JOURNAL: A Stinger Moment (via YouTube)?

"The helicopter was flying and passed over us, then we heard the firing of a missile," said Mohammad al-Janabi, a farmer. "The helicopter, then, turned into a ball of fire. It flew in a circle twice, then it went down."Aljazeera

In 1983, the US began to smuggle large number of the Stinger surface-to-air missiles into Afghanistan (as well as a mix of other weapons and tactics), in order to provide the mujaheddin a way to tackle the USSR's Hind-D helicopter. The result was spectacular. The Soviet's lost 333 Hinds. News that a sixth US helicopter was shot down today (the count includes a mix of models including the Blackhawk, a Boeing little bird, a Marine Sea Knight, and the Apache) may indicate a similar line has been crossed. It was likely inevitable, given the growing alignment between regional states with the non-state groups in Iraq (or even worse, the groups have generated sufficient funds/connections from black globalization to bypass states), that high-end weapons would begin to show up. With more effective SAMs in play in combination with barrage tactics (that leverage learning about US evasion tactics), US weapons helicopters are vulnerable like never before in this war. Besides an increase in casualties, these weapons radically increase the range of tactics available to the guerrillas and may result in a rapid innovation cycle similar to what the US faces in IEDs. Are advanced ATGWs and associated tactics next?

Comments

[S]

John
It seems incredibly likely that this is Mujadeen in reverse. Russia is provining advanced antiaircraft technoilogy so why should we be surprised if they are also providng the bird killers that crippled their effort in Afghan. Great observation. Couldn't help thinking the same exact think as the media continues to report that ground fire (?) is bringing down these craft.

[S]

Do you have any thoughts on retarding the nuclear proliferation in the Sunni bloc? What is the endgame of a nuclear armed middle east. Would taking out the nuclear capability in Iran retard the need for the Sunni bloc to go nuke themselves. Or is the genie out of the bottle and we are essentially dealing with a an entire region mimicing Pakistan? And once we determine there is no middle, then what? Do we really want to play for a balance of power in the region? No good solutions.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

It could just be random; that's not at all that improbable; but if it continues at that rate...

Or, it could be that the insurgents are using the (few) manpads saved from the invasion, now that the US is making its do or die offensive.

Or, it could be that Saudi supporters of the Sunnis have smuggled a few pilfered Stingers across the border.

Or, it could be the Iranians.

But the most interesting would be if they were home-made, open source arms bazaar style.
If the IRA could do it back in 1990, it certainly should possible for the iraqi insurgency to do it, with their experience of tinkering with IEDs and car-bombs.

Something like the Ruhrstahl X-4, maybe? :
http://www.luft46.com/missile/x-4.html

Definitely the most 4GW hypothesis....

[Coathangrrr]

I'm not sure exactly what kind of weapons we've been supplying and training the "army" (read:militia) in Iraq with, but I don't suppose there is any reason at all that those supplies *wouldn't* end up in the hands of the insurgents/militias. Especially considering how close to Iran most of the big players in the government are.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

As far as I have understood, it not trusted with much more than uniforms, helmets, AK47's, and pick-up trucks, maybe the odd APC. "Army" indeed.

[adam]

John,

I think it might be six helicopters shot down. According to the Times today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/08/world/middleeast/08helicopter.html?ei=5094&en=a2630624031bfc73&hp=&ex=1170997200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all

The US military has lost five and a PMC has lost one. (Question: I wonder if this count includes the Blackwater "little bird" shot down on the 24th? Apparently not.)

Buried within the story is a fascinating paragraph.

"A senior military official in Washington said Wednesday that, while the episodes were still under investigation, the rash of helicopter shoot-downs appeared to be part of an insurgent strategy to inflict heavier losses on American forces at the start of the new push to secure Baghdad."

Translation: the enemy have the initiative. They can choose to inflict heavier casualties when they want.

Of course the US denies that there are new modern weapons in theatre (despite the last paragraph). Still, the US military in Iraq have an unquestioned reputation for honesty. The fun thing about writing that sentence is that you can read it two ways - I use "unquestioned reputation" a lot these days. Its rather like Paul Bremers "the CPA's accounts are completely transparent", which as we all know means that you cannot see them at all...

[Duncan Kinder]

According to Defense Tech, most US copter pilots have not been trained to respond to threats from SAMs.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003252.html#comments

quote:

If a copter pilot does get attacked by an advanced SAM, he has a couple of ways to defend himself. He can fire off flares to confuse heat-seekers. He can set off radar or infrared jammers. Or he can fly "NOE" ("Nap of the Earth"), very low to the ground, following the contours of the landscape. That "minimize[s] the amount of time to acquire, and shoot a targe -- whether it's an AK[-47 assault rifle], RPG, or SA-7/14/18 [SAM]," according to ME.

But in training for Iraq, ME recalls, "we weren't too worried about SAMs... [W]e didn't think they had very many of them, in operating condition, in the hands of trained users. The more likely threat was massed fire from the vastly more common AK and RPG."

That threat assessment seems to be changing, quickly. "Based on what we have seen, we're already making adjustments in our tactics and techniques and procedures as to how we employ our helicopters," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters.

But there are only so many changes that can be made. These copters don't have a lot of armor. And not much more can be added, without "trading off fuel, weapons, or some other weight," ME notes. "Helicopters are already at very near their max weight... Improved electronics/avionics would help save a lot of weight, but most pilots would rather have the improved flight performance that reduced weight provides, rather than more armor."

"The real problem," he adds, "is the idea of using an anti-armor bird like the Apache or a scout like the Kiowa to slug it out with insurgents on the ground. Neither were really built for it, and the pilots aren't trained for it (unless its done at the individual unit level). TF160 [160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment] teaches and trains the best air to ground engagement tactics, but the rest of the aviation community doesn't get the ammunition, or range time to really teach it."

OK, sure. But now that we're in this counterinsurgent fight, what choice do those pilots really have?

:end_of_quote

[S]

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26822

Interesting take and probably the closest thing to reality out there

[Coathangrrr]

Yes, yes, blame it on Iran.

It isn't as if there are any nonstate actors who have experience shooting down choppers in the region.

[Marcello]

"The result was spectacular. The Soviet's lost 333 Hinds."

Things are not perfectly clear but it seems that 333 was actually the total number of helicopters (including Mi-8, Mi-6 etc.) lost during the entire war. In addition approximatively 120 fixed wing aircrafts were lost as well, including 22 Su-25. Stinger kills were approximatively 102 (including both helos and fixed wings).
This is what I have managed to piece together at any rate. Note that the Stinger wasn't the only MANPAD employed.

The iraqi army is basically armed with
AK-47s, PK/RPK machineguns, RPG-7s and mortars.Basically exactly the same weapons of the insurgents and of the former iraqi army. In addition there is an eclectic collection of APCs including BTR-94s,
BTR-80s, M113s, MT-LBs, Spartans, BMP-1s, Dzik-3s, up armored HMMWVs, gun trucks and God knows what else. Approximatively 100 T-55s and T-72M1s. No artillery, antitank missiles or antiaircraft weapons beyond some old DShK on tripod and probably not even many of those.

"open source arms bazaar style"

A SAM worth a spit is a pretty complicate piece of equipment. Not the sort of thing that can be turned out by any machine shop.
At a minimum someone would have to provide the IR seeker. Wire guidance was a technological dead end for antiaicraft purposes.

[dano]

The US lost a SpecFor Kiowa and a F-14 in the tanker wars in the Persian Gulf about that time too. I always wondered if those were unintended consequences from Stingers making their way down that direction.

I'd heard stories of Stingers (and other high tech weapons) being readily available in the arms bazaars of NW Pakistan (Peshawar, Quetta, etc.) during that period, as well as the inevitable flood of lower tech weaponry. This seems more likely than the Iranians having built or acquired them during that period just after their revolution.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

"According to Andrew Niccol, the filmmakers worked with actual gunrunners in the making of the film [Lord of War]. The tanks lined up for sale were real and belonged to a Czech arms dealer who had to have them back to sell to another country. They used a real stockpile of over 3,000 AK-47s because it was cheaper than getting prop guns. The gunrunners were more cooperative and efficient than the studio or the crew.
[...]
Before shooting the scene where tanks were lined up for sale, the filmmaker had to warn NATO, lest they think a real war was being started when they see satellite images of the set."

Special one-time offer! When buying dozen T-72 or thrree An-12, get Strrela frree! Forr you only my frriend!

"Not the sort of thing that can be turned out by any machine shop."

No, not the equivalent of a Strela, but something crude yet very serviceable.

Wire-guided, (radio-guided not recommendable because of US EW), actuators on the fins, liquid propellant hobby rocket engine, Human Eyeball Target Acquisition System Mark One.

Easily designed by rocket hobbyists, nevermind people with aero engineering degrees.
Of course, you have to build prototypes, test them, etc, but plenty of space in the Syrian or Saudi desert for that.
You get something with shorter range, less flexible deployment, lower reliabilty, less portable, more complex to use, lower kill probability than factory manpads, but who cares, as long as it works?
The hurdle is not technical or the resources for such a project, but the organisation & development time. Only worthwhile in a war lasting many years against a highly airmobile enemy... as in Iraq.
And, only if they're hard to get by from black markets and/or state patrons...
which is obviously not the case in Iraq.

But, if those two conditions are fullfilled, it is something you should expect.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

"This seems more likely than the Iranians having built or acquired them during that period just after their revolution."

"Iran has, at present, developed an uncanny ability to reverse engineer existing foreign hardware, improve it to its own requirements and then manufacture the finished product. Examples of this are the Boragh and the IAMI Azarakhsh."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Equipment_of_the_Iranian_Army

"Mohsen Rezai, commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, announces that Iran has obtained and successfully copied the anti-aircraft Stinger missile for quite some time." 'IRGC Commander on Producing Stinger Missiles' IRNA (Tehran), 10 October 1987; in FBIS Document FBIS-NES-87-197, 13 October 1987, p. 44.
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Iran/Missile/1788_1802.html

Besides, the argon IR coolant in the battery has a limited shelf-life.

People have a way of diss-miss-underestimating what can be achieved by people with dedication and a certain technical talent; especiallcy westerners of third-world people (and Americans of even other first-worlders).

Iran can reverse-engineer Stingers, and open source guerrillas could build home-made SAMs.

[Marcello]

"Wire-guided, (radio-guided not recommendable because of US EW), actuators on the fins, liquid propellant hobby rocket engine, Human Eyeball Target Acquisition System Mark One."

Then we are speaking about a weapon that is going to hit the target once in a blue moon, not the sort of thing that brings down several helicopters in a couple of weeks.
MCLOS guidance (what you are describing) was barely adequate for antitank purposes, and even then it required a lot of training to be somewhat effective. The need to observe both the target and where the missile was going was an heavy burden for the operator. Needless to say helicopters are a lot faster than tanks which makes it hopeless. No such weapon has been found anyway.

[londamium]

If you cast your mind back to April 2004, one of the earlier pieces of insurgent media product to gain widespread dissemination was a SAM attack on a DHL cargo plane that had just left Baghdad airport.

This class of weaponry has been in use ever since the occupation began - the most notable insurgent success being the Jan 2005 downing of an MoD Hercules transport plane just North of Baghdad.

Of the six helos downed, four were from heavy machine gun fire. I suspect that this represents an improvement in insurgent tactics against Apache/Kiowa and other assorted low value aerial targets; this is significant as it elevates the threat environment for coalition aviation and probably signals an end to US politicians going anywhere in Iraq outside an airbase.

Realistically, SAM's are not going to be in abundant supply, and a smart insurgency is going to want to achieve maximum bang-for-buck with this kind of weaponry. So, they'll use them to target Blackhawks and transport helicopters, as these routinely carry more than just a two-man crew, and if used in conjunction with a sophisticated intelligence network, can take out command-level echelons, as was done in Diyala ( the most dangerous province in Iraq for officers ).

I'd also note that the combined fatality count for these six downings is still less than the 34 killed in the Antonov crash ( IMHO due to hostile fire ) in early January - the worst aviation incident since the war began; then again, I guess that Moldovan aircrews and Turkish construction contractors aren't newsworthy victims. This is the other side of the equation - the first 2 days of February resulted in some 13 US fatalities, but the only ones that got airtime were the two helicopter pilots that went down near Najaf.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

Well, as I see it, any guidance at all is an improvement above a dumb RPG.
And using RPGs to shoot choppers is not... *lunatic*, given saturation fire and adequate tactics, even if any one of them has only a slighter probability of hitting helos than blue moons.

I haven't suggested this as a serious hypothesis for the recents shootdowns, but to get speculations in how a 4GW guerrila could find a technical solution to this particular operational problem, and use it tactically.
"Machines don't fight wars. People do. And they use their minds. People, ideas and hardware. In that order!", as Colonel Boyd said.

[Marcello]

"And using RPGs to shoot choppers is not... *lunatic*, given saturation fire and adequate tactics, even if any one of them has only a slighter probability of hitting helos than blue moons."

Of course RPGs are routinely used against helicopters. In addition to direct hits the basic grenade has a built in self destruct mechanism which makes it explode after approximatively 900 meters. This feature has been exploited for anti helicopter purposes in many situations, including in Afghanistan back in the 80's.
The thing is that the basic PG-7 series grenades are abundantly available and can be liberally expended in quantity. A SAM like the one described must be designed and manufactured using the limited facilities available. You will not be able to build many of them and if they are ineffective it will be a waste of resources better spent on IEDs or some other weapon.

[Azr@el]

I remember reading about the iranian version of the 12.7mm dushka antiair machine gun, their version had a slot for the radar guidance system. It was a simple short range unit that helped to lead a moving target. I always thought it was idiotic to strap a radar to a .50 cal, but considering the events of the last weeks , maybe it wasn't so idiotic afterall.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

Marcello, I'm not disputing that a hobby SAM is neither an efficient nor effective solution for the Iraqi insurgents of the real world.
Just an example of what could be *theorically possible* for a 4GW force, using simple and readily available components, like in Azr@ael's example above, that greatly enhances the capabilities of basic systems.

You mention the 900m self-destruct.
After I read about the X4's "Kranich Acoustical Fuse", I thought it would be very easy to fit a similar proximity fuse on a RPG, that is triggered by the Doppler shift of the rotor sound.

I think this would be very simple and cheap to build, and have a great battlefield effect.

[adam]

According to the far-out, far-right Israeli intelligence website Debka these are Iranian supplied shoulder carried missiles. I don't believe this for a millisecond but I am including it as a point for the discussion.

http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=3820

According to the website they are QW-1 or SA-7 anti-air missiles. If memory serves the QW-1 is a Chinese knockoff version of the Stinger, reverse engineered from copies bought in Afghanistan, though a colleague wryly notes that the Chinese manufacturers claim that like any Eastern made item its got better fuel economy, radar, larger warhead and a longer shelf life. Others may doubt this. If so this might be how a "Stinger" is operating 15 years after the US sold them, it simply looks like one.

Anyway personally I doubt that any of this is true and I'm going with the heavy machinegun story (possibly with anti-aircraft sights enhancement) for right now. I'll believe it when US troops report some on the ground. Even so this is the news story that the US will be told soon and it is probably the latest edge of the Israeli push for a US attack on Iran.

The reasons for my doubts are

a) Iran is supplying Sunnis, why? Iran is the big winner in Iraq, it has no reason whatsoever to harm the current Shi'ite led Iraqi government. If the US goes for Iran the current Iraqi government will be a dynamite ally (literally).
b) Iran is supplying Al-Quaeda, causes even more questions. Getting rid of AQ has long been an Iranian objective since AQ hit an Iranian consulate and killed a number of diplomats. Its little remembered in the US but Iran was a key ally in Afghanistan.
c) Iran isn't supplying her allies in SCIRI - which is rather odd.
d) How did the missiles reach Hizbollah? And no, I don't think that the stories idea of routing missiles through pro-US Kurdistan to anti-Kurd Sunnis makes any sense at all.

[Duncan Kinder]

If these helicopter downings have resulted, not from advanced missiles but rather from enhanced ground fire techniques, then is bodes ill not only for the United States in Iraq but also for Plan Columbia, which relies heavily on helicopters.

Missiles are few in number and, presumably, the Iraqi insurgents would want to hoard those which they may have. Ground fire skills, however, would be readily transferable - and it actually would be in the insurgents' interest to create headaches for the United States over in Columbia.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

"enhanced ground fire techniques"

Yes, I'd bet my money on that, ideas rather than hardware (though it's too early to dismiss randomness). My impression is that the insurgents have had a distinct tactical iniative since the war began.
They also have steadily increased the size of their operations, and now they're big enough to ambush helos.

They also seem to field new techniques/hardware not as much and as soon as they get them, but when the effect is greatest, for instance starting shooting down choppers in time for the coming escalation.

Just what the Germans should have done with their Panthers and Tigers, instead of sending the firsts few immediately to the front so the Allies got plenty of time to analyse them before there were many enough to make a difference.

[Marcello]

"After I read about the X4's "Kranich Acoustical Fuse", I thought it would be very easy to fit a similar proximity fuse on a RPG, that is triggered by the Doppler shift of the rotor sound."

I can't make out how much big exactly the fuze is but I suspect is much heavier and bigger than the current fuze. Thus probably cannot be mounted on existing grenades without messing too much with the grenade weights distribution, aerodynamics etc (the flight characteristics of the grenade are already quirky as it is).
At a minimum a compact electronic fuze would be needed. That might be difficult or not worth it. Practically speaking I have heard that some insurgents have tinkered with the self destruct mechanism to make the grenade explode at shorter (but still fixed) ranges. I am not sure if it is true but is probably as far as you can get without complicating things too much.

"Just what the Germans should have done with their Panthers and Tigers, instead of sending the firsts few immediately to the front so the Allies got plenty of time to analyse them before there were many enough to make a difference."

While the first Tiger were indeed sent piecemeal to the front, resulting early vehicles being captured, the Panther were employed exactly in the way you suggest.
They were hold back in reserve until they could be committed en masse at Kursk maximizing the suprise effect. Their appearance in significant numbers in Normandy was again an unpleasant surprise for the western Allies who had had failed to understand it was a mass production tank.
This resulted in a lot of dead US tankers but apart from that not much else. After the failure of operation Blau the germans were in such a deep strategic hole that no mechanical wonder toy they could pull out of the hat could do much for them.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

I asked a friend who knows a thing a two about that, and he told me you could do it with a microcontroller, like a PIC18F; costs about four bucks.

The chip's size is about a square millimeter, and you mount a mic above; alltogether a cube of around 1.2 cm on each side.

The software part is slightly trickier, you have to make samplings, model the acoustic signature etc, but it's a matter of applied wavelets transforms.

He said it'd take four or five guys with engineer-level skills with access to a lab in any university with a physics department.

"the germans were in such a deep strategic hole that no mechanical wonder toy they could pull out of the hat could do much for them"

You can say exactly the same about the US in Iraq.

[stevelaudig]

"Or he can fly "NOE" ("Nap of the Earth"), very low to the ground, following the contours of the landscape. That "minimize[s] the amount of time to acquire, and shoot a targe -- whether it's an AK[-47 assault rifle], RPG, or SA-7/14/18 [SAM]," according to ME."

only if the landscape doesn't steer the bird into predictable routes. Hounds to the hunters.