Reality check.
If you talk about amphibious assault in terms like "we won't be doing another D-Day" or "Iwo Jima" then you haven't thought about the operational art of warfare at all.
Consider the other two forms. Airborne and Air Assault.
Air Assault was laid to waste in an Iraqi Desert by a well planned helo trap courtesy of a smart Iraqi Commander, bad intel and overly optimistic mission planners in the Combat Aviation Brigade.
But Airborne Assault is usually the hat that everyone likes to wear as being the solution...the only solution to our forcible entry needs.
How stupid can that type of thinking be?!!!?!!
A group of C-17's being escorted by fighters is going to cross into enemy territory, drop its battalion or more of paratroops, keep them resupplied, reinforce them with additional paratroops and then link up with friendly forces?
Are you smoking crack?
You couldn't even perform an Airborne Forcible Entry Op into Syria right now...much less against a fully functioning government with a competent military....
Whats my point?
Simple.
All forms of forcible entry carry risks. Airborne and Air Assaults are as risky (or more) than amphibious assaults.
We could perform airborne forcible entry in Syria today, after some SEAD/DEAD. The 173rd did it in OIF (Bashur airfield).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ausa.org/publications/armymagazine/archive/2003/6/Documents/Collins_0603.pdf
I don't really consider air assault (helo) a form of early entry. It takes too long to get assets to their staging areas and they really can't assault very far.
dude. that's BULLSHIT! you don't have enough bombs in the arsenal to take out every threat to heavy transport. attempt an airborne op into Syria and one or two MANPADS could turn the opinion of the war so unfavorably that someone would HAVE to be held on charges for approving such a plan.
Deletethink about the flight profile for a mass drop. you're flying slow. you're flying low. anywhere from 1500 ft to 800 ft (and only if the commander has brass balls...he'll lose at least 1/4 of his force to injury) and in that envelope you're just bait to get bitten.
i stand by my assessment. airborne forcible entry ops are just for show.
So are you saying Airborne is just a waste of time or they have a different role to play in operations? If you're saying the former then why were you advocating for the Army to stand up the 11th Airborne or station an Airborne brigade in Australia?
Deletebecause they can arrive quickly in the area of operations and can come off the planes ready to fight. in a permissive environment you can fly in the 82nd, have them do an airlanding or jump and they can be a speedbump until the real force...US Marines arrive.
Deleteplus you have the issue of policy makers being slow to decide what they want to do. if for example China starts massing forces they can send an MEU to whereever they are but if more is needed you'd want an airborne unit hours away instead of another MEU that's days away.
I'm with Eric P on the relative value of occupying Syrian dirt. However, take a look at this open source analysis of the Syrian air defense network,
Deletehttp://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Syria-SAM-Deployment.html
Note the preponderance of air defenses along the coast, and the sparsely defended east. If you gain overflight rights over Turkey, you may not have to do much ingress/egress corridor SEAD/DEAD at all, other than some early warning radars. Pick an interior airfield, hit its defenses hard from the air, and drop nearby. Airborne forces take the airfield and sanitize the area around it. Fly in follow on forces.
The terrain in Kosovo was a different situation. Much harder to find mobile SAM sites in woodlands. It's easier in the desert.
Ultimately though, an airborne brigade by itself isn't going to defeat the Syrian military. We'd probably need heavy forces.
Just send a squadron of B-2's with JDAM, JSOW and even some bunker buster bombs. That alone would send the Syrians into panic and Assad begging on his knees.
ReplyDeleteWhat the 82 Airborne Div is designed to do is, kick in the door of the enemy. That's why they have one brigade that is on stand-by ready to go anywhere around the world.
now you're just talking shit. first they just stood back up their Division Ready Brigade (DRB) second, if you're deploying to a hot spot in 18 hours you're going in as a preventative force. no one is going to send a Brigade straight into combat in 18 hours. it ain't gonna happen.
Deletekicking in the door sounds good until you realize that when you kick a door people shoot back.
but what has me amazed is that you're not touching on the real issue. a DRB requires how many C-17's? say 6? so you have 6 C-17s flying in to the drop zone at less than 200 mph between 1500 and 800 feet...in a straight line.....and you don't think that every enemy soldier in the area won't be lighting those transports up?
you think that those paratroops won't be filled with holes on the way down? the Geneva Convention says you can shoot a paratrooper in the sky.
Airborne Forcible Ops is a joke. You know it, I know it and the 82nd Knows it.
We've trained to fight Russian-based air defense systems since Vietnam. SEAD/DEAD is the Air Force's bread and butter. Any SAM system larger than a MANPADS that threatens an area we're gonna drop troops into is gonna be a smoking hole in the ground before the first guy's out the door of a C-17. And as for those MANPADs, even the newest ones are very limited when it comes to range (compared to larger SAMs), so it would take a very skilled operator to be able to successfully engage an aircraft that's only gonna be in his engagement zone for at most 60 seconds (assuming surprise is achieved. And even if he did get off a shot, unless it's one of the newest MANPADS on the market flares will likely defeat the missile.
Deleteyeah? tell the Yugoslovians that! they were able to shoot down several of our aircraft and taught the Russians and Chinese how to defeat US airpower in certain areas.
Deleteadditionally you're not going to be able to move a battalion or more of troops and the aircraft that carry them without it getting out. an enemy with even common sense is gonna figure it out.
And the dirt has to actually be worth occupying.
ReplyDeleteCareful Sol. You will be telling me next land based fast air has a logistical tail. That heliborne infantry formations are light. (1) That the US Army has an expeditionary capability.(2) And that the US Army and US Air Force are both dependent on the sea to keep them supplied. :)
ReplyDelete(1) The troops may be light but the logistical tail of the helicopter certainly isn't.
(2) One of things that really annoys me about my fellow Brits with an interest in military things is they don't know the history of US forces. That apart from a brief excursion or two (Cuba and the Philippines) prior to WW2 it was the USMC that did the US's land fighting outside CONUS. Sitting in a base in Germany isn't expeditionary warfare. Really annoys me because it is often followed by why doesn't the USN do all the USMC flying? and the USMC is part of the USN. And they say Yanks are ignorant of other states.
An "airborne assault" can be an actual assault against a reasonably equal defending enemy or it can be large scale. But never both.
ReplyDeleteEven when large airborne assaults were used in the past, the idea was to drop the troops where they were not expected: land, regroup, equip, then assault.
The problems this approach has these days:
1. A few guys with MANPADs can cause a political/career shitstorm (at anything less than total war). And those guys can have low enough logistics needs and good enough camouflage, that in anything more complex than a flat desert one cannot know if they are there without going in.
2. With all the global communication possibilities it is harder than ever to achieve surprise on a large scale. I could see it working against some tin pot dictatorship deep in denial and dysfunction but that is not what one trains against.
3. SEAD/DEAD only works with a ground component. Does not have to be on the same ground, a near by conflict where CAS is used would also force the AD to act. But with air only, a competent defender can stay hidden, preserve forces and engage on Their terms only - as Kosovo showed.
Now, when considered as a way to "move" instead of "assault", the airborne side can claim that a typical country has far more undefended/uncovered ground than coastline. But the amphibious approach is significantly less vulnerable to small/asymmetric threats, and can bring in much more "stuff". So, it depends.
outstanding analysis and quite honestly that's where the 82nd is buttering its bread these days. airborne assaults are out...but getting to the scene quickly is in and thats what they bring to the table. but only the Marine Corps is talked about when it comes to actually performing forcible entries.
Delete