Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, mountains, nor seas could afford security.
– From Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson
Inspired by a recent discussion at Naval Gazing.
“When Failure Thrives”
Airborne operations have not, historically, proven very successful. The current size of airborne forces in Russia (VDV) and the United States is purely the result of institutional inertia and parochialism. Read this and weep.
To briefly recapitulate the linked article: The most successful airborne assaults, launched by the Germans in 1940 (e.g. Eben Emael) in hindsight relied on the total novelty of parachute infantry. Even by later in WW2, airborne operations became less likely to succeed and more costly when successful than the Happy Time of the early war. At any rate, advances in air defenses and increases in the numbers of light armored vehicles (which lightly armed paratroopers have difficulty fighting) in rear areas made a repetition of operations like Neptune (Normandy jump) suicidal after WW2. Airborne operations, being useless against serious militaries, were increasingly confined to “interventions” against weak or non-state forces.
The 82nd Airborne owes more of its existence to the Nazis than NASA does.
The 2014 French intervention in Mali is a continuation of this trend, which if it carries on will involve jumps against uncontacted Pacific islanders. (The linked Wikipedia article does not even come close to conveying the degree to which Operation Serval has fired the passions of airborne officers.)
The Problems with Airborne Infantry
In a parachute landing, lightly armed troops are dispersed randomly over the drop zone from a low altitude (800-1500′). Dispersion has lessened as air navigation improved, but parachute infantry remain lightly armed by necessity. The need for soldiers performing these operations to be highly trained and disciplined to have any chance of success has been universally recognized for the entirety of their existence.
Unfortunately, the low altitude and slow speed required of transport aircraft makes them extremely vulnerable to anti-aircraft weapons (unlike helicopters, these transport aircraft can’t fly so low that they can effectively take cover against ground defenses in terrain).
Once on the ground, the disorganized paratroopers are immediately vulnerable to any organized counterattack. Armored vehicles pose a particular danger, since they can respond quickly to airborne assaults over a large area and require heavy weapons to kill, of which limited numbers are available in an airborne assault.
The time and material resources devoted to jump training also detract from training for other tasks. I actually don’t think this is a serious problem for the most part, even assuming that jump training is absolutely useless — active duty units rarely work so hard that they literally don’t have time for anything else over the course of a training evolution, and the static-jump tackle isn’t ultimately that expensive. Aircraft are costly, but airborne requirements aren’t a serious driver of fleet requirements. The ability to airdrop supply packages is sufficiently useful that transport aircraft will be able to drop paratroops anyway.
Intangible Benefits
Setting aside hard military utility for the next section, airborne advocates make several claims about the intangible benefits of airborne units. The first, and most widespread, is that jump training builds character. Troops who volunteer for airborne are much braver and more motivated because jumping out of a plane is scary.
There is no evidence for this, and the actual way static-line jumps are conducted deliberately minimizes the individual paratrooper’s choice in falling out of the plane. Jumping is scary but so is firing a tank or throwing a grenade, and like those tasks one gets used to them fairly quickly with a few repetitions.
Another popular excuse, this time for airborne unit field exercises, is that the serious drawbacks of airborne operations — dispersion and light equipment — instill discipline and flexibility in soldiers. Like being cold, finding your way to the objective from the drop zone builds character. There might be something to this, although the same could also be said of tying soldiers’ legs together as in a three-legged race or, less glibly, doing everything in a contaminated environment (aka MOPP 4).
Not pictured: a three-legged race in MOPP4
Now, if airborne training is used as an excuse to form an all-volunteer unit in a conscript army, skim or attract higher-aptitude recruits, or stabilize personnel assignments, it can have a real effect on increasing the quality of a unit. The same result could be accomplished by forming units who specialize in rope dancing or Afghan goatball, but the vagaries of history have presented those condemned to live in the present with parachute infantry (and the Marines). Both airborne and amphibious assault do continue to have some military utility, at any rate.
One other benefit: given light infantry’s twin utilities of low cost and ability to operate in any terrain, requiring that all light infantry equipment be air-droppable prevents “light infantry” units from becoming road-bound. Airborne units have a readymade retort if the Good Idea Fairy decides that e.g. each “light infantry” company needs a 20-ton command or fire support vehicle (true story). The danger exists that this thinking will work in the wrong direction (e.g. building bigger planes to make airborne forces heavier), but I do think it has some value. Giving parachute infantry some APCs and extra ammo has never proved a very difficult task, if their actual airborne capabilities end up not being needed.
Actual Military Utility
Airborne units have two missions now: rapid deployment and forced entry. Rapid deployment means landing at an airfield and debarking on the ground, all on short notice. This mission evolved from parachute landings, but doesn’t involve them. There’s no reason that this mission needs to be limited to airborne units, and increasingly — as scheduled deployments for other units in Iraq and Afghanistan have decreased — it isn’t.
“Forced entry” means the initial deployment of troops to a theater where the host nation isn’t welcoming/supine enough to simply land a plane and debark. Airborne troops parachute to secure an airfield or other suitable landing site, then transport aircraft land to offload follow-on forces as quickly as possible.
This mission isn’t suitable to helicopter infantry (who don’t have the problems with dispersion that parachute infantry do, and whose transports are neither as vulnerable nor as high-payoff to the enemy), because of the great distances that might need to be traveled to the objective. Airborne forces can deploy directly from their homeland rather than the forward staging areas required by the limited range of helicopters.
Combined with Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) characteristics of military transport aircraft enabling the usage of marginal sites as significant airheads, the resulting capability is nothing to sneeze at. The threat of such an operation requires an enemy to either accept the risk of it occurring, or devote more resources to defense against it, whether it ever actually happens or not: extending an air defense network, and deploying more troops to secure airfields which he may not even have much use for. And, he may have trouble getting grips on the extent of the threat. Is that county airport that closed 30 years ago still usable–and that one? What if 200 men spend all night improving it? Can a C-130 land on that highway? Do you feel lucky?
The usefulness of this for a nation that wants to engage in expeditionary warfare anywhere in the world (the United States) is pretty good. The question, then, is not whether but how much. The last combat airborne operation above battalion strength was 1989 in Panama. (The use of parachute landings in securing Bashur Airfield in 2003 was a capabilities test at best and gratuitous at worst.) The above makes a great case for a battalion and a good case for a full independent maneuver element (Brigade Combat Team — includes logistics, artillery, and engineers, though a special battalion could include these). The need to rotate BCTs through ready, trained, and recovering phases argues for three BCTs i.e. the 82nd Airborne Division, as to a lesser extent does the desirability of maintaining the threat of a forced entry attempt once the first has actually occurred. Five? Well, read the first link again if you want to know why five Airborne BCTs exist.
Conclusion
The United States and other powers that want a fight-anywhere expeditionary capability have at least one good reason to maintain a few battalions of actual jump-qualified airborne troops. For everyone else, the paratrooper identity exists so might as well make use of it. These nations should (and generally do) simply make perfunctory training jumps and spend the rest of their time operating as light infantry.
As for nations that decide they need an airborne forced-entry capability, their “airborne” units will still spend the overwhelming majority of their time doing regular infantry tasks. These states should avoid allowing the organization and equipment of airborne units to diverge too far from regular infantry formations. The United States does this modulo some specific equipment, although Russia — ironically given the ignominious history of its actual airborne operations — does not, developing entire separate classes of not just personal weapons but armored vehicles for use by its airborne forces.
For guys who think the BMP has too much legroom
Any other national military with roots extending back to the 1940s will have units designated “airborne” and they’ll probably at least occasionally need to put on a parachute and jump if only to keep up appearances.
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