Over the last 18 days, five American helicopters have gone down in the areas in and around Baghdad. What first appeared to be an unfortunate coincidence, has now started to fuel speculation of a new dimension to the insurgency in Iraq.
On January 30, Defense Tech asked a former Kiowa Warrior pilot who had served in Iraq, identified only as "ME", for his thoughts on the string of crashes:
I haven't heard of any reason as to why we're losing more lately, but we also haven't lost any in a long time prior to this--I think it's reflective of somewhat of the odds catching up to us and an increased combat operations tempo.
Now that two more choppers have gone down, ME is "having second thoughts." When witnesses described an Apache helicopter bursting into flames in midair last Friday, ME had the following to say:
That's unlikely to happen due to small arms fire and the odds of hitting an Apache heads on with an unguided RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] are pretty slim. The fuel cells are crashworthy, and unless they are hit by something like an API (armor piercing incendiary--like a .50 cal or higher) shell, I don't think they are going to explode. Hitting munitions onboard isn't likely to make a fireball either. But the explosion of a SAM hitting it might look like a fireball.
I just got off the phone with Bill Roggio, who was also beginning to worry about the implications of so many choppers going down in such a short time period (56 have gone down since the war began). Roggio said it "appears one or more antiaircraft cells with Strela missiles are now operating in the area just north of Baghdad." Roggio added that he was "surprised it took this long" for the insurgents to start targeting rotorcraft more aggressively. He speculated that the delay might be a result of Sunni insurgents holding such missiles in reserve "to protect leaders," like Zarqawi. The string of crashes then might be related to a new effort by American forces to target al Qaeda leaders, said Roggio.
American pilots, however, have the equipment and training to effectively reduce their vulnerability to the threat posed by surface-to-air missiles. "We do have countermeasures," Roggio says, but if more missiles are finding their way into the hands of insurgents, the number of successful attacks is bound to increase.
So where might these missiles be coming from? It's true that Iraq was awash in heavy weapons in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, but MANPADS--man-portable air defense systems--are notoriously delicate weapons, with a relatively short shelf-life due to their reliance on military-grade batteries. Though a proficient terrorist might be able to replace those batteries by improvising an off-the-shelf solution, it is more likely that a surge in MANPAD attacks would be the result of an influx of the devices from neighboring countries. Said Roggio, "they might be getting run from Saudi Arabia, but I would think it's Iran." Iran supplying al Qaeda? Shiites working together with Sunnis to kill Americans? Anyone who still finds the idea of such cooperation far-fetched hasn't been paying close attention.
Roggio said we can expect more analysis of this development at his blog, The Fourth Rail, sometime in the next 24 hours.
