint is a horrible way to depict data. And yet it is the default tool for almost every army staff, and every army use case. Worse than what it does to data though, PowerPoint constrains the imagination.
There was nothing revolutionary about the math we did. Euclid could have done it over 2,000 years ago (back when MEDEVAC was hard). So could your average high school student. By treating the information available to us as data, we could do more than a PowerPoint slide. In this case it allowed us to keep open camps that were key to supporting operations.
Syrian Democratic Forces, the local population of Northeast Syria that had, with some coalition support, crippled the Islamic State. While many were Kurdish, there were also other local tribes who joined their efforts to purge Syria of ISIS and to rebuild in the aftermath.
Medical Evacuation. Transporting wounded from their place of injury to a treatment facility.