North County Times February 08, 2007
Helicopter downings signal possible shift in enemy tactics
By William Finn Bennett
NORTH COUNTY ---- A rash of five downed American helicopters in a little more than two weeks in Iraq has some military observers concerned that a disturbing trend may be developing as insurgents continue to seek vulnerabilities in U.S. forces.
"The enemy apparently is learning how easy it is to shoot down helicopters," Winslow Wheeler, with the military think tank Center for Defense Information, said Thursday from Washington.
Wheeler said the crashes, which have left 27 dead, show that the enemy is adapting.
"There is no good countermeasure for a guy with a machine gun who you can't see," Wheeler said.
On Wednesday, a Marine CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter went down northwest of Baghdad killing seven people, five of whom were Marines. At least two of them were from Camp Pendleton.
Although U.S. military officials have yet to confirm the cause of the crash, an Iraqi air force officer told The Associated Press that it had been shot down by an anti-aircraft missile; and an Internet statement signed by an Iraqi insurgent group claimed responsibility for taking down the helicopter.
U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, said Thursday that when the spate of helicopter crashes started, he immediately went to the Pentagon and received a classified briefing on what had happened to the helicopters and what is being done to address the attacks.
He said he could not talk about the cause of the helicopter downings or specifics on the countermeasures being taken, but said, "We are taking action, practical steps that should help to alleviate the situation."
It's important to recognize that no matter what the military does, however, "all helicopters have a certain vulnerability to groundfire that we will never totally eliminate," Hunter said.
Three of the other four crashes over the last two weeks or so appear to have been caused by gunfire, according to Associated Press reports. Meanwhile, a Jan. 20 crash in the Diyala province northeast of Baghdad that killed 12 soldiers may have been shot down by a shoulder-fired weapon, according to military officials.
Wheeler, whose organization provides analysis on national security and defense policy, said he is worried about what's to come.
"We are going to see more of these unless the Army and Marines change tactics radically and fast," Wheeler said, suggesting that military officials immediately look into changing their flight patterns.
"They know where we are flying and where the corridors are," he said.
John Pike, director of the military Web site GlobalSecurity.org in Virginia, said Thursday that while it's too early to be sure that the helicopter downings signal the start of a trend, military officials are already making adaptive changes. He said that commanders are allowing squadron leaders to decide on what type of tactical strategies to use.
That way, "each unit will be flying differently," thus making it impossible for the enemy to determine a pattern of behavior that would allow adaptive tactics, said Pike, whose site tracks military-related news stories and provides analysis on everything from defense policy to weaponry and defense-related legislation.
Winslow said that in Vietnam, the United States learned the hard way just how vulnerable helicopters are.
"In Vietnam, we lost 5,000-plus helicopters to AK-47s and machine guns," he said.
And while there is a new generation of helicopters being used today, "fundamentally, the nature of helicopters hasn't changed," he said.
"They're vulnerable to everything ---- they are slow, fragile and maneuver poorly," Wheeler said.
While he said he believes that most of the crashes have been the result of small-arms fire, surface-to-air missiles also present a major threat, Wheeler said.
"Saddam's army had thousands of the hand-held surface-to-air missiles supplied to them by Russia and China back in the 1980s," he said.
And while there are countermeasures that are being used to combat the missiles, "the pilot needs to know he is under attack and these things are not easy to detect.
"They're a significant threat," he said.
One countermeasure that pilots can use is the golf-ball flares that the helicopter spits out "and hope the missile will hone in on the false target," Wheeler said.
Another more sophisticated countermeasure involves the use of a laser-eye infrared weapon that blinds the incoming missile.
Eli Zimet, a fellow with the Center for Technology and National Security at the National Defense University in Washington, said Thursday that he, too, is concerned the use of surface-to-air missiles could increase.
"There are tens of thousands of these things out there, so I'm not surprised the insurgents got their hands on them," he said.
Like Wheeler, Zimet said that even light weapons pose a serious threat.
"If it hits a lucky spot, it can bring down a helicopter," he said.
There have been too many downings of helicopters in Iraq in recent weeks for it to be coincidental, said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow with a Washington policy think tank, the Brookings Institution.
He said he believes there are three possible explanations for the surge: "better weaponry, new insurgency tactics; or just more effort to do the same kind of tactics used all along."
He said some of the more obvious countermeasures U.S. military officials could take would be to fly low, avoid built-up areas that might hide insurgents, fly at night; and fly in groups to create multiple targets and multiple noise sources that would confuse the enemy.
© Copyright 2007, North County Times
