Army Equipment, Lesson 3: Musing about the Black Hole

[jmowreader]

It's easy to shoot down a helicopter with a heat-seeking missile. They produce a lot of heat and they don't fly very fast.

To solve this problem, the Army fielded a device called the Black Hole. If you look at a picture of a helicopter in Iraq, you'll see it--look right behind the main rotor shaft for a purple glass thing. That's the Black Hole.

I would love to have about six Black Holes. I'll turn them into table lamps. They are truly beautiful. They look like iridescent little jewels. How they work is simplicity itself: they blow exhaust from the main engines through this thing. It has a coating that heats up, and after a few minutes of operation it is hotter than the tailpipe. When someone fires a heat-seeking missile at the helicopter, the seeker head will steer the missile toward the hottest point on the aircraft, which is the Black Hole.

There have been too many Black Hole-equipped aircraft getting shot down in this war, and I can think of a few possibilities:

a) The Black Hole is in the stupidest place possible--about a foot and a half from the main rotor shaft. I would think that when the missile hit the Black Hole and exploded, it would damage the main rotor shaft too.

b) Someone in Iraq has invented a proximity fuze for surface-to-air missiles. Prox fuzes go off when the missile's close, and if they've got a prox fuze for their missiles, our guys are in trouble.

c) They've got some kind of operator-guided SAM. That would negate the usefulness of the Black Hole--if the guy on the ground is steering the missile into the tailpipe or the rotor disc, the hottest part of the aircraft is immaterial.

d) They may also be using guns instead of or in addition to missiles.

Our highest priority in Iraq right now is not reconstruction or even withdrawal. Our highest priority is figuring out what these people are shooting our aircraft down with, because if we can't do it the age of helicopter warfare has ended.

[teryang]

1. Operating helocopters outside a combined arms

...offensive scenario including fixed wing close air support or combat air patrol isn't politically permissable. The problem in Iraq now is that the fixed wing assets cannot flatten an area before helocopters enter to perform their tactical missions.

[Fovea]

2. Thank you

We learned this back when Sikorsky was the only player on the block.
I am astounded at how precision and stand off systems seem to have degraded our understanding of the tactical limitations of our systems.

A chopper has a lot of high stress parts, and is not going to out manuver anything swifter than a pidgeon. A clear sky with no support is not a chopper's friend. It also is a lot happier peice of equiptment in a jungle than in a desert. I suspect we'd be happier with some p51 squads just cruising the grid. Now there is a cheep airplane to run.

Man, command has slipped, or perhaps it is just that the volunteer military is just too lean to keep the command gene pool healthy.

So let's just say it in small simple words for the War College, shall we -- You need patrols of way more than two choppers. You need to be able to visually cover better, and target better than just one other Blackhawk can do. These attacks are opportunistic and are shit and git assaults.

If you can't aquire the opponent tout de suite, you won't be around to do anything about it. You need friends, because in one's and twos, we are not getting the hostiles, they are getting us. At the very least a little CS lobbed into the neighborhood first wouldnt hurt, would it?

For God's sake get some real close air and armored ground support and keep it all combined arms. Sure, it screws with your operational flexibility, and shoots your effective range to hell. But what is happening to you now is not sustainable politically.

None of these PNAC commanders have gotten anywhere near combat. Rummy and the rest wanted to do this on the cheap. Instant Empire on the Cheap. It had all the cleverness of jacking off with a rat trap, and the exact same results. I think Rummy, Perle, Wolfy, and the rest should get drafted into their own little platoon.

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. Yep...

certainly seems like operational command is in the hands of people who lack understanding of tactics, strategy and operational depth, eh?

[Eloriel]

5. You know, even I can see that (or sense it)

I've been so drawn into the whole Vietnam era millieu recently -- to such an extent it's quite painful at times.

One of the things I am sensing is that the quality of our military forces is degraded from the Vietnam era. I'm not talking about training, and certainly not technology, but something else entirely. Consciousness, I think. Perhpas there's a better word for what I'm sensing, but that's what comes to me.

I DO think we were better off with a draft, if only because all sorts of people, with multiple talents and skills and other interests, and multiple ideologies, were included. I believe they broadened the concsiousness of our overall forces in a way that a liberal arts education broadens the mind.

Sure, there are all sorts of people among our Reserves and National Guard as well -- but not as much so among our regular military forces.

It may also have a great deal to do with just being a different generation, in a different time. We were so much more "innocent" back then, as a generation. It was a more innocent time. I think we were better as a people back then, with more depth and (obviously) less shallowness.

If shallow, less conscious, less spiritually and emotionally mature people go into war (especially the commanders at various levels), can the outcomes be anything but fucked up?

I'm not sure I'm making any sense or articulating my point very well, but there IS a substantive difference, somehow, between this era's military force and that era's. And it's not a positive difference.

(This is NOT to diminish our troops in any way.)

Eloriel

[Fovea]

3. Or E

Flechettes, pullchain, and other small monkeywrenchables in the warheads.