By Bill Ickes
Agence France-Presse, 09 February 2007
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Air power is crucial to US military strategy in Iraq, but the insurgents and militia groups that made the roads treacherous are now taking deadly aim at helicopters, the army's flying workhorse.
Six US helicopters have crashed in less than three weeks, at least four of which are known to have been shot down, including two nimble private choppers from the Blackwater private security group.
Twenty-seven people have died in the crashes.
"Two of the six were directly attributable to enemy fire," Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said on Friday in Washington.
"Another two of the six are believed to have been downed by enemy fire while these helicopters were not in contact with the enemy."
The sharp losses have forced a serious rethink by Pentagon chiefs.
"Clearly, there's been more effective ground fire," Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said early this month.
"We're taking a hard look at that" to see if the crashes represent a short-term spike in attacks "or if there's some kind of new tactics and techniques that we need to adjust to," he added.
In Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said on Thursday that the military was "constantly reviewing our tactics and our techniques for dealing with the threat."
On Wednesday, a Marine CH-46 helicopter crashed in the western province of Al-Anbar, killing seven.
A video from the Islamic State of Iraq insurgent group broadcast on global television showed a helicopter apparently struck by a missile and crashing.
The video's authenticity could not be independently established, however.
Analyst Mike Williams at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London noted on Wednesday that the CH-46 Sea Knight "is a big target, made for moving people around" and also an ageing craft first used during the Vietnam War.
Other helicopters lost in Iraq were more recent models, however -- including two Apache gunships with cutting-edge defences that were nonetheless hit by fire from the ground.
There is speculation that insurgents and Shiite militia are equipped with new weapons, either upgraded versions of the Soviet SA-7 Strela missile or something more sophisticated.
The London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat has reported that the advanced SA-18 Igla -- a modern version of the Strela which is harder to defend against -- might have found its way into Iraq.
A version of that missile is produced in
Iran "and was successfully used by Hezbollah during last summer's war with Israel" in Lebanon, the newspaper said.
But a Pentagon spokesman said on Thursday that no link had been established between the crashes, and downplayed reports that advanced weapons were being used.
"I don't think I can make any sort of conclusion like that at this point," said the spokesman, Bryan Whitman.
Garver said that to keep insurgents guessing "we vary our flight operations so the enemy can't discern patterns in our flying. We vary our routes so that we don't establish traffic patterns."
But Anthony Cordesman at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said: "Insurgents can simply wait anywhere in the normal flight area until a helicopter becomes easy to attack."
He added that they can use "virtually any automatic weapon, man-portable surface-to-air missiles and even RPGs (rocket-propelled grenade launchers)."
Williams at RUSI said that in addition to weapons from Tehran, insurgents in Iraq have access to "any number of arms dealers, not necessarily state-based."
An estimate by the Brookings Institution in the US capital found that the United States had lost fewer than 60 helicopters since the March 2003 invasion, and Cordesman noted that "these losses compare with some 5,000 helicopters lost in Vietnam."
The worst US chopper crash in Iraq involved two Blackhawk transports near Mosul in the north of the country on November 15, 2003, and killed 17 soldiers.
Two weeks earlier, 16 soldiers died when their CH-47 Chinook was shot down near Fallujah in Anbar province.
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Citation: Bill Ickes. "Iraq insurgents threaten US helicopter fleet," Agence France-Presse, 09 February 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070209/wl_mideast_afp/iraqunrestusair_070209203356
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