Boston Globe November 16, 2003
17 soldiers die as 2 US helicopters crash in Iraq
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON -- Two US Black Hawk helicopters collided in the Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday, killing at least 17 soldiers and injuring five in in the military's deadliest disaster since the war began.
One US officer at the scene said that one of the helicopters had been struck in its tail by a rocket-propelled grenade, and witnesses said they collided and then went down. If that report is confirmed, the aircraft would be the fourth and fifth US helicopters to have been shot down in Iraq in three weeks.
The two Black Hawks, which can have a crew of four and carry about a dozen passengers, went down yesterday around 6:30 p.m. Iraq time, about an hour after sundown. They belonged to the 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, Ky., which controls northern Iraq.
A statement by US Central Command said one helicopter was carrying a quick reaction force and the other ferrying soldiers on a transport mission. The military did not give an official cause for the crash, but witnesses reported they saw the rotor blades of the two helicopters hit each other near a residential area.
In addition to the dead and wounded, one soldier was unaccounted for, Centcom said.
The crashes occurred hours after Iraq's Governing Council endorsed a US plan for an accelerated turnover of power that would install a sovereign government in Baghdad by July 1. The agreement was hammered out last week amid a surge of attacks on coalition forces by an increasingly audacious insurgency.
One helicopter "hit a house and a few minutes later it went ablaze," Nafe Younis, who lives across the street from where one helicopter crashed, told the Associated Press. There were no reports of ground casualties.
The Army has been upgrading defensive systems on its helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan as they come under fire from insurgents, officials say. The craft are immensely valuable for their speed of movement, but they are also vulnerable, especially to portable weapons.
"Helicopters in a tactical sense are inherently vulnerable to people who are in relatively close line of sight to them because a whole range of hand-held weapons can damage them," Owen Cote of MIT's Security Studies program said before Saturday's crashes. "That's always been true and it's never not going to be true."
The United States has lost three other helicopters to hostile fire in recent weeks, starting with a Black Hawk that was shot down near Tikrit on Oct. 2, injuring one crew member. On Nov. 2, a Chinook troop transport was downed west of Baghdad, killing 16. And on Nov. 7, a Black Hawk on approach to landing near Tikrit was shot down, apparently by a rocket-propelled grenade, killing six.
That day, Les Brownlee, the acting secretary of the Army, issued a memorandum asking the military for a plan to equip all helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan "with the most effective defensive systems we have in development or procurement." Below his signature, Brownlee scrawled, "Like other protection measures, this is URGENT!"
Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, got the memorandum from the Defense Department and released it to the media Thursday night.
As of Friday, the Army had begun moving to upgrade defensive systems on the aircraft that allow them to take defensive measures against surface-to-air missiles.
"It's going to start now, as fast as we can get the proper personnel and equipment over where it needs to go," said Major Gary Tallman, an Army spokesman.
Despite the recent losses, there has been little consideration of changing the role of helicopters in the Iraq occupation simply because they are too integral to Army operations. They provide speed as well as the ability to move across virtually any terrain.
"There's no alternative," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. "The alternative in Iraq is to haul stuff around by convoy and then you're going to get hit by a land mine.
"There's just a bunch of things the military would like to do that have to be done with helicopters because that's the best way to do it," he said. "They lost thousands of them in Vietnam and came away convinced that air mobility was the way to go."
Specialists cited a number of precautions can improve a helicopter's chances, including flying at night, when attackers would have little chance of targeting aircraft. Another is making sure not to fly predictable routes where traps can be set; several military specialists have speculated that the Chinook, ferrying soldiers on their way to scheduled leave, fell victim to such an ambush.
Unfortunately, the safety tactics can at times be contradictory.
"The steps that you take to foil a surface-to-air missile make you more susceptible to a rocket-propelled grenade," Loren Thompson, a military expert with the Lexington Institute in Washington, said last week. "And the steps that you take to foil a rocket-propelled grenade make you more susceptible to a surface-to-air missile."
For example, flying very low to the ground makes a helicopter hard to target, but puts it within range of a rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire. Conversely, flying over 1,000 feet puts the aircraft out of the range of grenades and small arms but presents a much more inviting target for a heat-seeking or radar-guided surface-to-air missile.
Several military experts pointed out, however, that the higher a helicopter flies, the more it can deploy flares that draw off heat-seeking missiles or chaff that confuses radar-guided missiles.
It is such systems that are most likely to be upgraded as part of Brownlee's order. Most Chinooks, for example, will get a system capable of firing four times as many rounds of flares or chaff.
Some Chinooks in Iraq have the system -- standard on the special operations version -- but after the switchover they will all be so armed, Tallman said.
© Copyright 2003, Globe Newspaper Company
