July 01, 2005
Team of U.S. Soldiers Missing in Afghanistan

A small team of U.S. soldiers was still missing Friday near Asadabad in the same mountains in eastern Afghanistan where a special forces helicopter was shot down earlier this week, and U.S. forces are using “every available asset” to find them, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The MH-47 Chinook helicopter — with 16 people on board who all died in the crash — had gone into the mountains Tuesday to “extract the soldiers.” The team on the ground has been missing since the chopper was downed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O’Hara said.

Note: Do you know what a MH-47 Chinook looks like? How about a MH-60, aka: Black Hawk, like the ones used in the infamous raid in Somalia? The MH-47 was downed by a garden-variety RPG, rocket propelled grenade, similiar to the weapon used against the Black Hawks in the 1993 raid in Mogadishu. Looks like another case of asymetrical warfare, and US forces came out on the wrong end of this one too, losing at least twenty four special forces personnel and two helicopters.

The Chinooks have a maximum airspeed of about 264ft/sec. A rocket propelled grenade has a maximum speed of about 950ft/sec, and a maximum range of about 1,000 yards. If the Chinook didn't use armaments it should have had at it's disposal to secure the LZ, or protect it while in the air over the LZ, then a casual reading of this extraction casts a significant level of doubt on the mission planning.

The MH-47 has a flight ceiling of almost 22,000 feet, so even in the mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan, the chopper should have been able to neuteralize a suitable landing area with air-fuel bombs, anti-personnel fire, or at least conducted the mission with additional close air support. With one chopper downed already at the site earlier in the week, what did the MH-47 crew think the opposition was going to do? Throw a stone at their Chinook?