All aboard air oblivion.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg
• Position: The Culture of Institutions

Gregg Easterbrook's 1981 piece was more than a pointed, technically sophisticated critique of our Army's helicopter force. It showed how the bureaucratic culture of the Pentagon gives us weapons we don't need.

Today the United States Army has a bigger air force than the Air Force-second largest in the world, in fact, trailing only the Soviet air force. The Army's air force is composed almost entirely of helicopters, 9,000 of them. (The Air Force has 7,000 aircraft, very few of which are helicopters.) America has more helicopters, and spends more money on helicopters, and is betting more of its security on helicopters, than any other nation.

Yet most of today's helicopter Army would not exist at all were it not for interservice rivalries. Army helicopter development began in earnest after the Air Force was split away from the Army, and new regulations barred the Army from having any airplanes. But the Army needed airplanes. It needed them to transport troops and equipment, and for "close support" attacks against enemy tanks during the heat of battle. The new Air Force was supposed to perform these tasks. It didn't. Desperate, the Army turned to helicopters-something it was allowed to have--to move its men and protect them from the air.

And these thousands of helicopters are, militarily and economically, a disaster area. Helicopters are fine for certain specialized military purposes-medical evacuation, rescue, commando raids, antisubmarine patrols, and terrorizing defenseless peasants (Russian helicopters in Afghanistan have been employed mainly for terror attacks). But in the two missions for which most army helicopters are built, front line transpor"close support," the machines are a fiasco.

Vietnam (sometimes called the "helicopter war") demonstrated how shockingly vulnerable helicopters were to even light opposition. At the height of Vietnam, the Army was losing one-third of its helicopter force per year, informed Pentagon officials say. These losses were not to flak batteries or sophisticated missiles but to "small arms fire," meaning infantry rifles.

Why is so much money being spent on a weapon of such limited practical value? One reason is that the helicopter has developed powerful institutional momentum. Four of the nation's largest defense contractors (Bell Textron, Boeing, Hughes, and United Technologies) have devoted significant resources to helicopter construction and agitate constantly for new contracts.

But much more important is the Army-Air Force rivalry. The Army's petty generals like helicopters simply because they are green and fly, and can be used to torment the Air Force during budget battles. Its sincere generals, knowing the Air Force's dismal record of support for army troops, feel they would rather take their chances with their own pilots and machines, even if those machines are inferior.

Unarmed dumbos

The 1950s proved to be an almost unbroken string of bureaucratic victories for the Air Force. After starting life with the old Army Air Corps's "tactical" missions and the new atomic bombing mission, it also walked away with most of the big...