FEATURE ARTICLE

March 2006

Insurgency Tactics Test Helicopters' Staying Power

By Sandra I. Erwin

Technology so far has proven to be of little use in protecting Army helicopters from the ravages of small arms and rocket propelled grenades, military and civilian experts contend.

The Army has spent nearly $2 billion outfitting helicopters with high-tech sensors and flares that help foil shoulder-launched missiles, but none of these devices can prevent choppers from getting shot out of the sky by rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, which are among the preferred weapons of Iraq’s insurgency.

“The longer we stay in this conflict, the greater the ability of the insurgents to counter our countermeasures with their technology,” says Steve Greer, a retired Army command sergeant major, and professor of unconventional warfare at American Military University.

Of the last three helicopters downed in Iraq, one, a Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance aircraft, was shot down by small-arms fire.

The latest war-emergency funding request by the Defense Department includes funds to replace at least 100 helicopters that were lost to crashes, enemy fire and training mishaps last year.

More than 400 helicopters operate in Iraq today, according to unofficial accounts.

While a number of technologies have been proven successful in deflecting shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles, none exists today that can protect from RPGs or standard rifle rounds, Greer says. “There’s no way to defend from small-arms fire other than visual recognition and maneuvering away from the line of fire.”

RPGs and small-arms rounds fall under the category of “dumb munitions,” which are unguided and far more difficult to counter with technical solutions, says Kernan Chaisson, senior electronics analyst at Forecast International, a market intelligence firm.

“You have high-tech protective equipment, but sometimes it doesn’t do you any good,” he says. “It’s a real predicament for aviation. The threat they face, it’s hard to do anything about.”

In environments such as Iraq, the best protection an aviator has is his own dexterity, says Lou Hennies, a retired major general who commanded the U.S. Army Safety Center. “You have to use pure skill and cunning when you are dealing with this.”

Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Mundt, director of Army aviation, notes that the service revamped its pilot training program and is emphasizing skills to circumvent enemy fire. Tactics such as “running gunfire” and “diving fire” used to be standard practice in Vietnam, but faded from the flight-school curriculum in favor of “hovering” tactics that were apt for the Cold War, but not for urban guerilla warfare.

“We got into hover tactics and found out it doesn’t work in this environment,” Mundt told National Defense.

In special operations units, pilots often employ suppressive fire — such as the Gatling machine gun — as a countermeasure.

The Army builds its aircraft with inherent ballistic tolerance so they can survive small-arms hits to the airframe and, as has been the case in many combat situations, to allow the pilot to land the aircraft even when it’s been greatly damaged, Mundt says.

New helicopters also are built with self-healing fuel tanks and fiber-optic technology that minimizes the reliance on cables in the flight controls, which makes the gearboxes less vulnerable.

Despite these improvements, determined enemies eventually figure out the helicopter’s weak points, Chaisson says. “You can make helicopters more ballistically tolerant; that protects the cabin. But if the rotor, tail or other vital areas are hit, you have a real problem.”

When Iraq’s insurgents began targeting truck convoys, the Army rushed to shield its trucks with steel plates. In the aviation world, it’s not that simple, says Hennies. “You can’t up-armor a helicopter.” The added weight likely would keep the aircraft from flying.

As the situation in Iraq gets progressively more dangerous for helicopters to operate, the Army’s best option is to reassign as many reconnaissance and surveillance missions as possible to unmanned aircraft, Greer says.

“This war has changed the way we view Army air and how it’s applied to the battlefield,” Greer says. “We are seeing that we don’t need a piloted aircraft to conduct the same interdiction or time sensitive targeting missions … UAVs provide a better capability to loiter versus a Kiowa or Apache.”

The Army, he says, should “keep pilots out of the air and put technology in the air so we can see.”

The Army UAV fleet already has dramatically grown in Iraq — including hand-launched drones as well as larger tactical UAVs equipped with sophisticated sensor packages. Among the unpiloted aircraft currently in operation are the four-and-a-half-pound Raven reconnaissance aircraft, and the brigade-level Shadow 200 and Hunter tactical UAVs.

For much more sophisticated intelligence collection and target-hunting missions, the Army will begin buying a new division-level UAV. This so-called “extended range multipurpose” UAV still is in development and will not be produced until 2008, Mundt says. The ERMP aircraft is similar to the Air Force Predator and potentially could become a joint Army-Air Force program, as both services are in negotiations to buy a common aircraft and other components.

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