US helicopter shot down by Taliban in Afghanistan

[Sea Skimmer]

MH-53 comes cloest to mind and were used by special forces extensively, but those have been phased out.

Nope, been lost to RPG hits in current wars as well; the aircraft also has a relatively high crash rate in general largely because it is so huge and unwieldy. In 2005 a CH-53 crashed in Iraq killing 31 Americans for example. Everyone on board died to be clear, if it had been full that would have been nearly 60 people killed. With an H-53 it becomes a problem simply to find acceptable landing zones which creates a lot of tactical vulnerability against an intelligent enemy.

Chinooks are excellent transports, but it was still best used as a logistics support aircraft during the Vietnam War. It also suffered pretty heavy losses - wiki says 200 aircraft lost out of 750 due to both combat and accidents.

They were also flown something like two million hours...the actual loss rate was very low considering the level of firepower the VC and NVA had, about thirty times that of anything the Taliban have managed since 2001. Remember the US lost around 6,000 helicopters in total in Nam including ones wrecked by enemy fire and sapper attacks on the ground, which was a lot, and the exact numbers will never be known because the all the service branches constantly reassembled ‘new’ aircraft out of parts of wrecked ones. It was a huge war, 58,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese died.

Besides which, I'm not advocating replacement of the entire Chinook fleet - I'm saying the US should procure a dedicated high-survivability transport chopper.

I think you have little clue how much that would cost, and how little it would actually change. Every extra pound of aircraft, armor ect… is more fuel, more spare parts and more maintenance men that have to be brought in and defended on the ground, all exposed to losses all the time. The preferable option is more, smaller aircraft, mainly Blackhawks, not a few niche aircraft that will never be reliability available, but that simply doesn’t work in the conditions of Afghanistan. it doesn’t work because performance is too low, and it’d take too many men to support them… see the theme?

Your talking about spending twenty billion dollars to do this; if you want to save US lives with twenty billion dollars of hardware think small (because that stuff might appear in a relevant timeframe!) like better helmets, more razor wire at remote outposts and paving roads to make planting IEDs more difficult. Or hell, just spend ALL the money on local reconstruction because that does work to win over people to support the NATO/Afghan forces and not the Taliban

The older versions of the MH-53 has been known to take RPG hits and survive in Vietnam, as the thing has a fair bit of armor. There are also instances of Chinooks surviving RPG hits that missed everything important (rotors, engines, cockpit), but chances are the MH-53 will survive a hit better than a CH-47. It wasn't called the "Jolly Green Giant" for nothing.

H-60s, Chinooks and single engine versions of the Cobras have also taken RPG hits and survived, such statements mean little in isolation. Any helicopter is still going to go down if you take a hit in a key area.

The Jolly Green Giant is the HH-3 version of the navy Sea King BTW, not the H-53. The H-53 series was based on the layout of the HH-3, but it’s far larger and sometimes called the Super Jolly Green Giant. The modern versions of MH-53 are far devoiced from the Nam era HH-53, minor changes like a third engine and ten thousand pounds of weight made it a lot more lumbering of an aircraft. That’s one of the reasons why the Pave Low fleet lapsed without replacement, nobody is too sure they want an aircraft that big for specialist roles. Funny enough the USAF has now selected the MH-47 to be its future search and rescue helicopter, the role once held by the Jolly Green Giants, though most recently by Blackhawk airframes.

Also, if you want to make it difficult for the enemy to shoot at you with an RPG, the MH-53 still wins out. It comes with three gatling guns as standard along with dedicated gunners, as opposed to the Chinook maybe having 3 MGs. The MH-53 can lay down a lot of suppressing fire if it has to.

And that's going to help against a random RPG shot in the dark... how? Actually the galting guns are largely phased out as well, most now live on hummves and MRAPs, because they don't have as long an effective range as RPGs and .50cal guns on the ground. Instead M3 series .50cal machine guns are now the typical H-53 series armament. The MH-47 meanwhile has four weapons stations, not three, and they can all take the same weapons the three stations on a H-53 can. The Army however doesn't give a damn as much on its normal CH-47 aircraft because it has far more and better gunships as escorts then the Marines or Air Force.

[Meest]

My question would be is why aren't these raids done with more backup forces, or over watch forces? Apaches or some aircraft in the area already, the first sign of any RPG fire and that building should be flattened, guessing the RPG operators aren't too afraid of some small arms return fire. Might not work for the more stealthy missions but still think they should roll around in more force and make it harder to get away if you dare to fire. It's being said now they took out 8 insurgents, how high value they are I have no clue but not seeing the trade off value.

[Sea Skimmer]

My question would be is why aren't these raids done with more backup forces, or over watch forces? Apaches or some aircraft in the area already,

Its a big highly dispersed war, the more forces sent on one mission the fewer missions you accomplish. Economy of force is essential to effective counter insurgency. Endless demands exist on aircraft assets in particular. Everyone would just love to have a pair of Apaches along for every raid, convoy, base that spotted some Taliban up on a hill and other day to day situation. It is not possible. Maybe 120 US Army Apaches are in the country, they can't all fly every day and each mission can only last a couple hours. They cannot be everywhere.

the first sign of any RPG fire and that building should be flattened, guessing the RPG operators aren't too afraid of some small arms return fire.

Blowing up buildings in response to the slightest fire used to be what the US did all the time.. and it meant we killed lots of civilians and had no idea if we'd killed any Taliban or not, let alone specific high value targets. Its a very bad blanket policy and the Taliban grew stronger every year it was in force. Anyway the real threat to aircraft is countless small one or two man weapons teams up on mountains.

Might not work for the more stealthy missions but still think they should roll around in more force and make it harder to get away if you dare to fire. It's being said now they took out 8 insurgents, how high value they are I have no clue but not seeing the trade off value.

How can you expect to know the value of something when you have no idea what the equation is in the first place? This is a war, shit happens, people die on both sides, and so far the US death toll for a TEN year war is still amazingly low. You don't like the war, that's fine and well, but the US military has a pretty damn good idea of what it's doing now. Demanding lower risks means lower results, often dramatically so. Demanding them after a not the usual loss of a loaded Chinook is just illogical.

[Sea Skimmer]

Interestingly it seems what evidence has been collected so far, the whole area is still a battlefield, suggests the aircraft was not hit by an RPG but a much larger rocket motor projectile, essentially an anti helicopter mine fired in salvos. Not much anyone can do about that if you fly into the kill zone. They brought down a few helicopters in Iraq in past years, as well as a number of Soviet ones in Afghanistan.

[Thanas]

How do these work?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'd assume they take the VT fuse out of an artillery shell and put it on what's basically a slightly smaller Qassam rocket. If with better production qualities there were a lot of anti-aircraft rockets for shooting down bomber streams produced and equipped like that post-WW2, though most were meant to be fired by aircraft, most notoriously the nuclear-tipped unguided Genie rocket.

[Sea Skimmer]

Varies. But basically they make a whole cluster of fat stubby rockets with very large heavy fragmentation warheads from scratch fired out of drain pipe or similar improvised launchers. Timed fuses are cut for varying lengths on each rocket so when you shoot them all in one volley and get a ripple of heavy explosions across the sky. They also work for bombardment purposes with impact fuses; but the main use is anti aircraft in and dug into the side of the narrow valleys of Afghanistan they are potentially inescapable. In Iraq they’d pack all the launch tubes into the bed of a truck, rig a command wire to the roof of a building and simply wait for days or weeks for a helicopter to fly near enough to be worth firing which wasn’t that efficient, but still worked during the peak of the fighting. A helicopter caught by one of theses suffers like it was hit by a large surface to air missile, not something shoulder fired, and may well break up in mid air, which appears to be the case here.

VT fuses are unlikely, these things are crude as hell usually, and a lot of modern VT fuses only look dead ahead and not out to the sides. They are no longer exactly the same as anti aircraft ones.

[JointStrikeFighter]

If you had a bunch of VT fuses that looked ahead it shouldn't be too hard to mount them angled to the side on your improvised rockets; if the rocket spins at a decent rate it'll give proximity like performance.

[Sea Skimmer]

Actually, that'd be hard as hell. We’re talking about people who usually don’t even have welding torches to even try to make this kind of thing, and you want them to rig up multiple VT fuses? They use home fired clay pots and metal trash to make IED casings. You must understand you can’t just tape together such fuses at random, you'd first have to take the thing apart, manually arm it in an incredibly unsafe never intended manner, the force of firing a a home made rocket is not reliable enough to ensure arming, especially not if the fuse is mounted horizontally, then put it back together… except with a lot of VT fuse designs once the fuse is armed it is also ACTIVE, which means after a very short time delay the fuse will function in proximity mode and detonate from proximity to your body, the walls of your mud hut or the fact that you are holding it three or four feet above ground level! It might not kill you, it sure will take off some fingers. So that wont even work.

Its actually being pretty optimistic to assume they could even make a single VT fuse work on an improvised rocket unless they had a dedicated VT fuse intended for military rockets, and also had a pretty damn high impulse improvised rocket to reach that threshold of firing impulse needed to arm the thing normally. The anti aircraft rockets that were made in Iraq were big heavy and slow, more of a bouncing betty mine scaled WAY up then a long range artillery rocket, so the launch impulse is unlikely to be violent enough for anything like normal arming. At least not with reliability, and when you are risking yourself to build the thing and then to move it, emplace it, and then wait to use it how much unreliability are you going to accept?

Even if they can do that, given multiple fuses you need to still devise a contained explosive powder train to link each fuse to a booster and the booster to the main charge, and for all that you still only made one rocket which may go nowhere near the target anyway and has a lot of extra features that might cause it to dud. This is all far more trouble then its worth for people with such primitive resources. In the time it took someone to do that they could crap out ten or even twenty rockets with timed fuses and barrage fire them; without the trouble of trying to obtain and transport VT fuses which still have good batteries.

Anti chopper mines do exist from factories which have proximity fuses, more often IR or laser ones then radar though, but that's factory stuff, little of which has ever hit production because its so expensive. The vast majority of production factory anti helicopter mines are just giant claymore types, intended more to cover vast open areas that could be helicopter landing zones economically (kill ranges can be 200-300m) then bring down choppers in mid air. These are not so much different then the improvised rocket mines in Iraq and now seemingly Afghanistan. The main point is just build a really heavy fragmentation warhead and you'll have a big kill zone. More then one chopper in Iraq was lost to nothing but an IED on the ground shaped to explode upwards with a lot of heavy fragments. Helicopters could fly higher to avoid this stuff, but then they become far better targets for MANPADS and will be seen and heard much further away in general.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Eh I meant a single vt fuse angled out which the rockets spin would cause to cover a wider area; think of the fuseing on the sensor fused weapon hockeypucks. I had assumed you could just use 60mm mortar round VT fuses, point taken wrt the arming mechanism.

[Sea Skimmer]

I see what you mean now; making the rocket spin stabilize without flying out of control would be its own can of worms though.

This is what one of the launchers for these things in Iraq looked like after firing; though in this instance it was targeted for a surface to surface attack on a US base
http://www.longwarjournal.org/images/Slide13.JPG

Rather large and bulky, but nothing Taliban pack mules couldn't haul onto a valley slope one by one over a number of days in preparation for an ambush.

[Jim Raynor]

Read Coffee's post again, he's talking about how the Taliban are facing extinction now that they've supposedly sufficiently angered the US special forces.

The killed 31 people and managed to gain the anger of several thousand people that are selected solely for their ability to never give up. All in all, this wasn't a victory, it's a flat out death kneel depending on how USSOCOM and the White House want to play it.

What else does that mean than that their heart hasn't been in it so far? Also excuse my skepticism about simply throwing more resources at the special forces or increasing their operations bringing the Taliban down. That train left the station years ago.

There's a difference between REALLY motivating an organization to kill more, and claiming that the guys with the guns in their hands are half-assing it. The SEALs in the choppers and on the ground don't come up with their own missions. They get their missions from commanding officers and political leaders.

[Jim Raynor]

According to the the news, the guy who shot down the Chinook has been killed. Also, the number of SEALs onboard has been lowered to 17.

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Coalition forces in Afghanistan have killed the Taliban insurgents responsible for the downing of a helicopter that left 38 U.S. and Afghan personnel dead, the commander of U.S. forces there and NATO announced Wednesday.

A precision airstrike killed Mullah Mohibullah -- a Taliban leader -- and the insurgent who fired what's believed to be the rocket-propelled grenade that brought down the helicopter, according to Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Several of their Taliban associates were also killed, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.

"This does not ease our loss, but we must and we will continue to relentlessly pursue the enemy," Allen told Pentagon reporters assembled for a video news conference Wednesday.

The strike took place in Chak district, Wardak province, on Monday, the ISAF said.

A Taliban spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment. Wardak provincial spokesman Shahidullah Shahid also could not be reached for comment.

The attack on the helicopter Saturday represented the worst single-incident loss of American life since the start of the Afghan war. Thirty Americans died in the crash, military officials said. The other victims were Afghan personnel.

The Pentagon will put the Navy SEAL death toll in the helicopter downing at 17, according to two Defense Department officials. Originally, Pentagon sources told the news media that 22 SEALs were killed.

Mohibullah was a key facilitator in an insurgent attack cell led by Din Mohammad, a Taliban leader killed in a previous Special Operations mission, Allen said. Mohibullah had as many as 12 Taliban fighters under his command, including potential suicide bombers.

"After an exhaustive manhunt, Special Operations forces located Mullah Mohibullah and the shooter after receiving multiple intelligence leads and tips from local citizens," the ISAF statement said. "The two men were attempting to flee the country in order to avoid capture."

ISAF troops found and followed the two into a wooded area and, after ensuring no civilians were around, called for the airstrike, the statement said.

Allen said the aircraft involved in the strike announced by NATO was the F-16, but he didn't say how many.

Allen said the strike didn't kill the Taliban leader that U.S. forces were hunting the night of the fatal attack, but he confirmed that Mohibullah was killed in the F-16 strike announced Wednesday.

The remains of all 38 of those killed in Saturday's incident arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Tuesday for a "dignified transfer." Because the catastrophic nature of the crash made the remains difficult to identify, all were brought to the United States.

The Air Force Mortuary Affairs Office explained that a "dignified transfer" is not a ceremony, but rather "the process by which, upon the return from the theater of operations to the United States, the remains of fallen military members are transferred from the aircraft to a waiting vehicle and then to the port mortuary."

Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan said the names, ages, hometowns and military units of the slain Americans will be released within the next 24 hours. He said the public announcement has been delayed for security reasons.

The Afghan remains will be returned to their families once identifications can be made, U.S. officials said.

[dragon]

Couple of questions.
1. Of the 300 personnel in a seal team how many of them are combat troops with the rest being support.

2. Several of the resources out there on seal teams says that seal team 6 was dissolved in 1987 and that the operators formed DEVGRU which fell under Joint Special Operations Command instead of Naval Special Warfare like thje rest of the seals.
However people still refere to them as seal team 6, did they get reformed later?

[Agent Fisher]

They're called Seal Team Six by the media and public still. Just rolls of the tongue easier than Naval Special Warfare Developmental Group.

[Pelranius]

Couple of questions.
1. Of the 300 personnel in a seal team how many of them are combat troops with the rest being support.

I've heard a 120 to all 300, with the support personnel being counted separately.