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February 10th,
2007 - Helicopter Downings Vex U.S. Military Analysts |
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Helicopter Downings
Vex U.S. Military Analysts By Anna Badkhen San Francisco Chronicle February 10, 2007 Since Jan. 20, six U.S.
helicopters have crashed in Iraq.... Alarmed by the recent spike
in successful attacks against American helicopters in Iraq, military
officials and analysts are trying to discern: Is this a string of bad luck
for U.S. pilots or an ominous escalation in capabilities enabling insurgents
to bring down aircraft crucial to American operations in Iraq? If the latter conjecture is
true, these new tactics could significantly impede the U.S. effort in Iraq,
experts say. At worst, they might lead to an American defeat in the war by
making the Iraqi airspace as dangerous to navigate as its roads, in the same
manner CIA-supplied Stinger missiles contributed to the Soviet defeat in
Afghanistan nearly two decades ago. "Either it's bad luck
of no larger consequence, or we have an Afghanistan-sized problem," said
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military think tank in
Alexandria, Va. Six helicopters have crashed
in Iraq over the past three weeks. The latest accident took place Wednesday,
when a Sea Knight helicopter crashed, for reasons unclear so far, near the
town of Taji about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, killing all seven people
onboard. On Feb. 2, a missile brought
down an Apache in northern Iraq. On Jan. 28, another Apache crashed south of
Baghdad. On Jan. 23, a Blackwater helicopter crashed after being attacked by
gunfire and then hitting a power line. On Jan. 20, a missile and gunfire
brought down a Black Hawk east of Baghdad. A helicopter operated by a private
security firm went down near Baghdad on Jan. 31. The military, which has been
poring over the wreckage and an insurgent video of what appears to be the Sea
Knight downing, says it is still trying to determine a pattern behind the
attacks. "I do not know whether
or not it is the law of averages that caught up with us ... (or) a change of
tactics, techniques and procedures on the part of the enemy," Marine
Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during Senate
testimony on Tuesday. But as the Pentagon plans to
increase the number of troops in Iraq by 21,500, and the domestic debate over
the war intensifies, the spike could become an essential element in the
argument for withdrawal, said Nathan Hughes, military analyst at Strategic
Forecasting, a Texas-based private security consulting group. "It's a delicate time
politically, domestically, and if there's suddenly all these new casualties
from helicopter crashes, that's gonna be difficult at home," Hughes
said. U.S. troops rely heavily on
aircraft, using helicopters for fire support of ground missions and for
transportation. Pike estimated that about
600 American military helicopters operate in Iraq today, flying an average of
one or two sorties daily. Of at least 58 helicopters that have gone down in
Iraq since May 2003, when the insurgency took off, only about half were
brought down by enemy fire, according to the Iraq Index of the Brookings
Institution. At least 172 U.S. troops
have died in the crashes - a small fraction of the total 3,117 U.S. war
casualties the Associated Press reports to date. "We've had pretty much
free rein in the air," Hughes said. Loss of air superiority in
counterinsurgencies can become cause for defeat. In the late 1980s, the CIA
supplied Afghan guerrillas, through Pakistan, with shoulder-mounted Stinger
missiles that helped bring down as many as 300 Soviet helicopter gunships,
fighter jets and transport aircraft. The introduction of the missiles is
widely regarded as a turning point in that war. The Soviets withdrew in 1989. If Iraqi insurgents have
acquired anti-aircraft missiles, the United States could soon find itself in
a similar position. That is why it is critical to determine how the
insurgents are shooting down the helicopters, Hughes and other experts said. Adam Raisman, an analyst who
monitors Islamist Web sites at the nonprofit SITE Institute, said he has seen
no indication that fighters in Iraq have acquired new missile technology, but
said that there was "no way of knowing for sure" whether insurgents
have the missiles. On Friday, a Sunni insurgent
group released a two-minute video of what it said was the "downing of
U.S. aircraft on Feb. 7," showing a helicopter that appears to be a Sea
Knight. The video shows an object trailing smoke in the sky near the
helicopter. Then it shows the aircraft, its hull on fire, spewing debris and
trailing smoke, heading downward and hitting the ground behind a line of
trees. The group that posted the
video, an umbrella organization called the Islamic State of Iraq, which
includes al Qaeda in Iraq, has said its "anti-aircraft" battalion
was responsible for the downing. Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the
Joint Chiefs' chief operations officer, cast doubt on the authenticity of the
video, telling a Pentagon news conference Friday that "there are some
eyewitness accounts that cause professional aviation officers to believe (the
cause of the crash) was most likely ... mechanical." Most heat-seeking,
shoulder-launched missiles have a firing range of about 2 miles, enabling the
attacker to shoot from a hidden location far from the target. Although
today's American military helicopters are equipped to divert heat-seeking
missiles, "there are countermeasures to the countermeasures," said
Winslow Wheeler, a military expert at the nongovernment Center for Defense
Information in Washington. If Iraqi insurgents do have
missiles, where did they get them? Wheeler said they could be
Russian-made SA-7s, bought by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s for the war against
Iran and looted from caches of the old Iraqi army after the U.S. invasion. But Hughes said the recent
spate in downed helicopters suggests that militants could have access to
newer, more sophisticated missiles, probably supplied recently from abroad. "It's unlikely that
they just now found a new hole in the U.S. operating procedure" that has
suddenly, after four years of war, enabled the insurgents to take down
helicopters more effectively, he said. "This is definitely an indication
of some sort of assistance from outside." If the missiles came from
other countries, "probably they would be from Syria or Iran," Pike
said. These countries stockpile
Russian-made missiles, a dozen of which can fit in the back of a pickup truck
and be driven across Iraq's porous borders. According to Strategic
Forecasting, Iran also has U.S.-made Stingers. The increase in attacks also
could have been a result of intensified air travel over Iraq as the United
States deploys new troops there. But Hughes dismissed such a possibility,
saying, "It's really too much to be just an increase in air
traffic." It is also possible that
insurgents have simply finessed their use of small arms, said Wheeler. "Helicopters are slow,
fragile, not very maneuverable and very easy to shoot down," he said.
"Machine guns are extremely lethal to helicopters, and there is no
countermeasure. Once the stream of bullets is in the air, they're gonna hit
you." For now, helicopters remain
faster and safer than ground traffic in Iraq because the attacks have not
been "on a scale that would really turn the tide," said Hughes. "But (the insurgents)
can certainly make that more risky, more costly," he said. "And the
more friction they put in that process, especially in terms of casualties,
the more they're going to hinder our operations." External link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/02/10/MNGU8O2HIU1.DTL |