Saturday, Nov 08, 2003
In the early hours of the first day of the ground war in Iraq, an American CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter lifted off from Kuwait with four US marines and eight British commandos aboard. Just minutes after crossing the Iraqi border it ran into turbulent weather and crashed, killing all aboard.
The deaths that morning were the first of the war and marked the beginning of a very difficult six months for the American military helicopter programme - a troubled record that continued into last week with the downing of an army Chinook helicopter, killing 16 soldiers, and yesterday's probable shooting down of a Black Hawk helicopter near Tikrit.
Senior Pentagon officers have been so concerned about the helicopter incidents that General Peter Schoomaker, the US army's new chief of staff, last month ordered a review of the service's aviation programme, including a rethinking of fundamental doctrinal issues such as how helicopters are used in areas where they can get little support from ground forces.
According to published accounts of the helicopter review in recent weeks, the study has many in the army concerned that Gen Schoomaker is prepared to cut some of the service's most prized platforms, including the stealthy but long-delayed Comanche being developed by Sikorski and Boeing.
Fear that big changes are in the works have been heightened by the high level of secrecy that Gen Schoomaker has forced on his helicopter review team.
"When you read the lessons learned that come out, one of the great sorts (of questions) in this is going to be: Was it the airplane, was it its mission, or was it its tactics?" said Arthur Cebrowski, a retired navy admiral who heads the Pentagon's office of force transformation.
"Those are going to be the tough questions."
During the war itself, helicopter accidents and six shootdowns accounted for about 20 per cent of American combat deaths, as well as one of the most highly publicised setbacks for US forces during the war - an attack by the army's 11th air assault regiment on Republican Guard positions near Karbala, which saw two Apaches downed and the other three dozen in the unit receiving severe small-arms damage.
Debate has raged since over whether the incident, which included the capture of two Apache pilots, was the fault of the helicopters themselves or the ways they were used, with many Pentagon officers believing it was an example of a faulty decision to use the helicopters in ways they were not intended to be used.
"If you don't use the force in the way that you've trained and essentially run with, so that you do proper battlefield preparation, then you may find out that it is not going to work as well as you wanted it to," said navy Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, commander of the US's joint forces command.
But the army insists such incidents are simply the risks that come in any war. General John Keane, the army's vice-chief of staff, said the Iraqi army was more spread out and in a different location than expected. "There was some surprise at what the enemy was able to achieve there." The army is beginning to learn that they can be surprised in the postwar world, too.
The incidents have contributed to a push to replace some of the helicopter fleet with so-called UCARs - unmanned combat armed rotorcrafts.
These helicopters could potentially be used in place of Comanches or even Apaches, but clearly could not replace Chinooks or Black Hawks, which are primarily used as troop transporters.
By PETER SPIEGEL
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