WASHINGTON -- First, U.S. military helicopter pilots in Iraq tried flying low and fast, hoping to elude heat-seeking missiles fired by insurgents.
The insurgents responded with heavy weapons such as machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, and the loss rate of American helicopters soared.
So the pilots went high -- and insurgents replied with lethal surface-to-air missiles.
A Marine Corps CH-46 helicopter was lost yesterday 20 miles northeast of Baghdad. It was the fifth helicopter that has gone down in Iraq in three weeks. Five Marines and two Navy hospital corpsmen were killed, and there was confusion over whether the twin-rotor Sea Knight troop carrier was shot down or crashed because of mechanical problems.
Sunni insurgents linked to al-Qaida said they shot it down, but a senior Pentagon official insisted that the 35-year-old aircraft caught fire and crashed because of mechanical problems.
There is no question that Iraq is becoming increasingly dangerous for the hundreds of U.S. military helicopters flying there.
With 4,000 to 5,000 increasingly sophisticated surface-to-air missiles in the hands of insurgents via the international arms markets, analysts say, American chopper pilots are caught in a narrowing flight envelope in which they can operate with relative safety. It takes years for the Pentagon to develop and field new defensive technology such as infrared jammers.
Each wrenching loss of a helicopter and crew brings an official statement saying that the military is studying new tactics. But this style of warfare requires that helicopters operate over mostly hostile territory, and pilots say there are precious few tactics that haven't been tried before.
"In many cases we are using tactics that were developed in Vietnam," said Marine Maj. Gen. Kenneth J. Glueck Jr., an attack helicopter pilot who commands the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Cherry Point, N.C. "There is nothing new about this," he said, referring to the skills needed to fly in Iraq.
Four helicopters have been shot down in Iraq since Jan. 20, including two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, a UH-60 Black Hawk and a commercial MD530F helicopter operated by the private security firm, Blackwater USA. Twenty-eight passengers and crew members were killed.
According to the Iraq Index, assembled by the Brookings Institution in Washington, 53 helicopters have gone down in Iraq since May 2003, not counting yesterday's loss. At least 27 were confirmed to have been shot down, a number that roughly coincides with Pentagon data.
Slow, cumbersome and inherently unstable, helicopters are often at their most vulnerable when flying the missions on which U.S. soldiers in Iraq utterly rely: delivering ammunition to remote units, airlifting troops for a raid, evacuating casualties and attacking insurgents.
Scudding along over sparse desert or thudding low over Baghdad rooftops, troop assault helicopters such as the CH-46 hopscotch from one "green" or relatively safe area to another, while their machine gunners anxiously scan the ground from their perches on each side. The pilots have armed their automatic flare dispensers, which fire showers of white-hot fireworks to confuse heat-seeking missiles, and "yank and bank" in a corkscrew motion when approaching a dangerous or "hot" landing zone, dropping with a gut-churning, nose-high descent.
Hovering, a helicopter is at its most vulnerable. But in this war, so is almost every place.
"The problem with being down low is the small arms threat," said Brig. Gen. Robert Milstead, a Cobra pilot who recently returned from commanding a Marine air wing in Iraq. "Above about 2,500 or 3,000 feet you are out of small arms range but you've got to worry about the manpad threat," he said, referring to "man-portable air defense" weapons.
"You avoid 500 to 1,000 [feet] because you're hanging out there like a grape, to be picked," he said.
These lessons were clear in Vietnam, where the Army and Marines lost hundreds of helicopters to surface-to-air missiles and ground fire. The lesson was driven home in 1989, when the Soviet army retreated from Afghanistan after suffering devastating helicopter losses from shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. The CIA reportedly supplied about 2,000 of the heat-seeking missiles to Afghan insurgents, and while there have been attempts to buy them back, there has been no public accounting of what happened to them.
Helicopter survival on modern battlefields again came into question in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, when rocket-propelled grenades brought down two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters. Eighteen American soldiers were killed in the ensuing street battle, and one of the pilots, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, was taken prisoner and dragged through the streets. The United States abandoned its Somalia mission months later and U.S. forces were withdrawn.
That grim history appeared to be repeating itself in 2003, the first year of the war in Iraq, when 29 helicopters went down. Sixteen soldiers died when a CH-46 helicopter was shot down in November by a surface-to-air missile. Two weeks later, two Black Hawk helicopters collided, apparently when one tried to evade a missile.
With almost four years of experience flying in Iraq have come major changes in tactics and technology, said Col. Bob Quackenbush, an Apache attack helicopter pilot who supervises Army aviation programs at the Pentagon. The Army has added armored crew seats on its Black Hawk helicopters, for instance, along with shielding critical engine components, and in some instances fitting vulnerable sections of the fuselage with ballistic blankets.
The problem, of course, is that helicopters must remain light, limiting the amount of armor they can carry.
"We have added weight where we needed to" in an effort to ensure that a helicopter can survive, Quackenbush said. "Maybe it's full of holes, but these guys are going to get to come home now," he said, referring to helicopter crews.
But the threat from surface-to-air missiles is growing, said David Rockwell, an engineer and military technology expert at the Teal Group Corp. in Fairfax, Va. A new generation of infrared-guided SAMS can attack from any direction, unlike earlier versions which had to be fired directly at a heat source such as a jet exhaust. The missiles carry "staring array" sensors that see a wide field of view and are less easily fooled by flares, Rockwell said
Defenses against improved missiles seem to take agonizingly long to develop and field. A new missile warning system that the Pentagon had been working on for years suddenly became a high priority early in 2004, when the Defense Department realized that it was needed to help protect helicopters in Iraq. Every helicopter in Iraq now has one, but it took 2 1/2 years to accomplish.
A new device called a "laser jamhead," which scrambles a missile's brain, is under development. The Army cannot not say when it will be fielded.
The threat to helicopters in Iraq also caused a major shift in tactics, Quackenbush said. Pilots groomed on Cold War tactics of hugging the terrain and popping up to fire at enemy tanks now learn a high-speed maneuvering tactic called "running and diving fire."
"You're firing on the move, keeping your speed up, operating at a higher altitude where it's safe," he said Monday in an interview.
But the tactics sounded familiar to Stephen M. Reilly, a Washington "suit and tie lawyer" who flew CH-47 helicopters in Vietnam 35 years ago.
"You either flew very low or very high; the middle ground was called the Dead Man's Zone," said Reilly, president of the Combat Helicopter Pilots Association. With a SAM threat to high fliers, "your only option was to move fast and low down on the deck. They know you're coming but they don't know in what direction, and you can be there and gone before they can get a bead on you."
Flying over Iraq today is a matter of common sense, said Milstead. "You go tooling in and start circling over a built-up area where there's a fight going on, and staying in tight, people are going to shoot at you," he said.
Instead, pilots should stand off at a safe distance, watching the fight, dashing in with a wingman when needed "and coming back out of the threat zone to a safe haven," he said.
Despite the risk, helicopters are considered essential to the war in Iraq, and in the long view, the losses are low.
The helicopter "is a vulnerable platform that by definition flies low and slow, and with that comes casualties," said Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington defense think tank. "But after flying millions of miles in Iraq, the casualty rate for helicopters is extraordinarily low. I'd hazard a guess that it's safer flying a helicopter in Iraq than driving on the streets of Washington."
david.wood@baltsun.com