LAST FLIGHT OF THE AIR CAVALRY?

Originally supplanting paratroops as a means of delivering soldiers precisely onto the battlefield, air assault became the standard for strategic planning in the Cold War. But as air threats have escalated, has peer-on-peer conflict made the tactic obsolete?

- PAUL METCALFE

Military helicopter operations came of age during the war in Vietnam in the late 1960s. The NBC evening news broadcasts beamed into US homes in the evenings showed fleets of UH-1 Hueys, with the familiar 'slap' of their blades echoing across the jungles as they hovered over clearings. At the same time, soldiers jumped from the helicopter skids and ran into battle. It was the age of 'search and destroy' tactics, with troops no longer having to march to where the fighting was taking place - they could now be taken directly to it, engage, before being picked up and taken back to the safety of their base.

The concept of the helicopter air assault was continuously developed and adapted during the war. It saw the creation of the Ist Cavalry Division (Airmobile), better known as the 'Ist Air Cav', an army division trained from the outset to operate in unison with helicopters, which they'd ride into battle. Although this new concept presented a tactical advantage, it came at the cost of more than 5,000 of the approximately 12,000 helicopters used during the conflict, as well as countless lives, as landing zones became the fiercest battles of the entire war.

By the latter decades of the Cold War, large-scale helicopter air assaults were still being openly discussed by senior military planners as a way to wage war on the battlefield under the heading of an 'AirLand Battle' or as part of an 'Active Defence' strategy. The Soviet Union suffered horrific air losses during the Afghanistan War, with its Mi-8 Hips and Mi-24 Hinds routinely shot down by ground fire, only for them to shift to a tactic of flying at higher altitudes. Here, they came within the range of CIA-supplied Stinger, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, and were downed in their hundreds, with little chance of survival for the crew and troops aboard.