by DAVID AXE

On Aug. 10, 2011, four Brazilian air force A-29 Super Tucano attack planes took off from Campo Grande in southern Brazil, flew to a spot 45 miles northeast of São Gabriel da Cachoeira and together dropped eight 500-pound bombs.

Their target: a dirt airstrip, hacked out of the lush rainforest canopy, suspected of belonging to a drug cartel or one of the many smuggling outfits that are steadily pilfering the Amazon rainforest of its minerals and wildlife.

The bombs exploded in thunderclaps of noise, smoke and earth. Circling the airstrip, the propeller-driven A-29s’ two-person crews confirmed that their bombs had cratered the strip and rendered it useless, for now.

The traffickers had other airfields—and might even repair the one outside São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Battling criminals in the Amazon is a “war without end,” in the words of Al Jazeera blogger Gabriel Elizondo. But it’s a war without end that the Brazilian air force is capable of waging.

Overlooked by most foreign observers focused on conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia and on the high-tech arms race between the U.S. and China in the Western Pacific, Brazil has quietly marshaled one of the world’s most impressive air forces—and unleashed it on criminal groups threatening the planet’s most ecologically important forest biome.

The Força Aérea Brasileira, “FAB” for short, is all the more impressive because of its unique structure—combining ultra-sophisticated surveillance and communications systems with tried-and-true 1970s-vintage jet fighters plus turboprops like the A-29 that, despite being only a few years old, at least look like something out of World War II.

And the FAB is also notable for being cheap. In an age when many air forces insist on buying increasingly expensive warplanes and therefore must buy fewer and fewer of them—in effect, unilaterally disarming—Brazil’s air arm thrives on a very small budget of just a few billion dollars a year. That’s possible because its leaders eschew whole categories of technology that, while appealing, aren’t actually helpful in South America.

But what’s most inspiring is why Brazil organizes its air force the way it does and buys the equipment that it does. More than most air arms, the FAB is shaped by an apparent clear sense among its civilian and military leaders of what their air force is actually for.

In a word: strategy. When it comes to air power, Brazil seems to have one. And in practice, that strategy translates directly into bombs, dropped by turboprop attack planes, exploding on some smugglers’ airstrip amid the richest forest ecosystem on the planet.