Airborne (1997) (3 page)

Airborne forces are hardly an American development. Actually, the United States was one of the last major powers to develop paratroop units. Prior to that, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Great Britain had all organized and committed airborne forces to battle. Nevertheless, the U.S. made up for its late start, and eventually conducted some of the largest and most successful airborne operations of all time. Today, despite their high costs, these same nations (and many others) continue to maintain some sort of airborne force. The reasons are obvious. The ability to reach into another nation’s territory and suddenly insert a military presence is just the kind of policy option that decision makers might want in a time of crisis. Think back to the 1976 Entebbe hostage rescue by the Israelis, the 1989 Panama invasion, or the initial Desert Shield deployments to Saudi Arabia in 1990.

Unfortunately, keeping such a capability alive and viable is expensive. Airborne troops need special training, equipment, and a force of transport aircraft to deliver them to their targets. Also, the personnel in airborne units are among the best qualified and motivated in the military, thus depriving other branches and services of skilled leaders and technicians that are badly needed. As early as World War II, senior Army leaders were concerned that the airborne divisions were skimming off the cream of their best infantry. A private in an airborne unit might well be qualified to be a sergeant and squad leader in a regular infantry formation. Still, those same Army leaders recognize a need for a hard-tipped force to smash an opening into enemy territory and lead the way in. That force is the airborne.

Modern airborne forces are part of the small group of elite units used by the United States and other nations in the highly specialized role of “forced entry.” This means forces assigned, specially trained, and equipped to lead assaults into an enemy-held area, then hold open the breach until reinforcements arrive to continue the attack. Today, these units usually fall into one of three different categories. They include:

 

In the United States, we have formed our airborne forces into several different types of units. A small percentage are concentrated into the various Army special forces units, like the famous Ranger battalions. Most of our airborne capabilities are found in a single large formation, the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Built around three airborne brigades (each based around a reinforced parachute regiment), it is a force with almost twenty thousand jump-qualified personnel. Everyone from the two-star divisional commander to the public-affairs file clerk is certified to make parachute jumps into a potential combat zone. Once upon a time, there were several dozen such units in the world’s armies. Today, though, only the 82nd is really set up to make a division-sized jump into hostile territory.
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This is more than just an idle boast. The 82nd was about to make such a jump into Haiti when they were recalled in the fall of 1994. Three full airborne brigades were ready to drop into a country in just a few hours, and bring a dictator to heel, had that been necessary.

Today, in maintaining the capacity to rapidly deploy overseas, the 82nd actually combines the capabilities of several major services and commands, including the U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) and their organic Air Mobility Command (AMC). The 82nd also derives a great deal of its training and transportation from the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command (AMC). Like so many of the capabilities of today’s military, there is almost always more to a unit than you see on CNN. So read on and I’ll try and show you the varieties of units and qualities that make up the 82nd’s legendary history and deadly combat potential.

Mother Nature probably deserves the credit for inventing airborne delivery. Puff on the ripe flower head of a dandelion and a hundred elegant parachutes dance away on the wind, each carrying a freight of seed. Evolution has taught countless species of plants and animals the lessons of lift and drag, embodied in an endless variety of superbly designed aerodynamic structures. From bald eagles to butterflies, nature was the original aerodynamic engineer, with endless generations to perfect what man today does with computers, wind tunnels, and composite structures.

A “chalk” of paratroops drops from the rear of a C-17A Globemaster III heavy transport.

It’s a long way from a dandelion pod to the modern transport aircraft and parachute systems that make the idea of FEDEXing an airborne unit overnight to the other side of the world possible. Still, the same physical principles apply to both problems.

Man has dreamt of flight from the very beginning of recorded time. Still, it wasn’t until the coming of the 20th century that the basic technologies allowed these dreams to become reality. The first was the transport aircraft. As opposed to fighters and bombers, whose armament constitute their payloads, the transport aircraft is the flying equivalent of a tractor-trailer truck. It is this aircraft which makes airborne operation possible, because without aerial transport, paratroopers are just extremely well-trained infantry.

The other technological development that made the airborne a viable force was the parachute, which required decades of evolution to reach the point where it could reliably deliver a man or vehicle safely to the ground. In fact, not until the 1950s was it really perfected. It is worth a look at these systems to better understand their significance in the development of airborne warfare.

If you have any knowledge of aviation history, you know that General Billy Mitchell was the first American with a real vision of the military uses of airpower. Even before the opening of World War I, he was pondering just what airplanes might do for the Army. The limited payload, range, and speed of early aircraft probably made it unlikely that, at first, he really thought much about dropping armed troops on an enemy. What we know of his nascent visions shows airpower as a tool of coercion, reconnaissance, and overmatching destruction, not necessarily as a delivery service for ground forces and their equipment. Even his experiences in World War I seem to have limited his thinking until 1918, when he began to plan a primitive airborne operation. By the standards of the time it was a stunning scheme: an airborne assault by parachute infantry behind the German lines. He proposed dropping a force of soldiers from the U.S. 1st Division onto Metz and several other fortress towns to help breakthroughs by Allied forces in the spring of 1919. While the end of World War I occurred before Mitchell could carry out his plan, the seed of airborne warfare had been planted in the American military. As a historical footnote, the young officer assigned to study and plan Mitchell’s assault concept was Louis Brereton, who later was to command the 9th Air Force and the 1st Airborne Army during World War II.

It is a matter of historic record that it only took a few years of development to adapt the airplane from a fairground novelty into a combat weapon. Despite the forward thinking of men like Mitchell, the only major military mission that the airplane did not conduct during the Great War is the one that is of interest to us here: personnel, equipment, and supply transport. In their zeal to become a combat arm, the early air force personnel concentrated their efforts upon procuring better models of pursuit (i.e., fighter), bomber, and reconnaissance aircraft.

Even today, most airpower advocates still prefer to think in terms of bombers and fighters striking offensively at an enemy, not the seemingly mundane supporting roles of transport and reconnaissance. Yet it is these last two roles that most ground unit commanders find the most worthwhile. This has been the essential debate for over seven decades. Does airpower support ground operations, or supersede them? Wherever your opinion, it is important to remember that airpower is more than just a killing force in warfare. Everyone, even those leaders wearing USAF blue, needs to remember that airpower’s essential value comes from the exploitation of aviation’s full range of possibilities. Even those missions important to mere mortals who walk and fight down in the mud.

After the First World War it took the vision of men who wanted to make peacetime aviation into a profitable business to cause the birth of real transport aircraft. The first of these efforts took the form of high-speed mail planes, which brought the dream of quick coast-to-coast mail service to reality. As soon as that concept was proven, the idea of doing the same thing with people came into being. You have to remember that coast-to-coast rail service took a minimum of four to six days in the 1920s. Given a propeller-driven aircraft of sufficient range, reliability, and safety, one could potentially reduce that to a day or two. With such aircraft, profitable airlines were possible. One of the first of these aircraft was the famous Ford Tri-Motor, which arrived in 1926. Called the “Tin Goose,” it made regional travel (say, between New York and Boston) in a day not only possible, but routine. European designs like the German Junkers Model 52 (Ju-52) brought similar benefits to airlines overseas.

A portrait of General Billy Mitchell, the father of American Airpower.

While an excellent start, these early airliners still failed to meet the real requirements of commercial airlines. Slow speeds, low ceiling limits, short range, and small payloads were just a few of the aircraft limitations that commercial operators felt had to be overcome to make aviation a viable industry. The breakthrough came in the form of two new designs from builders who should be familiar to almost any aviation enthusiast: the Boeing and Douglas Aircraft companies. At the time, these West Coast companies were pale shadows of their current corporate structures. In the 1930s, these two upstart manufacturers changed the world forever with their new ideas for large transport aircraft. The first new design, the Boeing Model 247D, appeared in 1933, and was the model that every modern transport aircraft would follow in the future. Features like all-metal construction, retractable landing gear, and a top speed of over 200 kn/381 kph made the 247D an overnight success for United Airlines, which had ordered the first sixty produced.

With the Boeing production line completely saturated by orders from United, other airlines like American and TWA turned to Douglas, in Long Beach, California, to build a competitor. From this came the famous “DC” series of commercial transports, which would continue through the jumbo jets of today. The original Douglas design, the DC-1, was a significant improvement over the 247D, with better speed, range, and passenger room. Then, in 1935, Douglas came up with the classic piston-engined transport airlift aircraft of all time: the DC-3. DC-3s would be built in larger numbers than any other transport aircraft in history, quickly becoming the backbone of the growing airline industry. By 1938, over eighty percent of American airline traffic was being carried by DC-3s. Additionally, DC-3s were license-built all over the world, even in the Soviet Union (as the Lisunov LI-2) and Imperial Japan (as the L2D Tabby).