The downing of American helicopter is perhaps the worse possible defeat the US can have on this battlefield. Losing a tank or Bradley fighting vehicle is not as crippling to our effort as losing our advance technology helicopters. Losing one often the results is a large number of casualties. They are one way we project power on land, similar to our large Navy, which projects power with its presence in the Persian Gulf. The defeat of the helicopter could, if not remedied, spell the immediate failure of the new strategy regardless of the amount of new troops being deployed to Baghdad.
History is on the side of the resistance – the fact that this enemy has shown success in defeating our helicopters is eerily similar to what happened in the Afghanistan in the 1980s. The US provided support to the rebel fighters against the Soviet Union in the form of Stinger missiles, which back then was our first generation surface to air shoulder fired missile.
The lack of accountability of the surface to air missile such as the SA-7 Grail has always been one of the risks of not having enough troops following the run up to Iraq in 2003. If we come to find out that the enemy has gotten their hands on a large cache of these, then this presents a real, clear and present danger to US peace keeping operations. Ground convoys will be force to move in smaller formations, travel unpredictable routes, and in general take longer to get to their destination if they are not covered by the helicopters from above. We won’t be able to move troops as quickly, as we will be risk adverse to put large numbers of troops at risk from being shot down.
You could actually consider an unaccounted for shoulder fired, surface to air missile a “weapon of mass destruction”. While clearly the weapon does not have the capability to wipe out hundreds of thousands of people such as a nuclear weapon, it could cripple the US economy if one is deployed against a commercial aircraft on our shores. Should a commercial airliner came under attack by a surface to air missile and was destroyed, the impact would be far reaching beyond the passengers on the plane. Airline traffic would come to a complete halt, similar to what followed 9/11, perhaps for days or even a week. Airlines would go bankrupt, commerce would slow down, and markets would be shaken. We must accept the fact that in the new kind of war we are fighting, weapons of mass destruction go beyond the nuclear threat, but are weapons that threaten our economy and basic freedoms.
The downing of the helicopter also reminds us of what happened in Mogadishu in 1993 as told in the story of Black Hawk Down. Small arms fire combined with a shoulder fired weapon took down a helicopter during a humanitarian mission to support starving people against warring factions. We remember the bodies of the pilots being dragged though the streets; 18 brave Americans lost their lives during a 24 hour battle to make sure no man was left behind. We felt such a loss, but what most people don’t realize is that thousands of enemy were killed and wounded, so from straight military perspective, we completely destroyed the enemy. Similar to the Tet offensive in Viet Nam, while the fight was won on the battlefield, it was lost in the hearts and minds of the Americans.
The enemy uses the defeat of these helicopters to a tremendous recruiting advantage – the fact that the Great Satan’s technology can be defeated with small arms fire and available munitions gives them great hope and resolve to continue the fight. It demonstrates we can be defeated in a very narrow window. It allows countries who sympathize with the resistance to supply them with something useful to their cause. We need to investigate immediately what kind of weapons are taking our helicopters down, and counter attack immediately, or else this war will be lost before the strategy had a chance to even work.
