We’ve been here before:
Fatal Basra crash sparks unrest
Remember this?
British tanks storm Basra jail to free undercover soldiers
You can refresh your memory about what that was all about here:
“Incident” in Al Amarah
You’ve got to love this masterly piece of understated headline writing from the Beeb:
Basra is a ’safe zone’ no more
Two quick points:
- The tactic has precedents in Northern Ireland, where helicopters were routinely used to avoid the threat from IRA bombs and snipers in “bandit country.”
- Yes true and the tactic stopped being used when IRA got weapons capable of shooting those helicopters down.
- “Helicopters are increasingly being used to replace vehicle patrols in the region.”
- In other words they’ve completely lost control and they’re isolated in their bases.
markfromireland
No tag for this post.
That’s it? I’ve had here and MFI open in separate windows and been hitting refresh ever since I saw it on Yahoo.
That’s it for the moment pete - too late here and not enough detail. But IMO the Malaysia strategy was only dubiously relevant to start off with and it’s been blown sky wide by what’s happened elsewhere.
I’d be inclined to see that chopper being shot down as a “warning shot.” That’s my reading of it after a few hours. I think its a reasonably well-educated guess but it is a guess as of now.
g’night folks. i’ll check the comments in the queue and answer in the morning.
*poof*
It’s been in the back of my mind since I read about the consternation caused by the possibility of the Russians selling SA-18 shoulder fired missiles (SFMs) to the Syrians, that the minute the coalition of the willful lose the ability to fly around the urban areas with relative impunity, then the game is up. Resupply gets increasingly difficult and there is no air cover for patrols.
The Russians lost in Afghanistan once the US supplied the Mudjahadeen with Stinger SFMs (so I read).
Further reading shows up that SFMs have been manufactured by various people for decades going back to SA-7s. There are literally hundreds of thousands of them floating around the world and available for as little as $5000 ea.
SO finally the question, why have the US and UK helicopters (and fighter jets) been allowed to operate as long as they have?
The gunships have IR blocking to protect themselves but I would have to question how effective this would be at very close range such as happens in urban guerilla warefare.
I’ve always considered “command of the air” to be vastly overrated what’s important is control of terra firma. If they have to ferry their troops around the place in helicopters then they don’t have control of what’s going on.
Griffon - though not related to helecopters, I found this interesting and the beeb had it as a link on yesterday’s report (which interestingly enough was not covered on their overnight world service)- it seems the RAF has some problems:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4963746.stm
in the original story in the “safe zone no more” I noticed the odd sentence about troops patrolling villages on foot at night which just seemed strange in the middle of a report about the region being dangerous to UK troops - and out of place in the article - does it make sense to anyone?
Link given by siun above:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4963746.stm
Griffon,
It depends on the SAM/SFMs you’re talking about. The Iraqi Army mostly had SA7s and some others upto and including SA14 (gremlin) and lots and lots and lots of them went missing because the Americans (and the Brits to a smaller degree) didn’t bother to secure the armouries.
There’s a minimum of 4000 SA7s unaccounted for and I’ve never seen even a halfassed guess about how many of the later models are hanging around.
Some have been used - I didn’t believe a word of most of those reports about American helicopters crashing or making “hard landings” and at some point about 6 months suddenly the stories changed and you got stories about them being shot down.
The earlier Strelas aren’t very accurate missiles (ha ha like a lot of the stories maybe we should research surface to air journalists and politicians) the ones you need are the ones you control visually instead of relying on passive IR homing and I can’t even guess how many of those are hanging around.
My guess is that the answer to your question is a mix:
Some of it is “keeping the best wine til last” and some of it is that a lot more have been fired than we’ve been told about. And even more have been canibalised for what the spokesmen call IEDs and what sensible people who actually have done real fighting instead of sitting around telling lies all day call bombs.
And of course as Mark said its far more important to kill the the troops on the ground or at least prevent them from moving around freely.
smurph and anto are both more interested in streetfighting things than me and from various things they’ve said I’d say that helicopters aren’t that useful in an urban context either unless there’s a hell of a lot of them and the yanks are big into “force protection” not saying that not a good a thing but they carry it to an extreme and that’s one of the main reasons why they’re as hamhanded as they are.
I saw the footage on CNN of the downed helicopter in Basra and immediately thought of Belfast. I opened the link to the BBC and had to go off for a walk before commenting. Our US news coverage was full of this downed British chopper yet curiously there was little information about a US chopper that fell out of the sky in Afghanistan killing all 12 on board.
/* begin shock and awe */
Goodness Grania now that is surprising
/* end shock and awe */
You know if someday Americans wake up and realise how completely they have been stabbed in the back by their politicians and their news companies and their big companies and their banks that they might get a little angry about it. I hope they get angry soon it is almost too late.
Thanks, Declan. Much appreciated.
Thanks for the link Siun.
More people dead through sheer incompetence.