Thread by @GStrategerist

Welcome Back, #miltwitter.
Here’s thread on everyone’s favorite punching bag,
AIRBORNE OPERATIONS!!

First, you may accuse me of bias right from the start. I am an unabashed Paratrooper. And if you want to write me off now, don’t waste your time reading on. But for the rest of you…

About once a month, someone will punch their “edgy miltwitter” card with a “Airborne Ops are obsolete” post. Fights break out, talks of “everyone’s a leg on the ground” “When was the last REAL jump, not the 173rd Photo shoot” “My buddy on the DZ said it was already secured”

If they are especially erudite like @soldier_cynic they might even reference the @ArmyUPress publication “When Failure Thrives” where Dr Devore lays out a case that Airborne operations haven’t become obsolete, they were in already obsolete in WWII.

The foundation of his case is shaky. To make his case, Devore has to show that airborne operations weren’t “successful” and therefore any post-war “success” of airborne culture was a result of something other than military effectiveness or utility.

But uses a misleading metric to judge success and that variable has many confounding factors, casualty rates.

The rate of casualties has little to do with the military or strategic value of an objective.

Yes, of the BRO and Dogfaced soldiers that stormed the beaches of Normandy, a lower percentage of them became casualties. But it’s not possible to say how many more they would have had if the Airborne didn’t succeed in seizing key crossroads and interdicting reinforcing units

Moreover, German units were not all of similar quality. Many units that manned the beach pill boxes were… let’s call them second tier.

Dominique François, the French historian, notes that many were understrength, equip with faulty, captured weapons...
amazon.com/Normandy-D-Day…

He’s a story about a Korean gentleman who manned one of those positions, after being captured & forced into the German Army, after being captured & forced into the Russian Army, after being captured & forced into the Japanese Army…warhistoryonline.com/instant-articl…

So comparing units that were confronted with the static auxiliary units with the units facing SS-Panzer division repositioning to reinforce, is not a fair comparison.

Moreover, some targets are simply not vulnerable to other modes of attack for a variety of reason. The terrible airborne assault of Crete (Operation Mercury) was so costly to the Germans, they essentially ruled out further airborne ops.

But the island of Crete was strategically important. The airfields on the island allowed Allies to range critical Romanian oilfields.

With defenses fixated on the few beaches where an amphibious assault could have landed meant an airborne assault was the only real way in.

Costs in this sense are measured against the value of the objective, not the other (possibly infeasible) alternatives.

Even Eisenhower saw it this way. When addressing Paratroopers before the D-Day invasion, his aide relayed that Ike felt like he was seeing the last of these men and whole Airborne Divisions would be wiped out.

saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/06/d-day-…

But in their expected annihilation, they would do enough good to justify their loss.

Compared to the Supreme Allied Commander’s assessment, the Airborne defied expectations, seized key points, and survived with the kind of grit and valor that gets HBO mini-series made.

So maybe there is more to the story of Airborne Operations in WWII than comes out in (misleading) statistics… but what of today?

Surely, in the age of A2AD, Paratroopers are obsolete! Right?

Well… no. If that was the case then the tank was obsolete after the 1973 Yom Kippur War (or maybe last years N-K war, or after helicopters began to fly… idk the tank has been declared dead you’d think it was actually made of cats instead of DU armor)

For that matter, the machine gun was obsolete when the tank arrived, and the infantry was obsolete when the machine gun arrived, and the cavalry was obsolete when the pike arrived… and so on and so on

So yes, I would not volunteer to jumpmaster in the door of a C-130 flying right at a battery of S-400s. And sure, man-portable SAMs are a thing (just like man portable AT weapons…) but that doesn’t mean that MASTAC airborne operations aren’t valuable

As Dr Gordon and Johnson point out in the article below, Airborne operations place enemy at risk in more places. Similar to the naval concept of the “fleet in being."
warontherocks.com/2016/04/reimag…

A favorite anecdote is GEN Powell’s visit to Haiti. When @82ndABNDiv paratroopers loaded up, the Haitian would-be-dictator decided, “please don’t, I’ll stop.”

It might be hard to measure deterrent power, but that seems like as good a measure as any.
baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-19…

Even in a Great Power Conflict ™ the enemy can’t cover the entire sky, and the fine folks at the @USAF have some tricks up their sleeve to suppress enemy air defenses. They cleverly call it, Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses.

Also, imagine the cost of trying to field as much air defense as it would take to be “impenetrable.”

I’d be perfectly fine fighting plywood tanks and soldiers without rifles, because that’s all that any great power could afford after building such a robust A2AD bubble.

So where does this leave us? Well in the same place as other military technologies and doctrines. We need to adapt and evolve. Just as the Israelis quickly figured out that AT missiles made AR/IN pairings essential, we need to figure out how to conduct airborne ops differently

I’d advocate for a more robust mobility capability for Airborne forces paired with some protected firepower. Here’s why. The A2AD bubble wont be everywhere, but it will be places of strategic/operational importance.

Our ability to jump or land on an offset DZ and move to an objective is limited by our equipment. Paratroopers, despite their hearty nature, can only move so far so fast. Combat loads for jumps are often 80+ pounds of radios, batteries, ammo, and gear

New, light, airdroppable vehicles are being added to their Property Books (yay Co Commanders!) that give the light infantry squad a way to mount up and move along rough terrain much more quickly with more gear. They can then dismount and fight light.

The Airborne is also testing out tanks #tanktwitter. Airdroppable tanks that can carry conventional ammo, optics, AT missiles, and drones are a gamechanger. They are armored enough that they can put themselves at increased risk to provide an umbrella of protection for the IN

But there are limits. The @USAF needs to invest in more and better lift. An ABN BCT takes a huge bill on lift assets and some vehicles can only be lifted by C-17 or C-5s. Of which there are precious few and there are few allies with fleets of their own.

So is the Airborne obsolete? If you’re imagining unguarded C-47s flying through Flak-88s, maybe we will never see it. But there is still value in having the capability. And there is value in updating and enhancing the capability to match modern times.

And that’s not even covering airborne operations conducted by smaller than brigade-sized units and special operations forces.

There is a reason Special Forces still sings about those silver wings on their chest after all… but that’s a thread for another day. 😉

This thread is dedicated to an extraordinary NCO we laid to rest today, CSM Rock Merritt
Fury from the Sky, CSM.

https://twitter.com/82ndabndiv/status/1372618732942589955