Military rotary wing assets: Army or RAAF
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In '68 whilst preparing for the SE Asia War Games I lived in a tent in the bush right beside our Army colleagues at Shoalwater Bay as part of RAAF support for 4RAR's pre-deployment workup - and I was Navy!
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I had the pleasure of being on Kangaroo 1, whereby the RAAF provided support to the Army and others. At the end of each day, the RAAF returned to Rocky and headed off to the motel for a good night's sleep, aided by a few bottles of anaesthetic.
I know that even the 'looxury' of a tent at the main base camp seriously pissed off some of the grunts. I can recall baiting an arty major out at Sam Hill one day telling him how we had to make do with cold showers when we got back to Rocky after dark every evening. Not having showered for a week, he 'bit' wonderfully well. God help me, with that little stir, I was probably partly responsible for the helos' transfer to the Army.
You're not totally wrong about some RAAF crews using motels during the exercise though. I can remember being told that the Herc crews would be put up in tents during the exercise and we all lined up grinning from ear to ear to watch their reaction to that piece of news on arrival at Rocky. However, they insisted on 'proper' accommodation and were put up in a motel in town, so we were denied that one piece of entertainment.
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"Try having an operation with marines, army, navy and airforce trying to operate together in this example!"
Marines flying Navy minesweeper MH-53s (without intake dust-filters), refueling from Air Force C-130s (whose encrypted radios wouldn't link with the USN helos' differently encrypted radios), with Army troops aboard!
Just because it was decided that all 4 services had to get their share of "glory", so no one would feel left out.
Of course, it would have been unthinkable to use Marines to fly USMC CH-53s, refuel from USMC KC-130s, with Force Recon on board, absolutely impossible!
Marines flying Navy minesweeper MH-53s (without intake dust-filters), refueling from Air Force C-130s (whose encrypted radios wouldn't link with the USN helos' differently encrypted radios), with Army troops aboard!
Just because it was decided that all 4 services had to get their share of "glory", so no one would feel left out.
Of course, it would have been unthinkable to use Marines to fly USMC CH-53s, refuel from USMC KC-130s, with Force Recon on board, absolutely impossible!
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Not that particular one, no, but there has been enough written about it for a lot of years to get a good picture of how it was "planned" (I use the term loosely) and how it went bad.
As this was not old history for me (I enlisted in the USMC July 1980), I have indeed paid attention to the facts as they became available, and have also seen how various authors have tried to "interpret" those facts to fit their particular agenda.
That is why I will accept no single author's view, no matter how "well respected" he is, or "definitive" his book is hailed to be.
More often than not, time does not bring clarity, but allows for well-meaning distortion of the event to go unchallenged as those with first-hand knowledge are ignored as "being too close to the situation to be objective", or simply aren't around to confirm or dispute the "new view" of the event.
Since the book you cite was written by a USAF officer involved in the operation, he has a decent view of what went wrong... and I do believe it would have gone much better if the USAF had provided the helos (if they had any suitable ones) and special ops types to lead the normal troops as well as the refueler/long range transport aircraft.
My statement about an all-Marine force was simply to illustrate one possible alternative to the politically-driven cluster-f$ck that actually went down.
Regardless of who ran the show, a single-service force would have avoided most of the problems with the mission.
Either that, or a coherant process & plan that equipped all services with compatable equipment, trained them all with the same standards and operating procedures, and conducted regular all-service planning & training exercises to allow them to become a unified team, rather than a bunch of separate "my way is the only way" teams working against each other whenever there is no one to "unite" against.
If you have spent the years of the peace fighting against one another, you will find it hard to put those differences aside when you have to "unite" against a common enemy... look at what went on in the US military headquarters in WW2 for a classic example. Inter-service rivalries & reluctance to cooperate added at least 6 months to the Pacific war, IMO.
In the 1980s & 1990s, the US Armed Forces have tried to fix those problems in incompatable equipment & training, and to work together more closely & more often, but they still have a long way to go to actually get it right.
As this was not old history for me (I enlisted in the USMC July 1980), I have indeed paid attention to the facts as they became available, and have also seen how various authors have tried to "interpret" those facts to fit their particular agenda.
That is why I will accept no single author's view, no matter how "well respected" he is, or "definitive" his book is hailed to be.
More often than not, time does not bring clarity, but allows for well-meaning distortion of the event to go unchallenged as those with first-hand knowledge are ignored as "being too close to the situation to be objective", or simply aren't around to confirm or dispute the "new view" of the event.
Since the book you cite was written by a USAF officer involved in the operation, he has a decent view of what went wrong... and I do believe it would have gone much better if the USAF had provided the helos (if they had any suitable ones) and special ops types to lead the normal troops as well as the refueler/long range transport aircraft.
My statement about an all-Marine force was simply to illustrate one possible alternative to the politically-driven cluster-f$ck that actually went down.
Regardless of who ran the show, a single-service force would have avoided most of the problems with the mission.
Either that, or a coherant process & plan that equipped all services with compatable equipment, trained them all with the same standards and operating procedures, and conducted regular all-service planning & training exercises to allow them to become a unified team, rather than a bunch of separate "my way is the only way" teams working against each other whenever there is no one to "unite" against.
If you have spent the years of the peace fighting against one another, you will find it hard to put those differences aside when you have to "unite" against a common enemy... look at what went on in the US military headquarters in WW2 for a classic example. Inter-service rivalries & reluctance to cooperate added at least 6 months to the Pacific war, IMO.
In the 1980s & 1990s, the US Armed Forces have tried to fix those problems in incompatable equipment & training, and to work together more closely & more often, but they still have a long way to go to actually get it right.
Last edited by GreenKnight121; 26th Dec 2006 at 04:03.
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A friend passed me the link to this now dead thread. I think many of not most of the comments made (from both camps) come from people so deeply rooted in that they ‘know’ that no argument from the other side will have any impact at all. However, one comment from ‘jessie13’ is so patently ridiculous I had to comment.
Is it about time that I add that the RAAF were good at operating rotary assets along as it wasn't on the week end, public holiday's, at night or in the wet!
Much of the flying I did on Hueys was at weekends supporting Army Reserve units, and almost every detachment to support a Regular unit involved starting first thing Monday morning and finished at 1500 on Friday afternoon - for the Army unit at least.
The chopper crew had to deploy on the Sunday to be on station at 0800 Monday morning and sometimes had to wait until Saturday to fly back to Amberley or Canberra - all to fit in with most regular Army units' "Monday to Friday" roster.
And when an individual Army unit went into the field maybe twice a year, the same helicopter (and Caribou) crews would be out in the bush digging yet another shell scrape a week or two later supporting another Army unit.
The comment above is a furphy up there with the crap you continually hear from Army people about RAAF chopper crews demanding always to be put up in five star hotels. All the five star hotels I stayed in in my time on choppers with the RAAF had green canvas walls - if I was lucky.
Well, good point, but their wings don't rotate that much these days by all accounts!
Mustn't be that confidence-boosting to be having to press 'CTRL-ALT-DELETE' to make the computers talk to eachother again whilst tooling around over the dark cold sea at night.
Mustn't be that confidence-boosting to be having to press 'CTRL-ALT-DELETE' to make the computers talk to eachother again whilst tooling around over the dark cold sea at night.
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EffohX,
Sounds identical to my short-lived RAAF rotary wing career.
But never let the facts stand in the way of a good story! 
Another example of how the politics of inter-service rivalry can fcuk up something that's working quite well to start with.
Sounds identical to my short-lived RAAF rotary wing career.
But never let the facts stand in the way of a good story! Another example of how the politics of inter-service rivalry can fcuk up something that's working quite well to start with.
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I was always surprised at the antipathy towards the RAAF that was so often displayed by the men (there were few women in my day) of the Green Machine.
(I know I’m treading on really thin ice here and am standing by for the inevitable ‘incoming’ my next comments will generate), but it reminded me a lot of what we used to call the ‘inverse snobbery’ that my wife would sometimes encounter from some (I stress only some) of her staff where she worked in the town near our RAAF base. They (her staff) were married to (RAAF) enlisted men, while she, their boss, was married to an officer, and so it was just assumed by these ladies that she would come over all superior – (I hasten to say that my wife acted anything but) – and she found herself working with women with a serious attitude problem before she’d opened her mouth.
I quite frequently found this same attitude among some (again, I stress some) Army personnel when we’d turn up on detachment to support an Army unit. Muggins would walk in ready to be as co-operative as he could be and get slapped in the chops with the proverbial wet fish by some gentleman – usually a Captain or a Major – in green who’d quite obviously had some serious issues – real or just in his imagination – in the past with the boys in blue.
Reading some of the comments in this thread, I can only assume the stories some have recounted here were first heard late one Friday afternoon in some Army O’s mess – and were being told by someone who’d heard them second or third hand himself, because they had so obviously grown outrageously in the telling.
I have to agree that the handing over of the helicopters to the Army back in 1988 stemmed directly from the experience in their junior officer days in Vietnam of the then CGS (and a few others) who wanted the RAAF to operate their Hueys the way the US Army did, and the fact that the RAAF refused to is really the nub of the whole multi-page argument here. If they had, the loss rate would have been considerably higher than it was – and the fact that that would have been unacceptable, both operationally and politically back in Australia is something the then CDF and others who shared his views conveniently overlook.
It had little or nothing to do with the courage of the RAAF crews – God knows, quite a few of them exhibited enough of that when push came to shove and the situation demanded it – and everything to do with the fact that the Australians didn’t possess the huge logistics and replacement train the Americans had.
The Americans lost 100 choppers in a few days when they first ‘officially’ invaded Cambodia in ’71, and although I know that hurt them, they had the resources to cope with such losses and more importantly, continue operating. If 9 Squadron had lost 4 Hueys over a similar period of time, it would have involved a major undertaking trying to replace them (both the airframes and the crews) – and in the meantime, the Army would have been without meaningful (or sufficient) rotary wing support.
I think there’s little doubt – none, in fact – that the rules of engagement the RAAF INITIALLY operated under when the Hueys were first deployed to Vung Tau were unrealistic and were undoubtedly drawn up by someone very deeply buried in some back office in Russell Hill. Long Tan changed all that – the men on the spot decided despite the rules to go in to what was an extraordinarily dangerous situation and, perhaps just as important, one that demanded a high degree of flying skill. While it may be true the Americans offered to go in if the RAAF wouldn’t, has anyone considered that very few of the US Army helicopter pilots were instrument rated? The question has to be asked if a non-instruments pilot would have been capable of flying in that storm.
I had a very close Grunt mate who was regaling me one night in the bar about how piss poor the RAAF helicopter crews were but how fantastic the US Army guys were. To illustrate his point, he told me how one day a US Army Huey answered the call his unit in Viet Nam made for a dustoff, but couldn’t land to get the casualty out because the clearing his soldiers were in was too small. It didn’t have a winch, so the pilot used his main rotor to cut himself a pad through quite heavy foliage. He got away with it (but needed two new main rotor blades before the aircraft could fly again).
I think that story illustrates the differences between the two camps in this argument. To the soldier, what the American did was admirable. Before doing the same thing, an airman would ask himself what would happen to the wounded soldier and his colleagues on the ground under him if his reckless actions were to cause the aircraft to crash onto them (and despite what you see in the Hollywood movies, there was a very real chance of that in this case).
(I know I’m treading on really thin ice here and am standing by for the inevitable ‘incoming’ my next comments will generate), but it reminded me a lot of what we used to call the ‘inverse snobbery’ that my wife would sometimes encounter from some (I stress only some) of her staff where she worked in the town near our RAAF base. They (her staff) were married to (RAAF) enlisted men, while she, their boss, was married to an officer, and so it was just assumed by these ladies that she would come over all superior – (I hasten to say that my wife acted anything but) – and she found herself working with women with a serious attitude problem before she’d opened her mouth.
I quite frequently found this same attitude among some (again, I stress some) Army personnel when we’d turn up on detachment to support an Army unit. Muggins would walk in ready to be as co-operative as he could be and get slapped in the chops with the proverbial wet fish by some gentleman – usually a Captain or a Major – in green who’d quite obviously had some serious issues – real or just in his imagination – in the past with the boys in blue.
Reading some of the comments in this thread, I can only assume the stories some have recounted here were first heard late one Friday afternoon in some Army O’s mess – and were being told by someone who’d heard them second or third hand himself, because they had so obviously grown outrageously in the telling.
I have to agree that the handing over of the helicopters to the Army back in 1988 stemmed directly from the experience in their junior officer days in Vietnam of the then CGS (and a few others) who wanted the RAAF to operate their Hueys the way the US Army did, and the fact that the RAAF refused to is really the nub of the whole multi-page argument here. If they had, the loss rate would have been considerably higher than it was – and the fact that that would have been unacceptable, both operationally and politically back in Australia is something the then CDF and others who shared his views conveniently overlook.
It had little or nothing to do with the courage of the RAAF crews – God knows, quite a few of them exhibited enough of that when push came to shove and the situation demanded it – and everything to do with the fact that the Australians didn’t possess the huge logistics and replacement train the Americans had.
The Americans lost 100 choppers in a few days when they first ‘officially’ invaded Cambodia in ’71, and although I know that hurt them, they had the resources to cope with such losses and more importantly, continue operating. If 9 Squadron had lost 4 Hueys over a similar period of time, it would have involved a major undertaking trying to replace them (both the airframes and the crews) – and in the meantime, the Army would have been without meaningful (or sufficient) rotary wing support.
I think there’s little doubt – none, in fact – that the rules of engagement the RAAF INITIALLY operated under when the Hueys were first deployed to Vung Tau were unrealistic and were undoubtedly drawn up by someone very deeply buried in some back office in Russell Hill. Long Tan changed all that – the men on the spot decided despite the rules to go in to what was an extraordinarily dangerous situation and, perhaps just as important, one that demanded a high degree of flying skill. While it may be true the Americans offered to go in if the RAAF wouldn’t, has anyone considered that very few of the US Army helicopter pilots were instrument rated? The question has to be asked if a non-instruments pilot would have been capable of flying in that storm.
I had a very close Grunt mate who was regaling me one night in the bar about how piss poor the RAAF helicopter crews were but how fantastic the US Army guys were. To illustrate his point, he told me how one day a US Army Huey answered the call his unit in Viet Nam made for a dustoff, but couldn’t land to get the casualty out because the clearing his soldiers were in was too small. It didn’t have a winch, so the pilot used his main rotor to cut himself a pad through quite heavy foliage. He got away with it (but needed two new main rotor blades before the aircraft could fly again).
I think that story illustrates the differences between the two camps in this argument. To the soldier, what the American did was admirable. Before doing the same thing, an airman would ask himself what would happen to the wounded soldier and his colleagues on the ground under him if his reckless actions were to cause the aircraft to crash onto them (and despite what you see in the Hollywood movies, there was a very real chance of that in this case).
An article worth reading
Here's an academic study which examines some of the topics being 'discussed' here....
http://www.defence.gov.au/raaf/airpo...elicopters.pdf
http://www.defence.gov.au/raaf/airpo...elicopters.pdf
Last edited by Tibbsy; 30th Mar 2007 at 10:58. Reason: Grammar...
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Long Tan changed all that – the men on the spot decided despite the rules to go in to what was an extraordinarily dangerous situation and, perhaps just as important, one that demanded a high degree of flying skill. While it may be true the Americans offered to go in if the RAAF wouldn’t, has anyone considered that very few of the US Army helicopter pilots were instrument rated? The question has to be asked if a non-instruments pilot would have been capable of flying in that storm.
Last edited by Brian Abraham; 1st Apr 2007 at 07:49.
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Re US Army and instruments - yes they were up to the job.
Read the excellent reference in Tibbsy's post to see why the RAAF was held in a sometimes less than flattering light by the Army
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Aaah Capt Sand Dune,
How right you are - but couldn't we all learn a lesson on Jointery (or lack of it) from the past? How much Operational Effect/Effort has been nullified by those championing misguided individual Service 'party politicks'.
Lets hope that the here and now of the Aussie investment in technology and equipment will not see all of that potential wasted by individual 'pi$$ing on each other's fires' contests.
How right you are - but couldn't we all learn a lesson on Jointery (or lack of it) from the past? How much Operational Effect/Effort has been nullified by those championing misguided individual Service 'party politicks'.
Lets hope that the here and now of the Aussie investment in technology and equipment will not see all of that potential wasted by individual 'pi$$ing on each other's fires' contests.
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With the exception of the FJ boys, I have always felt the RAAF have been in the business of flying, not warfighting.
This qoute goes back a long way so i hope you have had time to realise that it is complete bullsh1t. By your reasoning, Army loggies, truck drivers, vehicle maintainers etc etc are not warfighters. Does a war fighter have to have a gun at the ready.
Try "fighting a war" without the air supplies dropped to grunts in the field and air-to-air refuelling to keep CAS and CAP on station. And lets not forget about actually tansporting the armys new abrahams tanks, great kit, but hard to fight with them when they are stuck in Aus.
Pull your head in Griffinblack, anyone wearing an ADF uniform is a war fighter.
Rant over........pot stirred
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Griffinblack, you are the exact reason people leave the military, don't comment about other units and assume you know how they operate. A little bit of knowledge about what others do doesn't make you an expert, stick to what you know and comment on the Army.
In regards to flying, being professional is knowing everything about your aircraft and everything about the role your aircraft does. As others have said, everyones role contributes to the ADF being a force that is looked on in favourable terms by others.
The b...**** and bitching I've read in this thread makes me wonder why
I bother staying in the military sometimes.
In regards to flying, being professional is knowing everything about your aircraft and everything about the role your aircraft does. As others have said, everyones role contributes to the ADF being a force that is looked on in favourable terms by others.
The b...**** and bitching I've read in this thread makes me wonder why
I bother staying in the military sometimes.
