“I had a personal “no heavy-lift helicopter” policy for any operation I was involved in. The historical pattern of failed missions and squandered opportunities in Vietnam, Iran, Somalia, and the “empty-target” raids, were deeply etched in my mind. Two common-denominator lessons linked all of them; first, the obvious: helicopters make it all but impossible to achieve surprise on an enemy-occupied target. The long-range wap-wap and thumpity-thump created by the turbo-powered heavy-lift rotors inevitably alert any and all enemy personnel occupying a target to the approaching heliborne assault force. After Somalia, every despot, drug kingpin, and dictator who had any reason to believe that the United States might be coming for him expected that when and if we actually came, we’d come in helicopters.3 Imagine the hyper-paranoid UBL sitting in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, hearing the distinctive Doppler-induced noise signature of multiple heavy-lift helicopters flying toward him. It wasn’t likely that he was going to mistake or dismiss the sound as that of a wayward traffic helicopter that took a wrong turn in New York.
Second, I believed that operationally defaulting to the use of[…]”
Excerpt From
The Mission, The Men, and Me
Pete Blaber
The Mission, The Men, and Me
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