an aircraft for parades, not war?

Intersting article, I’d love to hear people’s opinions on the points within.

To buy or not to buy
By Amnon Barzilai
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/366142.html

A riveting battle is currently under way in the defense establishment over the deal for Boeing-manufactured Apache Longbow attack helicopters, which the Israel Air Force (IAF) purchased.

The Defense Ministry decided to acquire eight of the new helicopters and to update four Apaches the IAF already had in its possession. Together with the munitions and spare parts, the deal is worth about $500 million. Major General (ret.) David Ivry, a former commander of the IAF and director general of the Defense Ministry who is now the president of Boeing Israel, is wielding his influence in an effort to get the defense establishment to take up the IAF’s option to purchase additional attack helicopters for $200 million. This view is opposed by the current director general of the Defense Ministry, Major General (res.) Amos Yaron. Former senior IAF personnel also object
to the expansion of the deal.

According to Ivry, “It will be very foolish of the defense establishment not to implement the option to buy another six Apache helicopters.” If they’re not purchased, he says, it will mean that the $125 million invested by the defense establishment to develop special systems in the helicopters – which were manufactured for the IAF – will go down the drain. That type of investment, which is recognized in the research and development sphere as a permanent, one-time outlay, pays off in large-scale transactions. In the present case, if the transaction is of limited scope, the price to Israel of each new Apache Longbow will leap from $24 million to $34 million, and the price of an upgraded helicopter will jump from $12 million to $22 million.

Ivry adds that Boeing plans to introduce changes in the configuration of the Apache soon and that it will not be possible to install Israeli technology in the choppers that will be manufactured according to the new configuration. Therefore, he says, the Defense Ministry has to decide fast, so that it will be
able to purchase helicopters of the type in which the local technologies can still be installed.

In addition, Ivry notes, by the time the transaction is completed, in 2006, the IAF will have 12 Apache Longbows, but the minimum needed to create a critical mass of these helicopters is, he says, a squadron. A reduced squadron consists of 18 helicopters, a standard one has 24.

Ongoing failure Hovering over the Apache Longbow deal, and more especially above the helicopters themselves, is the shadow of the battle of Karbala. In the predawn hours of March 24, 2003, three days after the start of the war in Iraq, the U.S. forces in Iraq sustained a severe setback. A squadron of 30 Apache Longbow attack helicopters was forced to curtail its mission
against the Medina Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard in a battle near the city of Karbala. According to the report issued by the U.S. Army, one helicopter crashed on liftoff and a second was shot down and its two-man crew captured. The other helicopters in the assault force ran into a wall of automatic rifle fire or light 23 mm. antiaircraft weapon fire. Only two of the helicopters reached the target, inflicting very minor damage on the enemy.

“A wave of denial threatens to fog over the issue,” warns retired General Barry McCaffrey in an article he published in the American
Armed Forces Journal about the substandard performance of the Apache helicopters at Karbala. McCaffrey, who is now a professor of national security studies at West Point military academy, reveals that 28 attack helicopters were punctured like a sieve in the fighting and that of the 30 helicopters involved, 27 were removed from active service until the end of the war in the wake of the events at Karbala. The good news, the retired general says, is that the Apache Longbow showed itself to be a strong helicopter that is capable of taking fierce fire, while also ensuring the safe return home of its crew.

The battle at Karbala was part of an ongoing failure in the activation of attack helicopters in all the wars the U.S. was involved in during the 1990s. In his article, General McCaffrey recalls the Pentagon’s recoil at the use of attack helicopters in the Kosovo war: “A combination of bad press, bad luck and muddled military thinking led to a widespread belief that the Apache force was extremely vulnerable, a monster to deploy, difficult to maintain and poorly trained for high risk, nighttime
operations.”In the Kosovo war, the U.S. sent 24 Apache helicopters to the arena from Germany, accompanied by a huge defense and auxiliary force. However, technical mishaps brought about the destruction of two helicopters and the death of two crewmen. These disasters, McCaffrey notes, were enough for the mission assigned to the U.S. Army helicopters in Kosovo
to be canceled.

The reports about the blow to the prestige of the Apache Longbow in Iraq failed to stir a media furor amid the exultation at the American victory in the war. Also helping to cover up the failure was the fact that the American-led coalition lost only seven aircraft to Iraqi ground forces fire, a relatively low level of
damage in comparison to the overall scale of the forces in the war. (The other aircraft that were lost were due to accidents to mistaken identity resulting in “friendly fire” by the coalition forces.) However, the problem was that of the seven aircraft, six were helicopters – four Apache Longbows and two Cobras; the seventh was a warplane.

The ramifications of the battle of Karbala and the poor performance of the Apaches are now causing vexation within the Israeli defense establishment. Questions are being asked about
the logic that underlay the decision of the IAF and the Defense Ministry to purchase Longbows. Major General (ret.) Eitan Ben Eliahu, who was commander of the IAF at the time the decision
to acquire the Apache Longbows was made, says: “It’s true that the results of the campaign in Iraq now require a thorough review of the role of the attack helicopter on the battlefield.”

In the view of Brigadier General (ret.) Uzzi Rozzen – a former fighter pilot, commander of the IAF base at Tel Nof and assistant to the defense minister for specialized systems, and today corporate vice president for R&D and strategic planning at Israel Aircraft Industries – “the war in Iraq reinforced the recognition that attack helicopters are a passing episode on the battlefield. They should be given minimal investment, in the knowledge that they will not continue as an alignment until 2020. They will start to fade out long before that.”

A former senior fighter pilot in the IAF notes: “Many points concerning the limited capability of attack helicopters became clear only in the past few years in simulations and war games
that were conducted by the air force and in the recent war in Iraq. But even five years ago, when the transaction was decided on, the IAF knew about the limitations of the Apache Longbow – though I’m not sure everything was internalized properly.”

The fiercest critic of attack helicopters in the defense establishment is Major General (ret.) Prof. Itzhak Ben-Israel, former director of development of weapons systems and infrastructures in the Defense Ministry. In a comprehensive analysis of the war in Iraq written for the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, Ben-Israel asserts that the performance of the helicopters in the battle of Karbala raises serious questions about the future of attack helicopters in war.

“As in Kosovo and the earlier Gulf War,” Ben-Israel observes, “it turned out that this is a weapon capable of dealing with armor targets at short range only, and that within that range, it is highly vulnerable to counterfire … Although it is too soon to judge the performance of the attack helicopters in the war against Iraq, we can already say, with due caution, that they (again) proved a
disappointment … After this event [Karbala], no more helicopters were sent into action across the front line of the American ground
forces. Apart from a number of marginal cases (the capture of Umm Qasr, for example), no real use was made of attack helicopters.”

Role switch

The success of the U.S. Air Force in the Iraq war was seen in the use of long-range precision guided missiles, especially JDAM satellite guided bombs. The bombs were assigned precise targets even before the planes took off on their missions. In one sortie, a bomber was able to release dozens of bombs, which homed in
on their pre-designated targets and destroyed them. The bombs were released from long distances, far from the Iraqi army’s antiaircraft weapons – and, as a result, only one fighter aircraft was shot down in the war.

In many cases, the fighter planes and attack helicopters switched roles in the Iraq war. Because the attack helicopters were leery of
approaching close enough to be hit by tank fire, fighter planes assumed that mission. It also turned out that the antitank rockets the attack helicopters launched against outposts and entrenched positions were ineffective.

Ben Eliahu says that at the time the decision was made to acquire Apache Longbows, the ability of fighter planes to use precision munitions had not yet been proved. In addition, the IDF needed communications systems and capability to transmit data at a very high level between the air and ground forces. “Therefore, the decision to acquire the attack helicopters was the right one at the time.”

The Apache Longbow, Brigadier General (res.) Avner Naveh confirms, was acquired to be a response in the event of a surprise attack on Israel: “And it’s wrong to say that the IAF is
planning for the war that already took place. We are fighting for our country. In a war configuration on the model of the Yom Kippur War, we have no doubt that the attack helicopter will play an important role. It’s not just Syria. Do you have any idea who
[Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak’s successor will be? What if we have to go into Sinai again? Imagine that we have to move an armored division from north to south, compared with the
possibility of moving from one front to another with Apache helicopters. There’s no comparison.”

A senior source close to the IAF says that the attack helicopter is a problematic weapons system to use during a daylight offensive: “I can’t see attack helicopters flying around Sinai or deep into Syria during the day. That activity will be possible at night and from the flanks. The greatness of the Apache is in a containment and defensive battle. Attack helicopters will be the answer in case of a surprise attack on Israel. That’s the difference between the conception of using attack helicopters in the IDF and the U.S. Army. The U.S. is not deploying for containment battles. Who is going to attack it? Whereas in Israel, two Apache squadrons can be a substitute for an armored formation, and even for fighter planes in the first hours of a war, before air superiority is achieved.”

According to Prof. Ben-Israel, the attack helicopter is a vulnerable aerial platform that does not provide protection for its crew. “Therefore, it must not cross a hostile line because it will be downed, and therefore it won’t be used in a war.”

The Americans will continue to use attack helicopters due to considerations of money and politics, Ben-Israel says. The U.S. sent 400 Apache Longbows to Iraq, after investing billions of dollars in them. Now they are developing the attack helicopter of the future, the Commanche, again spending tens of billions of dollars.

“It’s true that the IDF uses attack helicopters for targeted assassinations – but that’s a sideshow,” explains Ben-Israel. “That’s not why we bought them. There are other ways to execute targeted assassinations. If we had had attack helicopters in the Yom Kippur War, that would have been excellent. It would have spared us many losses. In the meantime, wars of that kind have gone by the boards. The attack helicopter is an aircraft for parades. Not for war.”

Glitter in the eye

There was a glitter in the eyes of the defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, the director general of the ministry, Ilan Biran, and
several other senior officials from the defense establishment as they talked about their experience following a flight in the advanced generation of the Apache helicopter at the 1997 air show in Le Bourget, France. Other top officials, who had missed the opportunity to become acquainted with the helicopter in France, made up for it in a visit to McDonnell Douglas, the chopper’s manufacturer, in the United States (the factories are now owned by Boeing).

In the early 1990s, not long after the Apache became operational in the U.S. Army, the Israel Air Force (IAF) purchased 36 of the
helicopters. They were viewed as an air platform that would greatly enhance armored battles on the Golan Heights. The capabilities demonstrated by the Apache helicopter on
display at Le Bourget proved to be completely different from those of attack helicopters of previous generations. Its crowning feature was a radar system, called Longbow, which was
capable of locating any enemy target in the battlefield in any weather conditions, day or night, of differentiating between a tank and another type of armored vehicle, and of determining the coordinates of each of the targets.

Another improved feature of the helicopter was its command, control and communications systems. They allow the helicopter to transmit and receive data, and to share targets with fighter planes and attack helicopters, with ground forces and with forces using precision guided munitions. In addition, the computer system of the munitions systems enables a direct link between the Longbow radar and the 16 Hellfire antitank missiles with which the helicopter is equipped. The radar-guided missile is capable of navigating itself to the target under any conditions of visibility day or night.

The commercial literature that was disseminated by the helicopter’s manufacturer in Israel at the end of the 1990s – based on articles that appeared in professional military journals in
the United States – noted that the Apache Longbow’s tank-destroying capacity was tens of times greater than that of other attack helicopters and combat means.

The discussions in the Israel Defense Forces and the IAF in particular about the scale of the deal went on for about two years. The defense establishment put forward a number of demands, including provision of access to the code of the helicopter’s computer system. The Pentagon refused. In 2000, the decision was made to purchase a limited number of the helicopters and to reserve the option to acquire more in the future.

At the time of the decision, Major General Eitan Ben Eliahu was the commander of the IAF. His deputy was the current IAF commander, Major General Dan Halutz. The head of the air group
was Brigadier General (res.) Avner Naveh. Only a few years have passed since then. The technology developed rapidly. A transaction that seemed so justified and successful at the end of the 1990s now looks problematic. One of the main objections is that the decision was made in response to only one type of warfare – that of the Yom Kippur War.