What we need for 21st Century Combat?
The final fall-back position of the large complex, platform-centric helicopter community will be the platform inferiority complex complaints they will level against the micro-helicopter using the "boogie man" of enemy air defense platforms/systems without being in a modern battlefield Air Cavalry "killer bee" context. Its a what if Superman fought Batman? type argument, not admitting that both super heroes are on the same team in the first place. The Army's large helicopters can and should be made to fly faster and farther using Piasecki VTDP to self-deploy themselves without needing internal USAF fixed-wing transport to get to global battlefields. Fine. But as stated before once in the area, large helicopters will need large amounts of logistics to operate and will never be able to be fielded in the swarms of "killer bees" to cover large areas that an Air Cav needs to locate and destroy sub-national groups and key elements of a nation-state surveillance strike system (SSC) employing C3D2. Admit this reality and let's move on. Large Army helicopters will be on the battlefield to do 3D Air-Mech-Strike movements delivering main-force infantry in light tracked AFVs.
But what Carlton is proposing is that we simplify the current Army's smallest attack/transport helicopter, the A/MH-6 Little Bird to an even lower level of maintenance so that the micro-helicopter can be equivalent to a personal, individual mobility mount, ie; a horse. The micro Air Cavalry will operate in conjunction with ground armored Ground Cavalry troops in M113A3 ACAV light tracked AFVs so if an Air Cav Trooper is shot down, he will not be far away from rescue. In combat, his micro-helicopter will be expendable. This is achieved by using easy-to-maintain, burns-less-fuel, piston engines in microlight helicopters so swarms of Air Cavalry "killer bees" can take flight and with the lightweight of modern weaponry, autocannon, rockets and Hellfire/Javelin ATGMs their multiple "stings" will be lethal as their many eyes are looking out across the battlefield in search of the enemy. The "many eyes, many stings" concept is what the questionable current UCAV movement is trying to create remotely with narrow field of view sensors on piston-engined fixed-wing robot aircraft when its already been successfully done with manned pilots using piston-engined OH-13 (Bell Model 47) Scout helicopters albeit with less lethal weaponry and no sensor help. All Carlton is doing is noting that the technology is here today to make the OH-13 piston-engined scout/attack micro-helicopter significantly more lethal and omniscient.
A piston-engined micro scout helicopter is far more robust if hit in its engine than a fragile turbine engine and though it flies with less power, we are not asking it to lift too much so that it doesn't need a Saudi oil refinery nearby to keep swarms of them in the air. To get swarms of mico scout/attack helicopters into the sky, we need to break the only officers-can-fly egotistical rank-hath-its-privileges paradigm and have enlisted pilots. Because the helicopters are simple (VFR and NVGs at night, no instruments) and robust flight training will not have to be as laborous as with current larger helicopters.
Would fixed-wing "Killer Bees" be better?
Carlton has proposed an important transformation for the 1st Cavalry Division that would enable it to deploy almost dozen aircraft at a time inside a C-130 and get itself to world hot spots instead of sitting in a hot motor pool in CONUS with 33-ton BFV and 70-ton M1 tanks awaiting a replay of Desert Storm in some middle eastern desert. The final argument against the micro-helicoper Cavalry idea will be directed at the helicopter itself--essentially helicopters are about 100 mph, low-altitude aircraft that can hover and take-off/land vertically. Critics will attack the 100 mph speed and say its not fast enough while the helicopter proponents will cite terrain masking possible by low speed flight and hovering under the treetops will equal protection. Small helicopters could also be made quiet with rotor design and NOTAR hot engine exhausts for counter-torque control instead of tail rotors. If done right, Carlton's micro-helicopter Pegasus Air Cavalry would be a great success like the armed OH-13s were in Korea/Vietnam since the exposed tail struts blended in with the trees. Ground Cavalry with light tracked AFVs with band-tracks and hybrid-electric drives would complete a "stealth" Air/Ground Cavalry combined-arms team capable of general purpose, mobile combat missions.
Deja Army wimp-out all over again?
However, the realization that aeroscouting can be done better by small, two-seat fixed wing aircraft than small helicopters is not a new revelation:
The excellent Vietnam grunt web pages, points this out when describing the O-1F "Bird Dog":
"Early Army combat experience in Vietnam pointed out quite forcefully the need for a fixed-wing Forward Air Control (FAC) aircraft to replace the OH-13 Sioux and OH-23 Raven helicopters initially used in that role. The two ageing helicopters were quickly found to be totally unsuited for observation work in the 'hot and high' conditions routinely encountered in Southeast Asia, and both the Army and USAF therefore fell back on the much more capable O-1. The Bird Dog's performance was excellent in comparison to that of the Sioux and the Raven, and the Cessna also had a far better maintenance record and considerably lower operating costs."
Yet when push came to shove, the Army wimped out to the wishes of the assholes in the USAF who don't want to do CAS, and USAF ended up flying the O-1 Bird dogs in Vietnam.
Today, the pattern of cowardice continues by trying to put together a BS unmanned attack helicopter called the UCAR.
The current FCS concept using a micro-UAV helicopter
The U.S. Army right now is trying to launch a micro-helicopter from the Future Combat System (FCS) network of wheeled armored cars to provide overhead surveillance and possibly an attack capability akin to Speed Racer's mechanical bird. However, the A160 Hummingbird helicopter UAV while an advanced technology design is nowhere near large enough to carry a significant ordnance payload to attack/destroy targets and would be at best a nuisance. The "soda straw" narrowness of view of UAVs in general works against the A160 Unmanned Combat Armed Rotorcraft or "UCAR" being effective at CAS. CAS is often a "cat and mouse" game where it takes the active involvement of a man in the aircraft to exploit the opportunity of the enemy revealing his presence or our ground troops directing him to strike at a fleeting target. We need a man in the cockpit to have this kind of agility.
While I agree with Carlton's armed manned micro-helicopter Air Cavalry concept I conjecture that a light fixed-wing manned attack aircraft that can take-off from extremely short dirt runways may be even better for a number of reasons. Consider a prop or even jet-driven fixed-wing UCAV like the Predator UAV armed with Hellfire ATGMs except it would have as an option the ability to have the on-scene observation and guile of a human pilot, an "Unmanned/Manned Combat Air Vehicle" (U/MCAV).
The dirty secret of why helicopters are not in every American's garage along with the family ground car is that after a certain amount of hours EVERY HELICOPTER'S ENGINES, TRANSMISSIONS AND ROTOR SYSTEM HAS TO BE TAKEN APART AND PUT BACK TOGETHER OR ELSE ONE DAY YOU WILL BE FLYING AND IT WILL FALL APART AND KILL YOU. The helicopter must have organized depot level maintenance and even small size cannot prevent this. Robinson Helicopter masks this by building into purchase agreements that after the set number of hours, your R-22 will be turned back to them and rebuilt. For helicopters to fly they have to be constantly rebuilt. This is the dirty secret of the helicopter. Only 30% of a third world country's helicopters are in flying condition at any given time! While the U.S. Army has deep pockets there are not bottomless.
If on the other hand, we used an automobile piston engine to propel a fixed-wing attack U/MCAV we could fly them for years at a time with operator PMCS without having to constantly rebuild them, saving millions of dollars. We would gain twice the forward air speed (150-200 mph) possible high-altitude flight profiles but would lose hovering and V/TOL. But I dare say that extreme SHORT take-off and landing (ESTOL) from a dirt strip (500 feet or less) that could be cleared out by a M113A3 Gavin with a dozer blade is "good enough" for Army Air Cavalry operations because the fuel and armaments will need to come by wheeled trucks and this means some kind of roads, and roads can = airstrips for ESTOL aircraft. Another way to view this is that the U/MCAV would be a smaller, lighter version of what the OV-1 "Mohawk" CAS/recon aircraft was, flying out of O-1 "Bird Dog" artillery spotter plane short fields. Another way of looking at this is if the USAF O-2 and OV-10 Forward Air Controllers (FACs) had modern lightweight armaments--they could be attack aircraft in themselves in addition to directing fires from others. Since the retirement of FAC aircraft in the U.S. military, U.S. ground forces have not had good CAS as they once had, and the UAV has failed to live up to expectations and be as good as---let alone better---than human eyes with binoculars and sensors looking for targets actively and directly from aircraft. If done right, U/MCAVs could carry multiple rocket pods to create a modern ARA capability that we have not had since Vietnam. Laser-guided 2.75 inch rockets will give us precision kill capability of exactly what Army troops are laser-target designating, far safer for troops in close contact with the enemy than GPS/INS JDAMS without terminal guidance at a fraction of the cost of expensive Hellfire missiles. The 1992 B-movie, "Iron Eagle III", while not a great movie, has some great ideas in it--at the end of the film, they show ground troops laser marking enemy targets for prop-driven attack aircraft to fire laser-guided rockets and hit these targets even though friendly civilians were nearby! Pretty amazing for a film in 1992 realizing CAS requires slower flying aircraft and to anticipate laser-guided rockets!
In recent Afghanistan combat, U.S. Army ground troops pinned down by enemy fire by their downed helicopter had to wait over an hour for a CAS mission aircraft on strip alert at a faraway fixed-air base, and once it got there, its pilots were untrained in using their guns for strafing runs on the enemy that could be controlled by ground troops to avoid fratricide. Furthermore, fixed airbases with hard runways are easily targeted by enemy asymmetric forces as several recent RAND studies have documented. U/MCAVs can solve this vulnerability to enemy attack by placing CAS aircraft and pilots, support crews in the midst of Army ground maneuver units that are automatically self-defensively strong while shortening the response times to ground unit requests for air firepower to ZERO because U/MCAVs would be continuously overhead.
Phil West of England has an excellent web page describing U/MCAV options where countermeasures to enemy Air Defense Artillery weapons are fitted to affordable STOL CAS aircraft:
Brilliant writer and artist, Robert Johnson of Chandelle magazine documents how Cessna-type aircraft were used successfully as armed attack aircraft:
COIN: The Portuguese in Africa, 1959-1975, Part II in a series
"In desperation, the Portuguese turned to the only available STOL type that offered any improvement in payload over the Austers, the Dornier Do-27. The Dornier was essentially a light aircraft. It was powered by a 270-hp Lycoming. Yet, with 200 hp less than the Broussard, it lifted an equivalent payload, 6-8 passengers and crew. It was also rugged, versatile, and, with the simple, horizontally opposed Lycoming engine, economical to operate. After extensive tests, Portugal ordered 16 Do-27Ks, essentially the Luftwaffe's Do27A-4 with a strengthened, wide-track undercarriage, extra fuel tanks, and underwing hard points. These hard points allowed the aircraft to serve in a FAC (Forward Air Control) role with smoke-marker rockets or in the light close-support role with an 18-round pod of 37-mm MATRA SNEB rockets under each wing (interestingly, this rocket was also adapted for use in the standard, infantry bazooka of the Portuguese army). All aircraft were painted in standard Portuguese colors: bare-metal wings and grey fuselage with a white top and a blue cheat line. A second batch of 24 Do-27K-2s was received in 1962, all in overall aluminum finish. Finally, from 1963 on, as the German army and air force began to retire the Do-27, the German government passed many of the aircraft on to Portugal. In all, 106 Do-27A-1, A-3s, A-4s, and B-1s were taken on charge. All retained their German finish, generally NATO-standard Green and grey camouflage, sometimes with bright, day-glo orange cowls or wing tips.The Dorniers proved popular and highly successful in use, though losses were comparatively heavy. Though vulnerable to ground fire, the rocket-armed Do-27Ks were useful close-support aircraft. But they were in increasingly short supply (11 were lost in action). Several attempts were thus made to arm the German-surplus aircraft, all of which lacked the wing hardpoints that made rocket armament possible. A number of Do-27A-1 and A-4 aircraft were fitted with fuselage racks for two 50-kg bombs and used in action, but the modification does not appear to have been successful enough for gneral adoption. A K-1 was given an experimental door mounting for a 1200 round-per-minute MG42 machine gun and successfully tested using a circling, gunship-style flight path. Though this would have been the easiest way of arming the Do-27As, it was not accepted for service use. In any case, the Do-27s days as a viable combat aircraft were clearly numbered by the late '60s. Light aircraft could not survive in the face of the increasingly common 12.7-mm machine gun fire."
In fact, he describes how a Cessna Super SkyMaster type aircraft like Phil West's "Buzzard" was already used in combat as the Rhodesian "Lynx":
"As a twin-engined aircraft with well-separated engines, 450 hp, and no awkward engine-out assymetry to deal with, the FTB-337 was well-suited to facing small-arms fire, particularly if the O-2's fire-resistant fuel tanks and armored seats were included. Its designed load of six passengers and luggage could easily be traded for an equivalent weight of weapons, once reinforced strong points were built in to the wing and suitable racks supplied...When it reached Rhodesia, the Milirole became the Lynx. Rhodesian workshops armed the aircraft with underwing bomb racks and .303-in Browning machine guns salved from the aircraft the Lynx was to replace, the now elderly Hunting Provost. The guns were fitted into crudely streamlined pods and mounted on pylons over the cabin, where, in First World-War fashion, they could fire over the propeller. Ammunition was fed to the guns from boxes in the cabin. However, by the time the Lynxes were ready, the counterinsurgency/ground-attack mission could no longer be adequately filled by a light aircraft of the armed Provost/Milirole type. African resistance was more sophisticated than it had been: guerilla formations were larger, their antiaircraft defenses were heavier and better organized, and Rhodesian ground forces needed much heavier air support than the Lynx could manage. As a result, Lynxes confined themselves largely to forward air control, marking targets for Hunters and Canberras, and to flare dropping during night attacks on isolated farms and outposts. Typical weapons loads thus included pods of 37-mm MATRA rockets and small flares carried on locally developed multiple-ejector racks. A sizable number of the aircraft survived to see service in the African-controlled Zimbabwean air force."
See also Rhodesian Fire Forces under World Airborne Operations for operations where the Lynx was used.
In the Airpower Journal - Spring 1991 edition, "The Role of TACTICAL AIR POWER IN LOW-INTENSITY CONFLICT", Captain Vance C. Bateman, USAF outlines how affordable fixed-wing CAS aircraft could and should be a part of the USAF force structure and proposes several aircraft to include the Piper PA-48 Enforcer (photos here), the Sadler Piranha, A-22 and an armed crop duster. The Piranha uses a 30mm linked-feed version of the M230 autocannon used on the AH-64A Apache, AH-64 DAP and AH-6 Little Bird helicopters. I like how the Piranha can be TOWED by ground vehicle trucks until its time to be flown.
Another good article, "Battlefield Air Support: A Retrospective Assessment" in the 1990 Airpower Journal by Dr. Richard P. Hallion makes a compelling case for a continuous overhead presence of strike aircraft over ground forces except he is full of politically correct fighter-bomber jock USAF balogney on point #8 when he says current fuel-hungry, unarmored flying-too-fast-to-see-targets fighter-bombers are better than specially-designed, slower moving, armored attack aircraft for this purpose.
The expressed need for a Continued Overhead Presence (COP) to support future light forces destined to execute three dimensional maneuver warfare concepts, compels the DoD to explore possibilities to include fielding a dedicated aircraft such as an ASP (agile-survivable-potent). In general terms, an ASP might be described as a small, very agile and survivable cross between a Bronco and a Warthog (an "OAX") that could fly either from a maneuver element dirt strip forward arming and refueling point (FAARP) to avoid fixed-site air base targeting or an aircraft carrier without using catapults or arresting gear (as did the Bronco). However, CPT Bateman downplays the enemy ADA threat by saying these aircraft would not be used if these threats are present. This is naive to think we can pick and chose where and when we will fight, so we disagree and insist that countermeasures are included on the U/MCAV and that it be viewed as a full-spectrum of war CAS asset in conjunction with U.S. Army CAVALRY ground maneuver. These aircraft should belong to the Army not the AF.
It will be significantly easier to train enlisted pilots to fly fixed-wing U/MCAVs as years of civilian flight training using Cessna 150-type aircraft proves. Flying a helicopter with each hand on a control lever is more difficult and requires more hand/eye coordination than a fixed-wing aircraft. In fact, Soldiers who earn their private pilot's license would be recognized and encouraged to transition to the U/MCAV and earn their U.S. Army flight wings.
